The Problem of Information by Douglas Raber

Author:Douglas Raber [Raber, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461673453
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2013-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

What Is the Subject of a Text?

Determining the subject of a text is a question of interpreting its content and a matter of understanding its relationship with the reader. This condition introduces yet another a troubling note of relativism. Many, if not most, meanings assigned to a text by careful and reasonable readers will be predictable from its contents, so the problem of describing aboutness does not appear to be intractable. The range of meanings available for most texts, however, is still quite wide, and the need to interpret texts in order to establish what they are about raises problems for efforts at bibliographic control that ideally seek the certainty of unambiguous, one-to-one relationships between index terms as signifiers and the contents of the texts they signify. A full determining of the aboutness of a text requires that we distinguish functional representation of meaning from the mere description or summarizing of a text. Aboutness, as a matter of interpretation, is an extra-descriptive phenomenon, generated partly by the intrinsic subject of a text as signified by its content bearing units, but variable by user.14 In other words, aboutness, because it is a construction of human interpretation, must be regarded as a cognitive phenomenon, but must also be based on the actual attributes of the texts whose aboutness is at stake.

This condition brings us to the second aspect of interpretation. When we say that analyzing the aboutness of a text is a matter of interpreting its subject, we are assuming some idea of what we mean by the word/signifier “subject.” As might be expected, arriving at this meaning is not easy. What is the nature of the subject of a text? How do we conceive of it, and what problems do different conceptions cause for representation? Naively, we might view the subject as self-evident and contained within its various content-bearing units, for example its title. But to do so assumes that a word is an attribute of the thing it names, and as we saw with the map metaphor, this assumption disregards the ambiguity of signification—the relations between aboutness and meaning, signifier and signified, and the objective and subjective aspects of information.15

A different approach is to regard the subject as an idea, a concept, or an understanding. In this perspective, it is an intangible creation of thought about an object not an attribute of that object. Thus, a text may be about reality, but it is not the reality it is about. In fact, there may be as many “subjects” of a text as there are readers of that text. This approach thus privileges subjective over objective reality by essentially asserting the claim that the subject of a text is in the eye of the beholder—that it is what it is perceived to be. Unfortunately, its relativism tends to defeat not only representation but also all forms of shared meaning including ordinary human communication. In order to determine the “real” subject of a text, we would have to be able to access its author’s mind, and if we could do that, there would be no need for the text itself.

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