The other day I linked one of the critics of my academic work. Today, he sent me the following email—perhaps the most ironically stupid thing I have ever read. And when I say that, remember that I spent years grading student papers.
I’m reprinting it in full, because it simply must be seen to be believed. In fact, I relish the goddamn thing. Behold!
Just read through your college notes on hermeneutics. I should have guessed you’d be more comfortable with Marxist approaches that let you trample over the author’s intent, imposing your own beliefs on their words.
I only took one survey class in hermeneutics (from Dr. Gerald Bruns, now of Notre Dame), but reading your .pdf brought his lectures back to me with remarkable clarity and I dug through my own notes to confirm my memories of his lectures.
It’s rather odd that this Scandinavian socialist would feel more at home with a Talmudic approach while a neoconservative gentleman like yourself would favor Ricoeur. I understood Ricoeur’s approach to be quite controversial, but then again most of what I learned of Ricoeur was in an advanced Literature class taught by a Marxist.
I’m not one of your readers, and wouldn’t be familiar with you were it not for TBogg’s recent post. But the notion of a hermeneut abusing this discipline to graft his beliefs onto the text of others was amusing enough to get my attention.
Just out of curiosity, how often do you find the author to be flat out wrong about what they have written?
[all emphases mine]
My response was rather pointed:
Apparently you didn’t read my notes all too carefully. Because in fact, I am an intentionalist, and a very vocal one—as anyone who reads my site (or who has actually read through that .pdf) will readily see. So you got everything completely backwards. The entire set of course notes, in fact, are dedicated to explaining and supporting intentionalism as the ONLY coherent paradigm for interpretation.
It seems you spent more time composing this embarrassing email than you did reading my notes. Either that, or you really should refrain from ever trying to work through these problems again.
But perhaps I’m being too hard on you. Perhaps you just skimmed? Or maybe you’re confusing my explanation of Ricouer and Gadamer’s hermeneutics (in the section titled “hermeutics”—one of the many interpretive paradigms I went on to dismantle—for an agreement with them?
Let me help you out. This is from page 2 of the piece you claim you read, and which you claim marks me for one who abuses “this discipline to graft his beliefs onto the text of others” inasmuch as I throw my lot in “with Marxist approaches that let you trample over the author’s intent, imposing your own beliefs on their words.”
To make it clear where you’ve gone astray (and this is going to be difficult, because I don’t know how much clearer I can get), I’m going to bold some of this for you. The following, for instance, comes from section 1(!) of the notes, a section titled “Theoretical background – The Philosophy of Language”:
The course itself is predicated on a number of polemical claims, claims particularly controversial in an era of poststructuralist and new historicist literary sensibilities. The first of these claims is this: a text has one “meaning,” and that texts’ (singular) meaning is decided upon by its author and governed by his/her intentions. The theoretical background for this claim is speech act theory, particularly Searle’s “Principle of Expressibility.”1 Also deployed in this radical intentionalist argument is the semiotic work of Pierce and the semiology of Saussure and Barthes.2
It is my claim here that the concept of infinite or limitless “meaning” based upon the ideas of limitless context (Derrida and Culler),3 or range of linguistic conventions,4, is predicated on a misrepresentation of the process of signification as described by Saussure. Likewise (but more interesting theoretically) de Man’s sup>5 argument that any signifier can be potentially emptyâ€â€that a sign can be, at any time, reduced to nothing but its sound-form, a signifier that is left unsignifiedâ€â€is based on a misconception of the speech act which, I argue, must be signified in order to be a speech act to begin with; moreover, a “text” conceived of as a speech act can only be described as language once its intention to function as language has been properly established.
In case you didn’t catch that, what I’m saying is, intent is the ONLY thing that governs interpretation—and that any interpretive paradigm that tries to dislodge meaning from intent is incoherent.
The fact that such approaches are often based on the very Marxist ideas you claim I embrace is a testament to one truism: that even when one tries to make his intent perfectly clear, s/he can never guarantee that those intentions will be interpreted correctly by confused Norwegian socialists.
But let’s move on to the section on Ricouer, Gadamer, et al. (Section 3 of the course notes, which begins on page 8 and is labeled, decriptively, “Hermeneutics”). After describing the way the hermeneutics of Ricouer and Gadamer function—which is to say, after distilling them to (incorrect) their kernel assumptions—I conclude that section by noting the problems with their formulations, problems that stem directly from trying to untether meaning from intent:
But in what circumstances might it seem plausible to say that the verbal “meaning” of a text or utterance transcends the author’s intentionsâ€â€that a text can mean more than it was intended to mean?
For hermeneutics, the answer rests with the circumstances of linguistic convention, in that such convention provides a criterion of textual identity (ontology) that enables the interpreter to give a text a meaning that goes beyond the author’s intended meaning. Thus, the meaning of a text can seemingly be altered by the interpreter while the text itself remains (materially) unchanged. But such a claim, I’ll argue, is theoretically unsupportable; because if intended meaning is altered (which it can never be, in the sense that “altering” is changing what is theoretically unchangeableâ€â€a completed intention) so too, then, is the text. Instead, what we as interpreters are left with is a “meaning” of the text that we have created, one which is different from the “meaning” of the original text as it was performed.”
Again, most people who aren’t confused Norwegian socialists would not find in that conclusion much sympathy for the assumptions that animate the hermeneutics of Ricouer or Gadamer.
I then go on to perform a similar deconstruction on “deconstruction” itself before moving on to illustrate how intent must necessarily ground meaning—and to show the consequences of interpretive paradigms that don’t hold to that truism (those consequences being the elevation of the intepreter to the arbiter of meaning—even while the author retains the responsibility for that meaning).
This is the progressive linguistic project, borne of Marxist thought and encouraged by the Orientalism of Said, that I criticize almost every day on this blog—a project that has the practical effect of relativizing meaning, which in turn sets up the conditions wherein pure rhetoric holds sway, and the will to power, aided by the presumed “drift” of language, is ascendent.
How you managed to get everything ass backwards is beyond me. But the sheer arrogance of sending me an email that so completely misunderstands my position—and in a tone that is so self-assured and condescending—is sadly typical of those who, like you, appear to fancy themselves proficient in fields they are clearly still wrestling to get a handle on.
My recommendation? Read through the notes again. Only this time, when you’re reading them, try opening your eyes.
You might learn something—or at the very least, you might come up with a few points of contention that are worth my time and consideration.
Although if your first effort is any indication of your capabilities, I’m not going to hold my breath.
Regards,
Jeff
****
footnotes from the excerpted passages below the fold.
For some of my on-site discussions of these topics, see the following posts:
“In which I discuss hermeneutics with a leftover steamed dumpling from last night’s dim sum meal, 5”
“Monkey Shines”
“pomo a go-go”
“Morning in (racist Rethuglican) America: an intentionalist perspective”
“Moribund intentionalism and the death of the author”
“The swirly one of Allah and the Flight 93 Memorial redux”
“We commend the sensitive and prompt action that Burger King has taken.”
“Ends, means, the “progressive” left, and language (updated)”
“In which I discuss hermeneutics with a leftover steamed dumpling from last night’s dim sum meal, 4”
“In which I discuss hermeneutics with a leftover steamed dumpling from last night’s dim sum meal, 3”
“In which I discuss hermeneutics with a leftover steamed dumpling from last night’s dim sum meal, 2”
“In which I discuss hermeneutics with a leftover steamed beef dumpling from last night’s dim sum meal”
“More on Language and Word Ownership”
****
1 See Searle’s Speech Acts (1969) and Expression and Meaning (1979). What Searle argues is that there is no theoretical reason to assume that when we say something we don’t know what we “mean” by it. Even if we use words incorrectly, we still intended those words to “mean” to others what we ourselves meant by them. The fact that we “misused” the words is a conventional contingency; our meaning and intention cannot be judged by the efficacy of our communication. Simply, in this instance we’ve failed to communicate what we intendedâ€â€failed to indicate to others what we meant.
2Particularly useful are Barthes’ Image-Music-Text (1977), S/Z (1974), and Empire of Signs. In his essay “The Death of the Author” (included in Image-Music-Text), Barthes writes that “a text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” Such a claim, which repositions the meaningful agency for interpretation on the person of the reader, is essentially correctâ€â€though the implications of the claim are far less polemical than Barthes seems to suggest. To say that the reader of the verbal text embodies the space within which ‘all the traces by which the written text is constituted’ are collected and unified, is simply to say that the reader is responsible, ultimately, for deciding upon that text’s signification for her/himself. But I will argue that such a semiotic truism has no bearing on what the text-as-speech act “means”â€â€because the only way we are able to classify a text as a speech act is to recognize that it was intended as a speech act, which is to recognize that, as an intentional act, it has been previously signified. For interpretation to be interpretation, we must believe we are interpreting something which functions as a sign. All other signification is self-signification (often motivated by convention / intertextuality), and is an interpretative maneuver of the kind that for the Puritans turned locust infestation into a “sign” of God’s anger.
3 The Derridean argument I will challenge is most clearly articulated in his collection of essays/replies to Searle, Limited Inc (1977). Culler’s On Deconstruction (1982), The Pursuit of Signs (1981), and Framing the Sign (1988) were also consulted. Importantly, it was the American philosopher C.S. Peirce who, in the course of his work on semiotics, proposed the idea of “unlimited semiosis.” Since every sign creates and interpretant which in turn is the representamen of a second sign, semiosis results, for Peirce, in a ‘series of successive interpretants’ ad infinitum. There is no ‘first’ or ‘last’ sign in this process of unlimited semiosis.
And yet the idea of infinite semiosis does not, for Peirce, imply a vicious circle. Unlimited semiosis refers instead to the very modern idea that ‘thinking always proceeds in the form of a
dialogueâ€â€a dialogue between different phases of the egoâ€â€so that, being dialogical, it is essentially composed of signs.’ 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; 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.
For Culler, “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 illimitableâ€â€precisely because they are not universal, but are rather constructed as (provisional) propositionsâ€â€interpretation itself is illimitable. What I would argue, however, is that while interpretive assumptions may indeed by 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 absenceâ€â€and therefore to equate whatever proves non-provable with the necessity of its provisionality.
4A useful articulation of hermeneutic arguments can be found in Ricoeur’s From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II.
5 De Man, Paul. “The Purloined Ribbon.”
How wonderful it must have been to have that served, up on a tee, like.
Do let us know if he ever writes back. It’ll be a while, I know.
We’re willing to wait
– Awww now damn it Jeff. If you don’t allow a free flow of interpretation, how the hell can Liberals be expected to misrepresent everything in sight, and thus generate strawmen. Are you simply trying to viciously bury the “loyal aggrivation” under an unsupportable tonnage of common sense and intellectual honesty or what? Damn absolutionists, always nit-picked those that are striving for obfuscation, and some way out of the rhetorical binds of facts and truth.
“A Century of failure proves nothing!”
Jeff,
That was, uh, patient of you to reply to the e-mailer….HOWEVER, smashing a fly with a USS Iowa class Battleship is a bit too much effort. A flyswatter will do just as well. I suppose that the rest of us could use the post to learn a thing or two, so maybe I ought to rethink that…
Well, the fly has been buzzing around claiming that I don’t understand the subject matter.
Which is fine. That just makes him wrong.
But to send me an email explaining to me why I’m wrong—and to have my position precisely backwards – is just too good to pass up.
Note that he’s a tbogg reader. I think he’d do better hanging around here, but, hey, what are you gonna do: “Joseph Conrad” upthread has declared tbogg the be-all, end-all of internet success, and me the internet’s current buffoon.
More will to power, that last bit—though I admire how some of these lefties think they can will something into being simply by insisting it exists as they imagine it to exist.
There’s something so…Linus and the Great Pumpkin about that.
I find it cute.
I dont understand anything written in this post.
Can you write something about armadillos now?
OK, I threw you $50 I can barely afford, cos I love this blog. Does that now buy me the secret decoder ring that explains all this? Let’s start with hermeneutics…
Jeff, I have to say that it has been many years since my one linguistics course and though my profession is entirely built upon words (I’m a lawyer), it will take me a while to digest that.
One thing strikes me, though. The futility of certain positions. If the text means nothing more than what the reader assigns to it, if the author’s intent is immaterial, why bother reading in the first place? Why not just day-dream and speak to yourself (I am not saying you advocate that postion at all).
The question is so obvious that I am certain someone has addressed it at some point, but still, it seems to me a monumental foolishness for any student of language to argue that the author is irrelevant – it automatically brings to mind the next question: “Why then, Sir Interpreter of Authors, are you relevant? Why have you? I can do this blathering easier and cheaper myself.” (I am not saying you advocate that position – it is obvious you do not.)
I am much puzzled by a profession whose most lionized professors seem to advocate their own destruction, or worse, irrelevancy. (No glory in also-rans’.)
word:short – “In short, deconstructionism, or whatever this nonsense is, seems like professional suicide for the practicioners.”
Uh, Jeff … fuck the moron and his silly argument, but there’s something I find a little difficult about intentionalist argument as I understand you to be stating it.
Basically, how do you deal with the arbitrary and necessarily limited nature of symbol systems as communication?
Something that shows up to me in my occasional forays into translation is the difficulty in dealing with, for example, what someone says in German versus what I can say in English.
The example above is, arguably, pretty easy to translate: German is very much like English, and Peter Handke is a very concrete poet who uses relatively simple words. Still, I struggled with the best way to say, for example, “war es die Zeit der folgenden Fragen”: if you look in a dictionary, you have “folgenden”=”following” and this is just the beginning of a list of questions. On the other hand, there is a secondary meaning of “follows as a consquence”, which is the meaning on which I settled for my translation “it was the time for the consquential questions”.
Even more concretely, the poem starts out “Als das Kind Kind war”. I translate that as “As the child was a child”, ie, ”because the child was a child”, although other translations I’ve seen use “when”, ie, “at the time the child was a child”; and I consistently use the neuter pronoun “it” because that’s what matches the German, even though the convention in English would be to use “he” as the pronoun with “child.”
All of these decisions I made with the purpose of reflecting what I understand of Handke’s “intent”—and in fact I incline to your “intentionalist” approach in general: I want to know what the author said, not what some academic nitwit wants to say and the author be damned.
But then, if you watch Der Himmel über Berlin, as I recall, the poem is written out “Wenn das Kind, Kind war”—and Handke was co-author of the screenplay. Now what do I make of his intent?
The point is, since it’s difficult for anyone, even the author, to be confident what the author’s “intent” is, how can you deal with the tension between finding the “intent” and the reader’s inevitable contribution to what is understood of a text?
I am much puzzled by a profession whose most lionized professors seem to advocate their own destruction, or worse, irrelevancy. (No glory in also-rans’.)
Mikey, as it happens, when I was in gradual school myself (in computer science, not English) I hung about with the english grad students, and by transitivity hung about with Stan Fish and Jane Tompkins quite a bit. (Fish is an ass, Jane is actually rather sweet. God knows why she married him.)
At one point, Jane withdrew from teaching, took a leave, and started working at the local whole foods market. It was my impression that she’d more or less come to the same conclusion: that she and her collegues had managed to define their profession into meaninglessness.
YES!!!!
I’ve been waiting for a post like this!!!
I’m bookmarking this puppy.
My head exploded. I’m typing with muscle memory.
People actually talk about this stuff?
Thank you, Charlie. Based on past-performance I find your comments to be very insightful. That one is insightful to me.
I know I usually spend this time just making snarky or wise-ass remarks, but it doesn’t mean that I do not think about the post. I just usually need more time than the blogosphere (or whatever this is) gives to allow things to percolate through the rocks in my skull and produce a coherent thought that I can use.
This time, I think, was an exception, but only because Jeff has posted on the subject so often the percolation, as it were, was already done.
word:opened. “I don’t believe I need to say more than eyes.”
Of course, I wish to put out a preemptive apology to Lynne Truss, John Richards, and the Apostrophe Protection Society if in my phrase “also-rans’” I used the apostrophe incorrectly. It is late and I was not sure if that was a possesive, so I made it a plural possesive, and upon reflection, I think I squandered that apostrophe and should have saved it for its true need.
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Or something like that.
word:name. “Mine will be a hissing and a by-word.”
Hermaneutics?
Ricouer?
Intentionalism?
I come for the haikus and newly discovered red pill locations…
…and the armadillo. Gotta love the armadillo.
Charlie,
If you talk about translating German anymore, and as a result I end up having screaming nightmares about translating Erherzog Karl’s Hofskreigsrat letters, I will hunt you down and smash a large plate of Maultaschen in your face…wait, that would be a waste of excellent Swabian food – so, how about a swift kick in the nuts instead?
Charlie:
In Re: Translating Herr Handke.
The author may know very well what he intended, but if I may use this metaphor, once you launch your ship upon the tides, God alone knows what will happen to it. I am not saying that the author’s intent is irrelevent, it is just that trying to deal with the readers’ statements about what the author meant is hard enough without actually encouraging the reader to discount the author altogether.
In the forewords to “The Lord of the Rings”, Professor Tolkien seemed to be getting very testy with people assigning meanings to the text that he said were not there.
Beware the querulous British author, I say, and Occam’s Razor, and Murphey’s Law – and remember – Murphey was an optimist.
Jeff, every one of these more intellectual posts express parts of my previously inexpressible thoughts about everything I’ve ever synthesized from everything I’ve ever learned. Hell, they’ve made obsolete half of everything I’ve ever learned. I do not think that, had I stayed in college past my second year, that I would have ever been exposed to these ideas in such a precise, practical, and applied manner, if at all, regardless of whatever major I would have selected.
The knowledge I’ve gained from this site has helped me to mature intellectually, and to communicate more effectively. It’s even helped me to land a new job, the salary from which will enable me to finally hit your tip jar next month.
So, like, thanks, and stuff.
My salary, also, will soon allow me to hit tip jars.
Until then, sir, let me just say – “Bully!” to you.
Well, anyone who brags about being a TBogg reader already has a serious problem.
The average TBogg reader is incapable of reading that much text without an appreciable amount of porn embedded in it. That or the occasional rape fantasy about a certain female minority converative blogger.
I mean isn’t that the only reason people read TBogg.
Is this going on your resume?
Ignore actus.
Standard Warning.
“There’s something so…Linus and the Great Pumpkin about that.”
Yes, and this post is like Charie Brown listening to his teacher to me…wragh wragh wragh wragh.
Thanks for making me feel less stupid than your emailer though.
“A man has to know his limitations”-Harry Callihan
TW:research…no thanks!
Jeff,
I’d hit the tip jar to see you and Crooked Timber’s John Holbo in a cage match (or at least a series of letters.)
In a post last year, he fairly savaged Knapp & Michael and kicked Fish in the nuts for good measure.
Care to respond?
– According to section V of the “Blogging rules of engagement” the vibrating verbage Dildo, aka “Telephone pole” has been declared “Telephone pole nongrata”. PW management hereby avers endemnity from any third party loss of sanity resulting from the action(s) of willfully ignoring this disclaimer.
Furthermore no known Medical insurance includes this potential ailments(s) in its endendum of insurability or coverage, so the reader is at his/her own peril.
“and kicked Fish in the nuts for good measure.”
Oh God, don’t tell Pam Anderson.
Huh?
so, how about a swift kick in the nuts instead?
I’d rather have the Maultaschen.
Schweinehaxen war gut au’.
…kicked Fish in the nuts for good measure.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
People actually talk about this stuff?
Depends on what you intend by “talk”.
William
come for the armadillo, stay for the graduate-level lectures.
w4L —
Looking over it quickly, I find Holbo’s argument unpersuasive for a couple of reasons, and I believe I have addressed all of those points in my notes. Rather than compose a long response here, I point you to HZ and Pete Sattler in the comments of Holbo’s post. A good start is here.
In short, I am talking about an interpretive paradigm where the goal is to complete a speech act; and as my notes make clear, I was dealing with interpretation as it pertains to pedagogy: namely, what is it we think we’re doing when we ask students to “interpret” or “read” and comment upon a particular text. This is not to say meaning can’t be made without recourse to the original author (in fact, I’ve never made that argument, and it is on this point that Holbo seemed unconcerned, in his analysis: meaning can of course be made without positing original intent, or without there even having been original intent (in the case of things that look like language but which are not language outside of our desire to see it as such). But that creative act is itself bespeaks an intent to signify, which is how language comes to be language.
An interesting discussion, and one I hope to revisit when I have more time. But the formulation of Searle’s upon which Holbo’s entire essay hinges: namely, that “one could read while ignoring intention, however odd that would be, whereas Knapp and Michaels deny the possibility†is perhaps wrong (I’d have to see what Knapp and Michaels have to say about this), but is regardless certainly irrelevant to the question of meaning. Clearly, one could read while ignoring intention. But that, in itself, is an act with consequences —and to make what one is “reading” in such a way back into language at that point (that is, to intepret it), one must necessarily resignify, even if that resignification is to empty the signifier of any signified and refuse to “mean” anything other than “I refuse to allow this to mean.”
But I’ll give it some more thought. It is a longish piece, and I read it very quickly, looking for it’s implied defenses of a cerain type of formalism, which when I found them I had a pretty good idea what the rest of the argument would be.
Thanks for passing it along; it revisits names and texts I haven’t read in years, and reminds me that nearly all of my theory books (with the exception of a few anthologies and books on narratology and Eco’s Peircian semiotics) are packed away in the garage.
The point is, since it’s difficult for anyone, even the author, to be confident what the author’s “intent†is, how can you deal with the tension between finding the “intent†and the reader’s inevitable contribution to what is understood of a text?
Charlie, if I might take a stab at answering your question based on the responses Jeff’s already provided to some of my own questions: basically, as I understand it, intentionalism recognizes the tension you point out and does not seek to entirely dismiss it; rather, it simply states that, as you put it:
In other words, intentionalism accepts that the “audience” will always put its own (often unconscious) spin on the meaning of a text, but that in analyzing a text for meaning, the goal should always be to come as close as possible to what the interpreter believes to have been the author’s intent. This is, I believe, what Jeff means when he refers to the “grounding” or “tethering” of interpretation to intent, i.e. that the interpreter should never knowingly apply an interpretation which, in the final analysis, moves the “meaning” of the text away from the intent of the author. Intentionalism, in other words, is less about the specific, micro-level mechanisms of analysis, and more about the global framework (the “mission statement”) under which analysis should be carried out… though it would be interesting to hear from Jeff what his experience has taught him are some of the best practices for determining intent at an advanced level.
Not sure if this is any clearer, but I guess I can summarize by saying that, based on what you said, you seem to already fall well within the intentionalist paradigm simply by always making the effort to approach as closely as you can what you believe to be the author’s intended meaning as you translate from German to English… though I imagine inter-language interpretation would have a whole new, even more complex, set of rules to be followed.
Not sure if this is any clearer, but I guess I can summarize by saying that, based on what you said, you seem to already fall well within the intentionalist paradigm simply by always making the effort to approach as closely as you can what you believe to be the author’s intended meaning as you translate from German to English… though I imagine inter-language interpretation would have a whole new, even more complex, set of rules to be followed.
See, this is where my background in formal logic comes in. I understand your point, but … how can we claim anything very strongly about :intent” when we can’t complete the intent of a “speech act” without having an audience? If I, say, riff on some bit of Chinese poetry, and you don’t speak Chinese, what was it my intent to communicate? Especialy if I’m aware you don’t speak Chinese?
What about writers like James Joyce in his later days, when (I’m convinced) he was purposefully indending to slow down and impede the reader by making things obscure?
What of Ives’ 4’33”?
Or are we simply asserting that we should read with the idea in minds that the author must have meant something so we should try to figure out what it was?
And if so, what of (modulating synesthetically into visual art) Pollock?
Has anyone noticed the title of the top post on the Norwegian’s blog?
Putting some shoe leather where my mouth is
Absolutely brilliant! Next time, take your foot out first, genius.
I was practically reduced to tears when I took Critical Theory as part of the course work for my Ph.D. Nothing made sense. Then I had an epiphany: it wasn’t supposed to! These writers were writing to impress each other! I felt just like the kid in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
I am pleased to report that I actually followed your explanation (without having to use a dictionary, as I had to when I read Searle’s “Modern Critical Theory”), Jeff, and even more pleased that I was thinking the polite equivalent of “WTF?” as I read the email to you, as I knew immediately that the writer had completely misunderstoof you.
– Personally goddessOTCR, I blame the whole thing on 30 years of “hooked on phonics” TV commercials. Has anyone seen that hard shelled slippery little marsupial slinking around here lately?
Ives’ intent here was quite clear: he wanted to be mistaken for John Cage. (The giveaway is that Cage’s piece is written for piano; Ives would have written it for two orchestras, one not playing “Marching Through Georgia” at the same time the other isn’t playing “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean”.)
Jeff, a tipjar contribution coming your way for this post.
I confess I rather enjoyed Ricouer’s call for a second naivite re: biblical hermeneutics in particular. But overall, insofar as he overlaps the Gadamer set and the deconstruction program, you’re dead on I think.
We have such a massive dearth of substnative public intellectuals these days … and so much tendentious posturing from academics. Theories that detach textual meaning from author intention are one underlying cause, undercutting as they do both author accountability and the demand for logical coherence in argument. It’s not too far of a stretch from there to the state of journalism in the New York Times, alas.
We have such a massive dearth of substnative public intellectuals
I’m suffering a minor dearth of spelling skills this morning, too …
Paul, we can tell i’m up too early cause I completely missed that. (love your description of Ives’ version)
The short answer is, it depends on what you wish to do.
If you wish to interpret—in the sense of decode a message by re-encoding it on your end—then yes, you either posit an agency that created the original and try to approximate what that agency meant when s/he turned the signifier into a sign (in the case of Pollack, this takes place, presumably, the moment he creates the text on canvas; and even if he intented nothing other than a splatter pattern, whether to act as a commentary on the failures of representational art or simply because he liked colors, he nevertheless had some set of intentions. To interpret HIS painting, we must be willing to try to approximate his intent.
We don’t, however, HAVE to do that: and in fact, much of contemporary theory (and more than a little 60 year old New Critical theory [see my post on Scalia and Fish, dumpling 4, I think] say that we don’t). Which is true. But at that point, we have no business saying we are “interpreting” the text as a speech act, or turning around and attributing our “interpretations” to the author. Instead, we are resignifying at our own whim, unencumbered by authorial intention—which we may or may not recognize as existing (we believe it exists when we read Ulysses, even if we’re not sure what it is; we don’t necessarily believe it exists when we look at cloud formations and “read”, say, two sheep rutting under a beach umbrella.)
And that is a form of creative writing. You have simply borrowed someone else’s arrangement of signifiers to get you started.
Clear as mud.
…or a Carl Goss thought.
In all seriousness….
This post and comments section are one of the most succinct expositions of hermeneutics I’ve ever read.
It should be chronicled and entered into the curriculum on several levels.
Some of your best stuff ever Mr. G
And to think, it all started with an idiots letter.
Or are we simply asserting that we should read with the idea in minds that the author must have meant something so we should try to figure out what it was?
Well, I think this is inverting the purpose of intentionalist theory a bit. The key is the conditional “when analyzing a text for meaning”; in other words, there’s no need to look for meaning if one is simply editing the spelling of a particular piece, for example. However, if the need for establishing meaning is present, then the interpreter should attempt to do so by looking for, as Jeff put it, “textual, intertextual, intratextual, [or] metatextual clue[s]” as the primary variables, sort of like solving an equation where the result is “meaning” and each of the terms is a “clue” within the text (i.e. context).
It’s nowhere near as clean or certain as math, but the same principle applies: when attempting to determine an unknown value, only information that leads one closer to reality should be applied to the calculations. Allowing “meaning” to be centered on the interpreter introduces a whole new set of variables that make determining meaning all the more complex than it already is, because, as you say, authorial intent is not an easy thing to determine even in isolation.
As to your example of reading poetry in a language not understood by the audience… well, my guess would be that a linguist would say that no true linguistic communication had taken place in that exchange, since none of the signifiers would have had any meaning for the interpreter outside of their sounds. Meaning could only be gathered from “extra-’textual’” context, e.g. facial expression and tone of the speaker, environmental conditions, relevant localized events, etc. So I’m not really sure if intentionalist theory would apply in that instance, except to the extent that any reasonable person would probably be trying to figure out why in the world you were speaking in Chinese.
Actually, this all reminds me of a stand-up comedian I saw a while ago – he talks about having met and fallen in love with a Chinese girl, and says he’d like to read some poetry he wrote for her. He then pulls out a sheet of paper and starts reading in “Chinese” (which, though I don’t speak any, I would imagine is just a bunch of sounds that seem Chinese to English speakers). Either way, it’s pretty damn funny, which is clearly his intent. Obviously, that intent can be determined by the context of the situation, i.e. that he’s doing a stand-up routine and knows that the vast majority of his audience does not speak Chinese, or at least that they would not be expecting him to read in Chinese given that his entire act is in English. I just wish I could remember the dude’s name.
Heh, an oxymoron.
More and more, I’m coming to the conclusion that the secret to life, the universe, and everything is, Everything is created perfect. It’s the idiot end user (in the case of this topic, the listener who hijacks the speaker’s message, throws out the speaker’s meaning and replaces it with his own) who screws it up.
He applied an anti-intentionalist lens and re-defined intentionalism so that it included what he did. Just another case of the progressive linguistic project at work.
I have sometimes slapped at inept communicators (glances significantly at Carl W. Goss, et al) by saying that clarity of thought, or lack thereof, is often indicated by clarity of expression, or lack thereof (or words to that effect :red
. But the above frightens me.
What if some of these visitors are, in fact, attempting to communicate something valid and worthwhile, and it all just comes out as “You sniffle hypotenuse cheese” or some such? What if the problem isn’t that they’re dunces, they’re just aphasic?
<shudder>
Dang it. That smiley is supposed to be “
“
TW: you sniffle hypotenuse cheese
Word.
Ha-Ha! Talk about a donation! That was a gift from above.
I highly suggest you dip into the money donation pile and splurge on a flat-rate USPS envelope.
Address the envelop to the dear professor’s institution, attention to head of his department. Insert the two email print-outs and a note on top.
“It might be worthwhile to review every paper your employee has graded. I fear he might have mistakenly assigned F’s to every A paper.”
Call me a nitwit, but I don’t see why we need so much intellectual debate over something that’s COMMON FRIGGEN SENSE.
I mean, “Well, why don’t we fire an e-mail to the good Mrs. Morrison and ask her what Beloved was supposed to represent? Memories of slavery? Or just an innocent little girl… or what not?” should certainly wrap up much of the debate as it is. I refuse to believe there are people so arrogant as to claim author’s intent is immaterial, or that they are 100% sure as to the intent of the author without the author’s word/life experiences/beliefs on hand.
Jeff!
When you say “will to power,” what do you mean? The desire to possess political power (or some other type of coercive social authority)?
:peter
The idea that some “scholars” would seriously argue that any text is independent of any meaning intended by its author AND that interpreters of said text can thusly make up their own meaning would be laughable…
…save for the fact these are also the type of people who promote such stuff as letting children direct their own education AND grade themselves free from any parental influence.
Pity me, I’m just the poor daughter of an advertising man who grew up learning how to tease the true intent and meaning out of any mass media offering. I can’t help myself if I want to know the intent writers, painters, directors, poets, rappers, et al, have when they create. I was brainwashed that words actually mean something.
Well, I’d argue that social authority is political power of an important sort. So the answer is both.
Ives’ intent here was quite clear: he wanted to be mistaken for John Cage.
Oh goddamnit.
Look, it was 3AM, see?
– You know we just can’t focus enough on these sorts of aphasic, sniffle hypotenuse cheese pizza’s that force us to think deeply in area’s pertaining to desentially pro-cognitional prangonism, and affiable momistic slaughterglonck.
– On the other hand, maybe someone just has a really really big nose zit over copywrite laws.
Ok,late to the thread.I know nothing of this Heurmanetics stuff,but I DO know that I’ve always tried to at least FIGURE OUT the intent of the author before I put my own damned two cents in…Hell,I’m a mechanic,what do I know from intentionalism,signs,signifiers or even Hypotenuse cheese pizza(my favorite)…You read an author AT HIS WORD,not your own,or do I have this wrong? Oh,sent you some bucks Jeff,not a lot,but what I could.
My problem here is that I don’t have a firm hold on the jargon. Almost any highly technical field uses words in ways that aren’t part of the common vernacular, and philosophy is head and shoulders above the rest in that respect simply because the technical field involved is the words themselves.
It’s possible, even a fun game, to look at clouds and see pictures in them. “—look, a duck!” “No, you idiot, it’s an F22 dropping bombs on brown people.” But the mechanism that produces pictures in clouds is “random”, that is, there isn’t any intelligent intent behind it. Our own mental processes create the images in clouds; no other agent is involved.
It’s equally possible to look at a Pollack and see duckies, but in that case there was an intelligent agent that created those patterns. We conclude a priori that Pollack intended to construct a meaning, and it’s our job to decipher it. (In Pollack’s case that may be irrelevant. I belong to the school of thought that holds that much of modern “art” is elaborate practical jokes on those who consider themselves sophisticated.)
If there’s no intent there, then there’s no meaning, and we are free to fantasize duckies or F22s, depending upon our own character and imagination. It’s fun and feeds the ego, but I don’t see any point in it other than the point of any other form of masturbation.
Regards,
Ric
tw: major, and I’m not touching it.
Hey, don’t look at me, man. Hell, I always thought “hermeneutics” had something to do with the Munsters.
Now, if you want to discuss the Pleisiosynchronous Digital Heirarchy, I’m pretty much your go-to guy…
Being a fan of some of these guys (Barthes and Derrida of those you’ve mentioned), I’ve always been saddened by this, by the cowardice of it, how they sacrificed (what should have been) their art for “social power.”
Derrida, especially, could have been (and maybe was) a great post-Beckett/Mallarme/Kafka/Ponge/etc poetic fiction writer. When I read his work I pretend that it’s all installments in a parodic autobiography of a vacuous academic star (The Guy Who Wrote Of Grammatology), because it’s just too sad to believe that a great writer really wasted his life serving as a bureaucrat-priest.
Since this is about intention, I should say that he did encourage such a reading. If you’re not mining him for more elaborate excuses for hating your enemies, you can see it all over the text. Jumps to mind: one hilarious(?) moment in the interview glued onto the end of that fucking vile Nietzsche essay in The Ear Of The Other where he comes this close to airing the idea and is struck down sharply by one of his followers, who must have caught a glimpse there of the careers of all present (except JD) about to come crashing down around them.
As fiction, it’s like something from Dick or Gass. As fact, it’s merely horrifying. So I read it as the former.