What do texts do?

For those of you who have been following along, this is in response to Amy and her concerns about totalitarianism and subjective language.

Well, it seems that we have gotten away from our argument. I'm not sure why, but let's see where this goes. Amy, you said in your last post that you don't believe that texts do anything. I'm sure that you didn't mean that literally, for certainly texts do something. They sit on the shelf. They force me to buy them. At the very least, they decay. Sometimes, they are forgotten. Texts do many many things.

The point I believe you were making is that texts do not do something which literature people often assume that other literature people assume they will do--that is, add up to a coherent description of human thought. I say that literature people assume that other literature people assume this because I got to tell you, as one of those people who actually does assume this, I am in a rare minority, constantly criticized as being part of a majority that needs to be fought against, but finding very few allies in actuality on my side of this debate. Let me try this another way: nobody assumes that literature will actually add up to a coherent system of thought. Moreover, they are so galled by this possibility that anyone would assume such presupposition that they attack such people with viciousness. Honestly, I don't know how I survive.

Here it is in a nut shell. All this stuff about a text doing nothing but inspiring the thought of the reader carries with it certain logical conundrums that are not so easy to get around. First of all, the assumption that a text "lives" inside the mind of its interpreter, the reader, is pointless. What doesn't live inside the mind of the interpreter? That's the point of The Matrix, I do believe. So to say that a text does NOT contain a system of thought, and that a system of thought only emerges inside the mind of the reader is only to say that texts are like everything else in reality, including other people, which isn't saying much at all. Come now, we need to define the purpose of a text a little less broadly.

What's more, such definitions of text are counter-intuitive. If the point of literature is simply to create a system of thought in the reader's mind, then why don't we think that people who achieve such system of thoughts by reading Tom Clancey are the crowning achievement of literature. For that matter, why isn't illiteracy prized? It's far less strenuous than reading books to inspire you to create your own system of thought. But we don't believe such things. We believe, in our heart of hearts, that texts do, in fact, mean something. We just don't know how to reconcile this with our experience of a text meaning something different than someone else's. But is the answer really to say that there is no meaning in what we read, only in the act of reading?

I wonder if we'd say such things about the critics we read. Freud obviously means something. Why then doesn't Pynchon? Why doesn't Pynchon+DeLillo=system of thought?

But all this seems a bit far afield from the conversation that spawned it. If we say that academics' use of subjective language is empowering to totalitarian thought and then we say, "what is the utility of literature?" then we are aiming right at the sort of language which we consider dangerous. So, I will say it again, what is the point of an argument about the use of literature? We continue to read the same material. We find ourselves deep in the process of analysis. Neither of these acts is modified by our view of what we are doing. However, arguing about what we are doing does affect the world, because such arguments immediately call into question the act of placing absolute judgments, and left without absolutes, there can be no right, wrong, good, or evil. Thus totalitarianism gets a leg up.

I await your retort.