It’s official. The Boston Globe purposely misled its readers. Hell, who am I kidding?—the Globe outright lied. Bill INDC has the scoop:
I just interviewed Dr. Bouffard again, and he’s angry that the Globe has misrepresented him. He’s been getting hate mail and nasty phone calls since last night’s story was posted, and he wants me to correct the record. He did not change his mind, and he and his colleagues are becoming more certain that these documents are forgeries [emphasis in original].
Read the whole thing.
I’m with Dean on this: how am I ever supposed to trust the mainstream media again?
Face it, folks: this story is no longer about George Bush’s Air National Guard record. It’s about those in the mainstream media who have made the turn toward bald-faced political advocacy—about a willingness on the part of certain media members to manipulate stories for maximum impact, so long as the narrative they ultimately proffer serves their peculiar idea of the greater good. In short, this is the postmodern turn at its most cynical.
Well, we’re on to you, you gaggle of ink-stained Derrideans. And all I can say is, thank God Al Gore invented the internet…
****
update: Bill Quick offers his thoughts.
update 2: CBS News just repeated the Boston Globe claims, which were based on a misrepresentation of the primary source.
Reached for comment, Alex Beam quipped, ”now will you people leave me alone…?”
More from Patterico.
Centered – For Your Enjoyment!
Over at Pandagon theyr’e making the case that it does not matter whether the documents are forgeries. Because, you know, Bush was AWOL. Despite the fact that ANG service is based on yearly, not monthly, service and … well, that’s where most people stop saying ‘Bush was AWOL’.
However, in thinking about Young Ezra and Jesse’s points, I thought “you know, they might be right.” Who cares if they’re forgeries?
I know John Kerry had a typewriter in Vietnam, along with a movie camera, and, apparently, a rifle. But John Kerry had a typewriter. Maybe John Kerry wrote a memo to himself detailing how surprised he was that the Swift Boat duty he volunteered for changed from Coastal patrol to river patrol, and how he planned to get out of there as fast as possible by seeking a Purple Heart at every opportunity until he got three and how he was going to make damn sure that he was put in for awards while there.
And maybe, just maybe, that single piece of paper was seen by somebody in Kerry’s unit who kept it. I mean, John couldn’t *possibly* have kept track of every piece of paper he typed while in Vietnam.
So, using CBS news standards, we’ve established that John Kerry wrote a memo that confirms suspicions about John Kerry’s service.
So now a photocopy of that piece of paper turns up confirming those allegations.
MEMO TO SELF
Re: What to do?
I find myself on the horns of a dilema. My duty onboard the Gridley had become tiresome and not befitting me. Swift Boats were supposed to give me that (other) JFK’s panache, but the Admiral changed the duty. Now it’s to upriver. I find that wholly unacceptable, yet cannot glean a way to avoid it. Perhaps it will be for the best, yet fortune favors the person who plans and, no Fool I, I have a plan.
1) Buy a Movie Camera
2)
for whatever reason, preview showed the comment centered like a TexANG Unit Designation on a 30 year old memo.
My apologies.
but the ‘forged? so what?’ thought working its way through the Left will be entertaining. Until it gets to OhDubs site, at which point the thought will just be stupid.
Thanks for the heads up re: Pandagon. I directed them to Bill’s site and linked them in the post above.
FYI: http://www.boston.com/help/feedback/
Let them know what you think.
You do understand that I was never standing behind the AWOL story one way or the other, making your histrionics look really, really silly?
Instead, I was saying that whatever the argument, the memos don’t add anything new.
Get pissed if you want over this bullshit story, but don’t pretend I said things I didn’t.
My histrionics, Jesse? What on earth are you talking about?
The point here is that you should be concerned if CBS and the Boston Globe are foisting fake documents on the public. That you think it doesn’t matter one way or the other because you believe the facts have already been established elsewehere is perfectly telling—and in keeping with the spirit of my post.
To recap, here’s what you wrote:
Personally, I happen to believe it does mean something that CBS and The Globe tried to pawn this stuff off in support of their narrative. Which is what my post is about.
What part of “this story is no longer about George Bush’s Air National Guard record” confused you?
You say, “whatever the argument, the memos don’t add anything new.” Nonsense. Forged documents presented as real is itself a story worthy of following.
Again, what part of “this story is no longer about George Bush’s Air National Guard record” confused you?
You just don’t get it. He’s so nuanced he’s neither old media nor new media. He’s above the fray. Besides, those memos are leaning towards being real and true anyway but if they aren’t then it doesn’t matter so why even pay attention?
Got news for you jess, the NG story never mattered and still doesn’t. The fact major news media fly loose with facts and research to influence public opinion does.
It’s beginning to dawn on me…if it is this easy to create faux documents and get a reputable news outlet to believe it and stick doggedly to their story (even when it’s not a very good fake-job)…what in the world could happen? Dario is right–the scary thing here is not the NG story (no matter which side of the issue you’re on about that.)
Part of how our country works is that the free press is supposedly composed of reporters who’ll ferret out the truth, wherever the story leads. That’s the romance of journalism. I was a liberal at the time of Watergate; Woodward and Bernstein were household heroes. One began to trust that politicians are all dirtbags, but at the end of the day, reporters would sort them all out.
What is very scary here is not even that Rather is sticking to his story. Maybe that’s understandable. But CBS should make it known to us that there are NO SACRED COWS here, and that as investigation is their raison d’etre, it will be done rigorously in this case, led by someone other than Rather.
I have said it before and I will say it again. You want scary? THere are those on the left who see getting Bush out of the white house as some sort of (un)holy mission where the ends justify the means. I was expecting some sort of doctored video actually.
I’m sorry, maybe I missed this part, but what evidence is there that the documents are forgeries? This suggests very strongly that the documents are not forgeries. I know that the smart folks over at LGF promulgated a false version of typewriter history (?!) and confused possibility with probability, but the simple facts are:
* Bush told the military he did not want to serve overseas (in a war he, not incidentally, supported);
* Bush may have used his influence to jump the line into an ANG unit despite his scores being less than stellar;
* After doing his job for a while, Bush did not show up for a required physical and was, as a result, grounded. He wasted a lot of taxpayer money already;
* He somehow ended up in Alabama to work on a Repub political campaign (although the evidence is that he was shunted off to this ‘duty’ to get him out of trouble). While there, he didn’t do his service;
* Later, he went to Harvard Business School. Having claimed that he had ‘worked something out’ with the military, he did not seek out any NG units in Mass. He didn’t serve there;
* Mail informing him of what he needed to do continued to go to his Texas address, which indicates that he didn’t let the military know where he was;
* Despite all this, no doubt owing to his family connections, he got an honorable discharge.
That’s why the documents, in and of themselves, don’t matter. The evidence is overwhelmingly that Bush did not show up to serve his country in the early 70s just as he refused to serve his country in 2001 for 7 minutes, at the very least.
Is that clear?
What Derrida has to do with this, I have no idea. I know you’re name-dropping post-modernism, but if push came to shove, I think Derrida fits more comfortably into the ‘post-structuralist’ camp, and I think what you mean to deride is something about the ‘linguistic turn.’ Let’s try this to get some paradigmatic figures: Derrida post-structuralist; Kathy Acker, post-modernist. Okay? Next time you name drop, try not to name drop so ignorantly.
And then you pull out that out bullshit about Gore and the Internet and accuse us of disdain for the truth. One more time, slowly: Gore never said he invented the internet. And believe me, he did have something to do with its inception and, for that, can claim some of its credit.
And, Kathleen, nice way to work in the bullshit Fox News method, you know, the “some people say” method: THere are those on the left who see getting Bush out of the white house as some sort of (un)holy mission where the ends justify the means. I was expecting some sort of doctored video actually.
Yeah, and there are those on the Right who think blowing up Federal Buildings in OK is a just way to protest the government. Does that make everyone on the Right a nutcase? Is that a fair way to marshal a critique? Hell know. Source yourself Kathleen or you have no right to speak. About anything.
Karl, you are not merely an idiot. You are a liar as well. Your “simple facts” aren’t.
As for Kos’ piece on the existance of typewriters that had some of the features of the memo, that ignores the fact that none of the described typewriters can produce all of the features of the forged memos nor is the Composer a device that one used as typewriter. Lastly, the memos refer to a commanding officer putting pressure for a good evaluation of George Bush when that commanding officer had retired the previous year. All in all, Kos’ piece is a tired retread of already discredited defenses of CBS’ perfidy.
At least the self-assesment in Karl’s tag is accurate.
I’ll pass along your concerns about my name-dropping to my students next time I teach interpretive theory, Karl. Also, here’s what I was obliquely referencing when I mentioned the postmodern turn. I believe one of the sections is “Nietzsche’s Progeny and the Postmodern Turn: From Heidegger Through Derrida.” I’ll throw in a gratis quote for you (from the introductory section):
Enjoy your crow, bigshot.
Meantime, enjoy my primer on interpretation theory and the potential political consequences of embracing a particular idea about how signification works.
As for the Gore / internet thing…of course, I was being ironic. Which anybody who reads my site regularly knows. I know Gore never made that claim. But it’s out there, and a lot of people now do believe Gore made it Which, come to think on it, backs up my point about the effect these forgeries (if they turn out to be forgeries) are likely to have on whether or not the general public believes the allegations leveled at Bush over his Guard service.
So thanks.
Oh, and did you ask where my evidence is that the documents are forged? Um, scroll down to the Dan Rather interview post. See those orange highlighted words? Those are all links.
Is that clear?
…Or do you just want to rest on KOS being able to turn the kerning off in Word?
Meanwhile I’m impressed that people who can elide arguments can’t understand that Guard duty is based on an accumulation of points on a yearly basis and not a monthly one. Bush’s attendance month-to-month isn’t a big deal
The same thing goes for the flight physical. The forged memo contains the direct order. Therefore Bush did not violate a direct order since the order was forged. At most Bush failed to comply with a regulation regarding a flight physical resulting in the loss of his flight status.
What’s needed now is simple, direct questioning – the next time Terry Mac starts in with the Bush/AWOL business, the press should simply ask “You know fuck all about Guard duty, don’t you Terry?”
I’m tickled. My whole (blog pimping warning) Marketing Myopia post had all sorts of dire predictions of what would happen to big media if they failed to realize their role as information companies (as opposed to vehicles for gaining ratings and selling advertisements). I figured things would take a decade or so, but CBS and the Globe are accelerating the process admirably.
Okay, Jeff, I’ll grant that you’re qualified to talk theory. Provisionally, of course, contigent upon my reading your pdf; but even if I disagree with its conclusions, just by glancing at it, I can see that you’re ‘talking’ about ‘theory.’
Nevertheless, I stand by my primary charges. It’s said up there that Bush’s attendance month-to-month isn’t a big deal.
Perhaps. But he still has to show up. No one saw him in Alabama or Mass. Didn’t show up. Didn’t serve.
And if you’re going to dismiss Kos so out of hand, let’s try, ah Christ, link isn’t working: go to Pandagon, search for “Julius Citavius,” and hit the link. Much simpler, I think.
As for Bush’s respect for the US military, does his cutting veteren’s benefits trouble any of you?
Karl, my post was not about Bush’s service in the National Guard. It was about the release and trumpeting of documents that may indeed be forged, and what that portends for at least a portion of the mainstream media. My beef with Jesse is that he’s pretending the two issues can be separated. I disagree; I think how people come to view the Bush service issue is now largely tied to the veracity of these documents.
But I will look more closely at Kos’ analysis; and if you’re so inclined, go here and click on the links to see where I’m coming from.
Interesting tactic, Karl. Jeff doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Then, well, maybe he does. I’ve only seen this one play out about 50 times on this blog so you’ll permit me a giggle.
Then you say it doesn’t really matter because, well, this stuff is true.
Then, it’s on to a non sequitor with the veteran’s benefits.
The mind reels that you might perhaps be qualified to talk about post-modern theory yet not understand how laughable your logical path is.
I’m guessing that is the exact line of thought of the person behind the forgery. “Well, I know this is true. Time to make the evidence.”
Is the truth sometimes best expressed through a convenient lie, Karl? I think you might actually agree with that.
Karl, Source what? My opinion? Because thats what that was, my opinion. But if you insist.
Source: ME
but, Karl, people did see Bush during his guard duty in Alabama.
And, sorry to burst anybody’s bubble especially Bob Mintz’s, but if Bush was on temporary assignment to Alabama for a couple of days over the course of several months, I find it completely plausible that nobody would remember Bush and that Bush wouldn’t remember them
(unsupported tales of coke binges and alcoholic blackouts not withstanding)
The guy was in the Guard. Working primarily on a Senate campaign.
It’s not like Bush was active duty with the unit, staying at the base for three continuous weeks, playing pinnochle every night.
Bob Mintz (and Karl) seems to think that Bush was obligated to hang out at the Snake Pit with the other single guys.
The left, who I am sure were so tickled about this story, are having to face the MUCH bigger story of forged military documents to influence a presidential race.
The thing is that most people don’t care what Kerry or Bush did during Vietnam, but they are gonna care about this, oh yeah, they really are.
As Commander In Chief President Bush should deal with himself harshly on these alleged AWOL charges. He has two options:
1. Retroactively reduce his former self in rank or force his former self to resign his National Guard commission.
2. Deal with his present self by reducing his power from effective Commander In Chief to ineffective Commander In Chief – a sort of Kerry Commander-In-Chief.
Hey Karl –
Check this out. And …
And more:
Annenberg Public Policy Center: Kerry’s Claims About Veterans Health Cuts Are Not True. The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center stated in a FactCheck, “[F]unding for veterans is going up twice as fast under Bush as it did under Clinton. And the number of veterans getting health benefits is going up 25% under Bush’s budgets. That’s hardly a cut. … FactCheck.org twice contacted the Kerry campaign asking how he justified his claim that the VA budget is being cut, but we’ve received no response.” (FactCheck.org Website, http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docid=144 , Accessed 2/18/04)
Increased VA Funding. The President’s FY 2005 budget proposes to increase funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs to $68 billion from the 2001 level of $48 billion. The President’s budget requests $29.5 billion for VA’s medical care for next year, more that 40 percent above the 2001 level. The past four straight VA budget increases have provided more than a 40 percent increase in VA health care alone since 2001– enabling a million more patients to receive treatment.
Increased Health Care Service to Veterans. In the past four years, President Bush’s budgets have allowed the VA to enroll 2.5 million more veterans for health care services, increase outpatient visits from 44 million to 54 million, increase the number of prescriptions filled from 86 million to 108 million and open 194 new community-based clinics available for veterans. The number of veterans registered for health benefits increased 18 percent under President Bush and will increase by almost 26 percent by October 2004. (“Funding For Veterans Up 27%, But Democrats Call It A Cut,” FactCheck.org Website, http://www.factcheck.org, Accessed 2/18/04)
Concurrent Receipt of Benefits. President Bush has twice signed legislation effectively providing “concurrent receipt” of both military retired pay and VA disability compensation for combat-injured and highly-disabled veterans, reversing a century old law preventing concurrent receipt.
Cutting the Disability Claims Backlog. President Bush promised to reduce the disability claims backlog, and at his request, Congress has provided VA with the resources it needs to reduce claims. Claims backlogs have dropped from a high of 432,000 and are approaching the goal of 250,000 while the volume of claims decisions per month has increased from 40,000 to 68,000. The average length of time to process a veteran’s compensation claim has dropped from approximately 230 days to 160 days and the VA expects to meet its goal of 100 days this year.
Help for Homeless Veterans. As a result of the President’s 2003 budget, community grants were expanded to all 50 States and Washington, D.C. for the first time in history, ensuring that homeless veterans have access to housing, health care and shelter.
Additional Prescription Drug Coverage. Last year, President Bush took the unprecedented step of allowing veterans waiting for a medical appointment who already have a prescription from their private physician, to have those prescriptions filled by the VA. This is saving veterans hundreds of dollars in drug costs.
VA Expansion. The President is seeking to improve outpatient veteran’s health care services through the CARES improvements, which will result in the construction of two new medical centers in Orlando, Florida and Las Vegas, Nevada; over 100 major construction projects to revitalize and modernize VA medical centers in 37 states; creation of 156 new community-based outpatient clinics; potential creation of four new – and expansion of five existing – spinal cord injury centers; and opening up two new blind rehabilitation centers.
Ass, meet foot. Repeat as necessary.
But what about the t-shirt angle?
Before all this, who knew?
http://www.typewritermuseum.org/lib/library_photo_ero.html
besides Jeff, I mean.
Well, Jeff, thanks for passing on the link to your pdf. I found it an interested read, although, as you might expect, I don’t agree with it. I don’t have space to deal with everything that troubles me in it—I wonder about your conflation of literary and legal discourses, for instance—but what follows deals with what I think are your foundational points. You might want to know that you have typos (one a piece, and I can’t imagine this list is complete, since I wasn’t able to give your piece much time) on pages 3, 14, 16, 17, 21, and on 33 a parenthetical not adequately assimilated. As another aside, throughout, I find your use of the second-person pronoun, especially on 16, unsettling. Who is this transcendental ‘you’ that you call into being? The “our” and the “we” are also unsettling, although not so much so. Perhaps you’re referencing your class, but in every case, the pronoun seems to be used transcendentally. This response, I must stress, is quickly written, so I hope you can follow it: if you can’t, the fault is mine.
Primarily, what I’m doing is a medievalist intervention, or, as we can title this little response, “What do we do with ‘anonymous’? What do we do with manuscripture?” First, manuscripture: a written discursive environment in which texts—particularly texts without a clear author function—readily draw in other words, either from the margins, or from, in the case of chroniclers, continuators. Editions of these works, in order to demonstrate how something was actually read, must take account of this: The Golden Legend is a good example, as I can imagine the Ryan translation that most people know omits, in its effort to get at an “authorial†text, most of the material that was present in it when most medieval people read it. What we have as The Golden Legend is not, really, something that would be recognized by most of its medieval readers. Turning to one of your examples, I’m glad you chose Macbeth, because it is a dramatic work. Macbeth is witnessed only by the First Folio, which might suggest to you that this work, whether in the Penguin or Riverside, represents Shakespeare’s “intention”: and yet, the text, as you can see from the Riverside’s notes, is so garbled as to suggest that what we have represents some special performance of it. Which version—the Folio or the lost ‘original’ or some other unrecorded performance—is the true Macbeth? I’d suggest they all are. Shakespeare’s intention for the work would have changed with each change in venue: presumably he would have wanted something different with it at the Globe as compared to how it might have it performed for a more private function. We have a similar problem with The Golden Legend, but in that work Macbeth’s, so to speak, multiple originality is multiplied to an overwhelming degree. Turning away from texts, your hermeneutic privileges above all the individual personality, but as for manuscripture, I’m not convinced that in the production of a text that the individual personality (assuming for the moment that such a thing exists) matters more than the historical situation of production or reception. I’d suggest that with works by “anonymous”—whether that’s Beowulf—or by “virtually anonymous”—any of the innumerable works whose authors we know by (pseudo) name only, whether it’s the works of Chretien de Troyes, Heldris of Cornwall, or William Langland — we have in fact the benefit of not being distracted from historical context by a personality. The only way to learn what Chretien was is to reconstruct, as best we can, Champagne in the mid twelfth century. And if we knew as much about Chretien the person as we do about Chaucer the person, we’d still read him, as we do Chaucer, as primarily constituted by his place in time and space rather than any transhistorical, transcultural or otherwise transcendent individual.
Now, you and I might be in some sort of agreement here: I’m interested in promoting something other than malleability of interpretation based on the facility of the interpreter to come up with internally consistent interpretations. I want to ground reading. But in grounding reading in history (rather than ‘the author’
, I’ve evaded, first, the points I mention in the above paragraph—namely, the myth of the transcendent person—and, second, the imposition of any absolute meaning. That imposition is evaded, quite simply, by the fact that any given historical situation cannot be reduced to a monologic set of influences or even outcomes: for some New Yorkers, 9/11 is marked primarily by the 2001 terrorist attack, while in that same day, some other New Yorkers, victims of Pinochet and the CIA, might have been ruefully celebrating the overthrow of Chile’s Allende. Going back to the fourteenth century, we can ask whether such-and-such a Canterbury Tale was more influenced by anti-Semitism (which in itself is not homogenous), by economic pressures on towns, or even by the state of study into rhetoric at the point of its composition. Who knows? That’s why we argue; that’s part of why our job exists. Certainly some interpretations are more valid than others—and, as an aside, I will dismiss out of hand any interpretations of medieval works drawn from Freud’s ludicrous transhistorical myths—but no one interpretation is going to work to explain everything. “History,” being heterogeneous in its effects, won’t allow for one interpretation and one only to work. In fact, whatever explanation is “most convincing” is most convincing only because something’s been left out. In my model, explanations must come at the expense of completeness, and attempts at completeness preclude explanation. Interpretation, I imagine, is sort of like trying to hold onto a largish, but only partially full, water-balloon: you can get hold of one part, but in so doing, you’ve managed to put most of the balloon (temporarily) outside your grasp. Switching your grip doesn’t solve the problem: it just, so to speak, shifts the problem over. What matters, I suppose (to push this analogy too far), is that you keep hold of the balloon.
Nevertheless, my efforts, as strenuous as they might be, to recover the historical situatedness of the work (which situatedness, rather than some transhistorical person, is largely the work’s ‘author’
is going to be inevitably conditioned by my own historical situatedness: but you know this from reading Gadamer. As much as I’d like to be able to read a work from 1155 as someone from 1155 would have read it, I’m not going to be leave behind 2004. However, to some extent, that’s an advantage, because I’m going to have the benefit of hindsight and the benefit of knowing things about twelfth-century intertextuality that Chretien didn’t. As a twenty-first century scholar, I might actually be a better reader of his work, in many ways, that he was.
Another, related, point: works, as is particularly evident with medieval works, acquire different meanings dependent on what works they’re anthologized with. If someone in the thirteenth century binds their copy of Chretien’s Yvain with works from the Vulgate Cycle, that’s going to make the work speak differently than a copy of Yvain bound up with a miscellaneous set of religious material. Now, some readers bound various works together simply because, I can only imagine, it was cheaper and more convenient: if you own only a few works, why not bind them together into one readily accessibly codex so nothing gets lost? But other readers would bind works together because they thought the works had something in common. Bearing the problem of anthologies in mind, I’ll add this to my plea for a complexly understood notion of historical situatedness: it is our jobs as scholars not to recover the intention of the author, but to try to map a history of reading. How was Chretien read at this time by such and such people and what does that mean? Privileging Chretien the person—who, remember, since he is only a name, is more a place and a time than a ‘person’—is, quite frankly, pointless, because it valorizes more or less arbitrarily one moment in time, the moment of its creation, as the special time for the work: but perhaps the moment of creation, while important, was, in the long term, not the most important moment in its history. To put this point another way, the focus on intention makes our marginalized field of study even more marginalized by ignoring what effect these works might have had in the ‘real world.’ Whether or not any reading of Chretien, as suggested by his place in a particular anthology or by the accompaniment of a particular set of marginalia, is the one absolute meaning of the work is besides the point, because, as scholars, why should we have to excise subsequent readings from our consideration? As Chretien’s (post-mortem) reputation grew, shouldn’t those subsequent readings in fact demand more of intention because those readings had more of a cultural impact than readings generated from his own (irrecoverable) authorial intention?
Coming back to Freud, however much I loathe him: his (only, not ‘continued’
utility is in his making apparent that any articulation is not singular in its intent. Any articulation is overdetermined in its meanings. For Freud, it was his self-proclaimed job to recover the most pressing meaning in any articulation, but that pressing meaning (“when you say you want a dog it means you really want to leave your wife”) is at the least conditioned by, if not inevitably accompanied by, its ancillary meaning. That is, the annunciation, because no firm basis for privileging conscious over unconscious meaning can be made, is multiple in its intentions. The annunciator meant all these things at once, even if these various things contradict one another. What that means, in effect, is that no articulation can be reduced to any one intention and that any effort to recover that intention assumes a level of psychological transparency—let alone historical and cultural transparency—that quite simply is not. Notably, I see that on 28 you switch, without marking the switch, between speaking of “intentions” (plural) and “the author’s intended meaning” (singular). Which is it?
Thanks for sticking with me this far if you’re here. As for your contrast between ‘teleological’ and ‘accidental’ history, I think that this, like a lot of this essay, is an argument made on faulty premises. Your first faulty premise, in fact the faulty premise that, unless you’ve dealt with this problem elsewhere, makes hash of most of your argument, is your attempt to limit meaning to the author when you don’t bother to define what you mean by an author, i.e., when you don’t bother to try to isolate the author—or even the “person”—from all the other effects that could produce meaning in a text. In short, it’s the old problem that’s always dashed the essentialist position: where does the person come from? What are the person’s boundaries? You hint at this point towards the end of your piece in your discussion of history, but you never bother to resolve these questions adequately. The second faulty premise is related to the first: you suggest that history can be—is, in fact—a result of intention, but I would contend that historical events do not arise because of the any single intent, as, analogically, meaning does not arise out of any single isolatable intent of the annuciator. Historical events arise out of competing desires and competing decisions, all of which co-exist in its causes and effects. For a sense of how history can be, to borrow your terms, teleological and accidental at one and the same time, I suggest, more or less at random, this article: Stacey, Robert C. “Parliamentary Negotiation and the Expulsion of the Jews from England,†in R. H. Britnall, R. Frame, and M. C. Prestwich, eds. Thirteenth Century England VI (Woodbridge, 1997), 77-101. It’s the work of an actual working historian, the sort of person whose work you seem to have largely left out in your historical theorizing. You might also want to read Nancy Partner’s The Past as Text. While I’m throwing bibliography at you, on sign theory, you might find this article useful: Eco, U., Lambertini, R., Marmo, C., and A. Taborroni. “On Animal Language in the Medieval Classification of Signs.†On the Medieval Theory of Signs. ed. Umberto Eco and Constantino Marmo. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1989.
To take up the tail of this discussion, race is a worthy field of study because race, although a construct, has real effects. You seem, as indeed several leftists do, to confuse the study of race with creating the effects of race. But, in fact, the study of race should undermines the effects of race by destroying the essentialist arguments by which these effects (whether oppressive or celebratory) are justified. In other words, critical race theory is an interventionist theory intended to destroy the object of its study. On a related point, I should say that the purpose of creating an alternate history, as Benjamin would have us do, is not create something that is “ours” but rather to undermine the truths by which power justifies itself. What we have here is not a struggle for history, or a struggle for identity, so much as a struggle for creating a space for freer articulation. And what the critique of race that you cite on 30-31 (one with which you seem to agree) leaves out is power: whites can be accused of stealing culture from blacks (when the reverse cannot be true) because whites have the power to do so. Without a concept of power or oppression and its effects or, indeed, history (which, as a history of oppression, is, for most American blacks, ongoing), and especially without a concept of how race came into (and is always coming into) being, any discussion of race descends into meaninglessness. As for race “always” having been (something that I don’t imagine you believe), I hope you’re familiar with Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review, May/June 1990: 95-118. As I’ve taught this work, I found it useful to confuse my students by giving them the first chapter of Orientalism with the question being, ‘Which comes first? Ideology (Said) or oppression (Fields)?” You might also find useful the special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001) devoted to Race as well as the extraordinary multi-part study of identity and nationality by Rees Davies: “The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100-1400, I: Identities.†Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser., 4 (1994): 1-20. See also 5 (1995): 1-20; 6 (1996): 1-23; 7 (1997): 1-24.
This is all I can say right now. I need to get back to writing my dissertation. But if you’re interested in continuing this discussion, just write me at my e-mail address. I don’t think I’ll be reading this blog again.
—
as for the folks I left out, sorry: I had a mission. Keep on fighting against gays and the environment and fighting for oil and I hope you all wake up before you end up in a hell of your own creation.
Man, Karl sure can write a lot for someone in such a hurry. Too bad he won’t be coming back. I was sure that he was going to completely destroy Bill and BumperStickerist’s arguments.
Jeff, if you can understand that whole comment, you’re a better man than I.
Karl, finish that dissertation quickly. and get yourself a job.
Because after we finish with the mainstream press, we’re coming after academia next.
…And STAY out!
<slam>
Poor Karl. If only verbosity=accuracy. What a nice tidy little world that would be…
Karl, no, seriously—come back. Look, I’m hitting myself. Don’t cry. Isn’t this funny?
Really.
Come back.
Please?
f
p.s. It’s all a Rove plant.
Karl –
The document is a series of class notes—some I used for lectures, some I used as handouts. So the pronoun references change, because the whole thing is not meant to be read as a monograph.
Thanks for pointing out the typos; noticed many of them myself, but haven’t gotten around to fixing them (not a high priority with notes).
We’ll have to agree to disagree. For strictly semiotic reasons, I don’t believe context (eg., the way a text is anthologized) changes the original signification of the text; it only influences the way the text is re-signified on the reader’s end—which is only ever an attempt at approximation of author’s intent (if indeed that’s what the reader is interested in doing). There is no need to isolate the author or the person; the intent is in the sign as it is originally conceived. Not being able to divine the original joining of signifier to intended signified does NOT somehow obliterate the intent that joined them.
I think you misread some of the other sections (for instance, my critique of racialism is precisely a critique of essentialism as it applies to race; but it is social constructivists who continue to perpetuate essentialism in its soft form—namely, the suggestion that race is a social construct somehow freed from the ugliness of essentialism. But both formulations rely on the same kernel assumptions, which is what my interventionist critique aims to expose). And so on.
But I appreciate your taking the time to read through it. The disagreement we have is a typical one between historicsts and intentionalists. I suppose to continue, I’d need to know how you conceive of the sign, because it on the level of the mark that I’m staking my analysis.
Don’t cry, children: Karl the transcendent “individual” may be gone, but his historical situatedness lingers on and is probably good for another 20,000 words at the minimum. And there’s great comfort in knowing that, however heterogeneous both history and “history” may be in their effects, it’s still all about the oil.
Hmmmm.
I don’t know about you people but I’m going to type out a couple of fake “memos” and mail them off to Dan Rather c/o “60 Minutes”.
I figure that’ll do more to cheese off ol’Dan than a 100+ blog posts.
Hmmmm.
@Karl: “And what the critique of race that you cite on 30-31 (one with which you seem to agree) leaves out is power: whites can be accused of stealing culture from blacks (when the reverse cannot be true) because whites have the power to do so.”
Ummmm. Zimbabwe?
You know. A Place where a white oriented government was replaced by a plurality that has now shifted into oppression of whites by blacks?
As for the rest of it I must say that, for all the grandiose prose, it’s just plain nonsense. If you really had anything worthwhile to write, you’d write it in a much less dense style. The only reason anyone would write like that is if they were trying to put someone to sleep, worked for IBM writing manuals or were just vomiting words to try and prove to themself how wonderfully intelligent they were.
Oh and my use of the word “they” is “you”.
christ on a crutch.
Forged documents! How can the media be so gullible.
Oh … wait, we went to war on the basis of a crudely forged document and 1000 soldiers are dead. Any outrage over that?
Karl, baby, you just blew my mind. The bibliography was a nice touch.
Just so I’m clear Evan.. Are you suggesting that the false Niger uranium reports (that are still supported by the UK via non-fradulent documentation and intelligence gathering) is the only reason the US went to war in Iraq?
For arguements sake if perhaps those documents were publically available that the internet would have disected them more clearly and quickly than the established media would have.
But you are absolutely correct, falsified documents such as the Niger uranium docs is a serious matter and the French have a lot to answer for.
So if Dan Rather’s meglomania led him to abuse his position in order to influence a Presidential election and lie to cover up his fraud, when he is ultimately driven from his position of power—disgraced and bitter— will he be like the Dick Nixon of the airwaves
YOU MEAN THAT WASN’T HIS DISSERTATION?????????
Lets see.. checking my “To Do” list…
1)beat up a gay guy
2)pollute a river
3)send a donation to Exxon
I just LOVE my life!!
Gee, I knew Jeff was funny, but hes uber smart too?? Just tell me hes ugly so I won’t dream about him.
The quote by Gore (which is easily found via Google) is: “I took the initiative in creating the Internet”. I suppose that people who can’t even agree on the meaning of the word “is” are going to see no correlation with inventing the internet and the above quote. Inventing the internet is a funnier way to give the gist of Gore’s quote. It deserved ridicule.
Translation of the above megawordage into something the kiddies can understand, Jeff: 1, Karl: pwned.
Amazing how the “the documents are damning” meme has transmogrified itself so quickly into “the documents don’t matter”.
If the forged documents don’t, if taken at face value, tell us anything new, then this is all squabbling over trivia, and adding fuel to the fire is just more of the same. Thanks for lowering yourself, Karl. No go and wash.
Mike, since “taking the initiative in creating” is by no means synonymous with “inventing”, it would at least behoove you to look at a little thing called context, in which Gore makes it pretty clear what he is talking about: “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.”
On another topic: kerning. What’s all this fuss about kerning, and how typewriters of the period can not accomplish this? Hugh Hewitt had an expert e-mailing him (and Kos), and in an attempt to prove that the Selectric Composer of that time could not do kerning, he posted a manual for the Composer from that time…
… except that, you guessed it, in this manual, composed on the Selectric Composer itself, there are pretty clear examples of kerning – see the word ‘for’ in the third paragraph on the first page and the word ‘justified’ around the top of the second page.
What else does it have? Oh yeah, curly quote marks, instead of the straight ones.
And yet both of these (kerning and curly quotes) are supposed to be possible only with modern-day word processing equipment…
You can find the document here: http://www.ibmcomposer.org/docs/Selectric Composer Operations Manual.pdf
If that link doesn’t work for you, go to http://www.hughhewitt.com and go down to where this expert has written an e-mail to Markos (of Kos) – the link is in there.
Dave, you need to see this. But be sure to apply lots of shaving cream or you’ll get nicked something fierce by ol’ Mr. Occam.
Unless you’re a Kerry supporter in which case:
Dave,
I don’t have time at the moment to research it but since you brought it up perhaps you know the answer. It sounds like you are saying the manual for the typewriter is supposedly written on that same typewriter? Wouldn’t that take a small army? Has there ever been a manual for anything produced by an actual typewriter? Professional print presses had Times New Roman, kerning and all that fun stuff that produced manuals. Again, if you’re saying the actual typewriter itself made it’s own manual that seems far fetched. Again, that’s with no time for research.
McGehee,
“You must believe the Texas Air National Guard had a special typewriter that cost over $20,000 in today’s dollars.”
No, you don’t have to believe that at all. The IBM Executive series of typewriters didn’t cost anywhere near that much, had proportional spacing, was prevalent since the 50’s, and it wouldn’t strain the imagination overly that these would have been found in National Guard offices.
“You must believe that it was used to write everyday memos.”
If we’re talking about a model that was prevalent at the time, why would that be hard to believe?
“And that a special (read expensive) font ball was used.”
Or that typewriters for the military included a superscripted ‘th’. People who worked for IBM or with typewriters of that era said they weren’t difficult to customize and it was done all the time. Why the 111th would want a superscripted ‘th’ on their keyboard shouldn’t be so hard to understand.
“And that the ball was changed to a smaller size (8pt) to create the superscript in the middle of typing the memo and then changed back.”
Typewriters of the time also had fractions and such. It wouldn’t strain the imagination overly to think that they also had ‘st’, ‘nd’, ‘rd’ and ‘th’ as separate characters. Take for example the superscripted ‘th’ in Bush’s records. It was not only superscripted, but a different font size. Occam’s Razor would dictate not that someone changed the font ball on their typewriter to get this right – but that they had a dedicated character available on their typewriter.
“And that the spacing between lines (leading) was set to a highly non-standard (13pt) setting.”
That is something that can be set very easily on each individual typewriter.
“And that special measuring was performed to produce centered headers.”
This has also been discussed at length – to produce a centered heading, one merely has to backspace half the number of characters and then type forward. For something like an office letterhead, somebody who types this several dozen times a day would have these settings either engraved in their skull or taped to their typewriter.
“And such special measuring was done exactly the same on memos three-months apart.”
Since we’re talking about the letterhead that would have been typed in that very same office dozens of times every day, I would think they’d know the settings pretty well – and most likely could repeat this in their sleep.
“And that all of the above was performed by a man that didn’t type.”
Or his secretary, more likely. Part of whose job description most likely included “typing”.
That Occam’s Razor sure is interesting… but it’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it? Going by this rule, we would have to conclude that the reason Bush can’t dig up any proof of serving in Alabama is simply that Bush was indeed skipping duty.
dario:
“It sounds like you are saying the manual for the typewriter is supposedly written on that same typewriter? Wouldn’t that take a small army?”
Have a look at the link – that is the claim made in the document itself.
I don’t think they meant that they cranked out every copy of it on a typewriter, but that they created the original on the typewriter. The manual would have been made with an offset printing press, I’m guessing.
Me, I’m just waiting for an owner of one of these typewriters in question to type up something that’s even slightly comparable to the file memo.
Nice to see the true believers fighting ‘til the very end.
Kathleen of Rightwingsparkle reminds me of this paragraph from Friday’s WaPo story:
So Dave,
Jeff just produced a link that showed that the memo has different formatting to every other document that was produced there.
So far, every witness has either “recanted” or stated that they were misquoted.
The star expert witness Matley) reviewed only one document and not all four and then only the signature. When asked if the signature could be scanned, he had to admit that could be a possibility since he was NOT looking at originals.
Also Matley has stated that a cardinal rule is that photocopies are useless for determining authenticity. So now what is he doing? trying to determin authenticity of a copied doc.
Be careful with that Occam’s razor. I predict you will cut your neck off with it.
Dario,
I’m saying the forged Niger documents were just as important to the case for the war on Iraq as the documents from Killian are for the case for Bush being AWOL.
If you believe the Killian memos make up the entire case, then yes, they are totally equivalent.
If the media is gullible, so is the Bush administration.
If the Bush administration has doubts about any future cases for war, I hope it gives these documents the same scrutiny that you guys are giving anything that suggests Bush’s commander might have ordered him to comply with military regs.
Wait, in fact, … there’s no arguing that military regs were that Bush was required to take a flight physical, and furthermore that he didn’t do it … so in fact the documents from Killian are totally irrelevant. Every party to the discussion agrees that Bush violated TANG regs, including Bush himself.
Yet somehow the Niger document did influence official US policy or Bush would never have mentioned it in the SOTU address.
So Dario … which is it? Were the Niger documents a serious credibility issue for the Bush administration … or irrelevant? And if one is the case, what differs then in the case of the Killian documents?
Jeff, do we have other documents from Killian’s office? That would be the most relevant comparison.
capt joe, yes indeed, multiple generation photocopies are useless for this kind of analysis, which is why none of the experts have come out and said 100% that these documents are forgeries – they can’t even identify the font for sure.
And where’s Occam’s Razor when we look at the bigger picture here? The simplest explanation for the questions re. Bush’s service and the gaps in his record (as well as their silence on this matter right now) is that he was skipping duty and can not offer anything better than a non-denial denial. The simplest explanation for him refusing to deny he did hard drugs in his younger days is that he did hard drugs in his younger days. And so on.
Occam’s Razor’s fun.
Dave, now you need to read this. Ol’ Mr. Occam will be with you in a minute.
Mr. Occam also says to tell you that when all the experts say “forgery,”—while one guy who looked at one memo and has no expertise beyond handwriting analysis is the only one saying “genuine,” that makes believing it’s genuine kind of a Kool-Aid™ test.
Yeah, I’ve seen York’s article before, and it’s pretty weak. Going on about all the time when Bush did show up is like going on about all the nights Bill was faithful to Hillary. It’s typical “look-over-there” nonsense.
For some reason he also neglects to mention that the permission that Bush was given was revoked. I’m sure that’s just an innocent oversight.
I don’t know that we have other documents from Killian’s secret private stash, Dave. After all, his family says he hated typing, and that he didn’t keep personal files.
More on the AWOL front: Caught In The Act Of Not Being AWOL!.
See also.
I think, Jeff, what you’re missing in this whole discussion is the possibility that CBS actually believed the documents were genuine, even if it turns out that they were forgeries. I know, I know, the liberal media hate Bush and want to make sure he doesn’t get re-elected blah blah blah, but even so, does it seem particularly likely that so many prominent individuals (such as Dan Rather) would be willing to risk their credibility just to offer further evidence of an accusation against Bush which will be believed or disbelieved based far more on political affiliation than empirical evidence? Bush supporters will claim it’s just part of a manufactured left-wing attack campaign, and his opponents will claim that it’s just one more item to add to an already-existing mountain of evidence. So who stands to gain more from the publication of a document whose veracity can be so easily called into question?
And speaking of which, for someone who likes to deride Michael Moore as a [fatfatfatfatfat] paranoid (which probably isn’t far from the truth), tinfoil-hat-wearing propaganda hack, you seem to readily accept, nay, even shill for, the idea of a left-wing media conspiracy to bring Bush down. I’m not saying the one necessarily invalidates the other; it doesn’t. But perhaps before you write your next oh-so-clever post attacking Moore or anyone else to the left Joe Lieberman, you might want to consider how easy it is -assuming you really believe what you’re saying- to construct a demonic, caricaturish mental image of one’s political opponents in such a manner that you are willing to believe even the most ridiculous, impractical assertions made by the most extreme elements of “your side”. This is the trap into which the far left has fallen against Bush: they have allowed emotion to overwhelm reason, thereby helping to undermine what is, objectively, a very strong case against this administration. You might want to consider whether you are simply filling the same role on the opposite side of the political spectrum.
Is it okay if I wait until football is over before I search my soul so thoroughly, Walter? Because it seems so onerous a thing to do on a pleasant Sunday afternoon.
Meantime, and for the record—I never discounted that Rather, et al., may have believed the documents genuine. My criticism has been that CBS—in their eagerness to support Kerry (and I feel safe in saying, without partisan bias, that Dan Rather supports John Kerry over George Bush)— rushed their exclusive to air before properly vetting the docs; second, that they now refuse to release the original docs or divulge their sources, even in the face of growing skepticism over authenticity; and finally, that they are joined by the Boston Globe in a disingenuous attempt to cover their own asses by misrepresenting subsequent findings, and the testimony of their own contacted experts.
Listen: If you don’t like the tone of my “oh-so-clever” material here, Walter, go read somebody else’s blog. I’ll live. Because I certainly don’t need sanctimonious lectures from someone who takes such obvious pleasure in trying to present himself as nobly above the partisan fray—particularly when said sack of sanctimony is mischaracterizing my arguments in order to bolster his own perceived nobility and above-the-frayness.
This site is mostly a cultural /political humor site. And cartooning certain aspects of a given subject is how humor works, oftentimes. Live with it. Or don’t.
But take a look at this while you formulating your next set of “would prominent individuals such as Dan Rather blah blah blah” credibility questions.
PS. In the time it took me to write this response, Michael Moore finished off three feta cheese calzones and a trough of Mountain Dew.
Should I waste my time pointing out to Evan that he is writing false statements? Niger wasn’t the SOTU reference and it has turned out that in fact Niger does seem to have been contacted by Iraq for yellowcake. You are about 11 months behind on the news cycle, Evan.
Pretty hilarious when one is recycling past lost battles … over and over and over.
Robin … here’s an article from Newsweek:
So … please lemme know why the WH backed off the SOTU statement if those weren’t the source. And also show me the evidence that the WH was using that specifically related to uranium that conclusively was not from the Italian source.
Are you sure this came out of the horse’s mouth and not somewhere else???
More on the forgeries. This expert says it’s time to take out the “alleged.”
Jeff, sorry to post here again, but you haven’t provided any contact information other than this website. I’d really rather not clutter up your website any further.
I’m going to ignore all the typewriter stuff and chest-banging anti-intellectual stuff from your readers. I hope your readers aren’t put off by the professional competence of other professions. I can’t understand most of what my brother, the cardiologist, says; the reverse is true. But it doesn’t make me feel stupid, because, well, I’m not a cardiologist! Most of your readers, I suspect, haven’t read the pdf file in question, so when they attack me for being hieratic, they don’t realize that your piece is guilty of the same sin.
Short version: hey folks, Jeff is also in the academy, so if you go after me for that (being put off by bibliography, &c), you’re going after him, too.
I do think it a bit of a sleight-of-hand to replace ‘author’ or ‘person’ with “conscious entity,” but I can respond on that level. You’re right: the argument we’re having is typical. So, replacing ‘author’ with the originary moment of the creation of the sign, we can talk about intent, but my contention is that that intent is so complex—originating as it does in a multitude of conflicting causes—that it becomes a fool’s errand to try to discern any one intent. Maybe that’s not what you’re trying to do? Once we bring in an idea of multiple origins (and frankly, I don’t see why ‘origin’ should matter so much, since, again, we should be at least as interested in how something is read as we are in how something was produced), we increase our ability to generate multiple interpretations and decrease the utility of trying to isolate the origin.
Short version: to some degree, you’re asking us to become biographers rather than historians of discourse. I don’t think that’s a good direction for our discipline to take.
Quick version: unless you deal with the Macbeth thing, you can’t make your argument. Which Macbeth shows Shakespeare’s intent? Which Macbeth is the origin?
—
I may well have misread your critique of race theory. I’m completely opposed to any essentialism. I asked my gf, who’s a big reading of Toni Morrison, if she thought Morrison’s reading of race in Tar Baby was essentialist, where Son represented True Blackness or somesuch nonsense: she says, “no, it’s a lot more nuanced than that.” Good enough for me.
—
But, again, Jeff, if you want to continue this conversation, write me, because I don’t know how to write you. But I suspect we’ll just end up, as you no doubt suspect to, at the impasse that historicists and intentionalists always end up in. And although we disagree violently politically, I imagine, and although I was terribly rude to you when we began this conversation, you’re addressing me as a colleague: that’s classy, and I thank you for it.
Karl —
I don’t believe Morrison believes she’s being essentialist. In fact, I’m pretty sure she’d think she’s being anti-essentialist, though culturally proprietary nonetheless (I go over how I believe this works in the post “There’s no such thing as race…”, which you can find under greatest hits to the right). My critique of race and identity politics simply shows that the anti-essentialist, social-constructivist view of race is—against its very own purported aims—essentialist at its theoretical base. Morrison’s idea of “rememory”—and her theoretical expousals about the “black aesthetic”—pin her down in such a way that, however nuanced she wishes to be about such things, theoretically, at least, she’s locked into to a particular position about what race is and how it functions in our culture (and, as you probably divine by now, I’m very big on shaving through layers of nuance to reach foundational assumptions, at which point I like to begin my analysis. That way, I’m not put off point by the many outside layers of the onion).
Your contention that intent is a complex animal is both true and false: divining intent is often extraordinarly complex; knowing one’s own intent is often extraordinarily complex; but the act of creating a sign is not—it is the simple joining of the signifier to the signified, with corresponding referent in mind. You can intend a signifier to carry more than one signified (think of a conscious play on words); you can even intend for a signifier to act solely as a signifier—to act as an empty sign. De Man was on to something there, but the difference is, in my formulation, it’s the intent to leave the signifier empty of a referent that turns it into a sign, and that differentiates that sign from the accidental signifiers that WE turn into signs all the time (the full moon “means” x, for instance, based on our supplying a signified).
You write, “I don’t see why ‘origin’ should matter so much, since, again, we should be at least as interested in how something is read as we are in how something was produced), we increase our ability to generate multiple interpretations and decrease the utility of trying to isolate the origin. Short version: to some degree, you’re asking us to become biographers rather than historians of discourse. I don’t think that’s a good direction for our discipline to take.”
There is nothing in your summary I’d disagree with, except maybe that last sentence. As I mention in my notes, I’m coming at all of this both as a narrative theorist AND as an author/teacher. Pedagogically (and really, quite practically, from the point of view of the discipline, I think), I’m grappling with a way to justify grading the kinds of papers we assign. What is it that we think we’re doing when we assign a text? Which is why I try to differentiate between interpretation (actively trying to divine the signs the author leaves as marks—what you’d perhaps permit me to call textual biography), and other textual exercises—exercises equally as interesting and fruitful, but exercises which are not, in effect, interpretations (so much as they are creative non-fiction).
Being historians of discourse—exploring a text’s prevailing cultural dialogics, or exploring how our own situatedness effects our reading of the text, etc—these are all valid and interesting pursuits, and are not mutually exclusive from intentionalism and textual biography. In fact, Walter Benn Michaels, a pre-eminent intentionalist, is also a preeminent New Historicist. But as he points out—and as I further argue—the appeal, in terms of how signification works, is always to intent, even if the author’s original intent is not what you’re ultimately interested in from the perspective of scholarship. Remember, my critique rests on how signification actually works, and on what our aims are when we read. Very simply, we can either try to accurately divine the single originary textual “meaning” (the collection of all the originary signs strung together in the aggregate), or we can do something else. All such exercises involve creating an entirely new text (every decoding is another encoding), but some of those new texts will be closer to approximating the intent of the original. Which is one possible way to take the discipline (and, from my perspective as a fiction writer, the way I’d like to see it go, at least as a first step in training literary scholars; as an analogy—yes, Picaso was able to explore new ways the form can be looked at and situated in space; but before he did so, he could mimic reality with a startling degree of success; my suggestion, from a pedagogical perspective, is that we teach students the rigorous work of interpretation BEFORE we allow them the often more entertaining work of creating new, idiosyncratic textual encodings peculiar to their own whims—of indulgence).
You ask, “which version [of MacBeth]—the Folio or the lost ‘original’ or some other unrecorded performance—is the true Macbeth? I’d suggest they all are.”
…And I’d agree, though your trick here is to introduce the word “true.” But my reply is, it doesn’t matter so much (other than historically) that we can’t pin down which of the versions was actually penned by Shakespeare. Because what we’re after is the intentional signification of each iteration, regardless of the signifier provided us as being representative of authorial corporality; if, for example, a scene in MacBeth was re-written by a committee of actors in anticipation of the likes / biases of a particular audience—but yet the play still carries Shakespeare’s name as author—well, then we simply (which is anything but simple, of course) need to recognize that certain passages were signified by a different authorial entity. “Shakespeare” in this case, is a signifier that refers not only to the historical personage, but also to the host of others whose contributions to a particular version of MacBeth survive. And as such, one thing we can try to do as textual biographers is to tease out the historical personage and his intentions from the intentions of others masquerading historically—out of circumstance alone—under that same identity. But intention remains what it is—permanent, an historical occurence that survives so long as the marks survive—in that in order for the signifier to have been turned into a sign, it was at one point actually created as such through intention.
Or to put it as succinctly as I can without my coffee, each version of MacBeth has an originary intent, each version is signified by some consciousness. Interpreting means trying to approximate the signification process of that entity / those entities; exploring WHY an author or authors chose to signify something in a particular way is a perfectly valid form of textual study; exploring HOW elements of a given culture influenced an author to chose a particular signification is also a valid form of textual study; and exploring THE CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH a reader, 400+ years laters later, comes to resignify the play in his or her own way—this, too, is a perfectly valid and interesting pursuit within our discipline. But because signification works in such a way (for a sign to be a sign, it must be intentionally signified), and because the symbolic nature of language provides us only signifiers and requires us to resignify in order to turn a mark into a meaningful sign, we must first be clear what it is we are hoping to accomplish when we engage a text—and we must explain this clearly to our students.
–
back in the day, we just used to read stuff.
Karl and Jeff, real quick thought here.
Jeff already knows this as I’ve often bothered him (like the ignoramus I often am) about what some of the terms and concepts mean when he talks lit theory, but, after reading your dueling (and then more friendly) discussion here, I wonder if you guys realize that once you start using ultra specific terminology and the like, many of us start wondering exactly what it is you’re going on about.
I remember talking with Beck about trading on his website and realizing we were essentially going into trading shorthand that made it hard for those (even with a financial background) to follow us. So, it’s not just an issue confined to your specialties.
“Essentialism”, “intentionalism”, “signifiers”, etc: most aren’t following this discussion. That might be unavoidable and much might be lost through simplification but I wanted to make sure you guys notice it. A simple metaphor or analogy can give people a skeleton of understanding that they can drape more specific and complex ideas onto more easily.
Please understand I’m saying this because I just greatly enjoyed the discussion and was happy to see it after reading Jeff’s .pdf file awhile back.
I do try to explain some of these terms in the .pdf file, but for those who might still be following the discussion here, I’ll see what I can do to make things sound less pedantic.
A metaphor for essentialism might be “blood level.” Is race “essential” (determined by blood) or is it something society has constructed (an idea that becomes operative on the political and cultural level)? Can the two be distingued theoretically?
Intentionalism is pretty straight forward: it is a position in interpretive theory (the position I happen to hold) that believes the intentions of the text’s author determine the text’s meaning. Thus, when we interpret, we try to reconstruct the author’s meaning. For instance, when we interpret Moby Dick, we are trying to reconstruct Melville’s intent. This does NOT mean we can’t do other things with the text. Because the book we buy is made up of signs that appear to us only as sigifiers —the black marks on a page, or the pixel formations that create letters and words on your computer screen—we are forced to re-add signifieds (the referent that as we re-signify turns, for instance, the marks that make up “cat”, into the furry little animal, or a jazz aficionado, etc.)
In semiosis / semiotic (the study of signs)—one notion of the sign (the one favored by the poststructuralists) posits that a sign is a combination of the signifier (the mark that we see: “cat”) + the signified (what we intend the signifier to stand for: small furry feline animal).
To understand what much of this discussion turns on, consider whether the type face used in two separate editions of Moby Dick (say, hardcover and trade paperback, Times Roman and Palantino) in any way alter the “meaning” of the story.
What is being changed in the differing editions are the signifiers (the mark on the page the way they appear to us in different type faces). But this is NOT important to what the book “means,” most people will concede, because when we’re dealing with the written word, it is the SIGN(again, the marks + the attendant intentional signifieds) that matters, not the SIGNIFIER. That is, we “read” signs, not signifiers.
To decode signs, we are given signifiers and we re-supply the signifieds. We are able to do this based on a number of factors, among them habit, context, etc.
When we add different signifieds to a signifier than the author intended (if, for instance, I write “cat” and attach to it the signified, “groovy jazz loving dude”, but you see the mark and read it as “furry feline,” than you’ve misinterpreted my intent; the fault for this could be either mine or yours, but the fact remains that you’ve created a NEW SIGN altogether—one different than the one I created. Do this on a macro level, and you’ve created an entirely new text. Our choice as readers is, do we try to approximate the original text (interpret), or are we more interested in what we can make the TEXT DO once we attach to the signifiers signifieds that we’re certain the author didn’t intend.
It is the latter that allows me to write essays suggesting that Curious George is a postcolonialist narrative that turns on the capture and domestication of the indigenous Other (the monkey) by the colonialist aggressor (the man in the big yellow hat) —even though I know that Curious George’s author never intended for his signifiers to carry the signifieds necessary to make that argument work. Unless, that is, you concede that you can resignify those marks to MAKE such an argument work—in which case, you yourself have totally re-written the text yourself as a postcolonialist narrative. You have provided the intentional signifieds necessary to create a new text.
Jeff, that’s crystal clear and your students are lucky.
Thank goodness that made sense. Was too lazy to proofread it.
Moses supposes erroneously.
Evan, wow, I was right. You are really 11 months off the news cycle.
Even if was in the Oct ‘02 estimate, the SOTU speech didn’t mention Niger. It mentioned British intel that Iraq was attempting to obtain yellowcake from Africa. Intel that the British government hasn’t backed off from. And it turns out that Joe Wilson has admitted that Niger officials told him that an Iraqi official tried to open trade discussions that they interpreted as a request for a deal for yellowcake which you will find referenced in the same link above.
Try to catch up here Evan.
When it comes to this national guard deserter thing Bush reminds me of Maynard G. Krebbs who
used to explain to Dobie that “nothing is impossible for the man who refuses to listen to reason”.
Seriously I’m to the point where my suspension of belief is about to pull out. I think Bush is a Yippee! In the best Abbie Hoffman fashion he lives his fantasies and makes them real.
Three major acts of god in Florida in the last month, that’s got to have the true believers shaking, insurance deductibles going through the roof, the writing on the walls all says condemed.
Not even Karl Rove can spin to match a cat 5.
Whether you run from Charley or take flight from
Frances the next thing you know Ivan is coming
from Cuba to chase you through Alabama.
Damm. Rather is just putting it out there that what goes around comes around. That seems right to me. If I’m an extended NG giving an arm and a leg to tour scenic Babylon my sense of humour
may desert me when it comes time to cast my vote.
Was that Ivan taking all the wind out of the Bush balloon this week so that all of a sudden if you go to Rasmussen or Zogby there’s Kerry sailing by on a new tack asking you “What Bush Bubble?” in the polls?
regards,
steve
Although English is apparently not Steve’s first language, it’s worth noting for historical reference that, at the time he posted, both Rasmussen and Zogby have Bush leading Kerry.
Of course, when you are down to arguing that Floridians are going to blame Bush for hurricanes and that the troops in Iraq are going to vote for Kerry, a counter-factual reference to polls should not be surprising, I suppose.
i think that it was honorable for Kerry to fight in the war (along with any 18 yr old child to go fight a mans war) but i dont believe it is honorable to go around boasting about all of these metals and things he did. There are many veterans right now on the street without anything that risk life and limb (literally) for this country and this to me is more important than any of this silliness