Meaning and Troll (was: DEATH)
Stefan Kapusniak
In alt.pouting.sandwich, taly...@softhome.net (Talysman) wrote:
>however, a troll is a carefully-designed statement or
>series of statements that looks like an *obvious* joke
>to one group (the audience) but like a *serious* but
>grossly inaccurate claim to another group (the victim).
We could instead view "the audience" as a group who interpret
the "troll" as possesing serious meaning and the "the victims"
as a group who interpret the troll as possessing comedic or
disruptive intent.
This stance invites controversy, but gives an interesting
alternative flavour to the issue.
>Andrea Chen's posts in alt.surrealism, however, are not
>trolls, but metatrolls. and the fish are still biting.
In my opinion, it makes little sense to ask the question
"are Andrea Chen's posts to alt.surrealism trolls?" when
engaged in an analysis of their meaning. We can model
meaning more usefully as something assigned to a post
by its reader, rather than as some sort of platonic essence
imbued in the post which we must strive to uncover.
We can model all posts, by all authors, to all newsgroups
in a similar manner to produce equally interesting results.
Of course the author of a post assigns meanings of their
own to the words, but even if we can discover this
interpretation it tells us little about the strategic
and tactical impact that the act of interpreting the
text makes upon the nervous systems of the _other_
readers.
I have found it fruitful to contemplate to what degree
imprinted convention and social conditioning drive us to
assume an author-centred interpretation of meaning
holds superior validity _regardless of our context_.
Futhermore, I find the assumption that the meanings
assigned by an author -- or any other reader -- to a
text will not shift and change, perhaps radically, over
time, naive in the extreme. As the reference frame of
an observer changes so may assigned meaning. If I
compare my interpretation of a text made on Wednesday
that I made on Tuesday, I often discover points of
difference.
From moment to moment the way I perceive the world and
therefore the way I act toward it changes. Sometimes
subtly, sometimes radically. To take a trivial example;
suppose I were to stop typing this post and go and
drink several pints of beer. The meanings I would assign
to what I have written thus far would shift dramatically.
As the initial effects wore off and the hangover kicked
in assigned meaning would change yet again toward a
stance more consistent with my physical misery.
Tho' gross assaults on brain chemistry produce changes
in perception -- as we might expect -- we can see that,
far more commonly, changes in perception occur simply
by moving from one context to another. Suppose I were
to examine a post from the standpoint of compliance with
RFC 1036, an internet standard that describes -- to some
extent -- the requirments that a netnews post must
satisfy to be consider valid and well-formed for transit.
In that context the "meaning" of the words in the body
of the article would be irrelevant to the "meaning" of
the post in terms of my well-formedness criteria.
To take another usenet example, consider crossposting.
When I crosspost I place my article a number of _explictly_
different contexts each denoted by a different newsgroup
name. As such I run the risk that in some of those
contexts my post will be perceived as meaningless noise,
in other as meaningful yet mundane, and in still others
both meaningful and controversial. When we move between
newsgroups, changing our perceptual context to that of
the new group, posts we would consider as possessing no
meaning in the first group seem to us meaningful when
read in the second group.
Just sitting and reflecting upon how your perception
changes as you do something as simple moving from group to
group on Usenet can disturb one quite profoundly.
We also find that the deployment of semantics and syntax in
a tactical manner -- you do not read this word -- a
shifting of contexts in the middle of a text that unblocks
Orgone flow within the organism, can have equally dramatic
effects on the perceptual mechanism. The text thus
far undergoing unconsious re-interpretation, or perhaps
even treated by the reader as if unread.
If we posit a close interaction between these perceptual
mechanisms and the other mechanisms of the mind/body, as
we could expect to evolve in an efficient organism facing
an hostile environment, then hallucinatory, psychedelic
and psychosomatic experiences attributable to symbolic
manipulations -- "Magick" -- can under this model appear
far more tractable subjects of analysis than hitherto.
-- Kapusniak, Stefan m
Robert Scott Martin
Stefan Kapusniak <stefan...@zetnet.co.uk> wrote:
> This stance invites controversy, but gives an interesting
> alternative flavour to the issue.
Words, Soren K. What of the anti-troll, which appears as nonsense yet
delivers only essence?
Found poetry, cut-ups, aha, the dirt in the oyster that mothers pearls,
the occasion of the eureka?
One can make one post serve the work of five, acting as if it were five
separate posts whispered into five very different ears. Multivalent
*receptor theory* and also the secret of the xpost.
Out of ava!