LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 2
WITHDRAWALS FROM MEANING
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experiences. Ingarden’s particular project attempts to account for their existence during reading. Concisely said, he first discloses half-constituted meaning via an analysis of the essential structure of textual works. He then examines the structured acts through which those works are understood. Finally, he describes the convergence of the two sides in the reading experience where textual meaning is fully constituted and objectivated.
Ingarden clearly uses a subject-object methodology. On the object-side is the literary work of art whose structural properties must be sought in a pure analysis which makes no presuppositions. Doing so reveals this structure to be multi-layered, with individual strata sequentially ordered and forming a unity for the work as a whole. Nevertheless, this whole is a schematic formation, as several of its strata contain places of indeterminacy or structural gaps. On the subject-side is the reader who encounters these gaps as obstacles to meaning comprehension. Here the reading process slows down or even halts. Helplessness ensues and the reader guesses at the meaning to complete the act of understanding. Ingarden broadly identifies two types of reading. Passive reading proceeds sentence by sentence and is incapable of providing summaries. It thus fails to hold textual meaning as an object and so remains in the sphere of meaning. By contrast, active reading has a certain intercourse with the text. It anticipates the meaning of future sentences based on those that precede it, and rethinks the meaning of past sentences retroactively, in light of those that follow. It is as if reader and text are projected into a co-creative realm wherein extracted meanings change into intentions identical to those of the act of understanding and those of the text itself. In this way structural gaps are filled and the literary work of art becomes concretized.
The establishment of phenomenological aesthetics influences two key members of the Constance School of reception theory which reached a highpoint in the 1970s. Both Iser and Jauss establish technical methods that similarly regard the subject as co-creator of the irreducible, universal and shareable meanings of the text. Iser’s work particularly recommends itself for having undertaken its own phenomenology of reading. In many respects an updated version of Ingarden, Iser provides intricate descriptions of the slow convergence of reader and text from their initial separation to the final emergence of the aesthetic object meant. But he attends more to this emergence than does Ingarden, underscoring its dynamic interaction with both reader and text. This clarifies how meaning participates in its own constitution.
In terms of the previous discussion, Iser adds a level of complexity to the object-side by no longer considering structural gaps as stable. He reasons that a fundamental asymmetry exists between reader and text. They lack a common frame of reference which might otherwise regulate their dyadic interaction. Ultimately, the gaps encountered in the text are so many manifestations of the gap between reader and text. Attempting to bridge or fill gaps is what spurs the reading process. As the reader progresses through the text, imagined missing
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