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We can track meanings back as far as we may wish through the infinite regress of the participatory chain. Then, when the reader comes to make sense of the text, they work not just with an author and the artifact of their communication. They work with the polyphony of text, the multifariousness of its antecedent meanings. The reader “is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.” So, Barthes concludes with a celebrated rhetorical flourish, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”¹⁰⁶

Or to reframe this for a transpositional grammar, the birth of the interpreter must be at the cost of the death of the communicator – or at least the communicator as the paragon of participatory meaning.

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¹⁰² Umberto Eco, 1976, A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 15–17, 68–69; Umberto Eco, 1979, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 180–89.

¹⁰³ James Paul Gee, 1992 [2013], The Social Mind: Language, Ideology, and Social Practice, Champaign, IL: Common Ground, pp. 42–44.

¹⁰⁴ Umberto Eco, 1979, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 192–93, 197–98.

¹⁰⁵ Roland Barthes, 1976, Image-Music-Text, translated by S. Heath, London: Fontana, p. 146.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., p. 148.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 59–60. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” §AS1.2.3a