This was the first comment @ty-ty made to my previous article.
If you, the reader, follow this discussion, it's possible you end up finding it interesting.
This trigger warning proves: you, the writer, want to go in interaction with me, the reader. And while writing, you have me and my possible understanding before your eyes. Thus you give a vivid example of the so called 'implicite reader', that is: an interpretation of how the text ideally should be read.
Since you cannot determine how the reader, me, will really read and interprete your words, you divorce from your message and say to me: I wrote this down, I re-read my text, and now the rest is up to you, I do no longer interprete, my work is hereby finished.
This is as true as false.
Why? This seems to me to be condensed in your question:
Is the interpretation of symbols a uni or bydirectional process? Is an artist's work involved in bi-directional communication? Is there a feedback loop into a past moment of creation?
Communication is multi-dimensional process. It is not about the 'use of symbols' as if symbols were mere tools. If you pass me along a hammer, this is a unidirectional process without a feedback. I grab the hammer or I do not.
Writing and passing a text or an artwork is not a theme on sender and recipient. This model shows some issues and some properties of passing by symbols but is not a true image of what happens where living beings interact and use evolved and traditional and though non-solid signs, symbols, and 'the like'.
While writing this, I am interacting with myself and with my imagination of readers and I have a goal or idea what I want to tell and what I want to be discussed and to be agreed to. I look forward to possible interpretations of my words, of selected concepts and metaphors, and I give more than one while trying to make clear which direction I'd like to go.
I release my text and by that it could seem as if my work be done. But the truth is that I want to take an impact on the reader(s), that is: a change in thought and opinion. It is not the same person once without and once holding the hammer. It is mind-forming similar to terra-forming. By that there is some flow back to myself, be it earlier or later.
If I would think of signs and symbols as some objects like hammers, I were not able to explain how these signs and symbols are evolved out of a world before there were signs and symbols.
the artist has no contact with his audience and emits his message
Such presumptions make the gangway of thinking non-realistic thoughts.
I affirm that we cease having influence over the message
We have a message. We want to share this message. We do not emit nor broadcast a message as if we were a radio station. Instead we try to give our opinions and believes a 'Gestalt' in some speech and we want to be grasped in our meanings. So as reader I select and weight in between the words and lines, and if I am interested I try to get the intended message of my vis-à-vis. This is an active process of interaction while I go back and forth with the spoken or written words.
Symbol interpretation is dependent solely upon the receiver
Signs and symbols are arbitrary in regard of the meaning (I could call a chair 'blubb') but not in regard to the community that uses them. Once introduced - in a process of many steps, each one of them taken by many players of the speech game - these signs or symbols seem to have a dynamic on their own, that is: many reeps are pulled in many directions, and the resulting way follows no one's plan.
Symbols [...], once set, present a one way direction of communication that depends on a learned receiver to be decoded.
This is a technical or technician's look, the model be born by some people concerned with radio messages. This look ignores the social and psychological implications and pre-conditions of communication as an interactive process while coordinating actions.
There's no way I communicate with the author of the STOP sign
This is not true. I can and I do. This happens in my feelings about the design and it happened (not by myself) in evolving and choosing some properties and in refusing others (colour, lines, size, contrast, ...).
I cannot communicate to Hieronimous Bosch what I feel about his paintings
I cannot speak to Hieronimus since he is dead, that is the trivial part of the truth. But I can study his paintings and his biography and can get into an partly imaginary interaction with him in so far as I can let me getting involved in his way(s) of communication. From that point it is not relevant if he's dead or alive. While stepping into his paintings I cannot stay the one I was before. This was what he intended, and thus I am communicating with himself. Space and time are irrelevant. But needed to spread our thoughts and messages. Once you got my point it is no more relevant when and where.
The most I can do is interpret the symbolics in his paintings, according to my filter and library of symbols and take my own point of view of whatever he intended to express. There will always be as many points of view as there are observers, hence, receivers.
This is pure solipsism.
No one can communicate into the void.
That is the contrast to solipsism. Take this last sentence to reflect: why can no one communicate into the void?
the whole body of his [i.e. the artist's] work turns back to being a monologue, because there will be no way he can receive our input and use it in his next work.
You intermingle the materialist substract of the work with its spirit or message. You mentioned the names of CG Jung and Rupert Sheldrake, but did you concess they're having some point? Sheldrake's Morphic Field is far from Jung's Archetypen, and I have my doubts on both. But the thing that they are pointing to is to be reflected. This reflection means not to glue to matter, space and time.
I do not communicate back to it's creator.
This is your point of being, not mine. I can communicate back to creators, and I like to do so. The feelings and thoughts introduced to me by the music of Beethoven or Ligeti are real and do not vanish once the piece of music is gone. The music is not gone as it plays on and on in my memory. The more I hear it the deeper I get into it and the closer comes Beethoven to me. I am interpreted by his music as I can not grasp all of his ideas at once nor step by step. This process is vivid and part of my life as a human being. I would be a stone or a pillar if I did only let the sounds pass me by.
The symbolism is fixed and all I can do is interpret it through my filter, with my library of symbols. I do not produce change in the artist's finished work.
I do have my limitations but I am not inclined to call them 'filters' as if I were some apparatus. The symbolism is not fixed and never will be, and I am not an applicator of 'my library of symbols' as if I were ChatGPT. I DO produce change in the artist's finished work with each listening, sometimes more change, sometimes less. That you (with most part of mankind) are not able to hear and to follow these changes guides you to the opinion there would be none. But if you'd ask Levit or Barenboim, you would get other answers.
Building a house and living in it is a process of civilisation and of nature. Creating a work of art and living in it is a process of the same type.
Neither is communication a subject-object relation.
The other way: subject-object-relations are (based upon) communication.
Nature does not interpret anything.
Nature is the evolving interpretation. If you get the thought that mankind is thoroughly part of nature you get the thought that nature is interpreting itself not only through human beings. This is no 'animism'. It's a quite simple fact - but hidden by walls of concepts. If you leave positivism behind and follow Popper to Kant, your mind gets more widening than Hippies could dream of.
Last and least I apologize for not having given me and you the time to workout my answer in an appropriate post. Nevertheless I appreciate your workout. If I can in a timely fashion I will return and post some more elaborated paragraphs. But I'm in doubt:
My own experience says: Me for my own I needed hundreds of hours to learn a few things about Epistemology - how can I expect others to do it in some minutes? How should it be possible for me to condense the Critique of Pure Reason to a blog post? Am I - Sisyphos?