verisimilitude is the millstone around one s eye

Deconstruction is not destruction
or 'you may be right if you thought i was just being facetious,
or you may not'

→ Title to be read as is, as well as "... one as i"

→ "very-simi-litude" plays on the common hokkien dialect slang inquiry "simi!?"
which lies somewhere between the curious "what is this?" and the bewildered or impatient "what the fuck is this?!?!"

→ "he was right about april" - that

"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain ...

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images..."

"The Waste Land" ~ T.S. Eliot

→ Mercerism is a prominent religious/philosophical movement on Earth. The movement is based on the fable of Wilbur Mercer, a man who lived before the war. Adherents of Mercerism grip the handles of an electrically powered empathy box, while viewing a monitor which displays patterns that are meaningless until the handles are gripped. After a short interval the user's senses are transported to the world of Wilbur Mercer, where they inhabit his mind in an experience shared with any other people using an empathy box at that moment.

→ Connotative meanings are developed by the community and do not represent the inherent qualities of the thing or concept originally signified as the denotational meaning. The addition of such meanings introduces complexity into the coding system. If a signifier has only a single denotational meaning, the use of the sign will always be unambiguously decoded by the audience. But connotative meanings are context-dependent, i.e. the addressee must learn how to match the meaning intended by the addresser to one of the various possible meanings held in memory.
The power of connotation is that it enables the addresser to more easily consider abstract concepts and to introduce subtlety into the discourse.

→ Connotation is concerned with how the sign system is used in each message. The semantic content is selected by the addresser and represents that individual's values and intentions. Limiting an analysis purely to the sign system comprised by paradigms and syntagms excludes key elements in the interpretive process. Thus, subjective tests such as the commutation test have been developed to map connotations and so decode more of the addresser's intentions. This is achieved by changing the form of the signifiers, by substituting signifiers to assess what the alternative connotations would be and by considering what signifiers are absent and why their absences might be significant. The use of synonyms and antonyms clarifies connotational choices as between, say, pejorative and euphemistic usages.

→ Semiotics studies the relationship between the signifier and the signified, and thereby attempts to reveal the process of communicating understanding. In each case, a message is to be sent by an addresser to an addressee. For this to occur, the addresser and addressee must use a common code. Hence, language evolves dynamically. The community will identify a lexical thing that needs to be referred to in their language. By common agreement, a sign (sometimes called a signal) will be selected. Of the many possible shades of meanings that it can be used to convey, one or more will be selected and encoded, i.e. the chosen meaning(s) will be denoted or associated with the sign within the broader framework of syntactic and semantic systems available within the community. When the audience is exposed to the sign, the expectation is that they will be able to decode the meaning. As Roman Jakobson adds, there will also be an emotional element or value which represents the addresser's attitude towards the thing. This will either become a connotative meaning attached directly to the sign itself, or it will be communicated by the context in which the sign is used by the addresser.

→ The problem arises when several possible meanings or shades of meaning become associated with the sign. This is a shift from denotational to connotational meanings. Rules of interpretation are required to resolve uncertainty. Within the community, such rules are, for the most part, experiential and applied without conscious control. Members of a community have a shared memory of language patterns and norms which, for the most part, are stable over long periods of time. Individuals are therefore able to build up a cognitive framework which identifies the possible meanings from any grouping of signs and selects one considered the most appropriate from the context. This intuitive system is continuously tested through the audience's responses. If the responses are satisfying, intuition prevails. If the responses are obviously inappropriate, the audience will consciously review the thought process and decide whether to modify the framework. Semiotics has developed a more precise methodology for this interpretive process, seeking to expose the unstated habitual practices for interpreting signifiers.

→ The initial assumption is that the communication to be analysed represents both a cognitive use of the sign system and a statement that refers to the values of the addresser. The purpose of the test is therefore to illuminate the addresser's intention in using the code in this particular way. It works through a process of substitution, assessing the extent to which a change in the signifier leads to a change in the signified. The first step, therefore, is to exclude one signifier from the material to be analysed. This is a test of redundancy: to identify what meaning is lost (if any) by omitting that sign. It will be relatively unusual to find that one sign is completely superfluous, but more common to find that the contribution of the one sign to the whole meaning is relatively weak. The weakness or strength of its contribution can be calibrated more exactly by placing alternate (synonymous and antonymous) signs in the context. This will enable the analyst to make a judgement on the distinctiveness of the particular signifier chosen by the author/artist and of its value to the meaning, i.e. as more or less necessary for maintaining the meaning and/or rule structure in different occurrences. By changing the collocation between two of the existing signifiers, and so changing their original relationship, the relative significance of each signifier can be considered. Further, by also placing the original sign into different contexts, it can be seen whether the sign becomes more or less distinctive.

→ Reflecting on the relationship between the obvious symbolic meaning of a photograph (which he called the studium) and that which is purely personal and dependent on the individual, that which ‘pierces the viewer’ (which he called the punctum), Barthes was troubled by the fact that such distinctions collapse when personal significance is communicated to others and can have its symbolic logic rationalized. Barthes found the solution to this fine line of personal meaning in the form of his mother’s picture. Barthes explained that a picture is not so much a solid representation of ‘what is’ as ‘what was’ and therefore ‘what has ceased to be’. It does not make reality solid but serves as a reminder of the world’s inconstant and ever changing state. Because of this there is something uniquely personal contained in the photograph of Barthes’ mother that cannot be removed from his subjective: the recurrent feeling of loss experienced whenever he looks at it.

→ More important, the object itself shows that there is still more to be said. Every object shows itself as a set of possibilities, not merely as a determinate thing. To see a particular object is to see it in terms of possibilities. It is for example, to see the possibility of seeing the object from another perspective without knowing what perspective that might be or what I might see from that other perspective. To see one side of a chalk board eraser is to know (though usually only implicitly) that there is another side. That there is more to see and, therefore, to say is not just an inference I make when I see this side; the other side is not something I deduce from seeing this side. The fact that there is more than what I see immediately is part and parcel of seeing an object at all, for I don't see planes and surfaces and then deduce that they are objects. I see objects from the beginning and, as objects, objects have aspects that don't meet the eye, aspects like their other sides and things that I will only discover determinately on investigation. There is always more in what I see than I can name. Kant might have called this fact about the excessive character of perception one of the conditions for the possibility of having an experience at all. To perceive an object is to know immediately that there is always more to be said. All experience is experience of more, of possibility.

< * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * >