Deconstruction and Authority
Spoken language - "A unique authenticity, a truthfullness deriving from the intimute relation between word and idea"
Writing - "A threat, it cuts off at the source from the authorizing presence of speech. Writing is condemned to circulate endlessly from reader to reader, the best of whom can never be sure that they have understood the author's original intent. Its effect is to 'disseminate' meaning to a point where the authority of its origin is pushed out of sight...by a limitless interpretative freedom"
"To write risk's one's thoughts being perverted..wrenched out of context and exposed to all manner of mischievious reinterpretation"
Philospher, Socretes relied apon spoken language to preserve information and distrusted written text for these very reasons. Following him, the likes of Plato, Derrida and Foucoult have been very influential in the idea of the written text as an unreliable source for truth and authority.
In a chapter called "The Death of the Author", Michelle Foucault went so far as to say that you cannot know the true intent of the author or his text, leaving it open to interpretation. To my understanding, he claimed that anything in the world can be a text and so everything is relative and open to interpretation.
This is the beginning of a Deconstruction of meaning..Which i wish to challenge.
Why is there such a distrust of the reader's ability to interpret information correctly?
Why can we not know truthfully and faithfully the exact intention of an author/artist?
Playing with these theories and suspicions i've begun deconstructing what i believe to be true, direct and unquestionable data through, what i call, 'Instructional Mapping'.
