Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [97]
Meaning and Social Contexts
Baseball caps, for example, carry different associations from berets or wool caps because they come from different social contexts. Baseball caps convey a set of attitudes associated with the piece of American culture they come from. They suggest, for example, popular rather than high culture, casual rather than formal, young—perhaps defiantly so, especially if worn backward—rather than old, and so on.
We can, of course, protest that the “real” reason for turning our baseball cap backward is to allow more light in, making it easier to see than when the bill of the cap shields our faces. This practical rationale makes sense, but it does not explain away the social statement that the hat and a particular way of wearing it might make, whether or not this statement is intentional. Because meaning is, to a significant extent, socially determined, we can’t entirely control what our clothing, our manners, our language, or even our way of walking communicates to others.
The social contexts that make gestures like our choice of hats carry particular meanings are always shifting, but some such context is always present. As we asserted at the beginning of this chapter, everything means, and meaning is always contextual.
We turn now to two common problems writers encounter in interpretation. These problems are so widespread that we have fancifully labeled them “schools.”
THE FORTUNE COOKIE SCHOOL OF INTERPRETATION
The theory of interpretation that we call the Fortune Cookie School believes that things have a single, hidden, “right” meaning, and that if a person can only “crack” the thing, it will yield an extractable and self-contained “message.” There are several problems with this conception of the interpretive process (see Chapter 3, Implications Versus Hidden Meanings).
First, the assumption that things have single hidden meanings interferes with open-minded and dispassionate observation. Adherents of the Fortune Cookie School look solely for clues pointing to the hidden message and, having found these clues, discard the rest, like the cookie in a Chinese restaurant once the fortune has been extracted. The fortune cookie approach forecloses on the possibility of multiple plausible meanings, each within its own context. When you assume only one right answer exists, you are also assuming there is only one proper context for understanding and, by extension, that anybody who happens to select a different starting point or context and who thus arrives at a different answer is necessarily wrong.
Most of the time, practitioners of the fortune cookie approach aren’t even aware they are assuming the correctness of a single context because they don’t realize a fundamental truth about interpretations: they are always limited by contexts. In other words, we are suggesting that claims to universal truths are always problematic. Things don’t just mean in some simple and clear way for all people in all situations; they always mean within a network of beliefs, from a particular point of view. The person who claims to have access to some universal truth, beyond context and point of view, is either naïve (unaware) or, worse, a bully—insisting that his or her view of the world is obviously correct and must be accepted by everyone.
THE ANYTHING GOES SCHOOL OF INTERPRETATION
At the opposite extreme from the single-right-answer Fortune Cookie School lies the completely relativist Anything Goes School. The problem with the Anything Goes approach is that it tends to assume that all interpretations are equally viable, and that meanings are simply a matter of individual choice,