The reproducible sign so beloved of deconstructionists is a meaning-
less nothing outside its human context, as a simple thought experiment
will show. If NASA transmitted all the printed texts in the Library of
Congress into space, an alien race would still be unable to decipher the
information in its various codes without a large database of human cul-
tural contexts to give them meaning. The problem, as Jack Cohen and
Ian Stewart explain in The Collapse of Chaos, is that
The meaning in a language does not reside in the code, the words, the gram-
mar, the symbols. It stems from the shared interpretation of those symbols
in the mind of sender and receiver. This in turn stems from the existence of
a shared context. For language, the context is the culture shared by those
who speak that language.Cohen and Stewart usefully define words as “data compressors” and
argue that the problem with such compressed data is that one needs to
“make a computational effort to decompress the data before they exist
in usable form.” This, in a nutshell, is the problem of literary interpreta-
tion. There’s a cost for unpacking the information packed in a story or
poem’s codes. While reading a text, a reader has to de-compress the
meaning of words and sentences the way a CD player unpacks the digi-
tal information encoded on a disk. The player is the cost of decom-
pressing data. Similarly, the cost for unpacking information in a literary
text is a life spent in a human culture, learning the rules of language and
social behavior. That’s why, contra deconstruction, there is always some-
thing outside the text.
Furthermore, this packing and unpacking process is nonlinear and
recursive, since language begins and ends in a human brain.
Neuroscientists now define the brain and its various sub-mechanisms as
complex dynamic systems since from their earliest prenatal develop-
ment they are governed by self-organizing feedback processes.
Scientists now use terms like “attractors,” or “basins of attraction” to
describe how memories are stored in its neuronal weave. The fractal
nature of memory is also evident when we see how, from the merest
fleeting detail, we reconstruct complex patterns and scenes.
Sir Charles Sherrington, Nobel Prize-winning physiologist, in Man
on His Nature, describes the brain as “an enchanted loom, where mil-
lions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaning-
ful pattern, though never an abiding one: a shifting harmony of
sub-patterns.” If Swift’s mechanical frame represents the old paradigm,
Sherrington’s loom represents the newly emerging one. When we recall
The Enchanted Loom: A New Paradigm for Literature 149