(Note: This post was originally published back in May 2006)

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To this point, I’ve been kind to Thersites, whose flabby attempts at engaging my intentionalist arguments have been both lazy and, quite honestly, embarrassing.

In fact, I’ve treated those who’ve come over from his site seriously, and attempted to answer their questions, because it seems at least they are interested in having a substantive discussion on these issues.

Which, unfortunately, is a different tack than that taken by Thersites, who continues to try the smug, dismissive, blase’ pose in an effort to hide the fact that he won’t read my notes and hasn’t anything other than the most superficial understanding of semiotics; beyond that, I’m now convinced he doesn’t have the first clue about intentionalism.

A shame, too.  Because you’d think somebody affecting his level of faculty-lounge condescension would at least have some bullets in his rhetorical holster.

As it is, I feel like he’s pelting me with cheese puffs he’s forced into an air rifle.

Anyway, let’s take a look at his latest attempt to “dismantle” me for his readers’ “delectation,” this time in a post titled, “Pastyfoot”:

Some people are proud of the damndest things, like their ancient footnotes. They even put parts of the damn things in boldface. Like so:

convention, that is, points us toward proper interpretation. But the key here is that convention merely helps us to interpret. Following conventions, that is, is only a way of doing what is essential, namely, giving clues to intention.

But sometimes it is what is what is not in boldface that is more interesting. The above is the conclusion drawn from this:

Since “every thought must address itself to some other” the continuous process of semiosis (or thinking) can only be interrupted but never really ended. As Gallie points out, this endless series is essentially a potential one. Peirce’s point is that any actual interpretant of a given sign can theoretically be interpreted in some further sign, and that in another without any necessary end being reached. The exigencies of practical life inevitably cut short such potentially endless development. For Peirce, “habit” governs pragmatical sign use….

Deriving an orthodoxy from a strictly “pragmatical” idea is rather a neat trick. Based on the clear sense of Gallie’s account of Pierce’s ideas, “semiosis (thinking)” only stops because to reach any sort of conclusion one must at some point pack it in and call it a day. This doesn’t really stop the process of signification (which as we’re pastily, footnotily told goes on “ad infinitum”); it’s just at some point we have to get to bed, or, if we’re talking about linguistic exchanges, we have to ask someone to pass the salad in the hopes that they will give us the salad and not the butter. “Intention” is a handy tool for getting us things like salad and giving them to others when they ask for it. It’s necessary for “pragmatical” life, but semiosis continues. The semiotic process exceeds “intention,” is the sense of the Gallie quotation, just as it does “convention.” The point is that one needs both in order to create “meaning” in the real world where human beings actually think and communicate, or try to. How can one have “intention” without convention and have it result in communication? Try getting someone to pass the salad with pure intention and no conventions (like, say, the social conventions of dinner table conversation). Without using the Jedi mind trick, it cannot be done.

It can’t?  Why not?  Convention of course helps to signal intention (which is why we find it so useful, and why I bolded that bit for you), but it is certainly not necessary for making meaning.  In fact, Thersites has shown yet again that because he thinks he’s clever enough to skip my notes and still deliver a solid thrashing, he is willing to comment idiotically on a point I’ve already quite thoroughly discussed.

But let’s forgive him his arrogance and simply dive into his post.

First, he points to the fact that semiosis is potentially unending (as Peirce notes) as if that fact alone somehow troubles the intentionalist argument for the formation of meaning.

Which, naturally, it does not.  Because what Thersites is talking about here is the mental processes of the interpreter, which have no bearing on the meaning of the original utterance—“captured,” if you will, at the moment of its creation (when the signifier is intentionally signified).

In fact, I address this very question in another of my “ancient footnotes” (which, wait?—aren’t they, according to Thersites’ theoretics, born again anew each time someone with his deft literary touch encounters them?  Hmm.  I’ll have to remember to ask him about that…), this time footnote 10 on page 7:

[Stanley] Fish remarks, “every decoding is another encoding,” which is correct. But what I’m arguing is that the aim of interpretation proper is to match, as closely as possible, our new encoding to the encoding intended by the speech act’s producer. Such a project provides us with a common description for what it is we think we are doing when we say we are “interpreting” a text. What we produce through such a practice is, of course, a new text — a new encoding — but if what we are after is an approximation of the original (fashioned into a persuasive description of intention plus significance) then we must adhere to an idea of decoding which, for epistemological purposes, posits a conditional end to semiosis.  Which is only to say that if to interpret is to decode, then we have succeeded in decoding when our (third order) text persuasively argues itself into corroboration with the text being “interpreted.”

But be that as it may.

What is truly puzzling here is that Thersites cannot envision a scenario where uncoventional behavior is used to signal meaning.  Which means, among other things, that if Thersites is to be believed, “convention” must have been extant (at the creation?) in order for the first ever communication to have taken place.  Which is, of course, doubtful.

But beyond even that, Thersites continues, against all pressure to address the point, to conflate the failure to convey meaning successfully (a breakdown in communication) with the ability to make meaning—which relies on nothing more than the intent to signify.

Let’s use Thersites’ dinner table example as a case in point:

If I wish to have Thersites pass me the salad (which, having seen pictures of him, I’d note that his having a salad on the table is itself a stretch), and I am suddenly unable to form the words “please pass the salad,” or move my arms to gesture for the salad (perhaps I am stunned by his ability to fit eight baby red potatoes in his mouth at once, which causes a temporary paralysis above my waist), can we say that this failure to communicate has negated my desire for the salad?  Of course not.  Which is why though I’m suddenly unable to follow conventions, either verbal or indexical—I try something else:  I click my heels.

Thersites, his mouth crammed with potatoes, at first believes I’m trying to signal my love for Judy Garland (a love he happily shares!).  But then, after he sings a few potato-clotted words from “Over the Rainbow,” it suddenly dawns on him that I am trying to signal something else.  So, tentatively, he passes me the salt.  No good—I continue to click my heels, and Thersites now understands that I don’t want the salt at all, just as I wasn’t interested in hearing him butcher an old drag queen standard.  So now he offers to do naughty things to my nipples with his tongue.  But just as before, I keep clicking my heels, and he realizes (with a bit of sadness) that he has yet to understand what I’m trying to signal.  Finally he gets around to passing me the salad.  I stop clicking my heels.  At that point, Thersites concludes (rightly) that clicking my heels “means” that I wanted him to pass me the salad.

What has happened here is that Thersites has recognized that my completely unconventional sign—a clicking of the heels—means “pass me the salad, you pretentious nipple fetishizer.” And through trial and error, he has managed to suss my intent without having to appeal to any convention.

So yes, it can be done.  And Thersites’, bless him, has just pulled it off!

Which makes the next part of Thersites’ post that much more embarrassing:

Pasty people misread their own quotations; had they been in a “conventioneering” mood they could have just as easily written, equally wrongly:

Seeking for intentions, that is, is only a way of doing what is essential, namely, giving clues to convention.

But why would I do that?  First, it is (as Thersites’ notes), incorrect.  And second, it misunderstands certain facts about the process of signification.

So I suppose he’s right:  I could just as easily have written it.  But the fact is, I didn’t.  Because it’s absurd.

If Thersites has a point there, I’m not finding it, I’m afraid.  But he continues nevertheless:

Moving on. I don’t really care about pasty people’s beeves with deconstructionists, as I am not of that breed. (Culler can get his own damn blog.) So I’m not too sussed about boldfaced rebukes like this one:

What I would argue, however, is that while interpretive assumptions may indeed be institutionally (and thus impermenantly) sanctioned, “meaning”is not a product of particular assumptions, but rather a product of the intention to signify. If by “interpretation” we mean we are seeking a text’s “meaning” (what the addresser meant by the signs she used) then what we are after is, in fact, stable.

You can call it “stable” if it makes you feel nice, but so what? Asking whether or not meaning is “stable” is a purely airy-fairy question without a proveable answer, like egg-chicken questions or (more appropriately here) falling-trees-in-forests questions. Let’s keep things pragmatic. If we want to come up with an interpretation of what a “text” means, by all means, go make your best guess as to the author’s “intentions.” But you’re fucked if that’s your sole or even just your highest priority; literary works are notorious for exceeeding their authors’ intentions (which is why so many authors tell patently obvious lies about what their works “mean”).

This idea, that literary works are notorious for “exceeding their author’s intentions,” is covered quite thoroughly in the notes Thersites’ refuses to read.  I’d point him to section 3:  Hermeneutics, on ppgs 8-13, but why bother?  If he hasn’t done anything other than try to pull quotes out to trap me until now, why would I think he’d bother reading anything that addresses this very point?

But beyond that, we’re now seeing from Thersites’ the very necessary backpedaling from one who realizes he’s a bit out of his depth.  You’ll recall that his initial attack on me consisted of the suggestion that my theoretics were “clownish,” which I’m going to take to mean (based on what I assume Thersites intended, a conclusion I reached using other textual and intertextual clues) that I didn’t quite know what I was talking about.  He was going to remedy that by “dismantling” my notes for his readers’ “delectation.”

His second post noted that my understanding of how a sign is formed (and so meaning made), is a “standard oversimplification”—which is professorial code for “it doesn’t leave enough room to privilege my engagement with the text as part of the text’s “meaning”).

And now, finally, we have this third post, which addresses the the stability of originary meaning, the point at the heart of my thesis:  “[…] so what? Asking whether or not meaning is “stable” is a purely airy-fairy question without a proveable answer, like egg-chicken questions or (more appropriately here) falling-trees-in-forests questions. Let’s keep things pragmatic. If we want to come up with an interpretation of what a “text” means, by all means, go make your best guess as to the author’s ‘intentions.’ But you’re fucked if that’s your sole or even just your highest priority” [my emphasis].

Several things:  first, why is it a “purely airy-fairy question” to ask if meaning is “stable”?  Is Thersites really suggesting that because there is no metaphysical proof that meaning is either stable or not—that is, that God isn’t likely to carve any tablets pronouncing one way or the other on this question—it is a question not worth asking?

It seems to me this is remarkably evasive and rather baldly dishonest.  Because deciding where meaning is “fixed” has enormous implications for the “real world” Thersites is always on about, as anyone who reads my arguments on linguistics is aware.  In fact, how we come to think about interpretation is as important to me as is the fact that signification is the locus of meaning.

Second, my notes talk specifically about the pedagogical question of what we think we’re doing with a text.  If we say we are interpreting it, we must necessarily follow procedures that “make your best guest about the author’s ‘intentions.’” This is not to say (and I never have) that there aren’t other valuable things one can do with a text.  I simply wish to point out that those other things are not “interpretation”—and in fact, are far closer to “creative writing” than they are to interpreting.

This is especially true if one takes the position that the author’s intention is unimportant. Because in that case, one has decided to deal solely with empty signifiers—squiggles of ink, marks on a page—and then do whatever he or she pleases with them.  Whether this game emerges as origami or paper airplanes or as a dissertation looking into contemporary vs. contemporaneous responses by second-wave feminists to the clothing worn in Atwood’s Handmaiden’s Tale is immaterial.  What is important is that we realize that we are no longer dealing with “Atwood’s text” at all.  We are dealing with a text that borrows Atwood’s ordered signifiers and rewriting it with no regard to what she was trying to do when she took the trouble to signify all those marks.

So from a pedagogical perspective, it is hard to say you are “fucked” if your goal is to privilege the author’s intentions—or, to put it into less confusing terms, if your goal is to read and understand the author’s text as he or she tried to communicate it.  Others may have different objectives, or different interests with regard to the text—but none of that changes the fact that the author had an intent, and that the meaning of the text is governed by intention.

It’s just a matter of whose intention we wish to privilege:  the author’s or the interpreters’.

Thersites’ concludes:

You’re also still left with a lot of work involving literary conventions, which pretty much by definition AND by material necessity precede and encompass any literary work. You can’t “intend” to write a literary work without knowing that there is this category of cultural production called “literature,” with its own set of rather bizarre rules that define it (not to mention publishers who publish it). And you can’t interpret a literary work without understanding something about how this world had come to operate at the moment the author produced the work. Hence, making a fetish out of “intention” is merely to arbitrarily decide what is and is not legitimate “interpretation,” and no amount of circular argumentation can make that persuasive (“If by ‘interpretation’ we mean we are seeking a text’s ‘meaning’ (what the addresser ‘meant’ by the signs she used),” for fuck’s sake).

Again, Thersites is here interested in literary convention, which he believes is necessary for the production of a literary text.  Which would mean that the very first literary text is not really a literary text, because the grounds for convention had yet to be established.  Further, as Thersites notes, “you can’t ‘intend’ to write a literary work without knowing that there is this category of cultural production called ‘literature,’”—which of course doesn’t mean you can’t intend to communicate through imaginative narrative, just that without the conventions that give us convenient labels, people like Thersites wouldn’t know what to call what it is you’ve written.  What it wouldn’t do, however, is alter what what you have written means.

Once again, I’m going to refer to my answer to Culler, because Thersites seems to be missing the thrust of it—though he did, last time, manage to notice that it was bolded.  And it does not matter what label you give to Culler’s brand of criticism.  Dismissing it as deconstruction and then noting you are not a deconstructionist does not give you a pass on addressing the points contained in the argument.  After all, I’m not a deconstructionist either, but the points that Culler is making go directly to the argument about literary convention, and they need to be addressed from the intentionalist standpoint:

a willingness to think of literature as an institution composed of a variety of interpretive operations leads to the inevitable conclusion that all interpretive operations are dependent upon the institutional assumptions of the interpreter. Given that the assumptions which govern interpretive practices are theoretically illimitable precisely because they are not universal, but are rather constructed as (provisional) propositions, interpretation itself is illimitable. What I would argue, however, is that while interpretive assumptions may indeed be institutionally (and thus impermenantly) sanctioned, “meaning” is not a product of particular assumptions, but rather a product of the intention to signify. If by “interpretation” we mean we are seeking a text’s “meaning” (what the addresser “meant” by the signs she used) then what we are after is, in fact, stable. That institutions can adopt illimitable interpretive assumptions, then, simply means that at different times we believe we can do different things with texts, depending upon the assumptions employed at a given interpretive moment. But the force of this (accurate) claim does nothing to alter the meaning of the text under investigation; instead, it testifies to a kind of ingenuity which seeks to equate incorrigibility with absence — and therefore to equate whatever proves non-provable with the necessity of its provisionality.

What Thersites’ doesn’t seem to understand is that all his blather about literary convention and the importance of historical context are all folded into the intentionalist argument.

They just don’t alter the equation.

Literary conventions, like the conventions for requesting salad, are all part of the accoutrements that surround intention.  But it is intention itself that governs meaning.  Thersites writes, “[…] you can’t interpret a literary work without understanding something about how this world had come to operate at the moment the author produced the work.” This may or may not be true:  there are some authors who are more influenced by their particular historical moment than others (under some descriptions of this interpretive conceit, authors in this condition are “inscribed” by their historical situatedness—a formulation that reduces autonomous agency to a kind of cultural fly paper), and so learning about the historical moment can certainly provide clues to their intentions. But there are other authors who are spurred into imaginative production not by, say, the Corn Act, but rather by a case of indigestion resulting from a tainted oyster.  In which case, looking to “the world” operating “at the moment the author produced the work”—that is, focusing on either the cultural dialogic, or on some contemporary historical happening as being necessary influences on the work under examination— could, potentially, act as interpretive red herrings, leading the interpreter astray because it refuses to focus on what, for purposes of interpretation, is important to reconstructing meaning—namely, authorial intent

For Thersites, this observation is unimportant, however.  By allowing that the “meaning” of a text “exceeds” its authorial intent, all he is saying is that the author, by dint of not being there to correct misinterpretations or the play of language, is unable to police his or her meaning, and so people like Thersites can take partial (or total, if they are so inclined) ownership of the text.

In this way, they become a necessary appendage of the text, which gives them a discipline and a job.

As for this:

Man is Jeff Goldstein a fucking clown

—I’ll just say that portly people in big floppy shoes and giant three-fingered white gloves shouldn’t throw pies.

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update:  evidently, Thersites has replied to my counter-arguments.  He finds my replies “weak” and “idiotic,” refuses once again to let us know what his theoretics are (we know they are sociological and he cites Bordieu—but what he is echoing is no more than Bloom’s anxiety of influence argument, which relies on the idea that writers are necessarily influenced by those who have come before them), and, at length, once again tries to dismiss me with the pseudo-sophisticate’s hand wave.

I’m not even going to bother to respond at length because his arguments are too pathetic to waste my time on (for instance, he objects to the heel clicking argument because it seems silly to both he and “phila”; but of course, it was meant to be cartoonish to draw attention to the underlying point—that convention signals intent; if Thersites wants something less silly, I’m sure he can come up with more subtle examples of unconventional signaling of intent for himself.  But he will simply have come up with a less silly example of a perfectly ironclad argument).

Other responses (which follow a familiar pattern:  Thersites simply claims that I haven’t addressed his points because I am too stupid to suss their depth and nuance) include this:

It is simply impossible to “intend” to produce literature without knowing what “literature” is and the rules that are taken to govern it as a category of cultural production. Name the author who has performed this wonderful feat, and I will withdraw the objection.

Fine.  How about, oh, the author of the first ever short story?  Or the author of the first ever novel? Or the author of any fictional work that predates the study of literature but is now studied as literature (with its attendant “rules” that are taken to govern it as a category of cultural production,” which, of course, didn’t exist at the time of the writing, but which no more negate the literariness of the production than does not knowing the name for “omelet” negate that you’ve been able to fold mushrooms and cheese into a few eggs)? These authors may not have intended to produce “literature,” but as I noted in my post, they certainly intended to produce the kinds of texts Thersites now would call literary.

Is his argument honestly that before literary studies came along to categorize these productions, no one intended to produce things that have subsequently been termed literary?  Or, to put it more simply—this guy is a fucking professor?

Similarly, Thersites—who later pens a post about my lack of “civility”—repeatedly refers to me as “pasty”, “stupid,” and a “dick,” and uses the “I’m not a deconstructionist” dodge whenever and wherever he can shoehorn it in.  But as I noted earlier, whatever you label yourself, your ideas about how signification works are your ideas about how signification works.  Period.  Thersites is free to call himself whatever he wants.  But if he is more concerned with context, the material situatedness of the text, and what can happen to a text once it has be untethered from intent, he is a post-structuralist of one stripe or another.  For the record, I am not arguing against “deconstructionists” other than when I am arguing against those who call themselves deconstructionists.  Instead, I am arguing against kernel assumptions that animate a particular idea of how signification and interpretation work.  Name-dropping doesn’t impress me.

Thersites may fool his commenters with such dodges, but me, I’m rather bored by them.

Finally, he claims to have read the entirety of my notes.  But if that’s the case, one wonders how he could write something like this:

To insist that one can put their finger on “Meaning” with intention, and in the final analysis only intention is necessary to perform an interpretation, is simply absurd and cocksure, not least because of the practical impossibility of determining what the intent actually IS in most situations.

This is, of course, not at all what my notes say, nor is it even close to what I argue.

Proper interpretation is a grueling effort, and it can conceivably (but not necessarily—which is why we have competing interpretations that are equally valid) require a knowledge of the author’s life, his or her historical situatedness, the cultural milieu in which s/he produced the work, and any number of other textual, intertextual, intratextual, and metatextual clues.  But what it must do to be interpretation in the first place is appeal to the author’s intent.

Otherwise, the reader is simply resignifying and applying an intent of his or her own—much like, as I mention in my notes, children look at cloud formations and interpret them as dogs or sheep or rocking chairs, or early Christian settlers ascribed to locust infestations God’s anger.

And of course, the practical impossibility of ever fully divining authorial intent with metaphysical certainty cannot and should not be used as an excuse to say authorial intent isn’t 1) in the signs, and 2) the grounds for meaning.

I thought the Fish footnote would have made that clear, but alas, I didn’t bold.  That’s my bad.  Let’s try it again, only with the important parts bolded:

[Stanley] Fish remarks, “every decoding is another encoding,” which is correct. But what I’m arguing is that the aim of interpretation proper is to match, as closely as possible, our new encoding to the encoding intended by the speech act’s producer. Such a project provides us with a common description for what it is we think we are doing when we say we are “interpreting” a text. What we produce through such a practice is, of course, a new tex — a new encoding — but if what we are after is an approximation of the original (fashioned into a persuasive description of intention plus significance) then we must adhere to an idea of decoding which, for epistemological purposes, posits a conditional end to semiosis. Which is only to say that if to interpret is to decode, then we have succeeded in decoding when our (third order) text persuasively argues itself into corroboration with the text being “interpreted.”

For Thersites—though he denies it—the impossibility of ever completely reconstructing the author’s meaning is license to throw up one’s hands and do with it as they please.

Thersites wants to “play” with texts, because doing so makes him, as interpreter, as important to the study of the text as the author who signified it into being.  Privileging authorial intent, for the purposes of interpreting—an interpretive maneuver that Thersites calls “arbitrary and illogical and insufficient” (before calling me a “dick”) —remains essential to the understanding of the text’s meaning in any paradigm that claims to be “interpreting.”

Had Thersites really read my notes, he’d know that I don’t think meaning only resides in the author’s intent.  On the contrary, meaning is made by the interpreter all the time.  But when an interpreter makes meaning without appealing to authorial intent, s/he has simply decided to rewrite the text and try to use the signifiers in a way that is interesting to him or her.

And so s/he is not interpreting.  S/he is engaging in the kind of creative writing.

To call this interpretation—to insist that the reader is part of the text’s “meaning” if our goal is to interpret the text—is both arrogant and wrong-headed.  But then, Thersites calls me pasty, so I suppose I’m to be cowed, I guess.

Thersites says the section in my notes on hermeneutics doesn’t address his “simple point” “that literary works notoriously exceed the author’s intentions according to authors themselves” (which is in itself odd, his bringing up what authors say about their work here, when at all other interpretive instances, he is ready to marginalize them.  Convenient pawns in the great game of literary studies, authors are).

Of course, he’s wrong.  Pages 8-13 do indeed address this point.  That Thersites is unable to comprehend how or why this is so says more about his failure as a scholar than anything I could possibly say about him.  So we’ll just leave it there.