What is this thing called meaning?

Autumn brings the urge to change up my rhetorical strategy a bit, so for the next month or so I’ll switch from writing self-contained essays on different topics to posting a series of quotes, ideas-for-thought, and short provocations exploring the concept of meaning-making in the arts. As readers of this blog know, my mission is to open up the meaning-making process to and for our audiences.

Apologies to Cole Porter and all, but what is this thing called meaning, anyway?

Trying to figure out the nature of meaning—the message that is intended or expressed or signified—is, of course, fundamental to the history of thinking. In the Western tradition, this work extends back to Plato’s Dialogues and Aristotle’s On Interpretation and continues to this day in a range of disciplines (everything from semiotics, philosophy, and aesthetics to performance theory and learning science). For Plato, thinking (and its attendant meaning making) is a dialogue of the soul with itself. For Aristotle, meaning making arises from the relationship between two kinds of things: signs and the things they intend, express, or signify. When words are spoken, they become symbols or signs of what he calls the “affectations of the soul.” Language, then, becomes the representation of meaning—the machine that allows the soul’s dialogue to emerge and to transmit “what is meant.”

In modern Western thought, theories on how the interpretative function operates were first systematized in the early nineteenth century under the label “hermeneutics” (from hermeneu, the Greek word for interpret). In the 1960s German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer articulated the idea of the hermeneutic circle, or the acknowledgment that our approach to understanding a text (any object that can be “read,” including works of art) is necessarily conditioned by the series of interpreters (and interpretations) that precede us. A few decades later, Hans Robert Jauss argued that our capacity to interpret meaning is conditioned by our “horizons of expectation”—the shared set of criteria that we use to judge a text in any given period. For Jauss, the values used to interpret are formed through social structures, like education, and, as such, are not stable from one generation to another. As he famously said in his 1965 essay, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” “A literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period. It is not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a monologue.”

Contemporary theorists, working from disciplinary points of view as disparate as cognitive psychology, anthropology and reception theory, routinely acknowledge interpretation as both a function of our brain’s hard wiring and our socialization. Cognitive anthropologist Bradd Shore, for example, states that meaning and meaning-making are part of survival and adaptation of the species. As he argues in Culture in Mind, people “live out the details of their daily lives in terms of what they conceive to be real: not just rocks and mountains and storms at sea, but friendship, love, respect are known as false or real…This is the domain of meaning making, without which human beings in every culture fall into terror.”

What is this thing called meaning? I’ll continue to explore its mysteries in upcoming posts.