The Objective World is a Little Fishy

Meanings are not found in a void. From begining at one of the earliest stages of childhood, 3-5 years of age, Chandler's text opens itself up to the interpretation that culture, and its embedded signs and significations, shape an individual's understanding of the world. For example, what colors mean: black is death/morbid; white is good/wedding/heavenly; red is passion; pink is for girls; blue is for boys; these are all cultural constructions. The way in which individuals interpret texts, categorize texts, and by extension, the world, has been built into them through the culture that they have been born into. Nature, in a certain sense, is eroded by the time a person reaches maturity. What a person has is a culturally constructed self that interacts through the world it inhabits. This self operates through systems of signification which are demonstrated by how s/he approaches, understands, and interacts with film, literature, and even other people in the classroom (and by no means is this the full range of extension).

What Fish adds to the problem that is raised but left unresolved in Chandler -- How genres are constructed -- is a systems-oriented view where readers of a given text construct the meaning of the text. This meaning however (and this is very important) is not taken out of a void, a purely subjective meaning, but derives from the system in which the individual participates. Chandler notes that kids between the age of 3 and 5 are learning to separate shows, Sesame Street opposed to The News, and this process for which this seperation is just the beginning will broaden to include differences between a poem and an essay, a Western and Science-Fiction, and what it means if a person wears blue or pink or black. Already encoded into people is a system to give objects meaning. For example, people are able to categorize a film as a Western because, as Fish points out, "we create [poetry, assignments, lists, and by extension, genres] through interpretive strategies that are finally not our own but have their source in a publicly available system of intelligibility." What this means is that through agreement with others, individuals are able to construct the meanings of texts, like what genre a film belongs to. A raised hand in a middle-school classroom is open to two interpretations based upon the unspoken agreement of the children and teacher in the classroom that, for instance, a student will raise his or her hand to ask a question, or ask to go to the bathroom. The same hand in a different context, a college classroom, based upon a different agreement of the individuals within the group will exclude the possibility that the hand raised is to ask to go to the bathroom (though it can be). Likewise, another culturaly encoded difference that may be seen is where black is worn at funerals in the West, but in the East, Hindus wear white.

When Chandler focuses upon the interaction between the viewer and the producer of a film, where the viewer constructs and categorizes the film (which Chandler seems to criticize) Fish points out that these categories are culturally constructed and not just the categories but the fact that a person is watching a film and knows that they are watching a film. The very fact that a person knows that s/he is watching a movie will bring about a system of interpretation that are related to movies. Movies have plots, characters, action. Well, yes, but what about Andy Warhol who filmed a skyscraper in New York City for eight hours? Is that a movie? How is that to be understood? Films as these, which break conventions, demonstrate the problems of interpreting a text that is "outside" conventional systems of encodement.

One example of conventional interpretation in life is based on the judgements people make about other people's appearances. As if there are conventional codes by which people can deduce facts about individuals from the way they present themselves. Just take a look at what happened to me two semesters back.

I shaved my head bald. I did this for a multiplicity of different factors. For one I felt like I was reborn (not in a religious sense) but I felt like I was a new person. It was more in the sense that I felt like I could construct my own individuality from scratch and the shaved head was a personal symbol of that endeavour. I also wanted to show a girl I was interested in that I was not vain (and to this day I do not know if she understood the sign, though I'm led to believe that she did as I caught her smiling at my bald head one day). My cousin said she was smiling because I looked funny. She saw me as a cancer patient. I'm sure others did as well. My English professor asked me if I had joined the marines. When I said no, he asked if I joined some strange cult (whose name I cannot recall). I said no to that as well. I got strange looks, endearing looks, baffling looks, and a whole host of different responses to the bald object sitting above my neck. My great uncle with his mouth wide-open told me that he knew I was a good person and not a facist. I doubt anyone guessed my true motivation. I know this because the story develops further. The particular girl who I was pursuing was already taken, though this did not stop me, and her boyfriend knew about me and got extremely jealous as we both went after her affection. To cut a long story short, he won.

Interestingly enough, he and the girl both took the same class as I did the following semester. Now I felt pretty bad, considering I tried to take his girlfriend away, (let's leave out the moralizing, she was worth the fight) and pretty much avoided both of them during that class. But, earnestly, I wanted to befriend them both. The guy, by the way, had hair like he was from the 70s.

One day, the guy came into class, bald. Now how am I supposed to interpret this turn of events? Was he still insecure and competing with me? Is that how the sign is supposed to be read? Did it even have anything to do with me? Was he signaling that maybe friendship was not out of the question? Who knows. This is one of the fundamental problems of interpreting signs. I can construct a meaning based upon a system of intelligibility, as Fish notes, in the context in which the bald head revolves and come up with the possible significations of a person willingly going bald and what all that means but nevertheless the actual intent remains elusive. Put a military uniform on me and the baldness is explained. Unless, of course, I was playing a part in a play. And how does one know? Even within a given context, multiple interpretations may often still be formulated. This of course is not to say that people cannot be accuratly read - many have seen the difference between a depressed and a happy person - but it goes to show that people need to be much more aware of the possible mis-interuptations, difficulties, and constructions, that are involved in "reading," whether it be people, film, or books.

Now, after re-reading the story I just told, thanks to Eagleton's analysis, I've become aware of the "...unconscious system of value-judgements which underlie my own descriptive statements." By mentioning that I wished to leave-out the "moralizing," I have unconsciously brought to the surface that I expect the society to which I am writing to be of a moralistic ideological frame. Whether it is or is not, my text demonstrates a fear and an ackownledgement of a moralistic ideology. In a certain sense, this ideology, existent or not, shaped part of my text.