"Neon Bible"
I have argued here before that all forms of communication are full of arbitrary signs. Arbitrary signs, symbols, identities, whatever, are the basic tools of human existence and especially of human communication. This is not to say that there is no meaning in life, but on the contrary. Meaning is a production. When one attempts to communicate, one produces meaning. But equally, the attempt at understanding an attempt to communicate is also a production of meaning. The interpreter at her/his best attempts to produce a meaning that is closest to the perceived meaning of the original communicator. But never does a text, like the Bible, have any meaning inside of it. Its reader produces meaning and lays it on top of the text.
This is like asking someone what a sign says, and when they tell you, berating them because the sign doesn’t “say” anything — it only indicates. Texts always encode meanings, because they participate in a language game. Surely the Bible as an object has as little or as much intrinsic meaning as a copy of Éperons. Its meaning is applied from without. But the texts contained are attempts to communicate. Which is to say that the book as symbol is arbitrary and ambiguous, but is merely one signifier in a language imposed upon it. It does not participate in the game. But the text is a network of symbols in itself, the encoding of an attempt to participate in a very particular game. The symbols in the text are just as arbitrary and ambiguous, but they are combined in such a way as to communicate, well before the reader finds and interprets them. Their arrangement is not arbitrary — it belongs to a system; the text is a syntagma in itself, composed of syntagmatic elements: a use-product of a synchronic state of language.
And so you are right when you say that “the attempt at understanding an attempt to communicate is also a production of meaning.” But I wonder where the meaning of an encoded communication goes, then, between when it is encoded, and when it is decoded. Surely it relies on some commonality of understanding between parties. Then is writing in fact a production of meaning at all? And if it is, do you mean that, at best, the reader reproduces meaning?
Perhaps you are asking if the production of meaning can be separate from the production or use of signifiers. For certainly the construction of meaning is strongly determined by the signifiers at hand. But it is not limited, there must be room for innovation and creation, otherwise we would have to assume that all languages existed since the creation of the world.
I don’t think the reader “re”-produces meaning, except in a very nuanced way. One reader may completely re-construct meaning that is unrelated to the original communication, while another reader may work hard to produce a meaning that is close to the original. This spectrum suggests wide enough variations to argue against a reproduction in the same way. If you say reproduction is ‘re’-producing something in one’s own way, regardless of the original, then of course that is possible.
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