ABSTRACT
Contexts change. No work is separable from context; its meanings always function within it, which is precisely why it is an idealism to try to isolate specifically made up viewer-contexts, isolating viewers for example who think x rather than y, allowing their individualistic collectivity” to determine a text's meanings. That would be to assume that a material text had no social force, was simply always again an effect of a particular interpretation brought about a priori by this or that happenstance group of “subjects” who each time make a “new” context which thereby permits new ideas. Such an idealist position sees groupings of individuals, misnamed “context,” producing the world from their individualities. The best example I know of this perversion is the notion argued that film x is a parody of film it. When it is pointed out that film x was made seven years before film y, and therefore could not be a parody of it, the reply is, “But I, and the other viewers, didn't know that, therefore it is a parody.” This is how rampant individualism is entitled context.
