Brigadoom vs The Game
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What?!? If this is an extention of your pet theory that the Lexx is a phallic symbol, I find that very unlikely.
At best it’s eisegetic speculation and requires serious loosening of associations, at worst it’s borderline psychotic sexotropic pareidolia. Explanation: If you have sex on the brain, you’re going to see sex images everywhere. The Lexx is shaped like an insect. Nothing else. Not a male organ, not a nude woman. It has a distinct head, thorax, and abdomen, compound eyes, and an all-around arthropoid construction. It’s a dragonfly with no wings.
I think I might need to explain something to you – pareidolia is eisegetics. To ascribe meaning to something involves acts of inscription. Meaning is only possible via associations and is explicated/generated accordingly. Explanation: if you have meaning on the brain, you are going to see meaning everywhere. The question is where the meaning is really to be found. The answer is not (just) out there. Indeed, the world is not so much found but made in the finding. Despite what dgrequeen implied elsewhere, meaning is the most esotoric property imaginable (read: imagined). We need to distinguish between the model of reality and the reality of the model in order to better account for the relationship. The relation we are really talking about is the one between signifier and signified. I would therefore encourage you to invoke two other big words you seem disinclined to cite – that of semiotics and hermeneutics. You seem to want to rely on a literal or identity notion of meaning, but this is untentable within the context of making sense of anything, including that of (say) a penis or dragonfly. There is a disjunct between word and wor(l)d, and the one can only be generated by way of assosiation with the other. One thing (a word, concept, sentence, picture, etc) stands for or signifies another thing (object, event, property, situation, etc). Within the context of a language that encourages you to distinguish between pareidolia and eisegetics, you are invariably having recourse to language’s own pre/determinations (speculations). In other words, the relation between words explains the relation between word and world, and such a (semiotic) process is interpretive (or hermeneutical).
Indeed, the concept of meaning you seem to be defending is only relatively recent and culturally specific, and is inclined to interpret away its own symbolic status (relation to the world). What is at issue between us, then, is not a pet theory about Lexx’s symbolic function per se, but the role we seem to think a symbol plays within the universe. Everything is symbolic in so far as it possesses a content and exhibits a referent. The way symbols bridge this gap/cross the divide turns on the way content and referent relate to each other. As I indicated elsewhere, semiotics regards everything as a sign that refers (back) to other signs by way of interpretation and exeggesis. One way to illustrate this is the way you invoke one category of meaning to distinguish it from another (the ideas of ‘insect’ and ‘phallus’ respectively). These concepts, however, have already been mapped out for you in accordance with the way they function as signs within culturally determined significations (you might otherwise know their functional status as conceptual schemes or paradigms of meaning). Take the example of those planetary objects that continue to go by the significations of deities, even if WE do no deify such objects within our own accounts of the universe. Another way to illustrate this that via the notion that the universe is written in the language of mathematics. When you recognise a star as a star, however (or indeed, your own penis) it is not in the form of an equation – it is rather by way of an interpretation enabled by certain relations enacted by your own assumptions, as mediated by certain significations. The next time you go to the toilet you could (if you were say an Indian who subscribed to a different notion of meaning) be conceivably reaching for a dragonfly by some other name.
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The Lexx is shaped like an insect. It has a distinct head, thorax, and abdomen, compound eyes, and an all-around arthropoid construction. It’s a dragonfly with no wings.
Hey, nice description of a penis. [img]images/smiles/icon_razz.gif[/img]
[ 28-03-2002: Message edited by: bonnee ]