July 3, 2014 - 13:18
Rebecca says she's "thinking about my definition of meaning, and if I could impart that meaning on others." Her musings put me in mind of an essay Jody and I might just risk asking our first-semester freshman to read for our ESem, Changing Our Story, this fall. It's Bruno Latour, Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene. New Literary History 45, 1 (Winter 2014): 1-18. Latour says (in part--he also says a lot of other things!), "Meaning is a
property of all agents in as much as they keep having agency; this is true of Kutuzov, of the Mississippi, as well as of the CRF receptor. For all
agents, acting means having their existence, their subsistence, come from the future to the present; they act as long as they run the risk of bridging
the gap of existence—or else they disappear altogether. In other words, existence and meaning are synonymous. As long as they act, agents have
meaning."
In short (I think!) he's saying that we don't have to worry about "making" meaning, or "imparting" it--just by doing, we are doing that.