Authorial control has a boundary
The author can arrange a frame but cannot guarantee what another person notices, remembers, understands or can act upon. Readers may skip words, sentences, paragraphs or entire works. Any theory of “the intended reader” therefore meets a material limit at the recipient’s attention.
Misunderstanding as creation
“Your misunderstandings are acts of creation, and of recreation” is not merely decorative generosity. Misreading can generate new work. This does not mean every factual claim about a source becomes correct; productive consequence and accurate interpretation are different questions.
Meaning / resonance / consequence
| Layer | Question |
|---|---|
| Meaning | What does the received object say or do as a work? |
| Resonance | What becomes newly salient when a recipient uses, performs or carries it? |
| Consequence | What happens afterward in another person’s behavior, work, relation or world? |
A recipient’s action may leave meaning roughly intact while radically increasing resonance and consequence.
The ideal damaged transmission
An emphatic author-confirmed ideal case is extreme: somebody encounters one tiny fragment, misunderstands part of it, uses it to create something genuinely consequential and never needs to learn anything else about JQD. Successful transmission therefore does not require fidelity, completion or continued authorial authority.
Refusal counts
A direct command—walk, turn it off, write, listen, fork, play—does not abolish the recipient’s right to refuse. Refusal remains a legitimate response. The work can request action; it cannot normally compel the correct performance without becoming coercive.