Description Analysis Interpretation Insight

One of the reasons I've been collecting #politepapersigns for so long is because they throw into sharp relief the precariousness of social words.  The realm of rules, commands, government & institutions is shot through with human desire, ambition, calculation and manipulation.

And all of these come to fruition through representation.

And it's strange that often we're left with nothing but the fragments of representation drifting around, long after the desires and calculations have faded, failed or left town.

Polite paper signs always FEEL a little more lighthearted than some of these drifting signifiers, and as such they're a perfect petri dish for thinking about how political or commercial (or other) yearnings become the iron cages of our rationality.

One of my favorite games to play with polite paper signs is to add words like:

"In all cases.." or

"...for all time." or

"...on penalty of death."

The game is just in my head and the goal is just a quick laugh.  But the laughter is in memory of how historically contingent our ideas are, how contextually derived our social sense of meaning is.  And how every sign eventually fades, or gets ripped or the tape comes off or gets defaced.

I grew up in a strange little wing of Christianity called Fundamentalism who preferred a "literal" interpretation of scripture fueld by the "plain meaning."

Gradually though "plain meaning" did not necessarily seem so plain to me.  And I could imagine that in fact someone more recent was distorting some old meaning for personal gain.  No offense toward that human of course, humans have always been pivoting their representation strategies and morphing their meanings.  It's just that the hermeneutic of literal interpretation with plain meaning didn't account for those pivots or morphs.

The thing I value today is the process of description, analysis, interpretation and insight.  A cycle of hermeneutic actions which attends carefully to context and prizes the discovery of bounded meaning.  I am a meaning seeking junkie - ahd having a map with rules for that meaning-seeking?  Well that just makes me (a very contingent, subjective) human. 

(Optional Multiple Choice / Matching Quiz:  Which Sign from Where?  Doctor's Office, Bohemian Art Store, Bookstore.  Classroom.)

(Also one of these came from Canada.  Which one?)

(Optional Imagination Prompt - invent a time or space or author for each sign that radically shifts the meaning.)

(all quizzes will be received if you send them to andrewerudd@gmail.com)