Looks like some sort of philosophy “expert” got hold of my earlier post on the problems inherent in Obama’s purported judicial philosophy and, unsurprisingly, has decided I know not of what I speak.
What always makes me smile about this type of criticism (and about the inevitable commenter who misses the tongue-in-cheek nature of my site’s tagline) is that it pretends towards fleshing out my “pseudo” understanding of the too-difficult-for-small-minds-like-mine-to-discern jargon of poststructuralism and pragmatic philosophical thought — all while reducing my arguments to little convenient caricatures. To wit:
I’ve always found it a charming characteristic of conservative thought, that they view judges as a class of priestly explicators leading a national course of bible study, only using our secular, civic texts in place of holy writ.
See? How quaint! How delicious! These “conservatives” think justices should merely “explicate”! No, really! Isn’t that just so…oh, you know. Modernist…?
Of course, the smug, unspoken elitism stitched like golden thread through these types of remarks does nothing to trouble the integrity of the garment itself. It just makes it seem ostentatious.
Judges are not a “class,” certainly, but it is their job to interpret and apply the laws based on texts. So in effect, yes, they are explicators — which, sad to say, is now just so gauche when what one could be doing with language is infinitely more interesting and empowering! were one simply to forego such bourgeois exercises.
Sorry. But our civic texts are the binding documents of the social contract, and — when under dispute — they are dependent upon rigorous explication. And given that explication is a product of interpretation, it matters how we interpret; or rather, it matters what we think we are doing when we interpret.
Is it possible to achieve a one-to-one decoding to encoding reconstruction of a text — particularly one fraught with a palimpsest of interpretive problems and contextual layers (from ratification by consensus, to changes in diction between historical periods)? Well, potentially, yes — though we’d never know for certain whether or not we’ve achieved such a decoding given that there is no one around to appeal to for a ruling on our interpretive fidelity and acumen. But that doesn’t mean we should not be trying to approach the meaning that was intended, because it is within this intent, which manifests itself as an encoding of signs, that meaning resides. So we have to chose whose intent to privilege: our own, or that of those responsible for writing and passing the laws.
And of course, no dismissal of my writing is ever complete without this kind of business:
Jeff has never gained fluency in deconstructionist jargon; he speaks it the affect of schoolboy French. The conjugations are mostly corret, but the idiom is off. What’s especially cute is that he wants to use the self-reflecting language of indeterminacy to make an argument for original intent. He wants to deploy an academic discourse dedicated to the proposition that all meaning is contingent, whose central epistemological premises all have to do with mutability, in order to make an argument about immutability. Really:
And to do that, under the false assertion of “interpretation,†is to render any kind of legal “constraint†obsolete  save for the wink and the nod given it by those who would rather not admit publicly that what they are doing, when they rewrite the law (and that is precisely what they’re doing if their interests go anything beyond sussing out original intent, though that intent itself be tied to ratification, oftentimes) is to create new texts out of the marks of extant texts whose actual meaning was, at the time these texts became law, fixed and (at least theoretically), immutable.
New texts out of the marks of extant texts. Eat your heart out, Gertrude Stein.
Notice the common tics: 1) Jeff doesn’t quite understand his Derrida / Barthes, postructuralism, postmodernism, et al.
2. He is trying to reconcile competing philosophical problems using the “discourse” of a philosophical paradigm that is not intended for such usage. Fixed as it is in its ways. Which are forever mutable. — no, REALLY!
3. An oblique reference to an avant-garde literary figure, which is supposed to act as a substitute for an argument that is never really made. TENDER BUTTONS!
4. The obligatory “jeffy” to act as a form of diminishing.
The bee in the bonnet here seems to be that I wish to argue for fixed meaning in an epistemological context in which language, being man-made, creates the very conditions for uncertainty:
What’s especially cute is that he wants to use the self-reflecting language of indeterminacy to make an argument for original intent. He wants to deploy an academic discourse dedicated to the proposition that all meaning is contingent, whose central epistemological premises all have to do with mutability, in order to make an argument about immutability. Really
Why is this “especially cute”? Well, presumably because I want to “deploy an academic discourse dedicated to the proposition that all meaning contingent to make an argument about the permanency of meaning”.
To which I reply, and…?
This is, after all, hardly problematic — unless, that is, you beg the question and proceed from the idea that, because something is built by language, it can never be fixed, given the vagaries of convention, context, agency, etc., coupled with the “postmodernist” observation that there is no final judge to make a determination of truth beyond those arguments forged by language itself.
The central epistemological tenet of, say, Rorty’s pragmatism, though, speaks to how communities come to understand and accept truths (contingency, irony, solidarity). In other words, it is, like postmodernism, descriptive. And there is no reason why one cannot “deploy” an academic discourse “dedicated” to the (complex) assertion that “all meaning is contingent” in the course of arguing that such discourse implodes when pressured in certain localized ways — just as there is no reason why one cannot use the “discourse” or “idiom” of, say, physics, to argue for a linguistic application of Heisenberg. Parody, in fact, is often built on this premise.
Here it is, put simply: Some agency is responsible for turning marks into signs — for creating a speech act; until such time as intention is appealed to, it makes no sense to conceive of the product of what looks like language as language, precisely because language is man-made and not accidental. One can certainly see “accident” as language, but in doing so, one is making the (conventional) leap that what looks like language must be language. Whereas what is really happening is that one is turning accident into language by attaching signifieds to the signifiers that resemble language. They are creating texts — albeit with a little pre-made help.
Therefore, it is hardly a reach to note — and this is the paradox that seems to flummox some — that because language is man-made and the product of some agency, we must, when we are “interpreting,” assume some agency, and assume some intent. Once we’ve done that, we are able to argue that the intent to add a particular signified (or set of signifieds, or to leave a signifier free of signification, even) is what makes up a sign — and that it is signs we are after when we interpret.
Which leaves us with these choices: we can try to appeal to the signs left us by the original author(s); or we can take the signifiers and do with them as we please, essentially creating a new text by creating new signification from existing signifiers.
What I’ve argued is that meaning is precisely fixed at the time of signification: when I turn a signifier into a sign, that’s what I meant, and what I meant doesn’t change simply because some epistemological system points out that people can do things with texts that problematize the interpretative procedure, or that, even under the most perfect conditions, one can never really prove that they have properly decoded what I encoded, because there is no final judge to whom one may appeal for just such an assurance.
Rorty, though, differentiates between “truths” (man made linguistic expressions of immutable things) and “things as they are.” Here, the sign given us by the author is part of “things as they are,” and those things are, in fact, immutable. The mutability — the uncertainty of ever reaching an objective proof of meaning, and the mechanisms we use to reach a consensus and give something a communal meaning in the absence of metaphysical certainty — doesn’t trouble things as they are. When I intend to signify, that act is not itself troubled by the problems inherent to interpretation and the communication chain.
Thus, meaning is both fixed and contingent. And my argument is that simply because we can never “prove,” in the metaphysical sense of absolutes, that the meaning we’ve arrived at once signs have been filtered through an interpretive agency is exact, doesn’t mean that approximating that meaning as closely as is linguistically and epistemologically possible should not still be our goal — and more importantly, in a system based upon consensus and solidarity (or civic texts as holy writ), our obligation.
No, Really!
****
See also, “Is Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Patrick Frey anti-semitic”?
but was he sipping a daiquiri?
Civilization is hard work.
Pretending that communication is purely relative is suicide.
Then again, so is the logical result of realized socialism but that doesn’t seem to slow down those people, either.
I guess it’s just too much to ask anyone who disagrees with you to actually argue/show where they think you have made an error, be exact in their reasoning, and to do so without being a condescending prick.
What’s funny is that when judges for real start laying down rulings that further Baracky Chavez’s revolución, the ball will get bounced back to our stalwart legislators, right? And then once they change the law but the social justice hermeneutic still produces the same results, I’m thinking there’s gonna be a bit of puzzlement about who’s in charge around here.
There’s really nothing stupider than appointing judges that don’t have a text that backs up their interpretations, cause it sorta exposes an agenda really fast I think, a lot to the detriment of whoever appointed the particular black liberationist judges in question. But then socialist revolutions aren’t the most forward-thinking little things really.
No, really!
Someone posited this thought experiment in a long-ago thread on the same subject (intentionalism), so I’ll add it here, because it’s a good ‘un:
Imagine you are in the Amazonian rain forest and you stumble upon a stone tablet on which is inscribed all manner of symbols, but you’ve never seen them before.
And neither has anyone else on the planet. Because the sign system died out a long time ago, along with the original language it represented.
So, is the object of the game to figure out what the inscriber meant, or are you in good standing if you just assign plausible meaning to the signs? Given that the overall pattern of signifiers can support more than one set of signifieds, that is.
See, some of us morons over here studied semiotics too.
I followed the link to see what was up over there. As it turns out, not much. Dismissal is apparently their strongest form of argument. That and name-calling. Classy.
To answer #6, I would assume that actually determining original intent would probably be impossible, so the person who wanted to continue getting grants would assign plausible meanings and publish, publish, publish.
Don’t call it a comeback.
Ah, yes. So as not to frustrate the Messiah in his hopeychangey revolution.
Oh. Me I’d be really curious to know what the people that inscribed all the symbols meant. I’d probably wait for the Discovery Channel to do a show on it though.
I say we interpret those signs so as to maximize city tax revenues, dicentra.
That was a cortex-scrubber!
What many lawyers do not understand about legal interpretation is how rules and process oriented it is. It isn’t a question of finding vagueness and then taking a wild stab. There is a large body of case law out there, all of it with the intent of coming up with an answer that makes sense. It isn’t whim because the words have meaning – much greater meaning than some academic spouting off. This interpretation affects fortunes, liberty, and life. It has consequences, some of them very dire.
And the fact that some twit would like to add ‘caprice’ to the process should horrify anyone with more intelligence than God gave gravel.
dicentra —
You can revive the sign system as something new. But to get at what the tablet’s “author” meant, you’d need to appeal to intent.
Otherwise, any meaning you assign the squiggles on the tablet, plausible or not, will be your own. Would be funny if some long ago Amazonian dwellers discovered how to hack up and clean a giant anaconda, and the scratches and marks you were seeing on the “tablet” was really nothing more than the almost systemic scoring on a cutting board caused by a long-lost method of dressing snake.
#8 Indeed, finding out the original intent would be impossible, so you’d have to stand on “I don’t know, and I can’t know” for the rest of your natural life. Thus, you would acknowledge that the locus of meaning is in the intent of the utterer/inscriber, not in your admittedly clever yet ignorant imagination.
So the first fruits of locating meaning in the interpretation is TENURE! After that, nothing else really matters.
Excuse me – “What many non-lawyers…”
Although some lawyers don’t grasp it too well either.
dicentra,
GOOD INTENTIONS run a close second, though, don’t they?
#14 Of course, the academic who interpreted the slab would “find” a passage from Das Kapital, or at least a reasonable facsimile, thus proving that this allegedly primitive tribe was not possessed of a false consciousness, though how you’d address the question of historicity of values in that context would be something to see.
okfine.
can you determine intent without context?
intentionalism says there is no pure consciousness so everything is relativism.
#17 If you’re a progressive, the purity of your soul, and therefore your intentions, is ALL that matters.
Just because a bunch of primitive-minded, sexist, racist, hetero-normative morons scratched out some words on parchment doesn’t mean that we, the enlightened, should have to be shackled to their alleged “meaning.”
If Jefferson were living today, he’d vote for Obama. I’m sure of it.
and in the case of the Founders the context is fixed, static.
unless we get timetravel.
which is possible in an Einsteinian universe, altho not in a newtonian one.
intentionalism says there is no pure consciousness so everything is relativism.
Try again, nishi, this time with your brain switch in the ON position. And use the blessed Shift key once in awhile, eh?
I too think Jefferson would have voted for Obama.
He was an elitist afterall.
Better?
Nothing is acontextual. We live in context by virtue of living in time.
You can, however, determine intent without convention.
<facetious>If Jefferson were living today, he’d vote for Obama. I’m sure of it.<facetious>
Forgot to add more signifiers there…
For sure Jefferson would nail M’chelle I bet.
And sowwy…..I was using the Theory of Forms not American Heritage.
hehe
nishi,
interminable stasis is the flux in ex post facto dirigible. beatific condensation state arpeggio en fuego. racist.
Run along now.
You can, however, determine intent without convention.
You’re referring to that thought experiment you posed where you wanted someone to pass the salt, but all of your normal deixis tools were gone, i.e., language, finger to point, etc.
IIRC, your interlocutor had to figure out what your non-conventional signs meant by process of elimination. You couldn’t do that to the tablet because the inscriber wouldn’t be there to indicate whether you were right or not.
Yes, nishi, that’s better. I’m a professional editor/fussbudget, so agrammatical stuff without at least an attempt at good writing conventions drives me batty. I usually don’t read what you write for that reason.
Thus I must cop to having put the wrong slash in my closing tag, to my eternal shame.
I’m not facetious. I think Jefferson would have voted Obama.
An likely have nailed Michelle too. ;)
Does it ever speak in English?
Jeff G – They mock that which they do not understand.
Right. But I’m not arguing that you can always figure out meaning without convention. Just that it’s possible.
In your tablet thought experiment, if we knew the conventions, we might be able to determine that the marks were language. But then we’d still need to appeal to intent to know what the marks meant. Convention can get us close. But it is not determinative.
I see what he wrote, Jeff, but what he meant is that he has a tiny penis. To recast what you’ve said, the purveyors of deconstruction are suddenly aghast that it can be turned on them: that’s not how it was meant to be.
IIRC, your interlocutor had to figure out what your non-conventional signs meant by process of elimination.
I’m pretty sure the tablet doesn’t say hey let’s steal happyfeet’s shit for social justice.
In your tablet thought experiment, if we knew the conventions, we might be able to determine that the marks were language.
Yeah, you’d have to eliminate (sorry feets!) the possibility that the marks were caused by the stone being made of two materials that eroded away at different rates, and had been marbled together eons ago, and that the supposed signs were just an accident.
And to any of the non-PW folks who might still be listening, Harsanyi and all of us regulars interpreted “social and economic justice” to mean “forced redistribution of wealth” and “neo-Progressive attempts to change the law through judicial fiat.”
Can you indicate how the context of Obama’s past utterances, associations, and voting record would render this interpretation at odds with Obama’s intent, or is this just another one of those fractal statements that can’t be taken out of context because the part looks exactly like the whole, only on a different scale?
What it might could say though is hey don’t nobody touch that chicken cacciatore in the fridge cause I’m saving it for laters.
With Eco, it was a laundry list, I think.
What interests me about the relativist principle (wrong terminology, I know; shoot me; I never had formal courses in it) is the iterative application.
viz., a judge issues a ruling based on “interpretation” of “the marks”. That ruling is issued as, whattayaknow, “marks”, right? And some dude(s) is/are assigned to execute that ruling, so they go off to the University to get help with figuring out what to do, and they decide that the judge’s intent is irrelevant — it’s only their reading of the marks that matters — so instead of stealing happyfeet’s shit for social justice, they decide that the marks mean they’re supposed to steal Obama’s shit and give it to happyfeet. Where does the process stop?
Regards,
Ric
Where does the process stop?
With Western civilization in ruins, if I’m not mistaken.
That’s the best part: it’s impossible to be mistaken! Whatever meaning you impute to the text is correct! And if I impute an opposite meaning, I too am equally correct!
Until one of us decides to argue the point, and has a bigger gun.
…which means Western civilization is in ruins.
Conscious beings with theory of mind can figure things out sometimes. There is commonality of physical experience and it seeps into all our symbolic representation. Depending on the symbols penetrability, you could get squeeze some “original” meaning from the stone.
But if you WANT it to mean something…well human beings are quite willing at times to see what they wish to see in anything.
If a Democrat
means a paris hat:
Bébé, Oo-la-la!
Mais je suis toujour fidèle, darlin’, in my fashion,
Oui, je suis toujour fidèle, darlin’, in my way.
Whatever meaning you impute to the text is correct!
And whatever the weather does, it’s because of Global Warming!
Also known as a perfidious interpretation of signs, though “intent” would be a bit hard to discern in this case, given that the weather is not a sentient being, capable of intending.
Or is it…???
Speaking of Global Warmongers and their bad arguments…
Michael Mann, of the infamous Hockey Stick, had a little problem: his proxy data was derived primarily from bristlecone pine rings, and the rings had never been correlated to instrument data.
Which would, in the language of the current argument, mean that he had not sussed out the intent behind the width of the tree rings: do wider rings indicate more warmth? more rain? more CO2? that a deer had pooped on its roots that year?
And his data sets hadn’t been updated since the 70s or something. So someone went back to those trees and got an update on the rings, then tried to correlate the ring widths to the temperature data provided by actual instruments.
It didn’t correlate.
So instead of retracting his arguments, the way an honest scientist would do, Mann came up with the theory of “teleconnections”: his trees were not sensitive to local conditions but were mystically tuned in to the overall global scene.
The fact that this man has not been shamed into obscurity for this alone (notwithstanding his many other egregious errors) speaks volumes about the integrity of climate studies these days.
based upon the left’s theory of our legal system and judges, the entire purpose of our democracy is to figure out who gets to appoint the judges. Until the judges figure out an intepretation that allows them to appoint other judges, at which time the need for democracy and election will be gone – so the judges will interpret no need for elections.
but, that is all o.k. because that is clearly how the founders wanted it based on the book of forms or book of three or 9 of 12 or plato’s republic. I mean, how much clearer could it be?
Maybe global warming makes deer poopy. That is science.
Of course, any interpretation on the left is bound to be changed rather quickly. remember when having a president who had served in the military during a war was the most important qualification for being president? that was soooo 2004. that no longer matters. that interpretation of a good qualification to be president was an old interpretation. We have new interpretations today.
Also, I don’t understand how the left hates Scalia and Thomas so much. If all intepretation is perfectly permissible, equal and relative, why get so upset over a differing intepretation?
It certainly makes no logical sense to claim that the constitution is open to be read however you want to read it and that it means whatever you want it to mean, but then get angry when someone does just that. How does that make any sense?
Unless, as I am beginning to suspect, the left actually simply has outcomes that it wants and comes up with rationals to try and support those specific outcomes, and intellectual consistency or rationality have no part to play whatsoever.
“secure the blessings of liberty, to ourselves and our posterity.”
> willy wonkulatoring postmodern babeljudge >
” Secure Happyfeets shit to ourselves and our posterity….”
. . .
“Oh, this is like the third time we’ve mentioned this, but tenants must separate paper household refuse and place into the blue bins provided for your use”
dicentra has her “A” game with her todays.
happy – I am pretty sure that taking JD’s shit is a flawed interpretation as well.
In fact, I’m beginning to suspect that the left has no logical or intellectual consistency whatsoever, but simply has feelings that guide them from one argument to the next. In an attempt to create the appearance of reasoning, they have created a whole language of “intepretation” and deconstruction, that has a lot of words but little to no meaning.
Which I suppose is why most english lit professors that I have met lack any logical reasoning or common sense. But, they do believe that they are incredibly brilliant.
Intentionalism. Bottom line.
It has always pissed me off when certain people (guess which ones) take anything I say and load it down with the absolute worst possible interpretation.
Liberals are idiots, and always are looking for the outrage in anything anyone says.
Well, here is my definitive answer unrestrained eighth grade baloney:
Ummm.. Fuck you, fuck me, fuck EVERYBODY!
GB – The “thought process” that you describe is nothing other than a mechanism to achieve an end. If the end favors them and their policy goals, the means are of no consequence.
hat would have been SO powerful, except I left out the “to”
Good Christ.
I guess an argument (generously speaking) for (from, really) the immutability of genre can be made by someone who’s “gained [a socially useful pseudo-] fluency in deconstructionist jargon,” but not by anyone who knows what the fucking words mean.
I know you like a spar, Jeff, but punching babies is wrong.
They can take McGehee’s shit and give it to whoever will take it.
My money and house and truck and all, not so much.
“They can take McGehee’s shit and give it to whoever will take it.”
Deer is one thing.
Oh noes. The teleconnections has McGehee!
Some agency is responsible for turning marks into signs  for creating a speech act; until such time as intention is appealed to, it makes no sense to conceive of the product of what looks like language as language, precisely because language is man-made and not accidental.
Reading this I cannot help but think of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Any communicative act requires intent. Hell sometimes that’s pretty much all you can identify; somebody was trying to say something to somebody. You may never know what they were trying to say, but if you will not consider their intent then you might as well not even consider their existence.
“a charming characteristic of conservative thought…using our secular, civic texts in place of holy writ.”
It being Friday, I am confused. I thought we were the folks tearing up the Constitution in order to listen to Nancy Pelosi’s Kung Pao Chicken orders.
“Maybe global warming makes deer poopy.”
Wait.
Wouldn’t global warming make global warming poopy?
Sorry, psycho, but it was a particularly smug looking baby.
Tough love. Spare the rod, etc.
If this is all making much more sense than it usually does and I’m drinking (perhaps a bit heavily), should I infer that perhaps this time around it is all finally sinking in or that drinking was a necessary pre-condition to understanding?
… I mean, I’m willing to go either way. Or both, if need be.
Drinking opens up a fluency in deconstructionist jargon. Or the urethra.
A pick ’em, really.
Well, Jeff, thanks… I believe this is one of those piece-of-dung Zen moments that I remember reading from Alan Watts.
And now I have to pee! Satori!
This is the greatest blog there ever was… and I should know, I’ve hung around a few.
Jeff, I was asking in a facetious manner, but I am interested in the answer if there is one.
OK, so here we have scholars “interpreting” a “text”. But all they can actually do is make marks. In what way does the text they produce constitute an “interpretation” if readers can interpret their text without considering their intent? Doesn’t that constitute an assertion of “privilege”? And if not, how is the scholarly interpretation of a text different from Marko V. Cheney’s?
Regards,
Ric
Ah. While you’re formulating your response, I’m off for ice. The Jim Beam Black waits in the decanter.
Regards,
Ric
Jeff,
Can’t you just challenge these jokers to a few rounds of grappling? While I always find your hermeneutical smackdowns both entertaining and enlightening, there must be are more efficient may of accomplishing the task.
Oops, sorry, that it just my Taylorist false consciousness talking…
Well, Ric, if the original interpreter is trying faithfully to reconstruct the author’s meaning, they s/he is interpreting. If then readers of the second order text — the scholar’s interpretation, which is another encoding — fail to consider the intent of the scholar, they will not be interpreting his text in that same sense.
Of course, scholarship is often bound up in competing interpretations or the original text, many of them equally plausible (and some of them rather ridiculous). So in the end, that’s where the uncertainty comes in. You make your best argument, with corresponding proof, why you believe your interpretation is either a proper textual explication (interpretation) or why you believe interpretation matters little, because it is far more interesting to note what a text does once untethered from authorial intent and allowed to “drift” (which is really nothing more than academic code for “privileging the whims of the “interpreter,” who has become a creative writer while pretending to interpret).
I’d like to see the courts avoid the latter.
Stirner —
Does Wayne Brady have to slap a bitch?
That’s from the comments at that whatever place Jeff linked. It’s terrifying is all. Thought I’d share.
I think my testicles just crawled up into my abdomen.
Of course, it’s cold, so I don’t want to blame the Obamessiah’s army of Devos if I can’t be certain they’re to blame.
I’d hit it.
Than I’d have it make supper.
Just an aside before I go watch the Rockies game and begin drinking to surfeit, but traffic tends to drop on days I post.
Coincidence?
Or is that just what the Germans want you to think…?
“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”
-Robert Heinlein
but traffic tends to drop on days I post
You need to post more during the prime time hours when we’re at work… ooh, I probably shouldn’t admit that.
dicentra has her “A” game with her todays.
This is what happens when it’s Friday and I don’t give a rip about getting my 40 hours in before midnight tonight. Three-hour lunch! W00t!
…it is far more interesting to note what a text does once untethered from authorial intent and allowed to “drift” (which is really nothing more than academic code for “privileging the whims of the ‘interpreter,'” who has become a creative writer while pretending to interpret).
Which is why lit crits will never privilege intent over subjective interpretation. There are only so many ways you can interpret a text if you’re determined to stick to the author’s intent, and the mandate to publish or perish cannot survive such a dearth of angles.
Furthermore, it’s hard to build a following of sycophantic acolytes if all you do is try to suss out Bill Shakey’s intent. If you can find a really kewl iconoclastic approach to interpreting texts (that utterly scandalizes the bourgeoisie, natch!), you can publish books instead of articles, and you’ll get wined and cheesed in all the faculty lounges.
And finally, if you read with an eye toward discovering intent, you might actually have your vision of reality challenged, and challenged harshly, because authors can concatenate any sequence of events they like to show cause and effect.
But if you superimpose a neo-Marxist interpretation on everything, all you’ve done is convert every text in the world into neo-Marxist propaganda. It’s way easier that way, because you never have to question your assumptions by trying to crawl into the authors’ shoes.
Which means simply that intentionalist readings require empathy, humility, and a willingness to have your core assumptions challenged. So don’t look for it in academe: they don’t do that junk.
Jeff:
Traffic on all the blogs drops off on Friday afternoons. I should know: that’s when I’m most likely to check and check and check for updates.
Notice, for example, that the challengers from the this thread’s predecessor have evaporated.
Well, OK, Jeff, but that really doesn’t address my question. Of course I’ve only had one JBB.
The question is: based on the parameters given, why isn’t the whole process futile? It’s not a matter of arguing about different interpretations; that’s a parlor game played after the fact. Declaring that a particular interpretation is wrong (or right) inherently privileges the intent of the author. If not — if authorial intent is not considered — there is no difference from the point of view of the reader whether the interpretation is right, wrong, or random. So where is the point in authoring an interpretation?
Regards,
Ric
Just out of curiosity, I decided to submit the last couple of paragraphs of IOZ’s post to a Markov chain text generator to see what came out.
This is what Dr. Nerve produced, although I added a few newlines to break it up a bit:
Not bad, actually. I especially liked the long-haul kibbutzniks. But the interesting result was when I submitted the same text via cut-and-paste to Mark V. Shaney. It returned exactly the same text as submitted, except separated by lines into “bullet points”. Apparently some nonsense cannot be improved upon.
Regards,
Ric
“So where is the point in authoring an interpretation?”
I’m prepared to be crushed here.
Ric,
To control the narrative of the issue in question. To with malice limit or even deny entirely discussion, or investigation, the merits of a pet … desired… constructed…. chosen social/political/marketing paradigm.
It’s evil. In a society of supposedly intelligent, sentient, and at least in some venues, free individuals, it’s evil that makes cannibals look like schoolmarms. Or Howard Dean look like a statesman. It’s evil on a molecular level, and these days it’s a dangerous, thankless field on which to fight. So, thank you, Jeff, and anybody else equipped and inclined to fight…
That’s my muddled take.
Dammit I wish I had even my c game any more. The words do not come when I call.
Shorter Ric Locke: VOTE FOR TEH OBAMA!!!1111!!!
Is that kind of what you are getting at, Ric?
Well, yeah, that’s clear. I won’t say “it goes without saying”, because people need to be reminded.
But dammit, that’s a statement of intent. If intent isn’t privileged, it’s as wasted as the original author’s. Clearly I’m missing something here, and it can’t be alcohol deficiency at this point (trust me on this).
Regards,
Ric
Let’s not mention the commenting from work thing.
I’m a big fan of intentionalism when the intentions can be found, and even when we think we have found them. However, I am not convinced by penumbras and emanations upon (or from) the Constitution and most works like that. That seems to fall into the realm of wishful thinking. The so-called right to health care is one of those. I’m sure that George Washington is horribly pissed at his dentist right now for those historically infamous false teeth. Because he had a RIGHT to good health care.
Yeah, sure, whatever.
I guess I’m still unsure what you’re asking, Ric. But then, I’ve been drinking since 5.
Having said that, you’re correct: if we don’t think what we’re doing is appealing to authorial intent, there’s really no purpose in the exercise other than to show off how clever we can be with someone else’s signifier set.
I hope Jeff has time to work this thread a little bit.
I think the tequila inventory in Colorado is going to have to take a hit. It’s the only way to be sure.
I think the hijacking of intent changes communication into coercion. And it seems This Modern World we live in has an awful lot of coercion in it…
I don’t use the word “evil” lightly, or very often. Nor “love”. But sometimes there are no softer words for the task at hand.
no for real, dicentra is right. Any Friday where traffic is higher than the previous Thursday is a really quite good Friday for that week is a good rule of thumb. The Internet a lot starts its weekend early is why. Me I like the Internet way better when you post. Even though you’ve been not-posting for awhile it still feels like change having you gone. I hate change. Now that you’re back it feels like not-change, and for real a little not-change is a lot overdue I think.
Lewis Carroll looked into the future and nailed it.
When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’
“there’s really no purpose in the exercise other than to show off how clever we can be with someone else’s signifier set.”
Where’s “aside from entraining the thought process within the Hegelian dialectic”? The fact that most of the current “interpreters” would be buried in the cellars of the Lubyanka for incompetence within a week of their first submission doesn’t mean they aren’t trying. It just means they are incompetent on a level that the real pros would have found unacceptable.
In fact, they’re so bad that on one level, the fall of the USSR can be said to have damaged “scholarship” within the US.
Ya. I haven’t got it down yet, which means it’s either profound or bullshit, and the odds…
Lemme think about it some more. <fx: sound of ice cubes being dispensed from fridge> Nope, not quite there yet.
Regards,
Ric
In the meantime, I spent a few moments at IOZ’s place. Lots of standard “only America does or can start wars” moonbattery, but
Anybody who can come up with that isn’t all bad.
Regards,
Ric
Wow, you’ve got me beat by three years.
Wait, did I misinterpret?
Ah, how I’ve missed the posts on intentionalism.
I think I see what you’re getting at, Ric. Tell me if I’m off the mark here.
You’ve got Text A (say, the Constitution) with its own intended meaning embedded in it by its authors. Enter the reinterpretive judge, who renders meaningless the original intent of Text A, reinterpreting Text A in a judgment, which is now Text B.
But Text B’s meaning is assigned by the judge, and according to the fluid reinterpretation method, the judge’s meaning is irrelevant and Text B must be assigned new meaning by whoever is next in line, which produces Text C.
But Text C’s meaning is assigned by the…
It’s an infinite loop you’re describing, and it is one result of words becoming unmoored from their respective definitions.
Am I close?
You use your tongue (keyboard) prettier than a twenty dollar whore.
“appealing to authorial intent…”
then…we should be using the definition of intentionalism the authors unnerstood. From the Theory of Forms, not American Heritage. Those guys were steeped in teh Greek. Use the definitions of intentionalism, realism, objectivism, idealism…… and then reverse engineer the authorial intent.
it is not neccessarily an infinite loop…just an iterative process.
It’s an infinite loop you’re describing, and it is one result of words becoming unmoored from their respective definitions.
If would be an infinite loop if we used the analogy of the “telephone” parlor game, wherein the first person whispers a sentence in the second person’s ear, and so on down the line, until the last person says what s/he thinks s/he heard, and it resembles the original utterance not at all.
You could also compare it to the Babelfish game, wherein you feed a perfectly good text into the translator, then feed the translation through the translator again, in a different language, until you feel like translating it back into English, and it’s also distorted beyond recognition.
But these all have to do with fundamental misunderstanding of the plain meaning of the text/utterance–forget intention–which you have in the judicial system only to the extent that the parties involved cannot understand the meaning of each other’s language.
Which, I’m sorry to say, is not the case. American English has not evolved so drastically as to prevent us from understanding what was written in the late 1700s, especially when we’ve got tons of auxiliary texts wherein the original Framers elucidated their thoughts and intentions.
No, it’s not an infinite loop, because those who willfully misread the original text have a goal in mind, and as soon as they reach that goal, they’ll stop with all the malicious misprision and stuff.
Unfortunately, those who willfully misread texts eventually lose the ability to willfully see the plain meaning of texts, let alone champion them. Like habitual liars, they lose the ability to tell the difference between telling a lie and telling the truth, because it’s all a game of framing the narrative to your advantage.
we’ve got tons of auxiliary texts wherein the original Framers elucidated their thoughts and intentions.
but those are cultural contexts fixed in time.
how could the Framers have elucidated things that didn’t exist in their timeframe?
Perhaps judicial activism was even planned, and the Framers allowed for 99 bad interpretations so that the one neccessary interpretation could emerge.
The “framing of the narrative to your advantage” (I would substitute “preference” for “advantage” without hesitating) fills an inordinate amount of life for way too many people… to the detriment of us all.
I rather think that the Founders’ greatest crime against progressive thought was their unflinching demand that government’s function be defined as responsibility, not authority.
The progs will never, ever forgive them for that. It takes all the fun out of utopia when the agency of change faces consequences.
“No, it’s not an infinite loop, because those who willfully misread the original text have a goal in mind, and as soon as they reach that goal, they’ll stop with all the malicious misprision and stuff.”
And there’s the arbitrariness of it all. Without something exterior to stop it – left to its self-contained logic – it would result in an infinite loop. I think that’s what was needling Ric.
Like you said, dicentra, for them that exterior determinant is their preferred outcome (ends justifying the means). To want to infuse that type of arbitrariness into such a fundamental social construct is myopic and just plain silly. Not to mention the ensuing tyranny…
how could the Framers have elucidated things that didn’t exist in their timeframe?
They weren’t trying to elucidate things that would happen in an unseen future. What they elucidated was a theory of government, to wit:
• Some human rights should never be abridged by the State because they were given to humans by God (or nature or whatever).
• Government is legitimate only when it rules by the consent of the governed.
• Rule of law is the only moral way to run a society.
• Any governing body will jealously protect its power and seek to expand it, so the structure of government should pit bodies against each other to prevent any one body from gaining too much power.
• The greatest political evil is tyranny; the greatest political good is liberty.
The Constitution provides a framework for government, a methodology, a reification of Enlightenment concepts of the proper relationship between a government and the governed.
If you think we’ve outgrown the framework, that makes you a Progressive.
However, the Founders knew full well that they would not be able to anticipate every eventuality in their day. Which is why the Constitution has an amendment process, and also it’s why congress meets every year to make laws to address current concerns.
Geez, nishi, you really haven’t read the Constitution or the Federalist Papers or anything like unto it, have you?
See, when it comes to contemporary concerns such as abortion and same-sex marriage, the Constitution addresses them by providing us with the means to address them. And the means is that the legislative bodies should be the lawmakers, not the judges. The role of judges is to make sure that the legislative body doesn’t step out of bounds.
Checks and balances, remember? But if the judiciary creates new laws from the bench, then they’re violating the bounds that were set for them by the Constitution.
Look, if the legislature make laws that we don’t like, we can complain to them and pressure them–on pain of not reelecting them–to revoke laws or whatever. But if we can’t persuade the majority to see things our way, we have to live with it, because those are the rules of a civil society.
I agree with dicentra except that the founders saw dangers not only in tyranny. They were familiar with Aristotle’s Politics and wanted to establish a dynamically self-adjusting system that tries to preserve the positive aspects of monarchy, aristocracy (classical defined), and will of the people in general — without falling too deeply into tyranny, unmerited oligarchic (often inherited, plutocratic) authority, or mob rule.
I like s’mores.
Interpret that. But beware that “I” is a construct, “like” is contextually contingent, and “s’mores” are — well, just plain delicious!
you’d like more what!?
I know there are some Heinlein readers here … anyone besides me recall what a Fair Witness was?
A highly trained, select group of professional observers, who – in their professional capacity and according to their professional ethics – were not allowed to offer any opinion of the factual events they had witnessed in their professional capacity.
In many ways I’ve always thought that was what SCOTUS strove to be … to professionally put aside any opinion or personal itch to change things and be most scrupulous in getting as close to possible to original intent of the Constitution and using that as the ultimate measure by which all subsequent law tested.
Barry somehow believes SCOTUS should really be some sort of super legislature and rewrites the Constitution at will. Or, more likely, a priestly caste that privileges itself as the only ones who can legitimately understand the Constitution. If they could, they would lock it away, scrub its existence from every publication and thus make its language unavailable and unreadable, only to be revealed to the hoi poloi when they vomit out a revelation now and then.
“…it is all finally sinking in or that drinking was a necessary pre-condition to understanding?”
As much as I hate to say it, drinking, in my experience, is a pre-requisite to NOT understanding. Anything.
Not that it would ever deter me…
I like s’mores.
I think it has something to do with an armadillo.
Oh.
And Nishidopeaninja –
How hard would it be to make your comments in English, instead of filtering them through a teenager’s AOL website?
I really don’t care what your point of view is, but your “teeny-ish” style is really fucking annoying.
Everybody else here comments in at least high school English (and usually, way beyond), but every time I see your comments, I get the feeling they should be posted in pink, with little red hearts floating around the margins.
Please stop sounding like a twelve year old girl. And if you ARE a twelve year old girl, when can I take a shower with your sister?
Thanks, pally.
I was out having s’mores last night, Jeff. Missed this great post until now. Damn family time …
Well then.
Here is my specific example.
I’m too young to get any historical context for Roe, so I will use samesex marriage.
Homosexuals are citizens, right? So they are due the rights of citizens in this country.
Let us say 49 states pass anti-samesex marriage legislation. And the 50th legalizes samesex marriage.
Then homosexuals can go to that state, be married, and return to their own states, expecting their states to view their marriage as legal.
Then, presumeably, the supremes will rule that anti-samesex marriage laws are unconstitutional.
What is wrong with that? It is a failsafe to protect the citizen rights of a minority from what Plato would have described as mob rule.
So they are due the rights of citizens in this country.
Can you find an enumerated right in the Constitution to marriage of any sort?
Hint: No, you can’t.
Hint #2: Read the Tenth Amendment.
Idiot.
Then, presumeably, the supremes will rule that anti-samesex marriage laws are unconstitutional.
I mean, think of how much money we could save if we didn’t bother with all those lawyers and briefs and hearings and shit.
You can expect anything you’d like. You can also be sorely dissapointed.
See also the Defense of Marriage Act, which settled this matter legislatively. Unless that is found to be unconstitutional, then the law is perfectly clear and such cases would likely never get cert at SCOTUS. There’d be nothing new for them to rule on.
Nishit – Tis better to be silent and thought a fool than to type a bunch of gibberish and remove all doubt.
Oh, and you can’t just go to MA and get gay married. You have to live there, so same-sex marriage tourism is not in the cards.
“how could the Framers have elucidated things that didn’t exist in their timeframe?”
Because human nture doesn’t change.
N.O’Brain – Funny how the leftist always run that idea out there, but would never imagine doing so in regards to the media, for example. The Founders could have never envisioned the press being a mouthpiece for one party, they could have never envisioned Olberfuckface on television, not the internet. But, they would never view the 1st Amendment through an interpretive paradigm, unless they are trying to hide bad behavior behind a speech act.
More completely, nishi, “full faith and credit” doesn’t stretch that far — and the precedents that make that so were firmly established by something resembling the opposite situation.
The law of State A said that individual B was a slave. If, however, B could somehow travel to State C, the laws of which did not allow slavery, he or she was no longer a slave. State A’s laws were not fully credited within State C — and vice versa. The DMA rests on similar precedent. There were several attempts by Southern interests to get Federal law to require that State C was obliged to recognize B’s status as slave under A’s law, and to apprehend and return B to State A. They didn’t last long.
The situations are so clearly parallel that I don’t even think feeding Anthony Kennedy a big dinner of mushrooms would generate enough emanations of penumbras to cause a reversal.
Regards,
Ric
JD,
Illustrations of the profound depth of ignorance evinced by someone who claims to have participated in “higher education” have some utility within the discussion. Jeff lays out “approximating that meaning as closely as is linguistically and epistemologically possible should not still be our goal” in his conclusion. The whole thrust of the discussion (IMO) is that the goal mentioned pertains to an idealization rather than to “reality” (vide Duke 88) among the propagandists masquerading as professors within the disciplines involved.
I’m sure Cowboy or Dan could come up with illustrations of even deeper levels of ignorance among those whom they encounter on a daily basis but it’s sort of handy to have a partipating referent who claims to have completed a course of study within “higher education” and yet remains so abysmally ignorant of the actual structure of the system of governance under which we live.
Potentially, rather fertile fields, ready for the plow of “progressivism”, no?
Ric and Rick – Y’all rock. I learn something every time you comment, it seems. Folks like you replace the grey matter that the likes of nishit and Palooza destroy.
The situations are so clearly parallel that I don’t even think feeding Anthony Kennedy a big dinner of mushrooms would generate enough emanations of penumbras to cause a reversal.
Oooh, I wouldn’t be too sure about that… Just find Kennedy the appropriate country and slam it home.
Rick,
Excellent point. You correctly, I think, identify the problem here:
the goal mentioned pertains to an idealization rather than to “reality†(vide Duke 88) among the propagandists masquerading as professors within the disciplines involved.
As Jeff has put so much more fluently in the past, there is no recognition of ideal reality in academe. Plato’s “forms” are so antiquated as to be merely cute. Where idealism evaporates, the propagandists merely flop their own realities onto their students desk and call it a discipline. Furthermore, any pursuit which isn’t measurably feasible is considered folly. So, when you assert that trying to ascertain the intent of the author–even though it is largely impossible–is the highest function of the interpreter, you are laughed down because things that aren’t immediately present and “do-able” cannot have value.
I once had a student tell me that Williams’ “Little Red Wheelbarrow” was about her uncle. Her uncle, it seems, had a red Chevy Impala that looked just like that wheelbarrow after it rained.
When I told her, in no uncertain terms, that she was wrong, she acted like I’d shot her dog!
“But, but, but, that’s what I think it means…and, and, writing means something different to every reader, right”?
Do we want Reader-Responsey types taking a crack at the Constitution?
I’d rather teach the “Parable of the Cave” in every class, each semester until the day I die.
Dear Jeff,
I agree with your conclusion about meaning being both fixed and contingent. We could say the same of morals. But I recoil at your appeal to mysterious agency. Mr Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals may apply as well as Mr. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Show the fly the way out of the bottle. DaninKansas
wow. all of this just so you all can fail to refute ioz’ primary assertion that barack obama isn’t going to change very much of anything.
time well spent.
but ric, slavery isn’t marriage. well…i don’t think.
isnt’ marriage a citizen right when it is performed by agents of the state?
Someone that calls themselves puppylander prolly thought that it was all kittens and kites before Bush was elected, twice.
isnt’ marriage a citizen right when it is performed by agents of the state?
No. Our Rights are fairly clearly defined, nishit. They even have a name, at least they did prior to Roe.
My point was simply that the Full Faith and Credit clause doesn’t have universal reach, nishi. You need to understand the design documents before you dive into implementation details.
Regards,
Ric
That’s asking an awful lot, Ric, don’t you think?
I mean, we’re talking about someone who thinks that the fact that they don’t “get any historical context” is because of their age and not their ideology.
“Comment by nishizonoshinji on 5/10 @ 11:42 am #
but ric, slavery isn’t marriage. well…i don’t think.
isnt’ marriage a citizen right when it is performed by agents of the state?”
Well, yeah, in a way. Any gay male can marry any woman he wants to marry?
So what’s the big problem?
— Or, maybe we kind of just veered off and decided to talk about something else. Who cares about IOZ’s intent, anyhow? I’m DRIFTING, baby.
Anyhow, it’s not Obama I worry about so much as the kind of judges he’d tap. So to speak.
DaninKan —
The agency I’m talking about isn’t really mysterious. It is that culturally-inscribed thing that is surrounded by a skin and bone encasement, what eats and sleeps and takes poops when its stomach feels the time has come to do so. It may or may not also watch “American Idol,” however self-consciously.
Wait a minute. Does this mean I’m a mysterious agency?
Oooh! Can I be the Men in Black???
I mean, we’re talking about someone who thinks that the fact that they don’t “get any historical context†is because of their age and not their ideology.
well…im sowwy!
haha, age is relevent.
people my age don’t care about teh gay, think che! is a cool t-shirt, and don’t get all that exercised about abortion.
culture evolves.
No, no. He was saying that he has a tiny penis.
IOZ’s primary assertion was that Jeff is teh Supar Hott Studd.
Or that’s how I read it anyway.
Those women not voting was ok….at one neccessary flexibility to retreat from the xians burnt her.
Bruno too.
I have declared a host of the Founders would it is prolly the way the original Framers have ruled….but groups of them.
It’s a process. and…the mechanism for limiting judicial “activism†is how could actually make a humanzee in nanoscale?
im copping a cool t-shirt, and torches.
Im not just the lower 75% or at Johns Hopkins….he is bad, contra religion.
like i despise you know the supremes number 12.
Triumvirates have imagined a humanzee in Science
the eugenics word on the science is prolly the Theory of the system as sovereign.
im a simpleton like intellectual insects.
the original Framers elucidated their children to become chattel.
The Founders were smarter buyin the biology of crap. you be adopted, the mormon alien polygamy wives at Johns Hopkins….
You do realize that there are textbooks on this, yes? I guess its fun to hack your way through the jungle, but you are much more prone to get lost (as you have amply demonstrated) and it just seems a little silly when you find yourself beside a highway.
Merovign: we’re talking about someone who thinks that the fact that they don’t “get any historical context†is because of their age
I had to pass a test on the U.S. Constitution to advance from either eighth or ninth grade (I forget which, it’s been a long time). A quick Google indicates that the state I live in now has the same requirement, but in high school.
I’m guessing that nishi’s state doesn’t have that requirement.
Well don’t just stand there pointing, La Rana. SHOW ME THAT BREADCRUMB TRAIL TO INTELLECTUAL SUCCESS!
You do realize that there are textbooks on this, yes?
Le Frog: Some of the people here write textbooks. Others have taught this material at the graduate level (not I, it’s not my field).
Really.
Did you think those texts were brought down from on high (pun intended) by Derrida and Foucault after a 40 day/40 night post-structuralist binge of nitrous oxide and anal fisting?
Why, pray tell, should the signifieds found in so-called “textbooks” be privileged over those constructed by the readers here?
Oh, right: you’re stupid.
I mean, what textbooks? And what’s the “this” that they’re about?
Who do I read? Besides Derrida and Barthes? James, Rorty, Fish? Bakhtin? de Man? Iser? Hillis-Miller? Eco, Peirce, Burke, Ricoeur, Gadamar? Frank Kermode? Or maybe Jameson, Bercovitch, Empson, or Vendler? Rifaterre? Wittgenstein? Harold Bloom? Foucault?
Wait. Seymour Chatman. Oooh — I know: Gerald Prince! Or shit, Culler. How can one do without Culler? And Scholes. Genette? Hawkes? Chambers? Todorov? Brooks?
So many to choose from, right here on my shelf. Perloff, perhaps? Said? Kristeva? Norris? Butler? Rose? THROW ME A ROPE, LA RANA!
Fuck it, man. If a two-time School of Lit and Crit fellow can’t get this stuff, maybe it ain’t worth poring over, eh what?
La Rana might want to revisit “Against Theory,” though. I think that would be quite fruitful for her/him.
You said “bell peppers and beef.” There’s no beef in here. So you wouldn’t really call it “bell peppers and beef,” now would you?
Sapo mÃÂo:
It’s not enough to tell Jeff that he is teh pozer: you gots to bring your own good argument. Show your stuff. Bring it on. Write an actual essay that picks Jeff apart point by point.
Without resorting to ad hominem or any of the other logical fallacies.
Unlike academia, we P-dub regulars value actual substance over condescension. Some of us have Ivy League creds or the equivalent, but we soon recognized that much of what passed for scholarship was actually nekkid Emperors. Not a pretty sight. We got out.
So lose the attitude and show Jeff where his reasoning falls down. Show him where he misunderstands those he cites. Demonstrate how his conclusions don’t follow from his premises.
If you can. Because I know from experience that they don’t teach that stuff anymore.
Which is why I’ve taken to reading RFCs. They make more sense, and they actually do something useful.
Unlike the morons on Jeff’s bookshelf, whose contribution to the betterment of society registers in the negatives. Sorry Jeff, I’ve got them on my bookshelf too, and they’re just taking up space.
speak for yourself, bee-otch.
So you wouldn’t really call it “bell peppers and beef,†now would you?
What about Whiz? Wid or widdout? You’re talking about Geno’s, right?
Racist.
Unlike academia, we P-dub regulars value actual substance over condescension.
Allow me to clarify:
We P-dub regulars value actual substance over condescension, unless we’re responding to nishi. In which case there’s really no other posture to take, her comments being so lower-case and all.
I gotta go. Time to Round-Up® some weeds. Don’t tell the Swiss.
her comments being so lower-case and all.
Capital!
Don’t tell the Swiss.
Remember when Kerry tried to order a cheesesteak with Swiss cheese?
Heh.
heh. Sorry, I’m feeling a bit punchy lately. happy weed killing!
OK, I’m back.
I made the mistake of filling the pump sprayer a little too full, which means you have to stop and pump about every two seconds. I got tired really fast, but at least a bunch of mallow weeds will not see June.
As for Philly cheesesteaks, I am not all that familiar with them either. I’m from the Deep West. We do fry sauce and green Jell-O. I do know that they involve green peppers, which I cannot abide, so I wouldn’t indulge if I had the chance.
But I did bowl a 143 once, so there’s that.
I do know that they involve green peppers
Generally, although I’m told those are purely optional on the genuine Philly article.
As far as I know, though, they’re not made with frog meat, so it’s puzzling that His Batrachian Majesty seems to have gone missing just as he was about to assign our summer reading list.
You should see my copies of these books, dicentra. The arguments I’ve made here began in the margins there.
If I had to classify myself, I’d say I’m a narratologist; I think there is value in looking at how narratives work from the perspective of structural elements in language, be they self-contained mechanisms or more complex interactions and relationships between language as it moves from text to text.
I started out a big fan of Todorov and the Russian formalists. What I really like is the more “scientific” approach to narrative. I’m a fan of Hayden White, though I don’t always agree with his conclusions. Also, Mieke Bal and Gerald Prince, who have done excellent work in narratology.
Still, I realize that these are just topical trappings. One you break it all down, sign function can only act one way, so far as I’m concerned. There are those who’ve disagreed with me — who believe I’m too close to old Cornellians like Hirsch, or too much like Walter Benn Michaels — and those people tend to argue from a sort of Wittgensteinian, Searle perspective.
Then there are the cookie cutter, two-grad classes in theory-types who learned just enough about differance and iteration and ghosts of potential signifiers and power and punishment, to scoff at anything that takes a close look at how interpretation functions in the speech act.
To them I say study some semiotics. And not just a little Saussure from an anthology, either. Read Peirce and Eco. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods is very accessible. Also, read Eco’s “debate” with Culler: Interpretation and Over Interpretation, I think it’s called.
Then, once you know semiotic cold, throw it out, except for its breakdown of the sign, and realize that intentionalism is the default mechanism for making communication work.
I’m guessing that nishi’s state doesn’t have that requirement.
I probably was in private school that year. ;)
dicentra,
pity. The peppers are an essential part of the cheesesteak experience. However, you do not have to use so-called “bell peppers”, which I agree are an abomination before the Throne. Any sweet mild pepper works; the wrinkly pale-green ones, like you get in the salad at Olive Garden, are especially good. Actually, the most difficult part of a cheesesteak is to get the proper bun. Hot dog buns do /not/ work. The ideal bun is eight to ten inches long and three inches in diameter, made of firm bread, not wimpy stuff. If you have a griddle on your outdoor grill, cheesesteak sandwiches make an ideal alternative when you or your guests are bored with hamburgers.
For each sandwich:
6-8 oz. skirt steak
1/2 small onion
1 or 2 peppers
3-4 oz. grated or shredded cheese
bun
Slice the skirt steak thinly, max 1/4″ cross section across the grain. Cut the onion in rounds, then cut the rounds in half; slice the peppers thin. With the griddle or frypan on medium low, put in a little olive oil and barely brown the meat. Pile the onions on top and cook ’til the onions wilt, then toss on the peppers for a few moments. Scrape the whole mess into a pile, dump the cheese on top, and heat ’til the cheese melts. Dump on bun and serve, being sure to transfer some of the cooking grease.
Ballpark variant uses semiliquid cheese approximation instead of grated or shredded cheese. For Texas version, substitute jalapeños for the peppers (quantity dependent on your compression ratio) and cheap Mexican white cheese. If you do the thin-slicing in advance the total cooking time per sandwich is about half that of hamburgers. Great stuff, and easy-peasy.
Regards,
Ric
Oh, and Riffaterre. And Garrett Stewart. And Barthes.
I probably was in private school that year. ;)
Have your parents sued them for breach of contract?
I mean, if I paid for private school and my kid turned out both illiterate and brutally ignorant of history, I’d be pissed.
OK, so I’m not drinking at the moment… well, strictly speaking, I’m not drunk at the moment and pw being a fortress of pop culture wisdom, er, trivia, I’d like to jump from Todorov and the Russian formalists, something I’d understand when drunk, and ask, does anyone remember the name of the currency in George of the Jungle? I mean, the original Jay Ward cartoon, not the movie although I suppose it’s possible that the movie used the same currency. I remember it sounds like freebies or freezolies or some bad pun based on the word free but derived from some actual currency.
This is really important and someone’s life hangs in the balance. Thanks if you can help.
But if we can’t persuade the majority to see things our way, we have to live with it, because those are the rules of a civil society.
Aye, theres the rub.
Sure, I admit, i know zilch about history. It never interested me much. I saw early on the history is just a field lab for evo bio and theoretical population genetics.
But I always loved the Greeks.
And I do think the Founders were stone geniuses, especially Jefferson and Washington.
So I don’t believe that there isn’t something in the constitution to protect minority tribes from majority tribes.
I will just have to research it.
One thing I have learned, is that abortion makes ppl crazy.
No point in discussing that. Charles Johnson never allowed it at LGF either.
Charles Johnson never allowed it at LGF either.
Charles is not an actual conservative, he’s just a hawk and anti-idiotarian. Ergo, LGF attracts lizards of both the social con and social lib stripe, which means that if they ever get into topics such as abortion or Terry Shiavo or gay marriage, there’s likely to be a bloodbath of epic proportions, and the otherwise well-behaved regulars get clubbed with the ban stick because they go all ad hominem, which Charles hates.
Jeff:
I was never very good at remembering who argued what and then being able to reference them by name as a shortcut for their entire perspective. But I do remember that I thought Bakhtin’s heteroglossia made some sense. And I did catch what Eco was trying to say with The Name of the Rose: how the investigator came to a perfectly logical conclusion, given the clues (signs) in each of the deaths, but that he ended up being totally wrong. Nice twist.
Semiotics is good in that it emphasizes the arbitrariness of the relationship between sign and signifier in most cases, which seems dead obvious to moderns, but medieval scholars used to think that Hebrew was the natural language that assigned True Names to things. Which is why my unfinished dissertation was about the concept of language in the Spanish mystics (St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Fray Francisco de Osuna, etc.) and the four canonical ways of reading scripture and other stuff that was utterly foreign to me. I wanted to write a college-level textbook that explained how to read the mystics, because they’re so alien to us moderns, but it was not to be (ran out of resources to finish it).
Culler was at Cornell when I was (or vice-versa) and my thesis advisor (Spaniard, old-school scholar, neoplatonist) said Culler was downright childish about religion and stuff. No surprise there. I passed Culler and his entourage in the hall from time to time and I sensed the same old Ivy-League arrogance that you’d expect from Derrida’s second in command.
As for green peppers, Ric, I’m afraid I can’t abide most vegetables. I suspect I’m a supertaster and I detect a chemical that most people don’t. Outside of peas, carrots, taters, corn, celery, iceberg lettuce, and tomatoes (only four of which are true vegetables), I can’t do veggies.
Besides, I’m a gardener. I’m morally opposed to eating plant matter.
Now that you’ve all had a good whack at nothing, I meant interpretation as a legal philosophy. That is the ostensible subject, no?
Many of the arguments you make are very interesting and valid. But you quite clearly have never read anything on statutory interpretation, for instance. Lawyers read Foucault, too.
Dicentra: as soon as I find my hip boots.
Actually, I’ve read a bunch on legal interpretation. I’ve argued with Fish on the subject by way of copious marginalia. One of my favorite books to argue with is There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (and it’s a good thing, too).
If you do a site search for hermeneutics + steamed dumpling, you’ll see that I’ve discussed this very type of thing — most recently with respect to Fish’s reading of Scalia’s textualism (Scalia incorrectly describes what he does, I think — giving Fish an opening; and Stanley is a slippery Fish, that’s for sure).
Well, sure. But how smart is it to run an experiment for 6K+ years :-), then throw away all the field notes and preliminary papers? Not a very efficient use of resources.
Dicentra, I’m sorry to hear that. I’m not a big vegetable eater myself, but cruciforms and capsicums are important parts of my diet; I can’t imagine not liking jalapeños on my burger. I just hope you can restrain your humanitarian impulses.
Regards,
Ric
dicentra —
Yeah, Culler’s books were always interesting and well-argued (particularly something like Framing the Sign), but he was, when I saw him at Cornell, kinda boring and all over the place. But who knows, maybe he was trying out something new.
And I hear you about the names of theorists. Too often in grad school (and even at the School of Crit and Theory, where most attendees were faculty) you’d be arguing with someone who’d throw out a name — often in the strangest way (“Well, that’s just — listen: Benjamin. You see?”) — and try to use it to stand in for some point s/he can’t make her/himself (and that, invariably, the author s/he cites hasn’t made in the way s/he thinks he or she has). It’s a type of rhetorical dodge and a stalling tactic, often used as a way to end an argument (“If you haven’t yet read Genette’s monograph, there’s really no reason to continue this conversation!”) when one is cornered and beaten on the merits.
I always forget the names, with a few exceptions (generally, because they’ve said something either very interesting or very stupid-yet-influential: see Said, Edward), but I know the theory. It got the point where I could find what I felt to be the flaw in a theoretical argument about language in the first couple paragraphs of a piece.
One of the very interesting dynamics about grad school for me is that I was a creative writer who got into theory because literary studies types were always using it as a way to (it seemed to me) avoid the text as written. Which is fine, if what you want to be is, say, a cultural historian, but which didn’t make much sense to me if what you wanted to do was study textuality closely.
I cannot reconcile your declaration that you’ve read legal interpretation with your unspecific insistence on original intent (thought I think you are right to do so). That’s approximately step 1. The whole body of legal interpretation is dedicated to figuring out how to locate “original intent” and what it means when we find it. This book is a very good introduction to interpretation as a legal philosophy (http://www.amazon.com/Legislation-Statutes-Creation-American-Coursebooks/dp/031423330X/ref=pd_sim_b_img_2)
As far as I can tell, Scalia is a flaming liar. He’s very bright, and damn near genius at hiding his tracks, but he doesn’t practice originalism in either form. He simply does what he wants and calls it originalism. Not unlike every judge that has ever lived in history of human existence (/dig). Read his dissents in Green v. Bock Laundry, Chisom v. Romer, and (especially) Babbit v. Sweet Home. Not to mention Raich, as I am sure you are aware. I won’t spoil the fun, but if you read close enough (few do, sadly), you can see what he’s doing. It’s much more obvious if you understand Frickey, Hart and Sacs, and New Textualism.
Which brings me back to my question of last night. Let’s see if I can set it up.
A produces a work. B is then somehow motivated to provide a scholarly analysis or critique of A’s work, but by the rules as I understand them is permitted (or required?) to treat that work as a collection of marks existing on its own, to which B must then assign what I (lacking facility with the terminology) would call “meaning”.
So what’s in it for B?
That’s a lot of work. Picking through all the marks, designating them as symbols which signify something, assigning that significance… at the end, B produces a work, a text which C, motivated to analyze it, must in turn treat as a collection of arbitrary marks, thus discarding all of B’s labor. So why does B (or C, or D et seq bother?
Is it just that “literary theory” is a club, an association which treats its members’ works as having meaning derived from intent but denies such meaning to anything from outside the charmed circle?
Regards,
Ric
Pretty much, Ric.
La Rana — You can do a site search for Raich, as well. Like I said earlier, I’m a Thomas guy.
“Then there are the cookie cutter, two-grad classes in theory-types who learned just enough about differance and iteration and ghosts of potential signifiers and power and punishment, to scoff at anything that takes a close look at how interpretation functions in the speech act.”
Ok, I’ve never taken a class in anything except bitterness, religion and guns, but I take most of this to mean that if someone says something, he/she means what they say, right? How could they presume to change intent? WHY would someone do that? Please excuse an old dude who never had a chance at higher edu (had to run a friggin’ business) for asking.
It’s not that they don’t want to mean, these people who attempt to communicate. It’s that language is just too much for them, they can’t control it, and so the new priesthood can find all the secret subtexts, generally ones that show how racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynistic, or oppressive the original author is. If he happens to be a white man, say.
Crazy how that works.
So what’s in it for B?
Tenure.
…but by the rules as I understand them is permitted (or required?) to treat that work as a collection of marks existing on its own, to which B must then assign what I (lacking facility with the terminology) would call “meaningâ€Â.
“The Author Is Dead” is the current battle cry. See, what Derrida opened up with deconstruction was the idea that authors set down their signifiers as they please, but the signifieds that those signifiers “point to” are other signifiers, not “reality” or even the author’s “intention,” which literary critics in the past would pursue as a scientist would pursue scientific truth.
But if signifiers only point to other signifiers, and the relationship between signifier and signified is anything but rigid, then the “meaning” becomes slippery to the point that the author cannot entirely control what the signifiers point to. In fact, if you’re clever enough, you can interpret a text in such a way to show that the text can “mean” exactly the opposite of what the author ostensibly intended.
The classic example is the bumper sticker that says “Question Authority.” Which it says authoritatively, so if you question the bumper sticker’s authority to tell you what to do, does that mean that you accept authority, in which case you accept the authority of the bumper sticker, which means you have to question it.
And so on into the misty abyss. This kind of “infinite regress” is delicious to academics, because it’s so filled with nuance and indeterminacy, and they like the sensation of not having anything solid under their feet, especially if it means that they can “see” meanings that ordinary readers cannot see. Everyone likes to feel special.
That’s a lot of work. Picking through all the marks, designating them as symbols which signify something, assigning that significance
It’s not that much work as soon as you get the hang of it. Especially if you possess the talent of being able to string buzz words together such that you can snow everyone including yourself. The Sokal Hoax demonstrates how you can sound really deep without saying anything at all. I couldn’t pull off that kind of nonsense with a gun to my head.
Actually, “designating [the marks] as symbols which signify something, assigning that significance…” is what you’re doing right now, as you read this comment and any other written material. So it’s not hard work at all. What lit crits do is overcomplicate the matter so that they feel like their chosen field of study is as important as the physicist’s. Or even moreso, if you buy the notion that all cognition is mediated by language.
Is it just that “literary theory†is a club, an association…?
Unfortunately, there is a great deal of clubbishness and charmed-circleness going on. That’s not to say that I didn’t encounter some truly brilliant scholars and some magnificent insight, but it was awfully rare.
which treats its members’ works as having meaning derived from intent but denies such meaning to anything from outside the charmed circle
Hmmm. Are the critics as careless with the author’s intent when it comes to their critical essays as they are with the original literature? That’s a good question.
I don’t remember seeing anyone deconstruct Derrida or Eco or anyone else. Jeff, what say you?
I understand THAT Jeff…it’s just that the dishonesty involved would split me in half to even attempt such a thing. If you say “Cheese is good” then you mean cheese is good.If I say I want to take feets stuff? then Feet better watch out….I guess what I’m asking really isn’t semiotics or (heru-ie-something) but more of the psychology of the WHY??
I’ve seen plenty of deconstruction of Derrida. Attacking “deconstruction” was itself a cottage industry, for a while there.
The fact is, it doesn’t take much work to do, once you learn the tricks, and it cheapens language while it pretends to enrich it.
I just remembered:
The Marxists are always big on the “historicity of values,” which says that what you value is a function of your economic situation and place in history, not some phony desire to do the right thing or whatnot that those Godbotherers were always on about.
However, if you suggest that Marxism itself is just as informed by history and economics as any other value system, they’ll hotly deny it. Like the way Al Gore denies his colossal carbon foot print or those of his Hollywood buddies.
So yeah, they do tend to say “intentionalism for me but not for thee.” They can’t stand the idea of being on the same level as everyone else. They possess superior insight and heightened moral sensibilities, and don’t you dare question it.
For what its worth, Thomas is the only member of the supreme court I find myself agreeing with on anything (though I hear Ginsburg has her pet areas that she dominates). His commerce clause dissents are always some version of the same argument, essentially telling the liberals “you do realize the implications of what you’re saying, right?” and telling the conservatives, “you made this bed, now lie in it.” Didn’t make me too popular in law school.
That’s good training.
Jeff: Must have been after my time, or at least after I stopped paying attention.
Old dude: “It’s just that the dishonesty involved would split me in half to even attempt such a thing.” The contortions that some people will perform to deny to themselves that they’re power-hungry tyrants while at the same time hiding it from the masses (if not from themselves) is truly remarkable.
It’s an age-old problem: in every society, there will always be a group of people who believe that they’re entitled to rule over everyone else by virtue of their strength, high birth, riches, cleverness, or, well, “virtue.” We Americans, because of our country’s philosophical foundations don’t take kindly to anyone who says they’re entitled to rule.
So those people have to exercise their tyrannical impulses in other ways. Literary critics do it by wresting control of a text’s meaning from the author.
If this kind of tyranny confined itself to academia, it would be only an irritant, but because it’s leaked into the judicial system, the theory of how texts “mean” is vital to the survival of the Republic.
I’ve read this whole thread, and my understanding of literary theory is still a bit weak. Heck, I don’t know the difference between post modernism and Post Toasties, but at least I’ve got Ric Locke’s comment #161 on cheesesteak. ‘Cause I really likes the cheesesteak…
I mean, the name of the thread is “On meaning, intent, and the poststructural paradox”, and I end up with a recipe for cheesesteak. Where else on the intertubes can you get that?
That’s why I like PW…
Frank Kermode?
don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it….
I don’t believe that there isn’t something in the constitution to protect minority tribes from majority tribes.
I will just have to research it.
Here is a clue: it is the Constitution itself. Read James Madison’s bits in the Federalist Papers, he is brilliant.
Frank Kermode?
That is some serious shit right there.
Dammit! I am sorry. I tried.
Bob M…Me too
Dicentra, Thank you for the explanation, but I GET that (I’m not one of Nishidiodts 40 percenters) wierd, I understand what you’re saying (except Jeff, I have to google some words-sorry Jeff) But the thing I’m trying to get at I think is again WHY…
I understand the will to power and the need to dominate. I understand the need to feel superior to others who may just be superior to you( I really get this one, I’m linguistically inferior to everyone here) What I don’t understand is maybe not why….but HOW can these morally superior beings(in their own opinion) LIVE with themselves after (is ‘deconstructing’ the right word?) destroying “cheese is good” to mean that Cheese has a God given right to an abortion??
I’ll shutup now, but Thank You!!
Bob M
Stick around dude…the Dillo just may dance one day!
They can live with themselves precisely because they like seeing you turn red with frustration. They’re sadists, at heart. Just like most totalitarians.
There is a story, probably apocryphal, that Philip Sturgeon the science fiction author was challenged at a party by someone who didn’t like SF, and declared, “Ninety percent of science fiction is crap!” Sturgeon is supposed to have retorted, “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” My experience is that Sturgeon was optimistic to the point of pollyanism, so it is no surprise to discover that literary theory obeys Sturgeon’s Law.
Nor does it bother me, much. I regard such folks as the socioeconomic equivalent of tail fins or McMansions — examples of conspicuous consumption to remind us (and everybody else) how rich we are. The professor sneering at the rich student’s Porsche is much more expensive, and much less useful, than the automobile. The car does after all get from point A to point B, rather than spinning its wheels in place 24/7.
The only thing that really mystifies me is that they, themselves, never appear to notice. The few bits of literary theory I’ve dipped into seem much of a muchness with one another. It would appear that all “texts”, from the patterns of siding on a derelict barn to the Encyclopedia Britannica, can be deconstructed into the same turgid Marxism. Perhaps one could make a career out of taking existing “criticism”, feeding it to a Markov-chain text generator with a four- or five-word “window”, and lightly editing the result. I wonder how many people could tell the difference?
(If this is a bit scattered, my tenants just discovered four preadolescent possums in the feed shed, and we cooperated in evicting them. Possums, unlike other critters, are not particularly cute when little. At my age, there remains a somewhat limited capacity for focus.)
Regards,
Ric
I Reread the post Dicentra, and again, thank you. I would have to say though that it’s spread way further. It’s now in my kids school here in MA (HI PABLO) to the point that “an Inconvienient Truth” is a mandatory study in ALL grades 5-12. It gets worse…My mother is now being personally sued (through her work for SMOC) because a lawyer (ie. asshole) sees something that I don’t see in this paraphrase…
“(I can’t say her name) was tested twice over a period of 4 days. both times her urine level tested positive for opiates.
Due to (redacted?) constant belligerance in the house and the fact that this is a sober housing unit, I recommend that she be found new housing.
The lawyer is suing SMOC for sexual discrimination….Go figure
…and of course it’s Theodore Sturgeon. Sheesh. Blame it on the unfamiliar diet — Killian’s Red tonight, rather than the usual JBB and water.
Regards,
Ric
“They can live with themselves precisely because they like seeing you turn red with frustration. They’re sadists, at heart. Just like most totalitarians.”
Friggin’ LOL Jeff!!..Hell, I knew that too!! Just the thing is? I cain’t shoot ’em an I cain’t hug ’em…Yahweh KNOWS we cain’t breed with ’em…But Gators??….mebbee
/sarc
In all honesty, I know all the things y’all are saying and agree more than you know. I just know not of this (insert philosopher here, excluding Gallagher) Yawheh, I love this place!!
I will call Heideggerian hope, comes into question. I am holding in front of me, that I am not unaware how shocking this word might seem here. Nevertheless I am venturing it, without excluding any trace and enigma of differance, thus, is not sufficient to operate according to which all kinds of names in which, for example, the nominal effect différance is perhaps not solely the truth of Being, which must always be able neither to do is to compensate economically – this loss of meaning, in all its modifications; consciousness offers itself to putting into question the value of empiricism did not itself acquire its entire meaning in the occult of a kingdom.
And it is not fortuitously affiliated with the motif of a weaving, an interlacing which permits the different directions in which is no less so; and to defer as detour, relay, reserve, temporization. The concepts of trace (Spur), of breaching (Bahnung), and of the same, always aims at coming back to the very relation between presencing and what the limits of an absolutely negative simplicity, which absolutely excludes from itself all multiplicity, and, by virtue of this, is absolutely rigorous, then différance would be exposed to disappearing as disappearance. It would risk appearing: disappearing. So much so that it cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the detour of the past or future – presents, but with a certain extent, and even though in the system of referral in general that is interrogated by the mark of what it is written as différance, then, will be concerned with disengaging a superessentiality beyond the finite categories of being the highest being present to be inadequate), that I will read, and toward which the sign in all the problems posed by these definitions here.
Oh. I picked that up once in college and bailed. Mostly I just remember him going on and on about that différance business. That fucker wanted to sap precious moments of my youth is what he wanted to do.
Old dude: I guess I’m not understanding the question. Maybe I’ve been around academic malfeasance long enough to be accustomed to the idea that some people really don’t give a rip about doing the right thing or finding out what the truth is.
I was gobsmacked by it too, when I first got to Cornell. I was expecting intelligent debate but got none. I thought maybe that they knew something about life that I didn’t, or that they had better arguments against religion than BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CRUSADES AND THE INQUISITION (which no one expects), but they didn’t.
It’s disheartening, I know, but I guess the sheep and goats have to be eventually separated for a good reason, in the end.
Oh wait. Is #196 actual Derrida or is it one of those mechanical text-generators.
Because you really can’t tell, the Emperor being nekkid and all.
I’m pretty sure I remember that, but you could be right. Same différance really.
OK, feets, that was teh clevar. But Derrida coined the term différance as a play on words to begin with, so no gain on the play.
The privilege granted to consciousness therefore signifies the privilege granted to consciousness therefore signifies the privilege granted to the ideality which is located, as the epochality of Being. The trace (of that) which can be said, a fortiori, of différance. For what is consciousness? What does “consciousness” mean? Most often, in the extent to which all kinds of names might be given, a what, or a final is, as you will, turning these propositions back on themselves, we will look into the word difference; and to produce all of its play.
It might could be from here, but a different translation. I was trying to see if I could match it up then I realized that’s how they get you.
I actually heard Derrida speak at Cornell. The title of his two-night (!) lecture was “Is My Death Possible?” An hour into it and we were all eagerly hoping that it was.
And the analysis the history peculiar to eyes that has itself from vast unities of history. It rejects its analysis. its anthropological theme, which, despite itself, finding overhangs that serve as a privileged shelter than myths kinship systems, languages, sexuality, or text. And in which contain within themselves the games of ideas or to a science striving to measure the class struggle – and forms of the work is a rather shaky hand – or, at least, is to isolate the problem presented itself from the history when the periodisation dictated by Marx – or, at which is slowly taking place of irrigation, the problem of legitimacy ‘development’ and independent systems, rigorous but types of the disciplines have given – or, at both levels; on what extent one and of their names, evade very different history proper to some inaccessible origin, there is not the obstacle to distinguish not form, discipline, or logical relations; functional, causal, or how a historian secretly supposes to one of consequences) and the replacement of research, have moved from linguistics or overall determinations, while constituting a particular genre, form, undertook to slip through a general history. The ground where it could weave, around everything that they indicate, or economics, we were made, I will disperse nothing without restoring it.
I think “Derrida” was just another character played by Andy Kaufman.
“I will not buy this philosopher. He is striped.” — Babel Fish
QED on this whole thread.
“I will not buy this philosopher. He is striped.† Babel Fish
Try Google translate instead, then watch this.
I missed a Python reference. The shame! And in Spanish, it would be “rayado,” a cognate of “rayé.” Double shame!
Dicentra…
I’m thinking that there IS no questions answer that I’ve not learned here, although the answers you and Jeff gave mirror my own.
I/m so sure that Rics’ analysis (infinite loop) is the answer to one of them…the other? you’d have to look into the heart of a ….say? knip edoc (Is that right?…like pron?)or say praul nor?
I’m not willing to do that…I’m afraid that the LeSabre would come out in me…AND I’d have to give happyfeet his shit back
My God….That post made NO sense….Ok…I’ve understood and agreed with what you’ve said…my question CANNOT be answered because it cannot be (by me) be put into words. Frustration Jeff? YES…But not because of you, just me…OK,OK…..Dumb as a post, with an IQ in the 10’s (according to nishidiot)I guess I’m doing a leftie thing here, leading with my feelings…thing is? even without any formal training And the need to google certain words? i GET it!!!……….Thank you PW…Jeff, Dan, Karl. SI, Darleen,Craig….But especially Happy and Ric Locke!!!
I’m not one of Nishidiodts 40 percenters
Pardon, those would be Dr. Pournelle’s 40percenters.
I just quoted him.
See?
and this…..
Derrida for remedial english class. She sues.
hehe, Jeff, doesn’t Priva just itch to be made into one of your characters? She could sneer at both Billy and Shannon.
;)
I lurvs American.
Only here can one be sued for failing to provide a benevolent environment to teach French Narrative Theory.
I just quoted him.
Cool. Now quote the parts where he’s a devout Catholic, and believes that the states have a right to establish a religion if they so choose.
So are Ken Miller, molecular biologist, and Francis Collins, Director Human Gemone Project devout catholics.
I fail to see your point. Their religious belief does not inform their science.
My inflexible position on religion is yours is better for you and mine is better is better for me.
However, I am extremely resistant to anyone imposing their religion on me or anyone else. ;)
I don’t think the Founders endorsed state-religions, but if the states pass it i guess it will just work through the system.
I fail to see your point.
You don’t say?
dur…a state religion would be just like a state song or a state animal mascot.
it doesn’t mean everyone in the state would be forced to practice that religion.
dur…a state religion would be just like a state song or a state animal mascot.
dur… you’re a pig-ignorant, illiterate liar.
RE: infinite loop. C.S. Peirce called this unlimited semiosis, a potentiality that is stopped by habit (akin to communicative convention). Eco — who sounds a lot like me (a failed academic, most likely, who is not yet “fluent” in the “discourse” of mutability and of the nuances of French literary criticism — talks about unlimited semiosis a bit in his (recommended) Limits of Interpretation:
The above is taken from here.
Pasty Eco. C.S. Peircepastyfoot.
It should be noted that I further distill Eco’s observations about the intentions of the text / intentions of the author / intentions of the reader down to, simply, the intentions of the author and the intentions of the reader — the text being a product of an agency who can, of course, create an implied author that differs from the historical personage, but is still, nevertheless, one and the same.
It is a useful distinction for doing close narrative readings — and a distinction that helps students understand the artifice that separates an author from a narrator or narrative entity, in the case of third person texts. But for purposes of interpretation on the level of the sign, it matters little. It is useful narratologically, in other words; but it is, ultimately, a distinction without a difference when it comes to a text’s ontology.
There are a lot of undefined-to-me technical terms in there, but to the extent I apprehend the intent :-) nothing seems remarkable except Eco’s exception: the process of semiosis must finally “stop  at least for some time  outside language†[emphasis mine].
Working forward, as it were, that exception applies; the only limit to the chain is the imagination of the sign-creators. But working backward, it seems to me that we inevitably reach a boundary where the matter passes outside language, which is a construct of human brain-workings. If, for instance, we being with a simple term like “down” we can travel in a forward direction, a direction of increasing complexity and decreasing relevance to the original signified [if I am using that word correctly] essentially without limit, aided by the inherent ambiguity of the concept as normally used. But if we travel backward along the chain, we arrive at physics — “down” is in the direction an object will be accelerated by a gravitational field; it is impossible to travel beyond that; any further extensions of what is signified must be expressed in mathematics, which is not “language” in any sense in which semiotics is applicable.
The creation of a text is a process involving physics, which is subject to semiotic analysis only in a trivial sense; fundamental questions of significance must be deferred not to interpretation but to experiment. In that connection, “authorial intent” constitutes a physical force — a combination of chemical, electrochemical, and physical processes resulting in a particular set of marks, and beyond that semiotics cannot go without becoming a totally circular (and thus irrelevant) studay.
Regards,
Ric
“any further extensions of what is signified must be expressed in mathematics, which is not “language†in any sense in which semiotics is applicable.”
Lulz! Plato was right then.
haha, ric and i finally agree in something.
The problem is…..to get to the maths, you are going to have to go through q-consciousnes and the quantum biology.
;)
Excuse the spelling errors, especially “being” for “begin”.
Ouroboros must either find a dietary supplement or disappear entirely.
Regards,
Ric
The funny thing is, Ric, that the Laconians, for instance, have tried even to turn the physics and biology of agency into a linguistic construct — people are inscribed by the cultural dialogic and a number of other social and historical factors — which, if you ask me, is the essence of determinism.
It matters not that you can subvert such anti-agency thinking by pointing out that, even were that the case, each person is inscribed differently, given the illiminitable potential for contexts and relationships to forge that inscription in different ways — and so we’re right back to unique agency, only with a new vocabulary grounding it. These people truly want their ideas to replace what religions would ascribe to some Godhead: creationism.
If you can control history and narrative, you can control the creation of types. And once you can control types, you can control the world.
Attack of the Clones.
I think I would characterize unlimited semiosis as an unbounded recursion rather than an infinite loop. While it is technically possible to transform recursion to iteration, there are some differences, particularly in failure modes. Loops gone bad tend to simply hang (producing either no output or repetitive output), while unbounded recursions tend to smash the stack. A loop can run forever without producing any serious harm to the rest of the system, while unbounded recursions require a monotonically-increasing amount of system resources[*]. Compare nishi’s writing (infinite loop) compared to Derrida’s (unbounded recursion).
Side note: it’s interesting (and suggestive) that a rather simple stochastic model can produce text which is recognizably in the same “style” as theirs, although as dicentra mentions it helps a lot when it’s all nonsense to begin with.
If I understand what Eco, and you, are saying, you claim that any well-formed recursive process needs a defined base case which stands outside the recursive process, beyond which further recursion does not take place. If so, I agree completely.
That’s assuming I understand what’s going on here, which may be unwarranted — I’ve only looked into Peirce very briefly and haven’t read Eco at all (other than Foucault’s Pendulum). I found the Peirce selections I read (in a seminar on language evolution/computational linguistics) to be pretty tough sledding, although (unlike Derrida) there was definitely a “there there”.
[*] There is a very special type of recursion for which this is not true, but I don’t think it applies in this situation.
Lulz! Plato was right then.
I can’t wait until nishi discovers Hume.
Ric: physics, which is subject to semiotic analysis only in a trivial sense;
You haven’t encountered the Thermodynamics of Gender, I see.
This is what I believe as a description of the interpretive process when framed semiotically — which I differentiate from textual “meaning” in an important way. Meaning, with respect to a text-as-speech-act, just is: it is fixed at the time of signification, at the time when agency produces the intent to mean. Importantly, you can fail to make your intent clear — but this is a failure to signal intent rather than a failure of intent or a failure of meaning. The “base case,” then, is intent — which is itself often (though not necessarily) signaled by convention (or Habit).
What happens, however, with many post structuralists or cultural materialists — what Eco touches on, and which you’ve heard me touch on — is that these interpreters will bracket an appeal to original intent and play with the signifiers, attaching to them signifieds that the author never intended, to “show” how, for instance, a text can “deconstruct” and come to “mean” it’s opposite.
But what they are really saying there is something rather trivial (and simultaneously socially destructive); namely, look what I can make the text appear to mean if given license to signify the marks I’ve received in any way I wish, then surround that resignification with a narrative of my own second order explication intended to justify my willful misreading.
If you can control history and narrative, you can control the creation of types. And once you can control types, you can control the world.
Linguistics are out of my field,but I can’t help recalling (I think) O’Brien saying that if the party decrees 2+2=5 then it does. My only hope is that such hubristic people are living beneath the dam built according to those principles.
#230 Jeff G: Wpuldn’t it be fun to put the people you describe into a resort hotel, and have the entire staff act as if meaning is contingent on what the receiver wishes the meaning to be?
“Miss, I ordered coffee, you brought me a garden trowel.”
“If you wanted waffles you should have said so, sir.”
Heh. I like that, Mikey.
I’m going to steal it. Because everyone will think it’s mine, anyhow. SUCKER!
Neither the infinite loop nor the unbounded recursion model satisfy me, as both models can be constructed such that the state never changes. Indeed, in my experience a lack of state change is the most common reason the program fails, right along with having no bounds on the change of state.
I see unlimited semiosis as a Markov chain. You are moving from one semiotic state to another. In a given state you have a certain set of signifiers which collectively define a text. A human comes along and interprets the signified from the current set of signifiers; what they see as being signified becomes the new set of signifiers, and thus a new semiotic state has been constructed. The interpretation of the signifiers defines the state transformation between the two semiotic states.
However, this is an opinion that I am not married to. It merely seems more correct. The real issue, as Ric noted, is that you cannot apply mathematical models to language in any consistent manner. The language of math, as it were, is exact. It has to be. Language, on the other hand, is only as exact as we want it to be.
“Every decoding is another encoding.” — Stanley Fish
“Every decoding is another encoding…but so what?” — Jeff
You are welcome to it, no theft required – unless you want to think of it as a clever ruse a la the Saint. Then godo that.
Barack Obama will require you to work.
There’s no coding there. You’re a resource. Baracky will deploy you. So get with the program, you bitter piece of shit.
Jeff: But what they are really saying there is something rather trivial (and simultaneously socially destructive); namely, look what I can make the text appear to mean if given license to signify the marks I’ve received in any way I wish.
Right, if you’re allowed to just make shit up, all bets are off. People get tenure for this?
Jeff: The “base case,†then, is intent  which is itself often (though not necessarily) signaled by convention (or Habit).
The general problem in the seminar was: Given two symbol-emitting systems, A and B, how should one arrange things so that A and B eventually share a “common language”? Most of the approaches we studied involve pure introspection on the received symbols (i.e., a Krashen-like input model of language acquisition). In other words B would listen to what A was saying, and (somehow, eventually, ideally) extract meaning. I made myself slightly unpopular by suggesting a model that allowed B to simply ask A what the hell it was talking about, and/or allowed A to figure out that B didn’t have a clue and rephrase. Most of the others viewed these strategies as “cheating”(the professor in charge was supportive, though).
Mikey: O’Brien saying that if the party decrees 2+2=5 then it does.
Submission is the important thing here; the form it takes is less critical. In fact, from the standpoint of demonstrating abject submission, the more absurd it is, the better.
HF,
I’d respond, but I’ve got church and a gun show today.
There is no such thing as an objective reality, reality is subjective based on the ‘observor’.
“Let’s go over to Woodward and you can step in front of a bus and deny its objective reality.” – Me, many years ago in a drunken argument.
Right, if you’re allowed to just make shit up, all bets are off. People get tenure for this?
See the Duke professors’ thread and my request for a Department of Beer-Drinking and Snarky Blog-Commenting. I still have that tweed jacket!
A church and gun-show? Wow! Saint Winchester of the Perpetual Re-Load must have the funnest pot-lucks!
Mikey: O’Brien saying that if the party decrees 2+2=5 then it does.
Submission is the important thing here; the form it takes is less critical. In fact, from the standpoint of demonstrating abject submission, the more absurd it is, the better.
Come to think of it, the Soviet Union (Orwell’s model for 1984) did build Chernobyl. And the Soviet submarine fleet had such a wonderful safety record. The Party’s decrees and the people’s acceptance produced such a wonderful first class disaster! They’re number one! Woot! Woot!
I’d respond, but I’ve got church and a gun show today.
I like the sounds of this church.
dur…it seems that in the end it still comes down to either supernaturals or maths.
i think not iteration, recursion, or markov….perhaps meaning is like a turing machine, that can incorporate all those and more.
or perhaps like a memristor.
;)
i think not iteration, recursion, or markov….perhaps meaning is like a turing machine, that can incorporate all those and more.
I think you don’t have the slightest idea of what you’re jabbering about. As usual.
or perhaps like a memristor
Or perhaps like a babble-bot, incapable of doing anything besides spewing the pop sci story of the week.
Yes sir, at my church concealed carry is a sacrament, and everybody tithes–the reverend is a crack shot, as opposed to a crack pot. Sure we’re bitter, but it won’t be long until Baracky makes us lemonade.
‘scuse me while I put some bandaids on my knuckles.
awwww, c’mon SPB, memristor is hopeful at least.
if we can forge new paradigms in the hardware, isn’t there hope for the wetware?
it is a good time to be a geekess.
;)
In season one Giles fell in love with a techno-pagan, but it didn’t end well. Thematically it kind of suggested that it’s sorta perilous to embrace the future with such ardency that there’s a disregard for the wisdom and caution of tradition and lore.
I think this is why they always make early adapters pay more.
Awesome!
I’m aware, though lacking in details, of those efforts. When I first heard of them I was supportive.
I’m a science fiction reader. One of the staples of SF is “the road not taken” — that we, as a race, failed to notice something important, and as a result failed to develop it. The spacegoing aliens land in their FTL/antigravity spaceship, and when its principles are explained everybody goes Well, d’oh, Galileo/Leonardo/Plato noticed that but never took it anywhere. If something like that does exist, then lacking alien landings the only way to find it would be to re-examine the whole course of science in detail, taking it apart and searching for places where preconceptions, stereotypes, or other misapplications of intellect caused Natural Philosophy to fail to look in the proper place(s) — and this was, originally, the promise of the Deconstructionists. That promise, to put it in the mildest possible terms, has not been kept.
Part of the problem is that doing it right would be immensely difficult, involving not only a deep understanding of semiotics (which appears not to exist) and detailed appreciation of the cultural and dogmatic milieux under which the original work was done, but a sure grasp of what has been done; the latter necessary in order to recognize things that have not been done when and if they appear. From where I sit that consideration looks well-nigh irrelevant; it would appear that the attempt was never made, and may never have been intended. The whole thing has left me with a distaste, at minimum, for “textual interpretation”.
Cranky-d: that looks like an insight. To construct a Markov chain one considers adjacency — each sequence of n symbols (where n is the “window length”) has at least two other symbols adjacent to it; one determines the frequency of the adjacent symbols for each sequence, which constitutes a statistical link between symbol-combinations. Without going to the labor of constructing such an algorithm, it seems to me that an iterative process could be added, such that when constructing the essentially-random but statistically similar output the weights of each symbol vis-a-vÃÂs its adjacent sequence changed according to the generated output. The result would be that as the output proceeded it would become less and less “coherent” while maintaing the statistical properties of the original, eventually decaying into repetition of the most-common symbol combinations in various permutations. Perhaps that’s what the Dadaists are doing without realizing it.
Regards,
Ric
Librarians can tell when categories don’t parallel each other in terms of the way they get organized. Maybe they should a lot more ask why.
Nishi, if ignorance is bliss, you must be the happiest person in the universe.
but it didn’t end well.
that is acuz old ppl wrote the script.
Mr. Whedon was 33, but really you have to gauge whether it worked for the target 18-24 demo the WB was targeting. It a lot did, but this is pushing that little allegory a little far I think.
It is one thing to say that there is an objective reality, but that it is impossible for usto see all of it because our abilities to see it are clouded by our objective senses, and another thing to deny it exists and all reality is subjective.
The problem of the interpreters Jeff G. fights against is that they deny that there is actually an intent beyond the intent that of the receiver. It atomizes all experience down to that of the individual, anything that another has received is unimportant if it even exists at all. Each mind, each experience is a closed loop with nothing to say to any other person.
If you say ‘what is the point’ then you don’t understand because you are already acknowledging that there is something objective beyond your personal experience and that you are not the core of existence. Something that can be understood, however poorly, that is not dependent on your existence for its being. To say that their is an objective reality that can be understood and that you are to try to understand it is to humble yourself. And humility is not a trait that is found in academia.
So I understand, about five beers into this afternoon.
Maybe they should a lot more ask why.
Reading Christopher Alexander would prolly help.
‘Clouded by our subjective senses’ I blame the beer.
memristor is hopeful at least.
Can you demonstrate a function computable by memristors, but not by a standard Turing machine or λ-calculus?
No?
Then STFU, mkay?
Memristors: the Josephson Junction of the twenty-first century.
Regards,
Ric
But nowhere as much fun as Petticoat Junction.
Nuthin’ like young women swimming in the local water supply. Mmmm.
and with as witty a riposte as “Someone that calls themselves puppylander prolly thought that it was all kittens and kites before Bush was elected, twice”, i am dispatched, discredited. oh woe, oh woe. [wrist to forehead, swoon, collapse onto divan.]
jeff: none of it will make a whit of difference. comical, then. bye now.
[…] I guess I could pause here to note that Horowitz seems to lack a certain “fluidity” with radicalist argot — I mean, it’s “cute” how he tries to shoehorn […]
I think you missed my response to you at 136, puppylander.
You might think an Obama presidency won’t change a thing. Me, I worry about the courts, and about who he places in positions of power. Not to mention the bureaucratic appointees who tend to become lifers.
main I felt after my divorce was great
[…] essence of the collectivist impulse, institutionalized in the very structure of our language, and reinforced in the way we believe interpretation […]