Paying Attention: Provisional Observations and Inferences

Abstract

When the participants sat down in the meeting room, they had no idea what kinds of text they were going to encounter. It is an axiom of interpretation that nobody can pay heed to everything all the time and they had to decide swiftly how to allocate their attention. In Judith Langer’s term, they had to establish ‘orientations toward meaning’ (1995, p. 24, emphasis added). Wolfgang Iser talks about meaning as ‘something that happens’ (1978, p. 22). The text on offer (Run Lola Run on the first day) would supply some of the energy that would make it happen, but some of the constructive effort also had to come from the viewers. They had to prepare to create a fiction out of both what was present and what was absent on the screen in front of them, as Iser describes: ‘Communication in literature, then, is a process set in motion and regulated not by a given code but by a mutually restrictive and magnifying interaction between the explicit and the implicit, between revelation and concealment’ (1978, pp. 168–9).