Re: text and links some might like to see

Robbie --

I agree that historically, taking a view over the last 600 (or 2500 for
that matter) years, science is one of the humanities. Honestly, I like
your emphasis here. I wish more people thought like you (myself
included). I would say that today, now, in universities as they exist
now, in the culture we actually live in and work in and think in,
science and the humanities, for the most part, exist at completely
opposite poles ideologically, methodologically, and philosphically.
Just 150-200 years ago Hegel could claim his philosophy proceeded on a
"scientific" basis. Today, I don't think he could make that claim and
be taken seriously.

That's where I'm coming from. The rejection of Derrida by the
philosophers you quoted is predictable -- not necessarily because of
"bigotry" in the worst sense of the word, but because of their prior
commitments -- which reflect the prior commitments of someone working
within the same philosophical paradigms that science at large works
within. Empiricism, materialism, and logocentrism with regard to
language.

Those who claim Derrida as the primary source for the rejection of
authorial intent as the ground of textual meaning are simply ignorant of
the history of literary theory. Given John O's response to mine and
Matt K's recent dialog about this, I'm thinking they're probably
ignorant of Derrida too.

In response to your asking for a definition of deconstruction, I think
we need to keep in mind that there are at least two. First, there's the
definition Derrida developed in his philosophy. Then there's a
definition which does make it out to be a method, a method that
generally seeks to demonstrate how texts contain within themselves the
contradiction of what they seem to be asserting on a surface read. It's
not that critics deconstruct texts, but demonstrate how texts
deconstruct themselves.

I may as well respond to this too. In your first response to John O,
you said:

> It seems to me that a reader who believes that the author's intent governs
> all interpretation could do just as you do: offer several "possibilities,"
> suggesting that they are more or less probably correct on the basis of
> textual support, but always and out of principle maintaining a final
> ignorance.
>

If you admit that we pretty much always maintain a "final ignorance"
about authorial intent, then what good does it do to make reference to
it? What difference does it make -- specifically and methodologically --
to assert that this forever hidden and never known authorial intent is
really the ground of textual meaning?

Please pay extra close attention to what I put in boldface above. See,
if you assert that we can never know, with finality, what authorial
intent is, then the only possible difference reference to it can make is
methodological.

Note that the first people to describe the "intentional fallacy" did not
by any means believe texts could mean anything the readers wanted them
to mean. They believed the language itself communicated pretty
effectively apart from any external textual referent such as the author,
history, culture, etc., and that quite often there was only one correct
reading of a text.

Jim

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Received on Sat Mar 8 10:50:34 2003