Contextual Dentistry

Rick Politician
Christian Stuart
English 131
June 8, 2005
SA1.5
Related to Fish’s ideas of interpretive communities and already in-place assumptions, is the concept of everyday texts.  The concept of everyday texts can best be explained by describing a short account of a group discussion between three university classmates and I that took place in our expository writing class.  Between the four of us, Dani, Stephanie, Kelly and me, we were instructed to choose three everyday texts that we had brought to class and discuss the following questions based on these texts:  1. What about these texts make them “everyday?”  2.  What significance do they hold for everyday life? 3.  How would life be different without them?  Each group member asked themselves these questions as they fixed their analytical gaze upon the everyday texts in front of us… a Tully’s logo on the side of a cup, The North Face logo on a product description card and the Carmex logo on a lid of lip balm.
            The entire group was engaged in the exercise and put in their best efforts to come up with well thought out answers.  After five minutes of coming up with answers to the proposed questions individually, we were eager to hear each other’s results.  Below, a table summarizes the fruitful discussion within our group.
            From the group discussion, we synthesized a definition for everyday texts.  First, everyday texts were recognizable.  We either needed to be able to easily identify the text itself or be able to quickly categorize the text as a familiar type for it to be everyday.  Second, everyday texts could be an everyday text in more than one interpretive community.  Lastly, a text could be considered everyday in one interpretive community, yet simultaneously rare, or very much not everyday, in another.  
The group discussion also brought to light some connections that exist between everyday texts and Fish’s concepts of interpretive communities and already in-place assumptions.  For instance, the fact that all group members individually recognized the texts as brand logos is analogous to Fish’s anecdote involving a student raising his hand in class and the class uniformly interpreting the physical signal of hand raising (the text) to mean that the student wished to called upon to speak (Fish 311).  Our group uniformly saw patterns of context and design associated with the Tully’s, Carmex and The North Face texts and interpreted the texts to be logos.  Here is how context aided us in identifying and classifying each text: the Tully’s text was placed on the outside of an iced beverage cup, the The North Face text covered a product description card, and the Carmex text covered the lid to the lip balm container.  We perceived that the specific placement and surrounding of each text indicated that they were logos.  Each of these texts also shared design characteristics such as large lettering and a distinct use of colors and space which further supported our assumptions.  As a result of the already in-place assumptions our group had about the objects’ context and design, the group members universally identified the everyday texts as logos.  Or, as Fish explains the situation, “the source of our interpretive unanimity was a…structure whose categories so filled our individual consciousnesses that they were rendered one, immediately investing phenomena (i.e. hand raising, logos) with the significance they must have” (312).
The results of the group discussion seem to not only maintain Fish’s ideas of interpretive communities and already in-place assumptions, but illustrate a far-reaching effect of Fish’s concepts.  To this point, I have supported the idea that due to the already in-place assumptions associated with an everyday text, members of an interpretive community share similar interpretations of that text.  Taking the analysis of interpretation one step further, I offer the up the idea that members of an interpretive community rarely attempt to consciously interpret an everyday text further once they have assigned an acceptable meaning to the text that satisfies their curiosity.  For instance, our group talked about the how we all had the ability to ignore most of everyday texts we encounter on a day-to-day basis.  There were two reasons for this.  First, we had thoroughly interpreted an everyday text at an earlier date and, thus, already satisfied our curiosity towards that text.   Second, by having already in-place assumptions associated with the characteristics of an everyday text we could categorize that text into a familiar grouping.  Once categorized, we felt no longer felt the need to further interpret the text.  An exception to this phenomena occurred when a category had an unusually strong degree of relatedness to the interpreter.