Derrida calls this the thetic quality, the ability of words to form an arrow pointing outwards.

Thousands o f people are engaged in a mass interpretation. Not fantasy but hermeneutics

In the conventional, thetic, paranoid form of reading imposed on children, every text is a kind of a puzzle. You can read it simply, enjoying the shape of the words in your mouth, their indistinct resonances, their minute associations which seem to hold a special meaning for you and you alone, or the ones which float in the clear vastness of possibility and never need to settle down and become fixed; you can take joy in the act of reading, and understand it as a perpetual collaboration between yourself and an author you've never met. [...]

The liberal technocrats who complain that truth is being devalued and the determined believers who gibber that it still needs to be uncovered both have their legs broken in the same trap. They're stuck in a world built by bad literary criticism and the grammtological magicians of the CIA. They're stuck in the abyss under words, the land of secret incomprehension.

Our era is not post-truth. It's nowhere near there yet. We're pre-meaning, and we've been there for a very long time.