Comments on: Watching Like a Mother

By: amanda klein

amanda klein — Thu, 13 May 2010 17:30:59 +0000

I had the exact same reaction to the deaths of Sun and Jin in LOST. I assumed that after some pleading from Sun, Jin would realize that he could not possibly orphan his daughter, and swim out of the submarine. I was absolutely floored when he stayed. I love both of those characters but my anger at what I perceived as their selfishness, made it difficult for me to mourn them. How could they abandon their child for some romantic ideal? Why didn’t Sun, as a mother, beg her husband to go and get their baby?

My guess is that the writers thought this scene would really get the viewers sobbing and, as you mention, the pre-baby me would have been sobbign for sure. But my status as a mother heavily colored the entire scene, making it into something I don’t think the writers intended. In fact, I was shocked when Sun left her child behind to return to the island last season–this seemed so far fetched to me.

Anyway, thanks for highlighting this.

By: Kristina Busse

Kristina Busse — Sun, 09 May 2010 18:16:41 +0000

Oh, thanks 🙂 I knew I’d misunderstood you somewhere in there…

I agree. i didn’t read Fiske and Hall in my grad school days, of course, but reading them since then I’ve never gotten that impression. Though I guess the ‘subversive’ position is more homogenous, isn’t it? To me the subtle negotiations, the myriad positions make it more rather than less difficult to establish a resistant position.

And yes, I agree that theoretically it is near impossible to account for these things. But I kinda really want to…

By: Amanda Lotz

Amanda Lotz — Sun, 09 May 2010 17:51:46 +0000

Kristina, In my closing I was referencing what seemed the dominant debate at the time (those grad school classrooms) which was about what “multiple meanings” meant for our understanding of the operation of power. Fiske and Hall were often caricatured as suggesting zillions of meanings (which I don’t find in reading their original works), which some used to make an argument that there was more revolutionary potential than I really think is there. On one hand, there may be millions of subtle negotiations, but I think in terms of questions of power and the operation of dominant ideology, these negotiations are pretty slight in significance.

The scholarly agenda regarding accounting for different subject positions is a tough one. As messy as it is, I don’t know how much more precise than “multiple meanings” is reasonable at a macro level. This micro level variation is a dilemma for scholars though because theories do in essence seek to explain something larger than the individual.

By: Kristina Busse

Kristina Busse — Sun, 09 May 2010 16:36:08 +0000

Amanda, so many yes’s. I had the exact same epiphany with the exact same personal changes. I was dissertating on Holocaust narratives and shortly after my first kid was born, I was preparing for a seminar and reading a couple of new texts…and I could barely finish them. And it wasn’t that I was unemotional or unsympathetic before, and probably postpartum hormones were playing a role, but…my relationship to the characters, to the texts, had fundamentally shifted.

It was at that moment that I realized that all the collective reception theories could only go so far. Like my character bleed piece a few days ago here on Antenna, I think we really must start to properly theorize the individual experiences (and yes, I find Holland’s Five Readers Reading as problematic as the next person, and yet…). Rereading the same book ten years later; watching a film as a teen and as a midlife aged adult; coming to a classical children’s text as an adult first…all of these are experiences that our theories cannot fully contain.

Anyway, sorry to be going of in a different direction a bit here, but to return to your post, why do you conclude with “it grounds my understanding of negotiation of meaning to be fairly limited and of polysemy to be bounded”? If anything shouldn’t we expand our understanding of negotiations of meaning? Shouldn’t we try to find ways to account for particular subject positions vis a vis the text and how they affect our reception? Or is it just not possible?