AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Economy of Signification

Unaccountably persistent readers of these pages will admit that I’ve been nothing if not a constant advocate of the position that meaning always escapes our intentional control. We offer communicative tokens — words, images, sounds, gestures — and in a complicated back-and-forth negotiation, we try to reach a mutually-satisfactory understanding. Such power terms as “literal sense,” “plain sense,” and “simplest possible sense” serve mostly as shorthand for “I’m willing to gamble that the preponderance of my audience will agree that my interpretation seems obvious.”

So I can’t say anything about the plain, literal, simplest possible sense of Dick Cheney’s words. Since (on the other hand) Lynne Cheney, in her role as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, opposed the kind of fancy-pants, Frenchified, postmodern theory that has so complicated my own thinking, maybe she would say that the obvious meaning of what he said was, “If you vote for Kerry, terrorists will attack.” He’s not going to flip-flop on that, is he?