ABSTRACT
The late Franz Steiner once said that he could never bring himself to use the verb ‘to express’. Indeed, it opens the way to at least three fallacies. The first starts with overextending the contrast (necessary to any exegesis) between the expression and the idea expressed. Let me hasten to separate my range of problems from those in which such a distinction is necessary and right. In any restricted programme of interpretation, the analysis of a medium of discourse such as speaking, riddling, myth, clothing, food, there must be the vocabulary for referring the sign to that which it signifies. This is the straight translation job. In my own essay on ‘Deciphering a meal’, in the third section of this book (Chapter 18), I am involved in the decoding process as whole-heartedly as anyone. In what follows here I am warning against the fallacy of allowing the language of translation to carry abroad hidden and false assumptions about the relations between media of expression. If we say that speech and writing are media, and also radio and television and gifts of fruit or flowers, we are using the metaphor of a vehicle of conveyance, channel or band or code. Along and through it something else, the message, seems to pass. But if the idea of a medium be extended to all bodily behaviour and all social relations, as it readily can be, the puzzle arises as to what are the messages conveyed.
