The rewrite of a previous paper for this class. Some schools of critical thought are cited incorrectly, but that's how they were on the original paper; I goofed.
English 205
March 2, 2010
Barthes and Freud walk into a bar looking for Meaning. . . This could be the opening of a curious literary joke which unfolds in any manner of ways depending upon who and how it is told. Similarly, any given text—be it humor, essay, novel, film, philippic, or cartoon—may or may not have a multitude of possible meanings associated with it depending on elements that can extend beyond what the text itself says. For my own part, the method and degree of meaning I seek from a text considers such factors not limited to: how much interest I have in the subject matter; who wrote it; when and where I read in both the literal and metaphoric sense; what day of the week it is; and perhaps even which direction the wind is currently blowing. Each text is approached in subtlety different ways to discover its meaning, but I am always open to the likelihood that there is something I may miss if not paying close attention. Lately, I have equated this process to understand meaning to be analogous with watching bonus features on a DVD. The movie is there to view without any background information, but should you wish to—as I often do—the option is available to delve beyond the film, learning details and influences that exist apart from the film, yet still carry influence upon its meaning and creation. For current purposes, let us check out the bonus features of this process in an attempt to understand how we arrive at meaning.
Of course, to understand the meaning of any text, one must first approach it using some sort of rubric. In literary terms, this is done through through theoretical methods that inherently involve some sort of ideology. These methods are like maps helping the traveler find their way through the wilderness of potential meaning. The map is not the landscape, just as any meaning we might find is not the only meaning possible for a given work. For instance, New Criticism is a method which places the rubric for meaning upon only the text itself; nothing of the author's intent nor conditions of their culture and circumstance can be brought forth to define the text's meaning. Contrasting this would be the maps offered by the Deconstructionist theory, which places great emphasis upon outside influences defining what the text could mean. Just as there are numerous possible types of maps—topographical for those who would trek by foot; road maps for those traveling by vehicle, satellite maps displayed with Google Earth for the armchair voyager who doesn't wish to leave their familiar environs—there are myriad literary theories which are used to unveil a text. New Criticism and Deconstructionist theories are by no means the only ones available, but they are convenient because they act well as polarities to one another.
The web comic XKCD by Randall Munroe comes with its own caveat in the fine print which appears beneath each strip: "Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)." Just from this text alone, the reader who ventures forth does so having been given the keys to understand the author is intent on challenging at least some of the conventions and expectations which might be brought along with a reader to the content of this web comic. The January 13, 2010 edition of XKCD was called "Self Description." Encountering such title—and wearing my trusty English Major Academic Thinking Cap®—I deduced a self-awareness of post-modernism which might demonstrate a certain incredulity to its own meta-narrative. Which is an scholarly way of saying that I suspected the comic that day might mean it is deliberately going to play with the conventions of self-awareness and the regressive inversion of knowing its own audience is aware of themselves and the comic's own awareness of them being aware of its awareness, and so on down an infinite hall of mirrors casting reflections upon reflections. In other words, the strip seemed primed to be examined for meaning via the New Critical method.
 Another trait of this web comic is that a meta-text (also called an alt-text or, ironically, a hyper-text) is displayed when the mouse cursor is placed over the illustration. This text usually takes the form of a sarcastic comment about the subtext of the strip, or otherwise given meaning or complication to what is shown. In this particular strip, the alt-text tells us, "The contents of any one panel are dependent on the contents of every panel including itself. The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop. The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters" (Monroe). Here then we have a comic strip that seems to be doing nothing more than making a rather facile comment upon its own contents, and offers little to suggestion anything other than that. Being an ideological omnivore, I place attributions on it much like a Rorschach ink blot. These attributions are highly dependent on if I have donned my English Major Academic Thinking Cap®, or I have just awakened and taken to the internet before my second cup of coffee in the morning, or how much cognitive dissidence I wish to express (that is, a deliberately contrary opinion akin to taking the role of being the devil's advocation; a literary heretic). This is a strip which seems to provide no deeper meaning, but that could be precisely why it may offer some because, in life, literature, art, politics, what-have-you, initial appearances are rarely what they seem, and my brain is wired to instinctively wonder what else might be lurking there just below the surface. It could be considered as its own rubric to how meaning is made via the self-explanatory graphs depicting the black and white nature of itself; to understand what something means, you merely need to read literally what is set on the page.
But what of texts which all-but-prohibit some forms of critical analysis and seem tailor-made examples to encourage others? Would a Marxist reading of "Jack and the Beanstalk" be possible? Whereas the example offered by Randall Monroe's XKCD comic self-consciously strove to refer to nothing beyond the borders of its own frame, lending itself perfectly for a New Criticism analysis, it would only make sense to examine a contrasting text that would by necessity force a readers to look beyond what is given on the page to fully comprehend its subject (and thus the Deconstructionist theory would be far more applicable to analyze it). Sticking with web comics, Tatsuya Ishida's February 19, 2010 comic strip Sinfest becomes a perfect example. Each panel—indeed, even the featured quote above the artist's name—forces the reader to sources other than the text itself to glean what the strip itself is attempting to mean. To my way of thinking, this would start with a panel by panel breakdown of the characters involved, and then an analysis of the signs and signifiers being presented.
In the first panel, two characters are introduced—both of whom have appeared previously in the comic; one as a minor character and the other as a recurring secondary character. The Gay Guy appearance a week previous to this challenged the moral attitude of the main character's hyper-heterosexuality. The puppet is the clouds is the way Ishida represents the Judeo-Christian God (Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoist ideologies all have representative characters as well). God always appears as a hand-puppet in a derivation apropos to the context. Following this introductory understanding of the characters involved, an examination of the second panel would involve God's hand-puppet wearing a shirt with an inverted triangle. This symbol represents the pink triangle that was originally used to denote gay male prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. About thirty years later, the symbol was re-used by the gay pride movement in order to replace the shame involved with being forced to wear it with displaying pride at publicly showing one's sexual orientation. By the third panel, the reader is treated (or assaulted, depending upon one's musical ideology) with God-the-hand-puppet singing and mime dancing to the Village People's song, "Y.M.C.A." Of course, the context of this connects to the Village People being a (mostly) open gay band and the consideration that YMCAs were, for a gay man in the 1970s, a place to cruise for other gay men. The final panel has Gay Guy directly addressing God-as-a-hand-puppet with his question about loving everyone equally, a reference to the on-going struggle over homosexuality and Christianity; religious acceptance and Biblical condemnation. God-the-hand-puppet replies with what can almost be heard from the written text as a Wildean-lisp as He "strikes a pose" and quotes a Madonna song. The text above the artist's name quotes a song from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which further connects this particular comic to the subculture of non-heterosexuals and, well, the just plain weird. Without these off-the-page references, this strip could certainly be understood on one level, but the appreciation from such understanding would not go very deep. Taking into account the sub-referential material involved, a greater understanding—and thus a deeper appreciation is, if not reached, at least offered by the additional information. But what are we-as-readers to make of a subject without a definitive "text" from which to derive our meaning?
Sub-references and subjective possibilities are the only things offered in any look for meaning in the case of author Philip K. Dick and his beam of pink light. For purposes of brevity, this instance will be condensed and told as unadorned as possible. Phil Dick himself wrote extensively about what happened to him—what he theorized happened to him—through the course of at least three novels and more than eight thousand pages of type-written notes (which Dick called his "Exegesis"). In February and March of 1974 Phil Dick had his impacted wisdom teeth removed and, on a particular afternoon, the pharmacy delivered his pain medication. The delivery girl who came to his house wore an ichthys necklace. Dick asked her what it meant and when she told him is was a symbol used by early Christians Dick saw sunlight glint off the pendant and, "In that instant … I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, 'loss of forgetfulness.' I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me." More than that, "as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black, prisonlike contours of hateful Rome" (Dick). In the following weeks, Dick experienced further visions, none of which he ever claimed to completely understand nor objectively define. He did, however, spend the last eight years of his life writing about those experiences, examining what could possibly produce such events, and, in context to my own personal examination of deciphering what I encounter, what does it all mean?
On one hand, Dick had been a heavy user of amphetamines in the years previous to his "mystical experience" and that fact alone was not lost upon him when he sought to attribute source and cause to his visions. Likewise, he often considered the possibilities of a stroke or mental aberration as the cause. But Dick felt the beam of pink light was ultimately a benevolent event, because he attributed to it the sudden awareness of a inguinal hernia in his five-year-old son (a condition which modern medical techniques had missed). This layman's diagnosis saved his son's life. This certainly was a factor in Dick considered as he hypothesized what it was that happened to him. The most remarkable thing to me is that Dick never amassed the dogma in his own mental quest for meaning to categorically dismiss any possibility he could coherently structure, which included some outlandish theories such as a possible Teslaesque Soviet mind control beam, influence from an extraterrestrial satellite, and divine communication.
Not that anyone has to take any of Dick's own theories into account in order to attribute their own meaning to the event as it is related through any of the various texts it is described. This example places heavy emphasis upon the author of the text, and, as Dick himself would be quick to point out, the author is one of the least reliable sources for the information at hand. This is a man who, upon returning home one night to find the safe in his work room to have been blown open and his papers ransacked, attributed variously the break in to the FBI, the CIA, the Hells Angels, neighborhood drug dealers, or even, as he carefully considered, that he may have do it himself in a fit of schizophrenia (a disorder he was never had).
Given Phil Dick's wide range of meanings he deciphered from a singular event—from the mundane to the phantastic—who am I to say that the beam of pink light was merely a side effect of pain and prescription medication, or that Dick is a liar, or was residual after-effects to chronic speed usage, or that it never happened at all? My mind is open to the possibility that something can occur for which I have no framework to define it.
Meandering into this existential quagmire, we could easily and quickly become lost in subjective possibilities and never find meaning, let alone understand the epistemological fountain from which pure meaning flows. To compel understanding from any subject, the Oxford English Dictionary is a hefty tome carrying the definitive weigh of clarity and a dozen pounds of etymological concrete meaning. Under the entry for "meaning" the OED includes: "The action of MEAN v.2; moaning, lamentation," which refers to "a. To complain of or lament (something); to lament for (a dead person). b. To pity or comfort." But then the most obvious meaning of "meaning" is not the initial—or even secondary—definition at all.
This alliterative conundrum may seem to be a farcical endeavor, but it is purposefully used here to illustrate the point being made. The meaning of anything is rarely, if ever, what is encountered on its surface, its face-shown-to-the-world level of intention. And whatever it was that the author (that is, the creator or creators) of a particular text intends its meaning to be, there are certainly many other—and equally valid—meaning which can be deciphered from that text. What meaning the (reader/viewer/listener) audience of a work thinks and takes from it is just as valid as what the creator of the work intended, just as the meaning of the same text for the same individual may be different in accordance to when and how they re-encounter or re-examine it at another time.
All of which, in the case of Phil Dick and his beam of pink light, seemingly leaves us each to forge our own maps to define not only the texts we encounter, but also the world in which those texts exist. In a scientific sense, we cannot with any degree of reason define and proclaim limestone rock is green jello and hope to convey that as being a valid meaning as to the nature of sedimentary rock. But what it does reasonably suggest is that one person can read a Phil Dick novel and see his Penfield Mood Organs and Mercer Empathy Boxes as prophetic precursors to the currently ubiquitous small handheld devices with perfectly Phildickian names like "iPod" and "BlackBerry," while someone else reads that same novel and dismisses such notions due to lack of believable plot or emotionally uninvolved characterization. Both are true subjectively, but the objective veracity—whatever that loaded phrase may be taken to mean—remains unchanged. And an objective veracity to a subjective experience (which is what reading any text ultimately comes down to) is what Dick strove to discover and, with cognitive dissonance, understood to be an impossible quest.
On some level, everyone seeks to establish meaning to what they read, see, think, and experience, whether that meaning comes from science, traditional, society, religion, kith, kin, hallucination, or extraterrestrial influence, we amass and attribute our own meaning to everything we encounter. How we do that—how I do that—is specifically connected to what it is I am attempting to understand and define. Like Dick's methodology, I formulate meaning based on perception, perspective, and assess its own internal merit. Regardless of outcome, I then shift my own perception and perspective and formulate what I hope to be an equally valid and alternative meaning based on the same evidence. Following through in this manner several times, I then conclude which meaning I wish to attribute to the text I'm assessing—dependent upon, as was stated at the beginning of this paper, a number of seemingly unrelated influences.
A Barthsean scholar and a Freudian scholar are almost certainly not going to decipher the same meaning from Philip K. Dick's account of his anamnesis, nor am I going to take from it the same as what Dick himself intended when he committed his own experiences to the page and had it published. Meaning exists in so many different ephemeral forms, none of which—according to my currently constructed model of the world—can objectively be declared to be more comprehensively correct than another. So may be better delineated or be adequately explained than others, but all have the potential to be equally valid.
So clicking back from our special features to the main menu on our metaphoric DVD, I check the calendar (for what day it is) and the weather charts (to see if it is safe to go outside). But I need no weatherman to tell me which way the wind blows and, armed with a pen as my primary weapon and a lifetime of signs and signifiers at my behest, I journey forth to continue my mission of discovery: to seek out new texts and new literary theories (to boldly split infinitives anytime it is poetic to do so!), and to compound my attempts in understanding where and how I derive meaning itself. Which, however it is done, will, undoubtedly, involve subjective sub-references to scores of differing sources, and be flavored with the many spices of wit and sarcasm and include jokes to be groaned at aloud and then repeated at soonest opportunity.
Barthes and Freud walk into a bar looking for meaning.
You'd think the second one would have ducked.
Belolo, Henri, Jacques Morali, and Victor Willis. "Y.M.C.A." Rel. Dec. 1978. Village People. Jacques Morali.
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Doubleday, 1968. Print.
─. "How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978)."
In The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1995. Print.
─. In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis. Nevada City, CA: Underwood Books, 1991. Print.
Ishida, Tatsuya. "Gay Puppet." Sinfest 19 Feb. 2010. Web. 19 Feb. 2010.
Madonna, and Shep Pettibone. "Vogue." Rel. Mar. 1990. Madonna. Madonna, Shep Pettibone.
"Meaning." Def. 2a & 2b. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Print.
Munroe, Randall. "Self-Description." XKCD 13 Jan. 2010. Web. 13 Jan. 2010.
Peck, Abe. "Village People." Rolling Stone #289 19 Apr. 1979. Web. 28 Feb. 2010.
Plant, Richard. The pink triangle: the Nazi war against homosexuals. New York: Macmillan, 1988, Print.
~•~
English 205
March 2, 2010
The Epistemological Fountain of Pure Meaning
Barthes and Freud walk into a bar looking for Meaning. . . This could be the opening of a curious literary joke which unfolds in any manner of ways depending upon who and how it is told. Similarly, any given text—be it humor, essay, novel, film, philippic, or cartoon—may or may not have a multitude of possible meanings associated with it depending on elements that can extend beyond what the text itself says. For my own part, the method and degree of meaning I seek from a text considers such factors not limited to: how much interest I have in the subject matter; who wrote it; when and where I read in both the literal and metaphoric sense; what day of the week it is; and perhaps even which direction the wind is currently blowing. Each text is approached in subtlety different ways to discover its meaning, but I am always open to the likelihood that there is something I may miss if not paying close attention. Lately, I have equated this process to understand meaning to be analogous with watching bonus features on a DVD. The movie is there to view without any background information, but should you wish to—as I often do—the option is available to delve beyond the film, learning details and influences that exist apart from the film, yet still carry influence upon its meaning and creation. For current purposes, let us check out the bonus features of this process in an attempt to understand how we arrive at meaning.
Of course, to understand the meaning of any text, one must first approach it using some sort of rubric. In literary terms, this is done through through theoretical methods that inherently involve some sort of ideology. These methods are like maps helping the traveler find their way through the wilderness of potential meaning. The map is not the landscape, just as any meaning we might find is not the only meaning possible for a given work. For instance, New Criticism is a method which places the rubric for meaning upon only the text itself; nothing of the author's intent nor conditions of their culture and circumstance can be brought forth to define the text's meaning. Contrasting this would be the maps offered by the Deconstructionist theory, which places great emphasis upon outside influences defining what the text could mean. Just as there are numerous possible types of maps—topographical for those who would trek by foot; road maps for those traveling by vehicle, satellite maps displayed with Google Earth for the armchair voyager who doesn't wish to leave their familiar environs—there are myriad literary theories which are used to unveil a text. New Criticism and Deconstructionist theories are by no means the only ones available, but they are convenient because they act well as polarities to one another.
The web comic XKCD by Randall Munroe comes with its own caveat in the fine print which appears beneath each strip: "Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)." Just from this text alone, the reader who ventures forth does so having been given the keys to understand the author is intent on challenging at least some of the conventions and expectations which might be brought along with a reader to the content of this web comic. The January 13, 2010 edition of XKCD was called "Self Description." Encountering such title—and wearing my trusty English Major Academic Thinking Cap®—I deduced a self-awareness of post-modernism which might demonstrate a certain incredulity to its own meta-narrative. Which is an scholarly way of saying that I suspected the comic that day might mean it is deliberately going to play with the conventions of self-awareness and the regressive inversion of knowing its own audience is aware of themselves and the comic's own awareness of them being aware of its awareness, and so on down an infinite hall of mirrors casting reflections upon reflections. In other words, the strip seemed primed to be examined for meaning via the New Critical method.
 Another trait of this web comic is that a meta-text (also called an alt-text or, ironically, a hyper-text) is displayed when the mouse cursor is placed over the illustration. This text usually takes the form of a sarcastic comment about the subtext of the strip, or otherwise given meaning or complication to what is shown. In this particular strip, the alt-text tells us, "The contents of any one panel are dependent on the contents of every panel including itself. The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop. The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters" (Monroe). Here then we have a comic strip that seems to be doing nothing more than making a rather facile comment upon its own contents, and offers little to suggestion anything other than that. Being an ideological omnivore, I place attributions on it much like a Rorschach ink blot. These attributions are highly dependent on if I have donned my English Major Academic Thinking Cap®, or I have just awakened and taken to the internet before my second cup of coffee in the morning, or how much cognitive dissidence I wish to express (that is, a deliberately contrary opinion akin to taking the role of being the devil's advocation; a literary heretic). This is a strip which seems to provide no deeper meaning, but that could be precisely why it may offer some because, in life, literature, art, politics, what-have-you, initial appearances are rarely what they seem, and my brain is wired to instinctively wonder what else might be lurking there just below the surface. It could be considered as its own rubric to how meaning is made via the self-explanatory graphs depicting the black and white nature of itself; to understand what something means, you merely need to read literally what is set on the page.
But what of texts which all-but-prohibit some forms of critical analysis and seem tailor-made examples to encourage others? Would a Marxist reading of "Jack and the Beanstalk" be possible? Whereas the example offered by Randall Monroe's XKCD comic self-consciously strove to refer to nothing beyond the borders of its own frame, lending itself perfectly for a New Criticism analysis, it would only make sense to examine a contrasting text that would by necessity force a readers to look beyond what is given on the page to fully comprehend its subject (and thus the Deconstructionist theory would be far more applicable to analyze it). Sticking with web comics, Tatsuya Ishida's February 19, 2010 comic strip Sinfest becomes a perfect example. Each panel—indeed, even the featured quote above the artist's name—forces the reader to sources other than the text itself to glean what the strip itself is attempting to mean. To my way of thinking, this would start with a panel by panel breakdown of the characters involved, and then an analysis of the signs and signifiers being presented.
In the first panel, two characters are introduced—both of whom have appeared previously in the comic; one as a minor character and the other as a recurring secondary character. The Gay Guy appearance a week previous to this challenged the moral attitude of the main character's hyper-heterosexuality. The puppet is the clouds is the way Ishida represents the Judeo-Christian God (Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoist ideologies all have representative characters as well). God always appears as a hand-puppet in a derivation apropos to the context. Following this introductory understanding of the characters involved, an examination of the second panel would involve God's hand-puppet wearing a shirt with an inverted triangle. This symbol represents the pink triangle that was originally used to denote gay male prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. About thirty years later, the symbol was re-used by the gay pride movement in order to replace the shame involved with being forced to wear it with displaying pride at publicly showing one's sexual orientation. By the third panel, the reader is treated (or assaulted, depending upon one's musical ideology) with God-the-hand-puppet singing and mime dancing to the Village People's song, "Y.M.C.A." Of course, the context of this connects to the Village People being a (mostly) open gay band and the consideration that YMCAs were, for a gay man in the 1970s, a place to cruise for other gay men. The final panel has Gay Guy directly addressing God-as-a-hand-puppet with his question about loving everyone equally, a reference to the on-going struggle over homosexuality and Christianity; religious acceptance and Biblical condemnation. God-the-hand-puppet replies with what can almost be heard from the written text as a Wildean-lisp as He "strikes a pose" and quotes a Madonna song. The text above the artist's name quotes a song from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which further connects this particular comic to the subculture of non-heterosexuals and, well, the just plain weird. Without these off-the-page references, this strip could certainly be understood on one level, but the appreciation from such understanding would not go very deep. Taking into account the sub-referential material involved, a greater understanding—and thus a deeper appreciation is, if not reached, at least offered by the additional information. But what are we-as-readers to make of a subject without a definitive "text" from which to derive our meaning?
Sub-references and subjective possibilities are the only things offered in any look for meaning in the case of author Philip K. Dick and his beam of pink light. For purposes of brevity, this instance will be condensed and told as unadorned as possible. Phil Dick himself wrote extensively about what happened to him—what he theorized happened to him—through the course of at least three novels and more than eight thousand pages of type-written notes (which Dick called his "Exegesis"). In February and March of 1974 Phil Dick had his impacted wisdom teeth removed and, on a particular afternoon, the pharmacy delivered his pain medication. The delivery girl who came to his house wore an ichthys necklace. Dick asked her what it meant and when she told him is was a symbol used by early Christians Dick saw sunlight glint off the pendant and, "In that instant … I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, 'loss of forgetfulness.' I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me." More than that, "as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black, prisonlike contours of hateful Rome" (Dick). In the following weeks, Dick experienced further visions, none of which he ever claimed to completely understand nor objectively define. He did, however, spend the last eight years of his life writing about those experiences, examining what could possibly produce such events, and, in context to my own personal examination of deciphering what I encounter, what does it all mean?
On one hand, Dick had been a heavy user of amphetamines in the years previous to his "mystical experience" and that fact alone was not lost upon him when he sought to attribute source and cause to his visions. Likewise, he often considered the possibilities of a stroke or mental aberration as the cause. But Dick felt the beam of pink light was ultimately a benevolent event, because he attributed to it the sudden awareness of a inguinal hernia in his five-year-old son (a condition which modern medical techniques had missed). This layman's diagnosis saved his son's life. This certainly was a factor in Dick considered as he hypothesized what it was that happened to him. The most remarkable thing to me is that Dick never amassed the dogma in his own mental quest for meaning to categorically dismiss any possibility he could coherently structure, which included some outlandish theories such as a possible Teslaesque Soviet mind control beam, influence from an extraterrestrial satellite, and divine communication.
Not that anyone has to take any of Dick's own theories into account in order to attribute their own meaning to the event as it is related through any of the various texts it is described. This example places heavy emphasis upon the author of the text, and, as Dick himself would be quick to point out, the author is one of the least reliable sources for the information at hand. This is a man who, upon returning home one night to find the safe in his work room to have been blown open and his papers ransacked, attributed variously the break in to the FBI, the CIA, the Hells Angels, neighborhood drug dealers, or even, as he carefully considered, that he may have do it himself in a fit of schizophrenia (a disorder he was never had).
Given Phil Dick's wide range of meanings he deciphered from a singular event—from the mundane to the phantastic—who am I to say that the beam of pink light was merely a side effect of pain and prescription medication, or that Dick is a liar, or was residual after-effects to chronic speed usage, or that it never happened at all? My mind is open to the possibility that something can occur for which I have no framework to define it.
Meandering into this existential quagmire, we could easily and quickly become lost in subjective possibilities and never find meaning, let alone understand the epistemological fountain from which pure meaning flows. To compel understanding from any subject, the Oxford English Dictionary is a hefty tome carrying the definitive weigh of clarity and a dozen pounds of etymological concrete meaning. Under the entry for "meaning" the OED includes: "The action of MEAN v.2; moaning, lamentation," which refers to "a. To complain of or lament (something); to lament for (a dead person). b. To pity or comfort." But then the most obvious meaning of "meaning" is not the initial—or even secondary—definition at all.
This alliterative conundrum may seem to be a farcical endeavor, but it is purposefully used here to illustrate the point being made. The meaning of anything is rarely, if ever, what is encountered on its surface, its face-shown-to-the-world level of intention. And whatever it was that the author (that is, the creator or creators) of a particular text intends its meaning to be, there are certainly many other—and equally valid—meaning which can be deciphered from that text. What meaning the (reader/viewer/listener) audience of a work thinks and takes from it is just as valid as what the creator of the work intended, just as the meaning of the same text for the same individual may be different in accordance to when and how they re-encounter or re-examine it at another time.
All of which, in the case of Phil Dick and his beam of pink light, seemingly leaves us each to forge our own maps to define not only the texts we encounter, but also the world in which those texts exist. In a scientific sense, we cannot with any degree of reason define and proclaim limestone rock is green jello and hope to convey that as being a valid meaning as to the nature of sedimentary rock. But what it does reasonably suggest is that one person can read a Phil Dick novel and see his Penfield Mood Organs and Mercer Empathy Boxes as prophetic precursors to the currently ubiquitous small handheld devices with perfectly Phildickian names like "iPod" and "BlackBerry," while someone else reads that same novel and dismisses such notions due to lack of believable plot or emotionally uninvolved characterization. Both are true subjectively, but the objective veracity—whatever that loaded phrase may be taken to mean—remains unchanged. And an objective veracity to a subjective experience (which is what reading any text ultimately comes down to) is what Dick strove to discover and, with cognitive dissonance, understood to be an impossible quest.
On some level, everyone seeks to establish meaning to what they read, see, think, and experience, whether that meaning comes from science, traditional, society, religion, kith, kin, hallucination, or extraterrestrial influence, we amass and attribute our own meaning to everything we encounter. How we do that—how I do that—is specifically connected to what it is I am attempting to understand and define. Like Dick's methodology, I formulate meaning based on perception, perspective, and assess its own internal merit. Regardless of outcome, I then shift my own perception and perspective and formulate what I hope to be an equally valid and alternative meaning based on the same evidence. Following through in this manner several times, I then conclude which meaning I wish to attribute to the text I'm assessing—dependent upon, as was stated at the beginning of this paper, a number of seemingly unrelated influences.
A Barthsean scholar and a Freudian scholar are almost certainly not going to decipher the same meaning from Philip K. Dick's account of his anamnesis, nor am I going to take from it the same as what Dick himself intended when he committed his own experiences to the page and had it published. Meaning exists in so many different ephemeral forms, none of which—according to my currently constructed model of the world—can objectively be declared to be more comprehensively correct than another. So may be better delineated or be adequately explained than others, but all have the potential to be equally valid.
So clicking back from our special features to the main menu on our metaphoric DVD, I check the calendar (for what day it is) and the weather charts (to see if it is safe to go outside). But I need no weatherman to tell me which way the wind blows and, armed with a pen as my primary weapon and a lifetime of signs and signifiers at my behest, I journey forth to continue my mission of discovery: to seek out new texts and new literary theories (to boldly split infinitives anytime it is poetic to do so!), and to compound my attempts in understanding where and how I derive meaning itself. Which, however it is done, will, undoubtedly, involve subjective sub-references to scores of differing sources, and be flavored with the many spices of wit and sarcasm and include jokes to be groaned at aloud and then repeated at soonest opportunity.
Barthes and Freud walk into a bar looking for meaning.
You'd think the second one would have ducked.
Works Cited
Belolo, Henri, Jacques Morali, and Victor Willis. "Y.M.C.A." Rel. Dec. 1978. Village People. Jacques Morali.
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Doubleday, 1968. Print.
─. "How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978)."
In The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1995. Print.
─. In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis. Nevada City, CA: Underwood Books, 1991. Print.
Ishida, Tatsuya. "Gay Puppet." Sinfest 19 Feb. 2010. Web. 19 Feb. 2010.
Madonna, and Shep Pettibone. "Vogue." Rel. Mar. 1990. Madonna. Madonna, Shep Pettibone.
"Meaning." Def. 2a & 2b. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Print.
Munroe, Randall. "Self-Description." XKCD 13 Jan. 2010. Web. 13 Jan. 2010.
Peck, Abe. "Village People." Rolling Stone #289 19 Apr. 1979. Web. 28 Feb. 2010.
Plant, Richard. The pink triangle: the Nazi war against homosexuals. New York: Macmillan, 1988, Print.
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