Although I follow and agree with much of Barthes(or at least this idea of the death of the Author/birth of reader), I'm still a bit apprehensive. It's all nice to discuss and art/lit in such terms but we shouldn't stop short but extend this line of thought to history. Basically historians are given a number "facts" (1945 Hitler did so and so, etc) in the same way the events of a text, the plot perhaps, or the mere "physical" elements (color, sequence, etc.) are "objective." His- torians try to interpret some sort of possible cause-effect relation- ship --or so I simplify. And then there are times when people try to "rewrite" history by ignoring/denying/pretending events did not happen --when it's beneficial it's called "revisionist." At any rate, it's not history revisionists dispute but the prevailing interpretation of history instead. So is there a distinction between the image and the referent? -- the interpretation and the history? At any rate, this may all sound like standard conservative thought here, but I have yet to here any adequate defense of this sort of relativism. I do believe in the authority/autonomy of the reader but there is a connection between the author and reader. Although the reader may draw any interpretation he/she wishes, the author can try to limit the range of interpretations using cultural codes. People can read Joyce and come up with hundreds of interpretations, but people can read a news paper article and derive at best only a handful. Although an"artistic" text may be empowering in its"openness" for readers, any critical essay on such a text is usually "closed" and clearly not much room is left for reader response of the critical essay itself. If we must believe Barthes wholeheartedly and oversimplistically, why can't I interpret Barthes to argue for authorial intent regardless of what he says? The use of cultural codes brings up the distinction between expres- sion and communication. Such a "closed" text as Indiana Jones was in- terpreted by an Indian guru to be a story about a man overcoming his fear of snakes. "Art" shouldn't be measured by how open or how many possible meanings it may have--this openness depends mostly on the imagination of the audience. Implicit in such a measure of "art" is the cultural, possibly Romantic tendency to let "art/artist" be as self-in- dulgent as he/she wants to be just because it's "art." I find much "political" art to contain this self-indulgent assumption to excuse its possibly shoddy communication of political statement. Such art praised for its content but whose ambiguity is excused because of it s "artistic" status is in my opinion bogus--or at least "wrongly" appre ciated. At any rate, what is it that we are reading,interpreting, and discus- sing when we talk about a movie? We can never escape our own subjective senses--a near-sighted person sees a different movie than a colorblind viewer. But we must also realize that there are enough similarities, cultural codes to allow communication and that nothing exists in a vacu um. It's somewhere between atomized individual relativism and objective "truth," between the individual and the social--it's this space which Fredrick Jameson (of _Postmodernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capi talism_) might argue postmod should explore--a space which some feminist filmmakers who shun the subjectivity emphasized in modernism seem to work in. It's not really a helpful answer, but it's the best I've heard . ---Sterling Chen