Interpretation

From Geography

Every observation is not entirely objective. This is because all those observations are derrived from things that happened in the past. In short: an interpretation is a personal judgement about the meaning of a given situation, a text, a place and so on. According to Hall (1997) Meaning and representation seem to belong to the interpretative side of the human and cultural sciences. Interpretations never produce a final moment or absolute truth. Instead, interpretations are always followed by other interpretations, in an endless chain, which creates a 'circle of meaning' (Hall, 1997: 42). Jacques Derrida compared interpretation with writing: writing always leads to more writing. Differences, he argued, can never be wholly captured within any binary system (Derrida in Hall, 1997:42). The interpretation of a thing or a place is, as said, culturally depended. Words are not just symbols standing in for objects in the world. The world is recontextualized with an infinity of contextualization that provides multiple and contradictory readings(Gibson-Graham, 2000, p.97). The creation of meaning must be seen as an unfinished process where different meanings and interpretations are created and only temporarily fixed. Words are signs, constituted by a relation between two parts, the signifier and the signified(Gibson-Graham, 2000, p.96). The interpretation or the meaning of a thing/ place depends on one’s own complex social and intellectual structure.

References

Hall, S. (1997). Representation: cultural representations and signifying practices. The Open University, Walton Hall.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2000) Poststructuralist interventions. In, E. Sheppard & T. Barnes (eds.) A Companion to Economic Geography. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 95-110.

Published by Pauline van Heugten

Contributed by Fabian Busch and Luc Bouman