RSSWhy ‘Reading’ Is Not On The Cline Of Instantiation
Jun 04
Even leaving aside ascription as the organising principle of the cline of instantiation, the relation between a reading and a text is not the same as the relation between a text and system.
A ‘reading’ is metaphorical for Senser sensing Phenomenon.
So, unpacked, a ‘reading’ includes a reader, the reading process and the text that is being read.
So, variant ‘readings’ of one text include variant readers and/or variant reading processes.
The cline of instantiation, on the other hand, is merely a relation between (variant) texts and the system of which each is an instance. It does not include readers or the reading process.
Variation in readers and the reading process are distinct dimensions from the cline of instantiation, and, since they involve actual texts, these dimensions of variation intersect the cline of instantiation at the instance pole.
eldon
Jun 04, 2010 @ 18:13:54
here is what i wrote to a clown with leprosy earlier… before i read all the comments below [er, ‘above’], i’d rather show my true colours first….
or variant reading events by the same reader….
my issue seems to stem from this point.
due to the ‘reader’ being part of the ‘reading’ as defined above.
i’m also thinking of the ‘utterance’ here, so that ‘reading’ is a graphic analogue of the spoken ‘instance’ of interpretation… and then the interpretation (or should i say ‘interpretant’?) is a matter of response, which is, in my view, interchangeable with ‘utterance’ and ‘reading’ – there need be no overt ‘response’. but overt response is a new text, not a ‘reading’.
this may be the crux of it – the conception of different intersecting dimensions to account for reader.
eldon
Jun 04, 2010 @ 18:19:25
i tend to see ‘theory’ and ‘framework’ as rather different ‘things’.
one theory of language for example, can produce several different frameworks for analysing the instances of language, the texts. it rather deoends on what slice of the language you wish to investigate or focus on…
eldon
Jun 12, 2010 @ 17:40:39
not necessarily. but one does need to separate theory form framework in order to explain what students need to do in order to explain how they made their research.
for example, i see systemic functional linguistics as a theory of language, also has elements of a theory of learning as well. but there is no ready-made framework for analysing texts. from the theory there springs many frameworks for approaching texts analysis and informing a methodology. this must make sense for the findings of the research to be valid.
so, appraisal is a framework, not a theory. in broad terms. but within appraisal there are sub-frameworks that can be proposed and ‘applied’ to texts in order to investigate various phenomena…
A. Persona
Jun 15, 2010 @ 17:32:04
In any case, I do think the scope of ‘theory’ in the way you are using it differs in the way I am using it here – and mainly due to my need for more delicate framing of methodological approaches wrt teaching students of language and analysis.
So I guess we need to define terms sometimes, even amongst ourselves, before we can talk about some conceptual boundaries…
eldon
Jun 04, 2010 @ 18:51:05
so, i got stuck on:
where it says, does NOT include readers or the reading process.
and i mis-read your explanation.
i see now that you claim that the cline of instantiation does not include the reading event, and so you are separating these ‘readers’ and ‘processes’ from a conception of the cline of instantiation.
however, this is where i beg to differ, or where you are suggesting the theory should incorporate another intersecting dimension – which i am open to.
up till now, though, i have been willing (along with Ockham) to see the end of the pole as the reading event, or ‘reading’ for short.
this is because i was searching for a way to incorporate my analyses of appraisal values in texts in context(s) to a system network view. and realisation – as i mused earlier – did not cut it. did not make sense even – as if the ‘meanings’ were there in the text, and the lexico-grammar would only ‘realise’ these functions. but wrt appraisal, a realisation relationship could not be maintained over extended texts. and hence i needed to incorporate both a phylogenetic and logogenetic view of the texts as units of analysis, which sort of made a realisation relationship problematic also… actually, it didn;t make it problematic, it helped de-problematise it. ahem!
also, i was aware that i would change my interpretation of a segment of text, a ‘prosod’, or sub-phase, dependent on contemporaneous reading position, e.g. upon receipt of more ‘information’ on related topics.
anyway, as an analyst and as a participant, i was also made aware that MY interpretation was in fact also ontologically-biased. if you don’t mind. but other theories in fact insist that each person in a group does have a different interpretation of the same text – even given they have similar group-based phylogenetically-based information. so, although i was ostensibly researching group practices, at a micro-level, i needed to first claim that the reading event is part of the all-over group process (mediated by language to a large degree, or at least graphically-mediated)….
anyway, this is why the cline of instantiation seems to offer me an explanatory framework.
eldon
Jun 15, 2010 @ 17:49:06
i’m just reading martin 2008 (p.37), and there, his conception – and diagram – of the relationship involves 3 clines, all converging on ‘system’, like the wrist of a 3-toed claw, with ‘instantiation’ one of the other toes, ‘realisation’ another, and ‘individuation’ the final one.
tellingly, the instantiation cline has ‘instance’ at the claw end (not ‘reading’), while individuation has ‘persona’ (also not ‘reading’) at the claw end of its toe-cline, while the realisation toe has no claw. so to speak.
i’m not comfortable with the word ‘individuation’ because it has the connotations of a process, yet in this diagram it seems representative of a level or ‘state’. after a while i may grow accustomed to the word and it will lose its original chaffing quality, but at the moment it does not make enough sense to me. i think this is because i started to investigate what i called ‘textual persona’ – which may indeed be defined as something to do with, yes, the individual repertoire a writer evinces in a collection of their writings.
but obviously, this will not do for instantiation, because that is another matter, and down to the ‘instance’, rather than the ‘repertoire’ – even though, at the same time, a writer’s repertoire may be instantiated in a text.
eldon
Jun 05, 2010 @ 18:46:23
when JC writes:
i want to say, yes, this is what is entailed in what i said above.
but my analysis of a text is one reading event, and it is one of a set of possible or ‘potential’ readings of the same text.
i feel the need to acknowledge that my reading is not THE reading.
and i must say, YOUR reading of me is a very poor interpretant of my -ohdear- *intended* meaning.
so whereas my reading is one ‘instance’ of a potential set of readings given the text, it is at the extreme end of the poles – as i am a living embodiment of system, or at least one part of it. no knowledge without a knower. no language without a parole. these sorts of separations are analytic, not real, anyway.
also, readings are temporally located.
readings are time-based events, and happen in ‘real-time’.
…as someone reading jane austen 100 years ago pointed out to me through her time machine the other day as well..
eldon
Jun 05, 2010 @ 18:50:12
oh, by the way,
this is also not what i was suggesting… i mean, i also agree with you here… ironically, i have spent many long hours arguing just this to members of the mailing list i am still involved with on the blog.
Miss Eggernation
Jun 15, 2010 @ 18:29:47
my issues in thinking about this concern:
it seems that if ‘reading’ is disallowed on the cline of instantiation, this means that any analysis of a text that goes beyond the lexicogrammar, i.e. beyond mere description of what is ‘there’ – and this applies to the ‘meanings’ generated by whole texts for example, using whatever “framework” of analysis one cares to apply (e.g. genre staging or phases of text, thematic progression, transitivity analysis/dynamism) – will not be classified as part of instance.
for me, the term ‘reading’ applies to an analysis of a text, and analysis to me, is not just parsing, but classifying and recombining using a particular ‘framework’ of analysis in order to discover patterns in the text(s). and analysis unfortunately concerns and is performed by human agents.
if we disallow ‘reading’ then we must restrict the instance to the disembodied text, or the text whose features and elements may only be analysed by machine – not by a ‘reader’, i.e. an analyst.
of course, i speak as one interested mainly in the discourse semantic, the meaning-making function of language, the construal of experience at least. abstracted lexicogrammar seems more the domain of those focussing on syntax only.
how are we to view each analysis and interpretation of the meaning-making patterns in a text?
i mean, the “individuation” cline is not a text-based one – this seems more akin to the langue-parole distinction, what bernstein referred to as reservoir-repertoire…. this is focussed on ontogenesis rather than logogenesis and phylogenesis, it seems to me.
suggestions for theoretical re-consistecising?
eldon
Jun 17, 2010 @ 13:04:51
yes, ‘disallowed’ refers to its inclusion on the cline of instantiation, not disallowed altogether… interpersonal obligation notwithstanding.
yes, too, ‘reading’ is not stratum-specific at all, quite the opposite i’d say.
and there are a potentially infinite number of readings… of this text even i expect… even though practically-speaking, readings can be limited to number of readers, periods of time, etc.
but for the same reason, this is what i am interested in language for.. to answer another recently posed question. the interest (care-value) is in communication of all kinds, about relationship, not about static text which has no meaning, only meaning potential. it is in accounting for that meaning-potential that draws me to the reading end of … whatever cline… and conceptualised in terms of the language, or at least a semiotic system.
all forms of learning and communication are involved (the batesonian speaking here), not only natural language. the ‘reading event’ or ‘utterance’ is the only point where meaning actually ‘exists’ if you will, and the only way we can account for meaning-potential is to be part of reading and interpreting…and noting whether our own signs have been ‘recognised’, etc. i see this as linked to ‘addressivity’:
eldon
Jun 17, 2010 @ 13:11:25
oh, and so, my question still remains about how to conceptualise this ‘reading event’.
if it intersects the instance pole on some dimension of instantiation, and it also intersects or is linked in some way to the dimension of “individuation” (if i must use that term), then perhaps we need to think of a relationship between these dimensions which is not only intersecting at the system end as martin’s 2008 model suggests, but folds back on itself somehow.
eldon
Jun 17, 2010 @ 19:47:42
[in response to a request from one of the interactants whose comments do not now appear, i went to the trouble of taking an image of the diagram in Martin 2008]
martin 2008 representation of the clines of instantiation/individuation, or what i have previously referred to as
the three-toed claw
eldon
Jun 17, 2010 @ 19:46:05
dunno about a reading at the level of graphology – so, we narrow the stratum to the discourse semantic in my case.
i mean, is there reading at the level of phonology?
intonation has meaning, but only in context of different language to make a gross observation.
so graphology, if limited to keyboard-generated, is a 2-D thing at base, and it also explodes if one considers line length, column-use, font style, page layout/framing… and see for example, using graphology to effect visuals in the old ASCII-art days….
a ‘reading’ is the effect of a mental cognitive process, it is not the process itself. naturally, in being interested in accounting for text meanings, we do not discount cognitive processes – but that doesn’t mean we are going to investigate cognitive processes at all.
whenever i analyse a text, i perform a reading of it.
parsing a text is a ‘reading’ in that sense.
at the level of graphology, one needs to be able to recognise a context for words and that meanings are potential in them. if that is not the case, then we could not recognise those little nonsense distorted ‘words’ we need to inscribe into boxes in order to post comments on websites for example.
Cynthia Pigglebottom
Jun 19, 2010 @ 21:50:51
One cannot focus on one level of any dimension (aka strata?) and ask for the reading based on that level, especially if it has been agreed that any reading involves several levels, if not all.
As ‘reading event’ happens at a time, and at the ‘end’ of the cline (at the present conception of it), then it is actually a product of, or dependent on all levels, at that time and context.
So to ask about different readings of one level (strata?), especially at the level of graphology which is a servant of the next level ‘up’, feels like an error of logical typing. I note in passing that I am typing at this graphological level.
I am on a list where one of the writers consistently uses ‘*’ in a way I am not familiar with. Obviously, to her, it has a meaning or lends a meaning to the related words, but rather than me just asking her what it means (and thus revealing my ignorance) I assume that if I read it enough times in various contexts, I will eventually come to understand its semiotic potential. For her. And obviously as she believes, for us.
eldon
Jun 20, 2010 @ 10:19:04
actually, again, there is another slightly off-putting aspect to this issue – i may be misremembering again, but it seems to me that if we are talking about the cline of instantiation, then it may not be appropriate to refer to ‘strata’, since these are in a realisation relationship with next-door strata on the… well, is it a ‘cline’?… of realisation.
eldon
Jun 21, 2010 @ 11:50:26
to me, ‘reading’ is a product/function of the levels of ‘instance-types’ ‘above’ it. the fact that the notion of ontological ‘reader’ intersects with this ‘reading’ is not at issue for me, as i am not interested in investigating that so closely – only acknowledging that the experience and ‘culture’ of the reader should be recognised, and is a part of any semantic analysis (which is surely what ‘reading’ entails).
in this way, it does not matter that each level itself is in a relationship (of ‘deployment’) across the way with the strata of realisation. this is another perspective.
if you don’t mind, realisation is basically a bottom-up thing (even though the levels ‘above’ i can see as ‘downward causing’ a la lemke, and one calibrates the other in a 2-way ‘process’) because configurations at one level ‘realise’ configurations at the next strata ‘up’.
but in my use of instantiation, i was conceiving that it is more of a ‘top-down’ thing, i.e. that levels ‘above’ allow/constrain the configurations that occur ‘below’. so, system and instance are indeed linked in this way. i understand that an instance is only really an example of a particular ‘stratum’, and so should be conceived of as horizontally related, rather then vertically/hierarchically related.
anyway. in terms of there being instances of different graphological formations, of this i am (fairly) sure. spacing of letters, font types, framing, use of sets of letters, whether colour or even images appear in and with the text create different ‘texture’ and indeed ‘functions’. readings of graphology, to me, and if i am understanding your question right – ‘explode on context’.