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communicate certain intended meaning or to produce certain intended
effects, is both rhetorical and audience-oriented. Semioticians and
structuralists do not attempt to read the text in the sense of
interpreting it or assigning it meaning, but seek to analyse its codes
and conventions that make it possibly 'readable'. Once 'readable', the
text becomes easily 'describable'. The structuralist's description of
a text is more a simulacrum than a copy whose aim is to make the text
'intelligible'.
Structuralism and semiotics meet hermeneutics where codes and
conventions are deployed in the text by authors and readers
respectively. Positive (traditional) hermeneutics seeks to arrive at
an understanding of a human mind as that mind manifests or manifested
itself in written texts in an attempt to rid interpretation of
subjectivist or romantic overtones and establish the notion of
'universally valid interpretation'. Modern (negative) hermeneutics,
on the other hand, rejects the notion of 'universally valid
interpretation' in favour of Nietzchian philosophy which states that
"whatever exists . . is again and again reinterpreted to new ends,
taken over, transformed; all events in the organic world are a
subduing, a becoming master and all subduing and becoming master
involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any
previous 'meaning' and 'purpose' are necessarily obscure(1. or even
obliterated". (see Edward Said: 'Beginnings: Intention and Method',
1975, p175)
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