Nine Theses to Nail to the Academy Doors:
1. Anything can be read as a text.
2. Language,although it has systematicity, is unstable because it is ambiguous,
and because both sound and semantics change over time.
3. The meaning or content of a text is inseparable from its form and language. Thus,
Changes in the form of a text also change its content.
4. All texts, therefore, tend towards both indeterminacy and instability.
5. Scientific texts reduce ambiguity by defining language narrowly, to reduce unpredictability and eliminate
slippages of meaning .
6. Literary texts reduce predictability by defining language broadly, to increase ambiguity [chaos] and enhance
slippages of meaning.
7. The author's intentions in creating a text are:
a. unknowable to the reader;
b. somewhat unknowable to the author;
c. unable to prevent this slippage;
d. therefore always different from the text itself.
8. The slippages of meaning within literary texts constitute language's internal difference from itself.
9. Literary texts value and privilege this internal difference.