Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [97]
It is interesting and useful to try to determine from something you are analyzing what its makers might have intended. But, by and large, you are best off concentrating on what the thing itself communicates as opposed to what someone might have wanted it to communicate.
WHAT IS AND ISN’T “MEANT” TO BE ANALYZED
What about analyzing things that were not intended to “mean” anything, like entertainment films and everyday things like blue jeans and shopping malls? Some people believe it is wrong to bring out unintended implications. Let’s take another example: Barbie dolls. These are just toys intended for young girls, people might say. Clearly, the intention of the makers of Barbie is to make money by entertaining children. Does that mean Barbie must remain outside of interpretive scrutiny for such things as her built-in earrings, high-heeled feet, and heavily marketed lifestyle?
What the makers of a particular product or idea intend is only a part of what that product or idea communicates. The urge to cordon off certain subjects from analysis on the grounds that they weren’t meant to be analyzed unnecessarily excludes a wealth of information—and meaning—from your range of vision. It is right to be careful about the interpretive contexts we bring to our experience. It is less right— less useful—to confine our choice of context in a too literal-minded way to a single category. To some people, baseball is only a game and clothing is only there to protect us from the elements.
What such people don’t want to admit is that things communicate meaning to others whether we wish them to or not; that is, the meanings of most things are socially determined. What, for example, does the choice of wearing a baseball cap to a staff meeting or to a class “say”? Note, by the way, that a communicative gesture such as the wearing of a hat need not be premeditated to communicate something to other people. The hat is still “there” and available to be “read” by others as a sign of certain attitudes and a culturally defined sense of identity—with or without intention.
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