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August 25, 2012

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The Nehamas quote sounds very Gadamerian. I don't know what N thinks of G, but for me the challenge that faces such an attitude is one of avoiding conservatism: i.e., figuring out an interpretative standpoint that doesn't amount to "Old Ways = Best Ways." This seems to be a problem besetting holistic theories in general: if the best way to tweak an existing whole is by looking for the smallest change, then you're implicitly endorsing a conservative attitude. William James runs into this problem, and sets the scene for much debate about paradigm-shifts thereafter.

And so my responses are somewhat informed by Peirce and Sellars....

So then there's just the question of what sort of regulative mechanisms for meaning are used. A conservative inclination is not necessarily bad but can't be the be-all and end-all. I can be dazzled by Gilbert Ryle's preposterous account of Plato's life while acknowledging it to be wholly tenuous. So from my perspective an intentional framework need not be any different in the case of literature. Such a framework need not necessarily rely on speculating on the author's thoughts in committing his or her literary speech act (not even what the author DID mean, but what it was POSSIBLE for the author to have meant), but it does provide one regulative mechanism and one that, if attended to carefully, slightly lessens the chance for crap interpretations. Which is to say, interpretations that don't even hang together. For in the end I think the measure of success has to be some level of coherence and explanatory power: that is to say, to what extent does an interpretation allow us to further close the rest of the hermeneutic circle in a satisfactory manner.

Bad interpretations may also play an instrumental role in subsequent writing, as with Hegel on Antigone, but they are still *bad* interpretations (if sometimes fascinating ones) because they cannot be reconciled with everything else I know and understand, say, about life and literature and reading. That is to say, for Hegel's interpretation to be correct would require revising so many of my other interpretations as to alter my intellectual viewpoint radically. Riding & Graves are apparently quite *wrong* on Sonnet 129, as far as I can tell, but I can make use of their observations while still feeling justified in saying that their interpretation is wrong. Such regulative ideals may be contingent, but it doesn't affect my ability to act on them and prescribe them normatively in the same way one prescribes meaning in language. Appeal to "author meaning" is one regulative ideal that has, as with any ideal, its own problems and setbacks.

To put it in a different way, what we compare are not different "meanings" and "intentions" in the conventional sense of the terms, but different practices of reading and discussing literature.

If Nehemas is trying to capture a general principle that he sees to have held sway across different varieties of interpretation in producing "better" interpretations, I think that's fair; one need not hold him to the standard of needing to set out the necessary a posteriori in order to find (or reject) the validity of his strictures. And I don't think a set of such strictures, hypothetically speaking, would have to appeal to author-as-meaner; they just have to appeal to explanatory power and coherence.

And consequently, my answer to your question "But why should I care, in principle, about the writer's intentions?" is sort of banal: one should care for the same reason one would care about the social background in which the book was written, or about the other books that the author had read, or about books that have been influenced by that book, etc. etc.--it's more data, and in a holistic hermeneutic framework all data is good and useful. Such data (any kind of data) is not decisive, but neither is it irrelevant to the task of taking up the text.

E.g., when the clock shows up in Julius Caesar, I think it's fairly natural to wonder as to why such an anachronism might be present from the point of view of the author--is it merely a boo-boo, carelessness, or something else?--and I think it's harder to assess it in the total absence of speculation about the author's motives and intentions.

But why should I care, in principle, about the writer's intentions, or even what it's historically plausible for the writer to have intended? The text is there; I can take it up.

Isn't it important that you're in on the joke? That is, doesn't it matter that all of your commenters, patiently correcting you, are making a mistake?

If Nehemas is trying to capture a general principle that he sees to have held sway across different varieties of interpretation in producing "better" interpretations, I think that's fair; one need not hold him to the standard of needing to set out the necessary a posteriori in order to find (or reject) the validity of his strictures. And I don't think a set of such strictures, hypothetically speaking, would have to appeal to author-as-meaner; they just have to appeal to explanatory power and coherence.

I think Nehamas is trying to capture a general principle that he does see to have held sway in different varieties of interpretation in producing what were seen to be better interpretations—interpretations that take into account, among other things, more of what we know about the text. And what he's doing is fine as an articulation of the values internal to the practice. Nehamas in fact doesn't make the appeal to explanatory power and coherence, and I think that's wise: it opens the door to the question what is to be explained and to what one can appeal in making one's explanations, what things have to cohere with one another, etc. The same question, after all, can be raised about why one would care about the context in which the work was written, what else its author had read, etc. More data, sure. But why is that the data I should take into account?

Suppose Umberto Eco had carried out the project of "My Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination to Reduplication with Ridecolation of a Portrait of the Artist as Alessandro Manzoni" at journal-article or book length, rather than short-essay length, carrying out a close reading of I promessi sposi as if it were Joyce's last, post-Wake work. He would, of course, carefully attend to all the relevant data: the texts of Joyce's other works, and that of I promessi sposi (how interesting to note that Joyce wrote this, his last novel, in Italian and an antiquated style, etc.—the sorts of observations the narrator of "Pierre Menard" makes about Menard's Quixote). We can judge that interpretation on its coherence and its explanatory power: how well does it account for what happens in its object? Are there nasty explanatory danglers? Must it go through hideous contortions? Maybe Eco couldn't pull the project off. But then we could note that the interpretation is labored and leaves much out, calling it bad on those grounds. We could also note that we are pretty certain that I promessi sposi is actually the work of Manzoni and not Joyce and dismiss Eco's interpretation out of hand, but we wouldn't be doing so just on the basis of its incoherence or explanatory impotence—because we can only arrive at those given a prior choice of that with which it's supposed to cohere, and that which it's supposed to explain.

I will admit that if one wishes to offer an interpretation of Manzoni's novel I promessi sposi, it is relevant that the novel is Manzoni's and it seems hard to exclude the knowledge we have of Manzoni and his time and place from making demands on us. But that we must take the object of interpretation to be Manzoni's novel I promessi sposi is precisely what's in dispute. (Even here, though, I'm not sure how to prevent things from reaching all the way out to the writer as meaner in the end, in those cases where we do know what the writer meant. Surely if the fact that (given what we know of linguistic practice at the time) the use of X with the meaning Y was available constitutes relevant data for our interpretive project, the fact that (given what the writer has explicitly said) the writer did mean X with the word Y does as well. And if the reason that the former fact counts as relevant isn't that, since the use of X to mean Y was current at the time and in the place where the writer was writing, the writer could, with this use of X, have meant Y, at least for all we know, then I'm not sure what it might be. (Though of course the claim that the writer could have meant Y doesn't have to amount to the claim that the author could have performed an act of imbuing his use of the word X with the meaning Y. After being upset that Nehamas loses track of the strength of one of the positions he wants to reject, I should have kept the innocuous possibility more clearly in mind.)

Here is, maybe, a concrete example which is not totally off the wall. Basil Bunting included several endnotes to his collected poems, among which was one for Ode 36, which reads: "A friend's misunderstanding obliges me to declare that the implausible optics of this poem are not intended as an argument for the existence of God, but only suggest that the result of a successful work of art is more that [sic] the sum of its meanings and differs from them in kind." So, there you have it. If you want to interpret Bunting's Ode 36, you ought bear in mind that it's not a religious poem (or at least not an argument for the existence of God—I'm not sure how Bunting's friend arrived at that interpretation). But suppose one wishes rather (!) to offer an interpretation of the following:

See! Their verses are laid
as mosaic gold to gold
gold to lapis lazuli
white marble to porphyry
stone shouldering stone, the dice
polished alike, there is
no cement seen and no gap
between stones as the frieze strides
to the impending apse:
the rays of many glories
forced to its focus forming
a glory neither of stone
nor metal, neither of words
nor verses, but of the light
shining upon no substance;
a glory not made
for which all else was made.

Or, if "offer an interpretation" sounds too academic or formal, suppose one reads it and wishes to come to an understanding of what one has read, or found it intriguing or moving or just plain interesting and wishes to think on it, its significance, and how it captured one's attention. Some one might take it to express well what they had often not quite managed to think (until seeing those very words) concerning the divine creation, the divine creator, and (not to forget that the whole thing is a simile whose subject is "verses") the genial artist. That's very sketchy, and I'm not the one to draw it out, but I do believe it could be drawn out. If some other one ("B.") comes along and says "that's not what Bunting meant, you know, he was explicit about that elsewhere" (or "that's not what the poem means, you know, Bunting was explicit about that elsewhere"), I think our first one ("A.") could legitimately reply: "too bad for Bunting"; or, "but the significance I assign the poem is there"; or, "I am not aesthetically incompetent".

Were A. in the game that B. assumes he's in, B.'s comment would be on target. But one can play other games. A. is allowed to approach the poem as a textual artifact and make of it what he will, and it may be that it can be put to many uses. (Suppose I'm using plastic shopping bags to prevent my masa from sticking to my tortilla press. That's not what plastic shopping bags are for, isn't the purpose with which they're made or designed or anything like that. Am I using them wrong? Well, I'd certainly be using them wrong if I were after carrying food around in them but was holding them by the side, rather than the handles. And I'd be using them wrong if I just bunched them up on either side of the tortilla press, rather than smoothing them out (or however you use them; I just read something about this, but it's all the way over there, you know). In the latter case I think I'd be using them wrong only once over, not twice over. After all: they're there. I am not constrained by the purpose given them by their makers.) If we locate a mechanical artifact of another age and want to understand it qua artifact of another age, we'll want to bring in our knowledge of that time period, in order to understand—for instance—what it was for and how it was used. But we can also do another thing: try to figure out what it does here and now, and what we can do with it. It's not obvious to me that one of these has pride of place over the other. (Though sometimes we're left with only the second if we want to approach a text as poetry at all: vide Ern Malley.) (Another example: isn't it possible that some new Pierre Boyard will convince us that a murder mystery misidentifies the culprit? With deeper digging, we see the esoteric killer!)

One kind of position Nehamas, at least, wants to oppose says something like: all our interpretations of a text are creative acts, and none of them can be set above any of the others. I think Nehamas is successful at defusing the idea that if all our encounters with texts are creative/interpretive, no one interpretation can be favored. But there's another kind of position that seems unaddressed: we can go for Nehamas-like author-oriented (even postulated-author-oriented) interpretation, or we can go for this other kind, where we approach the text as raw material—why privilege the first? That's compatible with admitting that if you go with the first, then a whole new field of information becomes relevant. And it's compatible with thinking that in the second, it won't just be anything goes; we'll still have canons of criticism. (Recall Foucault: the alternative is pure romanticism.)

Isn't it important that you're in on the joke? That is, doesn't it matter that all of your commenters, patiently correcting you, are making a mistake?

Not directly relevant as a reply, perhaps, but I do think it's interesting that the people correcting me tended to do so (when they made specific charges) regarding what I think is really the strongest part of the proposed interpretation, and something that (I'm told) some people believe ingenuously. (I've halfway convinced myself to believe it, but I didn't start out ingenuous.) Namely, the interpretation of "they fuck you up". It really is something regarding which I'm inclined to say: but it's there. It works. This is absolutely not the case with, say, the proposed understanding of "misery".

Anyway, yes, it's true that it wouldn't be funny if those people weren't responding to something that they didn't wrongly take to be my ingenuous opinion. But I think that's ok, as long as I can also hold open for them the option of responding to the interpretation without worrying about whether it represents its writer's real opinion.

I feel as if this comment has gone on long enough in terms of words and time taken to compose, so I'm curtailing it here.

Ah, for me there's an implicit appeal to explanatory power and coherence in all of it--that is, the issues that Nehamas seems to be punting on boil down to ones of a holistic fit. And yes indeed, those issues of what's being explained and what coheres are quite tricky, and rightly so. This is the hermeneutic circle we're talking about here, after all!

You ask "Why is that the data I should take into account?" I do not think that this question is answerable without question-begging except by appeal to large-scale fit. I did not mean to say that this data was more significant than other data; what I meant to say is that *all* data is significant. Since we do not have infinite time and patience, we can't treat all the data. Nehamas is offering a heuristic for privileging this data above a lot of the rest. But I don't think he can justify privileging it without appeal to past and current interpretive practices--which is not necessarily a problem, but falls once again into Gadamer-land and its issues.

Likewise and contrariwise, the New Critics set up an ahistorical methodology of reading that can't possibly stand up to an external criticism: they were rigging the game. Some great criticism got produced, sure, but it was under false pretenses, to put it mildly. This unfortunately was only exacerbated by the "Death of the Author" nonsense, which seems terribly silly in retrospect--not because the fundamental point was so wrong-headed but because it was so clearly a revolutionary attack designed to declare a critical Year Zero against past practice. That is to say, since the author IS a critical construct, proclaiming the "death of the author" is just a power-move trying to ban a certain critical practice and declaiming a new orthodoxy. It grates.

And I think that Nehamas, writing in 1981, was probably replying to this sort of a move in his piece (possibly leavened with irritation at the absurd critical practices of Leo Strauss and his brethren), and so his appeal may seem unjustified now because the De Manian orthodoxy is no longer quite so dominant. But reconstructive projects are tricky because a new groundwork must be found, and it seems that Nehamas does not establish such a ground--but given the enormous nature of that task, his statement of a *heuristic* still seems reasonable. "To interpret a text is to place it in a context," he says. But I think it explains the inconsistency you find in the essay.

we can go for Nehamas-like author-oriented (even postulated-author-oriented) interpretation, or we can go for this other kind, where we approach the text as raw material—why privilege the first? That's compatible with admitting that if you go with the first, then a whole new field of information becomes relevant. And it's compatible with thinking that in the second, it won't just be anything goes; we'll still have canons of criticism.

I'd still like to object though to the notion of "raw material," on the grounds that the text is not more "raw" in the absence of biographical material than with it. I am suspicious of the idea of the "textual artifact." When words fall together in enough sense, I think we cannot help but think of them as intention-directed speech acts...that's all we know meaningful language to be!

I think "Deprivileging the historical-biographical" would be a fairer term for the "raw text approach", but rather than making it any more "raw" it brings to the work a different set of conditioning influences--say, for example, the several meanings of the word "fuck," which at least to me seems like a perfectly legitimate interpretive strategy. But I don't see why that would necessarily be incompatible with Nehamas' broad principles even if Larkin himself were to come out and say that it's balderdash. Meaning is communal.

And when I read Empson, to name a favorite, I see him arraying vastly more data, historical and ahistorical, into an orderly cosmos around a text than most critics ever manage. He managed both microinvestigations of Renaissance astronomy's presence in contemporaneous literature as well as a ruthlessly author-defying interpretation of Paradise Lost.

I am suspicious of the idea of the "textual artifact." When words fall together in enough sense, I think we cannot help but think of them as intention-directed speech acts...that's all we know meaningful language to be!

But isn't that (the part that comes after the note of suspicion is sounded) common to all things made by art? Not that we think of meat grinders, neatly planed boards, and hubcaps as speech acts, but we do take them, and would even if we stumbled across one in the wilderness, as the upshots of intentional productions. (That's all we know a hubcap to be, and metal thus-and-so arranged seems to us to be a hubcap or something like it) But it doesn't offend me to take "raw material" in a broader sense than—say—"thing without a purpose" (or "naturally occurring thing", or what have you). 2x4s aren't raw materials to the saw mill, but I'm fine with taking them to be raw material to the carpenter or hobbyist, who is unconstrained by the miller's intentions, except insofar as those intentions have shaped the properties of the board itself, which can be investigated in isolation from its history. Or, since, on the raw–cooked scale, 2x4s are likely blue, take, say, galvanized steel plumbing pipe (rare—you can tell their intended purpose from their name, but they also make good bookshelf infrastructure, or various IKEA products (well done). They're artifacts, and I don't think we can help but see them as artifacts, things that depend for their existence on the intentional activities of an agent.

Of course with a physical object that I recognize as an artifact, I could be entirely in the dark as to its purpose and still be able to have thoughts of the form: "I could use this to …". Though even here I doubt I could get very far into "alternative" uses without having some insight into the construction of the thing—the sort of insight that would provide guidance in forming hypotheses as to its actual purpose. But again: not so dissimilar in the writing case, except that the extreme end of incomprehension (where the best I can do as far as making sense of the possibilities the object affords is: paperweight) is not likely to occur, since that would conflict with my seeing the text as a text and not as marks. I'm really depending on the fact that we just do take texts to be the upshots of intentional linguistic acts (that, absent being capable of being made sense of in that light, something couldn't be taken as a text), despite my use of "raw material": when I quoted the text of Ode 36, after all, I relied on the fact that, in taking it as "raw material", we wouldn't be raising the questions "is it writing, or just marks? is it written in English? Does 'See!' in the first line mean 'See!'?", etc., questions that would be open if treating the text as raw material meant not treating it as a text at all.

The text is not rawer in the absence of biographical information than in its presence, but neither is the plumbing pipe rawer in the absence of plumbing know-how (the sort that would explain the significance of the difference between galvanized and black pipe) than in its presence. The text bzw. pipe hasn't changed.

Add to this the fact that our inability to take a text as anything but intention-directed speech acts says nothing about tethering those speech acts to any particular speaker, even if we happen to know who historically is responsible for this particular text existing. To be sure, that fact might impose restrictions on the interpretations we can come up with: that's why my hypothetical reader of Ode 36 attends to the simile announced in the first line and doesn't just read the poem as being about the divine creation solely. (Or why I strain myself to account for more than just the first six lines of the Larkin.) To pick up a thread from your earlier comment: when I speculate about the author's intentions and motives for the anachronism in Julius Caesar, the author doesn't, so far, have to be the writer. When reading Julius Caesar one is not inexorably driven by consideration of the text to the conclusion that the author lived at such-and-such time, wrote such-and-such else, etc., even though one does, to be reading it at all, have to take it as produced by an authorial hand.

And so …

You ask "Why is that the data I should take into account?" I do not think that this question is answerable without question-begging except by appeal to large-scale fit. I did not mean to say that this data was more significant than other data; what I meant to say is that *all* data is significant.

All data is significant, to which must be conjoined, and it's all data, since my question "why is that the data I have to take into account?" can be rephrased more simply as "why is that data?". Stellar fusion may be a conditio sine qua non for the composition of "This Be the Verse" but it is not, I think, something that any interpretation need consider. (Perhaps I will be surprised by a compelling reading that does mention stellar fusion.) But then there's the question that can't be answered without question-begging except by appeal to something other than large-scale fit, which is, why should I care about large-scale fit? Your interpretation takes both biography and the many senses of "fuck" into account (two things that seem to me not to fit together easily, when the latter is justified by the communality of meaning), whereas mine slights the former. Yours therefore has a better large-scale fit than mine, but I was never interested in the interpretatio omnium ab omnibus anyway: I explicitly forwent biographical fit. If the reason for attending to biographical facts (which include such generic facts as lifespan) is that doing so increases the scale of the fit our interpretations can have with everything else we also hold, it requires establishment that increasing such fit or such power is or should be the goal of all our interpretive activity.

If you want to say that it matters who's speaking—it matters that Bunting, who thought what he thought about Ode 36, wrote Ode 36—because including that information will give my interpretation greater coherence and power, it's a little underwhelming to hear that what it will give my interpretation greater coherence with and power to explain is that information itself. If I then ask why coherence with that information is anything my interpretation of Ode 36 should bother with, invoking coherence or fit again won't move me.

rather than making it any more "raw" it brings to the work a different set of conditioning influences

Freely conceded, but not, I think, a concession of moment. I never meant that the text could be "raw", whatever that might mean, and approaching something as a "raw material" doesn't mean utter freedom, it means being thrown back on yourself (as Sussman analogously learned).

That is to say, since the author IS a critical construct, proclaiming the "death of the author" is just a power-move trying to ban a certain critical practice and declaiming a new orthodoxy. It grates.

I suspect that it is easier to be grated by this at a time when it's possible to write "since the author IS a critical construct…" and move on. Perhaps just a personal reaction on my part—I only read "What is an Author?" (which is much more sober than "The Death of the Author" anyway) in the 2000s, having missed all the to-do that my elders closer to.

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