Thursday, October 04, 2007

Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

I'm sure a 5,000 word post on intentionalism and the critical interpretation of the term "faggot" is on the way.

…this entire dustup over the use of “faggot” does nothing much more than vindicate every argument I’ve ever made on this site about how language functions — and about the dangers of allowing for the appropriation of hermeneutics by consensus-driven communities under no compulsion to appeal to anything other than their own interpretations as a way towards determining “meaning.”

Not only is the maneuver on offer all over the leftwing blogosphere the last few days politically expedient and powerful — a way to graft committed group will onto “reality” by way of projection and collusion (a will to power through force of ego) — but it has the happy secondary effect of allowing interpreters to avoid the hard work of completing the speech act as accurately as possible so that they can rush immediately to OUTRAGE (real or feigned, depending on the sophistication of the interpreter), the tool they use to elevate, by way either of implied or explicit juxtaposition, their own commitment to “tolerance.”

That they miss the irony of their tolerance being intolerant almost by definition to speech of the kind they don’t approve (and it is “speech” in the most literal and superficial form that they are attacking here, not a worldview or an instance of encoded hate, many of them having determined that the intent is irrelevant (linguistically incorrect), or that they are entitled to dictate what that intent was (poor interpretation)) is therefore quite understandable: irony requires the rubbing together of meanings, and judging by the reaction here, signifiers can only take on one particular signified at any time, or at least, the meaning of the sign must be determined by....lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Integer nec lectus. Maecenas ullamcorper eros a lectus. Duis leo ligula, hendrerit ut, malesuada eget, gravida at, purus. Nam sagittis, mi non accumsan euismod, massa sem suscipit magna, id viverra mi diam in felis. Integer in sem. Da-do runrun, da-do runrun. Boink. Bonk. Phlbbbbbt.