Christopher:

<snip>
That's life in a nutshell, really: being able to agree on
being uncertain as to whether we disagree...
<snip>

Ah, well, life would be easier if uncertainty were so easily
agreed to!

<snip>
And yet the nuances are perhaps a little different. So perhaps we are both
in Konstanz, as it were, tapping out these messages on either side of the
same partition wall. Would it be unfair, for example, to suggest that, for
you, there are gaps (Iser's *Leerstellen*) within the text which the
reader then supplies? Whereas I'm trying to put across a 'social' sense of gaps:
between people (reader & reader, author & author and author & reader) and
between the reader's text and the author's text. Sperber's speaker tries
to alter the cognitive environment of any hearer.
<snip>

No, it's not unfair to suggest that for me that there
are gaps *Leerstellen* within the text, though I wouldn't
say that the reader necessarily "supplies" them but
may or may not. I also agree with your sense here of social
gaps between people, and that the speaker does alter
the cognitive environment of any hearer merely by speaking.
My hesitation at whether the reader necessarily supplies
the gaps is because of my sense that there are also
gaps within the author, the reader, etc. That the gaps
exist intrapsychically as much as intrapersonally. Which
connects with my earlier talking about the self as fortress,
as owning being, which can involve, among other things,
plastering over the gaps to present a kind of impermeable
surface.



<snip>
It seems to me that readings are emergent rather than settled, even (with
luck!) when the same reader returns to the same text after an interval of
some sort: another sort of gap. And that's important. I sometimes think
that taking a *cognitive* approach to texts segues too easily into the hope
that one day variant readings might be subsumed within a single master reading,
stable across cultural perspectives and through time, rather as those of
us who are sighted might believe we are able to recognise the _whole_
elephant over which all those silly blind men merely fumble.
<snip>

Yes, I think so too, that readings are emergent. There are
not only these gaps in time but gaps in the reader, perhaps
other gaps. So that for instance reading a poem by Dickinson
that I memorized at 16, the reading is emergent, occurs
in a different "cognitive environment" of which the gap
in time (of which there may be many having gone back to the
poem at various times in the intervening years) is the easiest
to point out, the gaps in me being more difficult to describe
though my perception of them and of the intervening change
is itself not devoid of *leerstellen*.

<snip>
What I'm trying (badly) to put across is a sense of what is possible for
the
reader. And that comes about partly through its not having been ruled out
(the bit I'd concentrated on) but partly also through its having been
raised
in the first place: it is our speaking that renders silence active, our
writing that gives a tension to the blankness of the page. Thus my silly
garden path sentence, 'A cricketer hit a six pound pigeon with a baseball
bat', invites you to imagine a cricketer but to break the usual
connections
between 'cricketer' and 'six' and 'cricketer' and 'bat'. After which, it's
up to you...
<snip>

Yes, here, too, I agree with this sense of correspondence
between speaking and silence and writing and the blankness
of the page. Your garden path sentence is interesting, because
it partly depends upon disrupting, or placing a kind of gap,
within a garden path cognitive environment. And yet since
I know not much about cricket and have never seen a game,
i.e, gaps between people and gaps in the reader, the effect
was not so much the disruption or placing of a gap in
a garden path sentence. It seemed quite unstartling to
me that the "cricketer hit a six pound pigeon with a
bat", which perhaps illustrates the point about gaps
better than anything else I can say!

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com









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'Please try to avoid common sense' (Niklas Luhmann)
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