"You're Reading Way Too Much Into the Text..."

Is there any more commonplace complaint about theoretical readings of texts?

I am adapting this post from a response to someone from recent comments, but the point is more general (and since a new semester of teaching rhetoric and critical theory is beginning right about now it is a point that has a special resonance).

Perhaps it will help to realize that from my theoretical perspective the meaning of a text is far from exhausted by trotting out the author's intentions for that piece (to the extent that these intentions are even determinable in the relevant sense, even, sometimes, for the author herself), and that the work that texts do depends deeply as well on the context of a text's production and on the changing contexts of its reception and so on.

I am not making the claim that every text means every possible thing or some such facile relativist point you may want to attribute to me upon hearing this. But I am saying that just as authors rely on the archive of past creativity they rely as well on the ongoing collaborative expressivity of readers for whatever force, meaning, relevance, and abiding life their texts attain to. This understanding of textual meaning-making (and some of you might very well be somewhat appalled -- or possibly exhilarated -- to realize just how wide-ranging are the things in which I discern textlike characteristics in the relevant sense) plays very deeply, you can be sure, into my own sympathies as a technoprogressive democrat for the politics of access-to-knowledge (a2k), FlOSS (free-libre-open source software), peer-to-peer (p2p), pay-to-peer (public subsidization of p2p), copyfight, free press, anti-corporate-militarist personhood/anti-corporatist-militarist secrecy movements, by the way.

What my frustrated commenter intended to communicate in an off-the cuff way in a text of his published on another blog seems to have resonated with Michael Anissimov enough that he recommended the commenter's text to me in the midst of a conversation we were having concerning technodevelopmental politics. Maybe Michael was "reading more into the text" as much as I was when he found in it what seemed to him a particularly useful way to summarize his own sense of the issues at hand, just as much as the commenter would say I was "reading more into the text" when I said of it that the text symptomizes certain key problems I grapple with when technology-talk goes "superlative" in various ways.

Writers have less say than they would like as to the ways in which their work will be taken up by the world and the work their work will do once it has been released into the dynamic reception of that world. Even if that yields frustrations for me as it does any other writer from time to time, I'll admit that I wouldn't have it any other way.

Of such vulnerabilities, pleasures, frustrations, and serendipities is freedom made.