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 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 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.
****
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.
Evidently Thersites is the name of your ‘dillo. Cause that cocksucker sure ain’t dancin’. And it is Friday.
TW: corps (corpse – missed it by that much)
Jeff,
By Monday, will you have fashioned a lampshade out of Thersite’s skin? Well, several lampshades, as you indicate there is plenty of raw material.
I’d hate to see you get into a pissing match with Steven den Beste–it’d consume all the bandwidth in Creation.
Cordially…
Someday, Jeff, you really must write a synopsis of this debate using layman’s terms understandable to the masses. The salad example was a good start.
Even with my limited understanding of hermeneutics it’s obvious you have maintained the upper hand in this debate.
Now, ABOUT THAT ‘DILLO…
Fat lot of good that’s gonna do ya! You’re paralyzed, remember?
A fine description of the misplaced arrogance at play here. And Thirsty can’t understand why anyone would take issue with it. This sort of thinking is the likely result of his Mommy raising him to believe that he’s extra special, though if he is, it isn’t in the way he’d like it to be.
RACIST!
Jeff,
You are swatting flies with Vulcan’s hammer.
I’m kind of scared, cause I think I understood most of it. Fortunately, I’m incapable of articulating why I think that, so I won’t.
But, you’re right Marcus, the salad helped.
Hmmm… Well oh Grand Goluff of hermeneutics, clicker of heels to fetch salads, and general user of more words than Webster to explain “hamburger”, break this down and smoke it in your Hukah:
Nuclear Handbook operating Instructions:
Rule #1 – You can’t put too much water in a nuclear cooling grid.
(I know. Akroid and Curtin couldn’t figure out what it was ment to convey either. So they left it to Belosi.)
– I’ve been following your sign wars with interest. Question. Where would an authors work achieving a “sum greater than its interpretive parts” fit into the discussion, that rare case of the “classic” tome that exceeds even the authors expectations? In other words how does a body of text just happen to rise to an enefable “greater” level on its own. Something everyone agrees is there, a feeling about the work not easily described, but universally agreed on. Is there such a thing as “mob-mind” interpretation or?
Having fun, Jeff? Ah, nothing quite like a good academic argument. I got about two-thirds of the way through before my eyes started glazing over; not Jeff’s fault, I just have a low tolerance for it. Personal failing, for which I apologize.
What hits me every time I start trying to follow one of these is that Thersites is deliberately restricting the size of his sandbox. He talks about “literary conventions” as if they were fundamental properties of the subject, but it appears to me that what he intends (heh!) is to circumscribe the field of the argument, restricting it to what he and his ilk (nyaah, nyahh) wish to define as “literature”. Of course he would interpret, say, an instruction manual with the intent of the author in mind, but an instruction manual is not “literature”.
So A commits literature. B’s criticism and commentary upon A’s effort then becomes part of the literature, upon which C can comment, followed by D, and on until it comes ‘round to A’s turn again. Nothing outside the field of “literature” is affected. In the end they all disappear up one another’s asses with a faint popping sound, and nobody gives a damn but the Dean(s) who have to find more professors. The technical term is “circle jerk”.
Which is fine. It makes Thersites and his fellows examples of conspicuous consumption—<style and enough faux honors to keep them happy, and <i>your</i> society can only manage that for the dictator and his family. Nyaah Nyaah Nya Nya Nya, we’re rich and you ain’t! Thersites and his fellows are decorative, in that sense, gaudy excrescences on the vehicle of Western society.
So long as they’re content to be tailfins on Juggernaut they don’t cause any problems. It’s when their disabilities get inflicted on the outside world (e.g., the Press) that difficulties arise.
Regards,
Ric
tw: group Thersites’s in-group seems limited in extent.
paragraph three, following the em dash:
…our society is rich enough to give these pompous, useless, parasitic yahoos a decent lifestyle and enough faux honors to keep them happy…
Regards,
Ric
tw: theres sometimes a glitch in the html here…
She-it… I’d sleep through his class and still get a B.
Escha-con attendee’s should be known as FellAtriots.
OW! Brain hurt!!
I have implemented plan A:
Open mockery.
You lost me at someone wanting to toss your salad…
Well, there is such a thing as a canon, and oftentimes a texts’ ascension to the canon (which is all to often these days decide upon by editors looking to be “inclusive”) reinforces the (subjective) sense that it must be “important” in a way that a close reading shows is not necessarily the case.
And of course, a text can always exceed an author’s expectations. Which doesn’t change it’s meaning; instead, it speaks to its reception, which can often turn on whims such as public mood, or a particularly good marketing campaign, etc.
There’s a saying that you cannot respond coherently to that which is incoherent. It is a testament to Jeff’s intentionalist interpretive skills that his response to Theristes’ incoherent rambling is itself coherent.
How is it possible for Theristes to claim that an author is even capable of telling ‘patently obvious lies’ about the meaning of his text if its meaning is not stable? I thought ‘to lie’ meant ‘to make a statement which has a meaning at variance with the truth.’ If you hold the meaning of the ‘lie’ statement fixed and let the meaning of the text drift with the tides, then the meaning of the text can wander back into congruence with the author’s attempted lie about the meaning. And Theristes can’t even claim that, because he claims the ‘lie’ statement doesn’t have a fixed meaning either. But if the underlying fact means only what people say it means, and statements about the underlying fact can be branded lies or not depending on what people say about them, then
…
holy shit, I’ve just explained the Democratic Party to myself.
Heh.
Overheard in a Sechwan Temple sleeping area:
Adept: ….Sensei…. you said about all things relative today… many parallel universe’s…that word you used… e-e-equivalency….
Sensei: ….Erm…..Yes grasshopper… and?
Adept: ….Well does that mean in some universe Howard Dean is President of the Republic of AmeriKa….
Sensei: ….Now now grasshopper…. you were just having a nightmare….roll over and go to sleep…
I keep having comedy flashbacks – a Canadian comedy trope… I mean troupe, called “Kids in the Hall” had a serial sketch where a short 98-lb weakling would challenge huge burly-men to fights. The fight would always end with the weakling charging the burly man, who would simply hold out his fist…
Someday Thersites will get tire and have a lie-down. I doubt any revelatory admission (even to himself) that he’s just plain in error (or just being a yutz) will be forthcoming.
Even though it’s as obvious as a Blue Whale flopping around in that apocryphal bowl of salad.
Not that it matters, but the last sentence of War and Peace is:
I don’t know why that seems important
Thanks a lot, Jay. You’ve never heard of a spoiler alert?
Jeff, I think you gave the machine ideas with your pledge drive. Last TW ‘bill’, this time ‘twenty’. If the next one is ‘nonconsecutive’ I’m getting out of here.
Wow, all I did in college was go to football games and drink beer. I guess I missed a lot.
No wonder I smoked so much dope in grad school. After conversations like these, I needed something to clear my head.
Dammit, bgates, I had the same thought myself! Why do I ever sleep? All the good stuff happens at ungodly hours.
I was thinking of interpretive dance as an unconventional way of asking for the salad. Clicking the heels is a lot less spendy of energy, which is important if you’re only talking about salad.
I’m doing my poor best to follow the arguments here, but it sure seems to me that the importance of the intention of the creator of a work cannot be trumped by any other meanings found in the work by others, or else the act of creation is meaningless. If art of whatever type can be “created” without the primacy of an authorial meaning in mind, sheesh, why should anyone bother? Why shouldn’t everyone choose his art by whether it goes with the sofa, or whether its binding looks good on the shelf, or whether its dynamic range shows off his speakers particularly well? And why should anyone bother to create, bother to imbue something of pedestrian ingredients with meaning, if that meaning is supposed to be dragged through the muck by any yahoo to come along? (Of course any yahoo can drag the meaning of a work through the muck, but should we celebrate that fact?)
I’m not an artist of any stripe, so artists, what do you think? Do you create your art for yourself solely, or for your audience solely, or for yourself but with an intent, or at least a hope that you’ll be able, to open your meaning, your creation, for the audience? And are you more or less successful if the audience correctly grasps your meaning?
How do you win an argument with someone who thinks you can’t define the meanining of your own argument?
TW asked. He said asked, but he meant answered.
I just wanted to thank Mr. Goldstein for answering. I have been very interested in this argument(which I find somewhat frightening).
I think, however, that Thersites is not up to the challenge. I don’t mean that as an attack on his intellect, but on his maturity.
What I have been amazed by is Geoduck, who continually attempts to engage in reasoned debate on this site, while pretending not to notice that Thersites is behaving like a child on metacomments.
TW: step up to the plate Thersites
I think I shall drop to my knees and thank the good Lord that those of us in the hard sciences never had to write anything like that.
Ever.
TW: know
As in, you know what I’m sayin?
To take this back to Snow, we know and accept that he intended to use “tar baby” to mean “difficult situation.” Given the baggage that comes with the phrase, there are other things that by necessity he must have “meant” along with it (I use quotes because some choices obviously aren’t meaning in the intentionalist sense). How does one choose from these examples?
a) Only knew “tar baby” as a simple metaphor, ignorant of all other uses.
b) Knew that “tar baby” was, in the right context, a racist term, but elected to use because “everyone” would understand the linguistic simplicity and purity of his intentions. He intended to convey a simple elegance of language.
c) Knew that “tar baby” was, in the right context, a racist term, didn’t care what those sensitive PC douches think. A phrase means what it means. Deal with it. He intended to convey that he is an intentionalist and unconcerned with extraneous signification.
d) Knew that “tar baby” was, in the right context, a racist term, knew that the use of the term would impress the sort of people that don’t care what those sensitive PC douches think. He intended to convey that he is on the side of people who feel burdened by oversignification.
e) Knew that “tar baby” was, in the right context, a racist term, and used it because, not in spite of, this. He intended to convey that he was at worst, a racist and at best comfortable pandering to racists.
One of the other meanings was intended (or “intended”) and how are we to judge? In other words, at what point does intentionalism halt discourse to the advantage of the author but the detriment of the audience?
Apologies if this has been covered. I’m jumping in late and these comment threads are long enough to be daunting. (Especially when >50% are usually inside jokes from the comment regulars.)
My last post arrogantly implies that I’ve figured out all of the possible additional meanings. That wasn’t intended, though I guess you’d have no way of knowing. I was just trying to put out a range of possibilities.
Charles —
Quick hypothetical: you’ve never heard the phrase “tar baby” before. Does it still come with baggage? If so, how?
The answer is that it does not. The “baggage” is your knowledge of previous usages for that signifier set, and your decision—your intent — to insist that the signifiers contain that baggage.
But they are nothing but squiggles or sound forms until they are signified—that is, until meaning is added to them by some agency, they are not even language. Intent turns them into language.
So you are simply wrong when you say “there are other things that by necessity he must have “meant†along with it”. To say so is to saddle Snow with the “baggage” carried by others, and leads to situations where he is presumed to be responsible for what others can do with his signifiers.
Your last question is the nut: how do we judge what he actually meant? In each of the potential instances you cite, you are appealing to what you believe to be Tony Snow’s intent. And so you make your choice based on every available bit of information that can clue you in to Snow’s meaning. In this case, the folks at Think Progress used the context in which snow made the utterance, his follow-up remark, likely his tone and facial expression (as extratextual clues), and perhaps their knowledge of him personally.
And they determined that he meant nothing racist by “tar-baby”. In your list above, incidentally, I notice that you don’t provide a choice wherein Snow does not know “tar-baby” is a potentially racist term. But this is something that also must be factored in at the moment of deciding upon an interpretation.
Now, you are free to conclude that Snow, as both a conservative and a well-educated one, is likely both familiar with racist terms for blacks and the Uncle Remus stories. But it could also be that he was simply a fan of Robert Anton Wilson, and learned of the Tar Baby principle that way—never connecting it to any racial group.
Intentionalism never halts discourse to the advantage of the author but the detriment of the audience. It simply insists that if the audience wants to claim it is “interpreting” remarks or texts not of their making, they must necessarily appeal to what they believe to be the author’s intent.
And remember, a failure to suss the author’s intent perfectly is a failure inherent in the communication process (which relies on symbols and referents that can easily be misconstrued), not a failure inherent in making meaning.
I know that Charles left at least one possibility off his list:
f) Knew that “tar baby” was, in the right context, a racist term, but correctly dismissed the fact as irrelevant since his context was so obviously NOT the right context for that.
Jeff: I notice that you don’t provide a choice wherein Snow does not know “tar-baby†is a potentially racist term.
In fact, I made that choice (a). I think that covers the quick hypo that you started with as well – it is theoretically possible that he had never heard the term in any other context before the press conference, and for the purposes of discussion I agree that it is a necessary choice when discussing intentionalism as a tool. I made sure to include that choice because I am not looking to impute any racist intent to Snow. The philosophical debate interests me more than the analysis of a stranger. (If I remember correctly, I took care not to impute intent to Bennett in the abortion/crime kerfuffle or whoever used the phrase “articulate” about whoever they were talking about (Rice? Powell? some scholar? I don’t remember the exact debate). I’m not a mind reader or mudslinger.)
As you note yourself, however, it is highly unlikely that someone as worldly as Snow had no knowledge of the racist meanings attributed to the phrase tar baby (or, for that matter, the interpretations that impute racist meanings to the Uncle Remus stories generally). So, once we assume, as actors who must receive and then interpret the signals, that Snow was aware of the racist implications of the term, how then do we proceed? Think Progress passsive-aggressively opted for (b) while pretending that it might have been (a) – and probably actually thinking (c), (d) or (e).
Not knowing Snow at all, if I truly believed (a), wouldn’t it be reasonable to say “There is some pretty heavy baggage that comes with that phrase. You might mean X, but a lot of people are going to hear Y. Some of them will be black and hurt; some will be racist and happy. It is a shame, since the phrase is apt and descriptive, but as a public figure you might want to steer clear.” If you replace the insincere smugness with genuine concern for Snow, that is what ThinkProgress did.
Is that wrong? Does intentionalism allow for the reasonableness of accomodations to reduce the number of inevitable misunderstandings because language is ambiguous and intent can be such a bitch to suss out?
Paul: I know that Charles left at least one possibility off his list: f)…
I thought that was pretty well covered by (b), but don’t mind if you disagree. Like I said, I wasn’t presuming to cover all possibilities.
I’m not a professional writer, but I’ve been published a few times, and I’ve been thinking about this recently.
Basically, I was plotting out an SF story, more or less about the collision of three dramatically different military systems. A human-held colony planet has a large, underequipped, undertrained but enthusiastic militia. A trio of NATO instructors—“Aggressors”—are visiting to help train the militia by pretending to be the most likely enemy. Then aliens invade, cutting off the planet from outside help.
So basically, you’ve got NATO front-line soldiers, a militia, and aliens. Realistically, the militia is almost torn apart, taking horrible casualties while the aliens pretty much effortlessly overrun them, limited more by their own logistics problems than anything else.
Now where’s where I started having some problems.
At first, I thought it would be fascinating to make the colonists Zulus, using a traditional Impi based military, naturally upgraded from stabbing spears.
However, that throws in a really nasty interpretation, and moved the story from “Militias do poorly against professional armies” to “Africans can’t fight.” Which is not only ugly, but not my intent.
Now, I’m confident that a good writer could come up with a way to pull that off somehow without implying that Africans are terrible soldiers, but personally, I can’t see a way that I can do it, so if I do write the thing, I’ll probably make the colonists Americans or Europeans.
So to sum it up, my take is that as an author you have to be aware that the reader can’t read your mind, and try to think of ways your text could be misread before finishing.
Charles—
Sorry, completely missed (a).
As for this:<blockquote>Not knowing Snow at all, if I truly believed (a), wouldn’t it be reasonable to say “There is some pretty heavy baggage that comes with that phrase. You might mean X, but a lot of people are going to hear Y. Some of them will be black and hurt; some will be racist and happy. It is a shame, since the phrase is apt and descriptive, but as a public figure you might want to steer clear.”</blockquote>That a lot of people will hear what they want to hear, or impute to you meaning that you didn’t intend, is simply a truism of the communication process. None of which means the sigifier comes with baggage (or is “haunted by the ghosts of all its potential signifieds”). It means, again, that interpreters bring baggage to bear on their interpretations—that they have their own intentions.
Of course it’s wrong. Because they are admitting they knew Snow didn’t mean X, but are positing a hypothetical (likely black) interpreter who they “worry” might not be smart enough to correctly intepret Snow’s commments. I discussed this in both the Snow post and in the Bennett post, so I’ll just point you back to those posts rather than rehashing the arguments here.
As I noted in my Snow post, it is always a good idea to pick your public words carefully if it is your wish to avoid potentially offending someone. But to make such a rule punishable by firings, etc. (which, as TP points out, has happened) is to allow that when others are offended by things you didn’t mean, you are responsible for their failure to interpret you correctly. This makes of language a mine field; it also puts us in a position where we are answerable to “language” rather than asserting our control over it. The end effect is linguistic totalitarianism (which we already see in PC language mandates). It also effectively destroys language by taking more and more of it out of play. As a writer myself, I find this desire to reduce and restrict language by making its acceptable usage contingent on not giving offense (especially when the number of offenses or those offended is theoretically limitless) a very dangerous game.
Finally, the phrase “the reasonableness of accomodations to reduce the number of inevitable misunderstandings” is, I think, misleading. Because “reasonableness of accomodations” is just another way of saying “one of a number of potential misreadings based on the baggage we, as interpreters, bring to the process.”
So long as those who make those interpretation are appealing to authorial intent, they are doing nothing “wrong” with respect to intentionalism; instead, they are simply misinterpreting.
The problem with TP was that they acknowledged that such an intepretation would be wrong, but then asserted that this shouldn’t matter: that because Snow’s signifiers could potentially be misunderstood, he is responsible for that misunderstanding.
Well, you might want to leave something ambiguous, in which case you’ll want to signify in such a way that multiple interpretations are equally plausible and in keeping with your intent.
And example of this is irony.
Worrying about how someone might misinterpret you is a conscious decison an author is capable of engaging in; some of the risks of being misinterepreted—like having Thersites take his tongue to your nipples, to revisit my salad example in the post—are more horrific than others.
That strikes me as question begging. Of course it means something about interpreters, but once you as a speaker become aware of the likely responses and interpretations, failing to acknowledge them is smug at best and sociopathic at worst. A speaker aware of the ghosts ignores them at their own risk.
Apologies, I meant to take this away from the intent of ThinkProgress. We can agree that it goes without saying that TP was disingenuous in one way or another (either they believe that Snow is a racist and are softpedalling it or they don’t and should STFU and stop trying to score political points.) I meant in a more sincere scenario is it wrong to make someone aware of the ghosts. I’d argue not.
I also question the use of the term “smart enough” – someone plenty smart but with no foreknowledge of Snow but a personal history of racism directed at him isn’t stupid, just informed by experience and can only divine intent from the available info. Such a category of listeners is a demographic that a Press Secretary would be wise to take account of.
No argument here, but as I said before, if you want to walk the razor’s edge, you are subject to the whim of the listener. Under strictly intentionalist principles, you can get yourself a proper screwing because “That’s not what I meant” isn’t always a very compelling argument. (See, for example, 90% of politicians caught on tape speaking their minds honestly.)
If you think that I should find a way to pull myself away from the computer, you are probably correct.
Right, exactly. I don’t have a problem with being ambiguous, or with being intentionally ironic. In fact, one of the themes of this particular storyline is confusion. None of the characters actually understands what’s really going on and only the omniscient viewpoint “gets” the war.
And I am assuming good faith on the part of the reader. “Africans can’t fight” is a perfectly reasonable message to read into a story where the least effective of three military forces is entirely African, in both personnel and organization. But it’s a loathsome message.
How about this: if a reader can, in good faith, put a meaning onto a text that the author did not intend and is unwilling to accept, then the author screwed up.
Charles —
Well, if it strikes you as question begging, you’d be wrong. It has to do with how signification functions. It is a reality of sign formation.
But saying “a speaker aware of the ghosts ignores them at their own risk” is a truism that has nothing at all to do with what he or she means. It simply says that one way to avoid being branded a racist, say, by disingenuous or confused interpreters is to avoid saying anything that can vaguely be construed as racist. Or, to put it another way: you know how men are, honey. Wearing that short skirt into a bar like that? Well, that was either smug at best, or sociopathic at worst.”
Actually, it is a demographic that a Press Secretary—and all of us, for that matter—would do well to remind they haven’t the linguistic authority to view everyone else’s utterances through their own experiences, and then to attribute their offense to the utterer.
This is the whole point. We should not surrender language to this kind of drift, because it can be used by unscrupulous people (like TP) to attack the character and credibility of a speaker and put him/her on the defensive.
And yes, I need to go run errands and go to the park. So this will have to continue later. Have a nice afternoon!
If by “screwed up” you mean failed to signal his intent as best s/he could, sure.
Yeah, “Screwed up” is probably too strong, since it implies any merit in the work has been destroyed. “The onus of the failure is on the author,” perhaps, recognizing that any text probably fails on one level or other.
Phone Technician,
I agree that intent is not enough to establish meaning in communications. If I said to my sweetie, “Baby, I fucking hate you,” I doubt she will get the romantic vibe I’m so channeling. If I quoted priceless Shakespeare sonnets, in Swahili, she would likely say, ‘uh huh, yeah, that’s nice, where’s the checkbook, I need to go shopping”, and totally miss the point.
Reference to the rest of the world is important, to logic, to grammar, to language, to history, and all. There is tension between speakers and listeners; speakers want succinctness in vocabulary [a perfect world for an orator would be Smurf village where one word meant all things to all people], listeners want variety; “baby, what kind of flower am I?, when, and how do you love me, make me FEEL it, SEE it, mmmmmm, SMELL and TASTE it, roll the petals on my cheek, let HEAR the PURRR-FECTION in scarlet silk.” That sort of thing.
But your example is a rather perfect example of subjection of the listener to both grammar, logic, and the writer himself. Unless the writer is a rank amateur–which he might be on page 1 but will not be on page 350, almost by definition–he will not put Kralls and Zulus and Assagais on Mars, nor will he have NATO trainers (the Atlantic is a bit far away). Then there is alien equation, which might, without the presence of NATO in the first place, be akin to English or Boor intrusions, but now is complicated beyond the limits of the limited metaphor (colonists as African tribesman).
All of this, if written in a heavy handed imprimatur as MARTIAN COLONISTS = AFRICANS, one to one, then yes, you might be making a somewhat specious political statement. But any work of fiction will rapidly defeat your limited, initial aims (or should, if you as a writer challenge yourself).
And look at it again. Say you are writing a history of the Zulu nation. Is writing about their defeats prejudicial to their valour? Is writing about British courage–at Rourke’s drift, for instance–prejudicial to the Zulu’s valour? A good case can be made that the British fighting man or Boor settler was smarter, more disciplined, better trained and equipped AND more courageous (the Zulus did not face 100K redcoats sweeping through their valleys against their 30K armies, but British did face off battalions against thousands of native warriors, outnumbered 2-3 and more to one) all at the same time.
Pointing out military fact–discipline trumps passion–does not make you a racist or impugning another man or group of men. It is simply that the education of the listener/reader is so abysmal that such facts are not self-evident.
In other words, you as the writer are appealing to history as a guide just as you as a writer would appeal to science for the science-fiction part. That is part of the job. Just because the readership gets up in arms does not mean that they have a right to their own set of facts about history or science.
I still don’t think I’m wrong. If the speaker is aware of various interpretations, his intent must a fortiori include an intent to have those interpretations of the phrase included in their interpretations of his utterance by at least some of the audience. Ambiguity, therefore, is a risk borne by the speaker as well as the listener. If all intentionalism does is tell the listener that they bear all of the risk it isn’t a very useful theory of communication. It ignores too much about how communication works in practice in favor of how it might work if we were all perfect receivers. I haven’t read your notes either, though, so this may be addressed as well.
It is sunny in Brooklyn and I promise I won’t look at this again until tomorrow.
If your story is that an entirely African force is wiped out by their military incompetence and just because they are Africans (In Space…), that is your message, especially if you make it painstakingly thorough. The difference here is Tony Snow using the n-word to refer to a bowl of Cheetos; you are denying the obvious meaning of the words and passages you have written.
But if it is a cursory similiarity…no. If no reasonable person can reach that conclusion, without ‘special’ near-gnostic knowledge, the answer is no.
As far as the tar-baby imbroglio goes…I remember the folktale. I cannot name one instance in my entire life in which I have ever heard or read that ‘tar-baby’ referred to a black person except by inference…i.e. that ‘tar-baby’ is allegedly a racial epithet. I am sure it has happened. But that requires a specialized second-hand data set. So it is quite a stretch to say that tar-baby is strictly a racial epithet and therefore should never be used, or that it reveals hidden racism. It has a specific meaning and a secondary (or tertiary even) desultary one. And in no circumstances could ‘black dude’ or ‘my negro’ be substituted for ‘tarbaby’ into Snow’s words and make any sense.
‘I will not get into that black person during this press conference…’ Huh?
Damn me. I forgot to mention this…
Which, tragically, is exactly right. But that doesn’t mean we let the listener off the hook; a short skirt is a thin reed on which to hang forcible penetration as a defense to a criminal charge.
And then, of course, one can parse the whole blasted mess through Snow’s own words on the topic:
Press Secretary Tony Snow speaks.
That might eliminate a few of the possibilities in the long chain of maybes and could haves. His comment on the tar baby issue is about a page above the section on Jeff Sessions.
Why? Knowing that some people might be able to do different things with your signifiers than you intend does not mean you “intend” they do so, nor does it mean that every time you signify you are responsible for all the potential intepretations that someone can make of your utterances. It simply acknowledges that language is symbolic.
Of course it’s a risk. One always runs the risk of being misunderstood. But this is a failure in either signaling intent or interpreting intent, not the failure to mean what one means.
It doesn’t. Intentionalism has to do with where meaning is situated and is perfectly aware that the utterer can be “responsible” for the failure of his interpreters to suss his meaning. Which is why communication relies on things like convention, context, etc., to help point to intent.
When you get a chance, read through the first 15-20 pages of the notes and you’ll get a better feel for what it is intentionalism is arguing.
Hey Jeff,
Yours is on my short list of daily must-reads. I especially find this ongoing thread fascinating – though it is funny to me that so much can be written (and contested) on a seemingly simple and self-evident concept: What I’ve written means what I meant when I wrote it. What the hell else could it mean?
Watching a show about Nostradamus on the History Channel last night brought this subject to mind; the entire show – all Nostradamus-related scholarship, for that matter – is based upon divining the intent of his text. That he was so vague in his writing invites (and owes its endurance to) resignification by the signified.
That brought to mind a “real world” example of text that, as you say re: formalism, “reinscribes the intention with the receiver rather than the utterer” – that being horoscopes. Those rely solely upon the reader to assign meaning and are deliberately devoid of authorial intent.
I’ve never given any of this any thought before encountering it here, and just thought this was a cool little aspect of the topic at hand.
Keep up the good work, Jeff, and do let me know if I’m completely missing the mark here.
Thanks, Token.
Re: horoscopes. You are right that they are written to be purposely ambiguous, which gives the receiver a lot of room to play. I don’t think, however, they are devoid of authorial intent: it’s just that the original intent is to create a text that is as ambiguous as possible so that receivers can reinscribe them in ways that are very personal to them.
Not only that, but the authors don’t mind —and actually encourage—that “meaning” be made by the reader/listener. That is, they rely on readers to apply their own intent and to believe, erroneously, that the horoscope itself “means” what they’ve decided it means.
In short, they don’t want readers/listeners to intepret; they want them to engage in a kind of autobiographical creative writing using the signifiers offered by the author as a template.
If that makes sense.
Makes sense. “Devoid” was a poor word choice on my part. I guess in the case of horoscopes it’s more authorial meta-intent, leaving the meat of signification to the reader. That the reader completes and personalizes the signification fulfills the outcome-independent intent of the author. (There’s a more appropriate word than independent there that escapes me.)
Not unlike giving a kid some Legos and seeing what his mind conjures – the parent “authors” some plastic blocks; the kid makes a rocket ship. “Thanks for the rocket ship, Dad!” “I’m glad you like it, Son.”
– All of which goes to explain why studies have shown that Astrological processes (text/readings etc) are most successful with a highly educated audience, evidencing active formulative imaginations, and preoccupation with personal image.
That what Jeff has been saying, or a simpler variant of it, is self-evident, and that those who deny it don’t do so honestly, but out of a self-/class/whatever interest that’s indistinguishable from a desire to subjugate us (and our audience), which interest/desire has been well-deconstructed by theorists in whose names these powermad assholes regularly claim authority.
The first part of that, at least.
Seems my last comment did not take. But anyway, this stuff is great.
Charles, if you want you can certainly look on my (f) as an elaboration of your (b). All I can say is that I much prefer the elaborated version, as it gives a reason for what your version seems to imply is an act of faith on someone’s part. The important point is that to conclude that Snow was using “tar baby” in its innocuous meaning rather than its racist meaning, you need not make any assumptions at all about his good intentions or lack of them; you need only pick the meaning that makes sense in the sentence over the one that reduces it to gibberish. That is all.
Dude – nobody cares.
Honest.
Emphasis mine.
That very last clause is the key to this whole argument. If the author is not, in fact, dead, and his/her intention is the locus of meaning, entire literature departments will be exposed as useless. Literary criticism would be reduced to detective work, where you round up all the clues as to what the author intended and come to the best conclusion you can. You might be able to keep alive some interesting debates about what the intent really is, but most of the scholarship could be chucked in the fire.
Furthermore, lit crit has determined that all cognition is mediated by language: you can’t think at all without employing these slippery signs and signifiers, nor can you so much as perceive. Which means that those who best understand language become the arbiters of reality. The linguists and lit crits become the Oracles of Delphi, who alone can tell us what it all means.
So not only do they get to take ownership of written texts, they get to take ownership of events. History. Existence itself. How ironic that the answer they’ve come up with is that because signification is inexact, even “slippery,” reality is up for grabs. Any narrative that you can construct for the events (signifiers) is valid. Is it any wonder that the “reality-based” community comes up with so many outlandish interpretations of what is real? They’re not constrained by any rule beyond their own ingenuity and personal desires.
So the upshot of this is that there is no way that a literature professor will locate signification in the author’s intent. You’d sooner see a logger join the movement to save spotted owls.
TW: Jeff wins on the sheer strength of his opponent’s self-interest.
Dude. That’s the operating definition of fan fic. Those Freudian analyses of Don Quijote superimpose concepts of human nature that were utterly alien to Cervantes (not to mention violently anachronistic), but they sure validate the analyzer’s world view as accurate, don’t they? Because if, without realizing it, Cervantes codified Freudian imagery into his text, it must be because it’s real.
Dude – I care.
Honest.
No, no, he’s right; I don’t care. Then again, I do love me some paste. . .
Okay, let’s just cut to the chase for Thersites’ sake and concede that…
…IT’S ALL GEORGE BUSH’S FAULT!!!
That ought to fill him with the same sense of inner satisfaction one gets from the warmth of one’s own urine spreading outward and downward in one’s own pants.
Geoduck and Phila. Both present themselves as reasonable and engaged on this site. Then scurry back to Thersites site and report in a condescending manner that the folks here just aren’t up to snuff. Thersites agrees and they all break out the virtual brie and crackers and have a good laugh at the paste eaters expense. Sophmores.
Told you Jeff – Thersites issued an amused challenge that was nothing more than posturing to the hoi poloi on his site. He never expected he would be taken up on it. He is out of his depth and knows it and isn’t going to engage you in any substantial way.
Be done with him. The best way to handle pompous bombastic asswipes is to look right through them. Nothing irks them more than to be treated as irrelevant. Let him accept the admiration of his sycophants and declare victory in his own sandbox. He’ll stew in the realization that he has been dismissed when he ventured outside it.
Somehow, these quotes, from enlightened edumacted students during McCain’s commencement speech at New School, belong in this discussion:
Ok, I snuck that last one in there. But the vein is the same. This is the face of progressive academia.
Cardinal – Which will of course, judiciously applying the “Third law of Hermeneutics”, wherein all signs lead to non-stability, we find that:
…IT’S ALL GEORGE BUSH’S FAULT!!!
… actually translates, in anagramic fashion too:
…THERSITES SUCKS A LARGE CRANK!!!
Which while true, is really nasty….
Then scurry back to Thersites site and report in a condescending manner that the folks here just aren’t up to snuff.
No – that is not a fair representation. What we’ve been saying is more that JG wants to argue against deconstruction.
However, Thersites hasn’t been using a deconstruction critique at all. What needs to be addressed is a critque from Bordieu.
What Phila said:
At this point, Thersites has made a pretty coherent argument that JG has scarcely begun to address, let alone refute…but I’d be more impressed with a careful, reasoned explanation of why a Bordieuan critique is inapplicable to JG’s work.
Yep.
Sure it is. You said this, right?
And this:
That’s not true at all.
Your compatriot Aquaria:
Your hero Thirsty:
Who do you hope to fool with your protest, geoduck? Why even offer it here?
You seem to forget that the point of this excercise was that Thirsty was going to dismantle Jeff’s “tedentious garbage” on Intentionalism. Thus far, you folks seem to want to do that by espousing the joys of deconstructionism. While you might have a ball with that activity, it doesn’t achieve the goal of the exercise.
Once again, you’re swinging, missing, and thinking you knocked one out of the park.
This is precisely the kind of ludicrous dodge one can expect from academics who have nothing to offer. First off, whether one label’s Thersites’ critique a “deconstructionist” critque or not is absolutely irrelevant. I haven’t responded to a type of critique, I’ve responded to what Thersites’ wrote—and dropping names meant to label his critique doesn’t change the substance of his critique.
To say that I have scarcely begun to address Thersites’ argument—which I have patiently broken down to each of its kernel assertions and addressed at length—shows precisely the kind of intellectual dishonesty coupled with smug and evasive self-satisfaction that people recoil from in self-styled academics.
The discussion (which began about meaning’s situatedness) has now been massaged in a different direction: having conceding intent’s role in meaning making, the chin-scratching pompous know-nothings have now gone on to wave that away with a “so what? Other things can be done with texts that we believe are more important”—which is something that I discuss in my notes (it is correct observation, but the results of those other things we do with texts—specifically what we think they are, and what relationship they carry to the text’s meaning, either in an interpretive paradigm or outside one) are the important questions.
I suppose I’m through answering questions from either geoduck or phila, and Thersites has proven he is absolutely indoctrinated by easy and puerile theoretics—whatever name he wants to give to his “approach.” But I do find it both touching and telling that his sycophants continue to try to protect him and insolate him from what I hope I’ve shown objective readers are the inherent flaws in his (very convoluted) position.
As for a list the list of books geoduck cited…so? I addressed the problems with new historicism. I’ve read Greenblatt and Tompkins and on and on.
You simply wish to name drop—now I’m to answer a “Bordieuan critique” but I’m not to do such using a “deconstructionist” paradigm, is that it?—but you won’t put your money where you mouth is.
I’m not worried about labels and name dropping. If its a critique of B you want, spell out the assertions of the argument and I will address them. I have been quite clear in what my kernel assertions are. Why won’t Thersites just spell out what his theoretics are? And pray tell, someone please point out what arguments Thersites has made that I have “scarcely begun to address”.
Otherwise you are shams, frauds, and a coterie of self-reinforcing back-patters. What’s worse, you are disingenuous, and have proven yourselves incapable of dealing with someone who has directly taken on each of the points you’ve raised.
Go on. Declare yourself the victors. Throw in some quote from Benjamin and step away.
But anybody following along knows what happened here.
I suggest you save further commentary for Thersites’ site, where you can join in with the luxuriating over my supposed stupidity and inability to write. It is clear none of you bothered to read the notes—but have instead decided you were able to my arguments with the sheer strength of your oblique, namedropping bullshit. I knocked that kind of self-serving bullshit down at the School of Crit an Theory, and I’m having no problem doing it here, despite what you people seem to wish to convince yourselves you’ve done to trip me up.
The fact is, I very much doubt you blindly loyal supporters of Thersites (and Thersites himself) have a scholarly impulse in their bodies. Insted, you have learned how to write papers from a particular (and quite easy) critical perspective, and you squeeze everything out through that particular intellectual sausage maker until you’ve filled up enough casings to fill a collection of essays. It’s like you people are assembly line workers.
But saddest is the fact that you can say, with a straight face, that I haven’t addressed Thersites’ arguments when I have posted the entirety of his arguments here and addressed each of their points.
Now go away. There are paste-eating dork remarks to be made. Just not here, where serious people (on occasion) gather.
Say, am I late for the party?
Pablo, you forgot the whole effort is solipsistic.
Here’s from Geoduck in The Taste of Paste…
Technically, two people reading it side by side has a very different meaning. Unfortunately, this line of ‘reasoning’ is circular…
In which case you are going after a certain consensus of culture, but this convenant includes the previous generation’s consensus, and the generation’s before, the one before that, etc, until you get to the author’s generation and his own participation in that consensus. Which is to say that this…
Is bunk. It is either solipsism (every reader gets to make their own interpretation) or an appeal to consensus that is no different than objective language, grammar, and history, and that includes an understanding of the world in which the author lives and wrote (and in some cases, studied) which trumps the reader’s.
Good. Giving Thersites or his sycophants even indirect credibility by engaging them assumes they are looking for something more than cocooning. This is business as usual for the loony left in general and the self styled progressive left in particular. Thersites may or may not be a smart guy (I have my doubts), but his intention was never to engage you on the subject matter. It was to score points with the usual suspects using the whole lefty ‘We are smart (ivory tower elite and wannabes) and they (paste eaters) are not.’ So he threw down the guantlet, got slapped with it, and ran off. Let him stew on his own site and let his acolytes sooth his injured sensibilities there.
On a side note, someone should take ownership of ‘paste eater’ away from the left like has recently been done with ‘chickenhawk’. It would be interesting to watch the evolution of the next catchall phrase. Whatever the next one is, it will reveal as much about where the ‘progressive’ left is really coming from as the old ones did.
– Without a moral compass, man quickly decends to an animal. If you doubt that visit Wonkette for a look see. I see this “paste eaters” thing as one more example of the deep seated bigotry that is hidden beneath the Leftist veneer. Translate that from a mentally challanged person to a Black American, and they’d scream like hell, and call you racist.
Claim unequaled support of gays, while ranting and bashing gays in the Clergy.
Murder their babies at the blink of an eye, but pray too save the lives of serial killers.
Marxist ambiquity at its finest.
– Of course its always easier to bash the defenseless. Hopefully all the stupid “non-elites” will fail to notice the cowardliness of it, or that you’re a raving hypocrit for doing it.
– So seeing this sort of response among their academic endeavors as well is not really surprising, just boring as hell like every other humorless, godless, vapid thing they do.
– Those two sterling moments in statesmanship with Edwards and Kerry speaking uncaring garbagemouth to power about Cheneys daughter in front of the Nation is all you’ll ever need to know about the scum that populates the Left these days.
– Personally I’ve stopped even responding to the nattering of over educated, under matured, narcissitic children.
Thus far, you folks seem to want to do that by espousing the joys of deconstructionism. While you might have a ball with that activity, it doesn’t achieve the goal of the exercise.
I do want to underline that I’m not a deconstructionist. If anything I specialize in contextualization.
And, nobody has been arguing for deconstruction. That’s kind of my point. On this site a lot of people have wanted to argue against a deconstructionist.
However, please note that I’m not arguing for that.
Consequently nobody has addressed why the following authors have not made contributions to the study of literature:
Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America.
Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence
Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance.
Stephen Grenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare
Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America
If you find these above scholars to have contributed nothing of value to the field – then the burden is on you to assert why their monographs are worthless.
Huh?
How about you assert why Knapp and Michaels, Fish, Eco, Peirce, Bal, Chatman, etc. have contributed “nothing of value to the field.” The burden is on you to assert why their “monographs”(?) are worthless.
Or better yet, just take your red herrings back to the comments section of metacomments where people pretend they aren’t red herrings and instead see in them a “sublety” of thought that normal folks recognize simply isn’t there.
Just the other day, I made a wonderful pot of chili, as I am wont to do from time to time. It kicks ass, if I do say so myself. I made it with paste.
Now I’m thinking about trying my hand at Sushi. That will also require paste.
And the, somewhere along the line, I might eat some Elmer’s, just for the hell of it!
Now you know why I stopped inviting Stan Fish to parties.
– Was that a sneaky Fish Paste joke?
Those authors have made contributions to the study of literature. Dumbass contributions, sure – but contributions none-the-less.
So you’re point is mute.
or moot.
interpret it as you see fit.
– And ladies and gentlebums….. The fantastic technocolored Dean Machine marches on. Once more with “feeling” .
You cheeky bastard. I’ll do the speaking for nobody, around here, thank you very much!
I may be missing the whole point, but then I am just a not-very-humble programmer. My audience, year in and year out, is a paranoid, literalist, idiot. I make my living making my intentions so perfectly clear that the paranoid literalist idiot will do exactly as I intend, no more, no less. If I fail by as much as a single binary digit to make myself exquisitely and exhaustingly clear, the idiot calls me names and makes me do it over.
At least the idiot doesn’t mix up a batch of fertilizer from his own crap and try to pretend that’s what I meant.
Don’t talk to me about intentionalism. Been there, done that, got the scars.
Someone left the following comment at my site:
My daughter turns two in August.
I know that Jeff Goldstein will distance himself from this comment and commenter, even if it turns out to have been made by one of his regulars. Frankly, I believe this comment was left by a sociopathic troll of some sort, one driven by obscure but obscene motivations.
Of course I distance myself from such a comment. It’s deplorable. I have a two-year-old son.
But why bring it up here? You don’t think I did it, do you?
POOPY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The way I read it, it seemed completely ironical. Since I have all the power (as the audience), I guess that’s that.
I brought it up here specifically because (as I posted at my site) I do *not* think you said it and I do not want a blogfight to develop that involves my kids. So I am stating here and at my place that while my first response was to see red, I am going to interpret the comment as purely mischievous and insane and designed to create a weird sort of trouble. (I have already told several people on my “side” not to make a big deal of this, because I think I may have been trolled.)
It may be one of your commenters, it may not. Doesn’t matter, as long as the line is drawn, as far as I am concerned. Too far is too far.
Since I have all the power (as the audience)
Grow up.
Dude, that’s your point. That’s what you’ve been arguing.
Deal with it.
I can’t believe some one thought it was funny to threaten to rape a baby.
You are despicable.
Who is the “you” to whom you refer, geoduck?
I think you should aim your ire at the commenter. Have you proof it came from here?
Thersites: send me the IP address of the commenter and I’ll see if it matches somebody who comments here regularly. If so, I’ll let you two hash it out.
I wouldn’t be too surprised if it was one of YOUR regulars either, Thersites. And, despite the anemic traffic, it’s not as if you are posting behind a firewall. There is the whole internets thing with a billion people out there doing google searches for Iliad hunchback porn.
– Theres a third possibility Thers. Back when my blog was active I had a few trolls that would do that. Just bomb throw and then run and hide. I stopped that by making sure all comments were monitored before posting, and I posted nothing unless I knew the user. After that a few tried posing but were easily exposed and banned. Why do they do it? Who knows. Serious personal issues that compeles them. Very well could be it has not a thing to do with the current academic debate. As I recall none of the trolls at my site talked to the topic. Just drop something vicious for what ever kicks they get. Sad.
Verc, you’re my hero.
Thirsty, you’ve got a comment delete function on the control panel. I’d suggest you use it. Then go spend some time finding new ways to incorporate “paste” or a variant thereof in each and every sentence you write.
Verc, what does it mean when Thirsty says “paste”? I get the feeling it’s got something to do with that Jerry Fallwell/Larry Flynt dustup some years ago, with Thirsty in the ambulatory role. Of course, that’s just my read.
Nooooo! Really?
How dare we paste-eaters continue to resist an interpretive paradigm of such staggering explanatory power?
geoduck, the comment in question is despicable, but isn’t a threat to rape a child. There’s no reason to appear here claiming it did and casting out some general accusation.
Thersites himself recognizes that the comment could just as easily come from his side. I expect that the rationale is someone was trying to stir the coals etc, a rabble rouser. From nearly the very start of this contretemps over Jeff’s notes there have been a couple of people commenting reasonably on this site, then scurrying back to Thersites site and striking a very different note there. Rabble rousing. You are one of them. You might want to think about that impression of your style before charging in here to show the flag.
In no way, shape, or manner do I condone or dismiss the odious comment but I also took a few moments to read through the comments on Thersites site. A few things strike me as contradictory at the least.
In the latest post, he starts with saying that someone referenced his daughter, then pasted the odious thread comment on his front page. If it were me, I would have deleted the comment and banned the commenter in the original thread. Not left it there and going beyond that reposting it on the front page. His wife went over to Atrios’ site and drew everyone’s attention by posting the url to the comment on metacomments. I understand he is now saying that he does not want anyone making a big deal about it, but has left it on his front page where anyone going there will see it.
What’s wrong with that picture?
The second thing that struck me is Thersites’ presenting this as someone referencing his daughter on the front page. If you read the comments in the thread at issue, it was Thersites who first referenced his own daughter in an heated argument with a commenter. He used her as a comic prop in an imaginary converstion that ended with Thersites reassuring his two year old that she is indeed smarter than the person he was arguing with. That person then went way over the top in the next comment.
Basically, Thersites used his own daughter in a middle school level taunt aimed at an already irate opponent and is appalled at the response. The response went beyond the pale but what a jackass Thersites was to bring a two year old into a blog comment flame war.
Thersites still has his post entitled “Protein Wisdom and Civility”, despite having presented no evidence whatever that the comment in question had anything at all to do with Jeff, or even any of his frequent commentors.
– Then again it would be a nice diverting stratedgy, were you too be getting your ass thouroughly freudenstueka in a debate. Who knows. Whatever the source, its part of blogging unfortunately.
It’s not worth leaving a comment over at the hunch-backed hemisphere’s website, but let the flame wars go on.
I brought it up here specifically because (as I posted at my site) I do *not* think you said it and I do not want a blogfight to develop that involves my kids. So I am stating here and at my place that while my first response was to see red, I am going to interpret the comment as purely mischievous and insane and designed to create a weird sort of trouble. (I have already told several people on my “side†not to make a big deal of this, because I think I may have been trolled.)
1) Thers—I’m sorry I escalated this.
2) My comment was directed to the person who wrote it.
Thanks for the heads up, Slart. I try to avoid his site, so I hadn’t known he’d included me in his post about this.
I left the following comment on his site. For the sake of completeness, I’ll leave it here, too:
Which comment you saw fit to make here including an incendiary morphing of the original comment on Thersites site into a threat to rape a baby. What a piece of work you are, lady.
I forget, how civil is the paste-eater and moron epithets? Hmmm, seems someone needs to pull their lacy panties out of their cracks.
*Cough* Thersites *Cough* Geoduck *Cough, Cough…
It’s striking how similar the course of this ‘debate’ has been to that surrounding the Sokal episode (http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/).
Does any of this sound familiar?
(S.Fish) Professor Sokal’s question should alert us to the improbability of the scenario he conjures up: Scholars with impeccable credentials making statements no sane person could credit. The truth is that none of his targets would ever make such statements.
But of course they did.
(Andrew Ross) “I won’t deny that there is a law of gravity. I would nevertheless argue that there are no laws in nature, there are only laws in society. Laws are things that men and women make, and that they can change.”
And the evasions.
(Fish)
Sociologists of science aren’t trying to do science; they are trying to come up with a rich and powerful explanation of what it means to do it. [ed: ..and then denouncing the scientific community for not employing such critiques in their own work. That’s ‘doing science’].
such as (B.Robbins, A.Ross)But your readers should not be left with the impression that Sokal has caught the editors of Social Text championing a disbelief in the existence of the physical universe [ed: the attack was on their scholarship. Sokal never creditted them with a sincerity of belief]. There is every difference in the world between such nonsense and questioning, as we do, the scientific community’s abuses of authority, its priestly organization and lack of accountability to the public, how it sets its agendas and allocates its resources. [ed: no agenda there!]
and the insinuations..
(Fish)
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, fraud is said to go “beyond error to erode the foundation of trust on which science is built.” .
The scientific community didn’t agree and Sokal hasn’t had to pay for a drink since.
Sokals basic point:(Sokal)
The laws of nature are not social constructions; the universe existed long before we did. Our theories about the laws of nature are social constructions. The goal of science is for the latter to approximate as closely as possible the former.
You’re in good company JG.
just for fun (refresh ‘til tenure).
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo
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Joshu was asked by the head of the monastery to investigate the old woman who ran a tea house down the road from the monastery, because young monks were beaten from her shop with her broom whenever they asked her about her supposedly deep understanding of Zen. Joshu went to the shop, ordered tea, drank it up, paid and returned to the monastery. When asked by the monks what happened, he said, “I investigated the old woman who runs the tea shop.” And he said no more about it.
First strike through joke#FirstTwitterHashTagJoke[…] manuals, for instance, most likely hope to be clear and precise and immediately understood). Conventions provide shortcuts to determining intent, and when intent operates within the bounds of a particular set of adopted […]