Nature of the Life of Meaning in Time and our Life in Meaning in Time

1.      Nature of the Life of Meaning in Time and our Life in Meaning in Time

Introduction

Written text is fundamental to human communication, second only to spoken word. Text enables us to take history forward. It makes us feel proud of our past and allows us to think of a better future. A text is more than its component words. Texts have influenced minds, raised questions, answered some and left many unanswered. it has caused revolutions. ‘What changes the world’ is what we make out of the text in and for our times- that is, its meaning in time. Readers come and go, but texts continue to influence and change the world. Therefore, study of text and its meaning are extremely important in understanding our life and its meaning in the present world.

Synchronic Language and Diachronic Text

            Our world is composed of many codes. Language is the most complex code. We need this code to speak, write and understand. Any realization of language is only a disclosure or parole of the treasury of the code of language. This code of language is synchronic. It is static and doesn’t have complexities of growth, and is ‘of a time’. It was Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a Swiss linguist, who proposed that language as a system of signs should be studied as a complete system at any given point in time. This implies that language is synchronic- ‘of a time’.

            On the contrary, a literary text is diachronic. It is an anti-realistic perspective. Diachrony suggests changes in meaning over time. Meaning begins to move across time. The text doesn’t cling to the author’s bosom. It drifts away from the writer. This is called distanciation.

Distanciation

            In the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), the transition from speaking to writing is marked by what can be called ‘alienation’ or ‘distanciation’ (Verfremdung). The realization of discourse in writing distances the text from its context of spoken discourse. During this transition, the original context of the discourse vanishes. The text takes on a whole new meaning and is no longer bound by its original writer. The text is distanced or alienated from the author. It is now ready for the reader to read and interpret.

This distanciation is the first step in the diachronic journey of the text. Text leaves its origin and ground and moves away from the author. This can be equated to Individuation in Developmental Psychology, proposed by Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). The text undergoes a sort of diachronic individuation. The text is now free to move in time and space. There are no limits as to where to go or how far to go.

In Ricoeurian hermeneutics, distanciation is not looked at negatively as something that needs to be overcome. On the contrary, distanciation turns out to be the very condition of meaning making because it paves the way for ‘Semantic Autonomy’. Semantic Autonomy is nothing but the fact that through the act of writing, the text is freed from the ‘intention of the author’. Against this backdrop of distanciation, ‘Semantic Autonomy’ is inbuilt in the text, i.e., the reader is absent from the act of writing; the writer is absent from the act of reading [death of the author].

Thus freed, the text becomes a ‘projected world’ with a career in time. It has a diachronic life of its own. Hermeneutics focuses on this diachronic life. Literary text is an ‘outward seeker’ looking for readers of all times. It sets out on a diachronic journey in time and space. It is disposed with a quality namely, ‘universality of address’. It is ready for uptake anywhere in the world. For Ricoeur destination of the text is readers’ appropriation - self understanding through dialogue with the text which is a form of the other. Text is a complexified other. Appropriation is making the other myself, that is, ‘Otherness’ into ‘own-ness’. Hermeneutics deals with this appropriation- self understanding through dialogue. It happens across problematic zones of liminality.

Liminality

If I am a realist reader, I go back to the author’s time and space to capture the authorial meaning. The spatiotemporal gap does not count for a realist. One is a contemporary of all times in realist reading. It is an unproblematic travel according to realist hermeneutics. But Ricoeur says such an unproblematic passage is not possible. For him, a reader in the present understands a text of the past with all the ‘receptions’ it gathered during the gap between past and present.

Reception History

Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997) spoke of reception history (Rezeptions Geschichte) of a text. “Literature and art only obtain a history that has the character of a process when the succession of works is mediated not only through the producing subject but also through the consuming subject—through the interaction of author and public.” We receive a text with a history and all the meanings it accumulated during the journey through time and space. Ricoeur says, when you read it, you read it with all its history and the diachronic journey it made. The process of reading, for reception theory, is always a dynamic one, a complex movement.

All readers have an age, history, era and situation in an epoch, which is named a horizon. A horizon of expectation (Prejudice for Gadamer: 1900-2002) is what we can see within a horizon. It is within a horizon of expectations that Reception takes place. Time is a continuum of receptions in horizons of expectation.

Surplus Meaning

Text goes through receptions through generations of horizons of expectations. Text has a meaning, excess/more than what it had at its birth, because it travels in time gathering meaning. The excess meaning a text acquires during its diachronic journey across time is called Surplus Meaning.

This means, text does not remain disembodied in a vacuumized zone, available for uniform reading. Text travelling through history is historicized in reception. No text is complete in the past. Meaning is not closed and complete in the past but open in its future. Meaning of a text is the future of the text. It is not a finished fact, but an unfolding fate. It comes to my horizon as a sedimentation of a complex reception history that it incurs during its diachronic journey. The sum total of all these is the meaning of the text.

Unfolding Meaning

Ricoeur and Gadamer speak of us being implicated into unfolding meaning in an unconcluded world where last word is not said about anything. Jauss says, “A literary text is not an object that stands by itself and offers the same face to each reader in each period.” Neither writer nor reader has the privilege of a final meaning. Meaning is on an unfolding trajectory in contemporary literary theory. This view is anti-theological and sponsors multiple readings and meanings. It is open to the future. Ricoeur’s surplus meaning is a sign of ever unfolding evolutionary meaning on a journey towards the Omega point in the future.

Reflection

“The sense of a text is not behind the text, but in front of it,” says Ricoeur. Such an attitude to written text would revolutionize one’s perspective. Wherever tradition or faith has declared a dead end to meaning making and interpretation, there was bloodshed. When meaning is closed, tolerance vanishes. Self righteousness looms in the world, which in turn brings in wars to eliminate the ‘difference’. An open attitude to meaning would ensure cohabitation of ‘difference’ in a colourful, multi faced and peace promoting world.

As we are being pulled into the future, into an ever unfolding, ever complexified world of meaning, there needs to be an air of magnanimity to breath and elixir of tolerance to quench our thirst with. If humanity has to coexist, we need to turn and see that there is truth in our neighbor too. Such an atmosphere of mutual human trust will blossom only when we accept that meaning is not exclusive, but inclusive.

Conclusion

“Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world; the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken; the world is open and free; everything is still in the future and will always be in the future,” says Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975). Meaning is not closed in the past, but is open to the future. There is no degradation, but expansion, addition and increase of meaning. Act of reading is never a distortion. Thus irrespective of changing readers, the text unfolds its meaning into a life of ever increasing spectrum of meaning, enriching the horizons of our lives with prosperous texts of ever blooming realizations.