Re: text and links some might like to see

First, Robbie and John O., thank you for the discussion of aporia.
Entertaining and engaging.

> I don't disagree that the distance is there today. It certainly is, much to
> my dismay, and, I dare say, to our society's misfortune. My assertion is
> that the distance is artificial and problematic, and that good scientists
> are not precluded from philosophy merely by a commitment to science (and
> that you yourself and not precluded from Newton or Einstein, or any other,
> merely by your commitments, so long as you're up for a tough read). -- robbie.
>

Oh, I'm not trying to say philosophy and science are completely
disconnected, but that science as a discipline tends to have narrow
philosophical preferences. This is a huge generalization, of course
("to generalize is to be an idiot" -- Blake), but my experience has
pretty consistently borne it out. By "materialism" I mean that the
sciences tend to look for physical causes for physical effects, and by
"empiricism" I meant that they tend to value observation as the source
of data.

> Whether or not he [Hegel] could make it today and be taken seriously, I do believe
> that he could certainly make it today and be right. And that's what I'm
> seeing as important, here.
>

To my knowledge, Hegel relied upon his Logic to lend scientific validity
to his work, and the different things I've read about Hegel's logic
declare it to be, in large part, a monstrous failure (and this from
people sympathetic to Hegel). But I've only read around a little bit
and haven't read the Logic itself.

This isn't to say he isn't to be taken seriously for a number of
reasons, but probably not as someone who developed a "science" in any
meaningful sense of the word.

> It seems to me that undermining the stability of language is far
> more threatening to the humanities than the sciences. I suppose that one
> might argue that it would be something of a scandal to scientists of
> language (like Chomsky), but even they are concerned with the mechanics and
> biology of language, grammar and how the brain makes it, while complex
> literary meanings aren't really the issue.
>

Oh, no, I'd disagree here. Science requires a stable vocabulary for it
to do its job. Some of the humanities thrive on instability here.
Some.

> Unless the denial of
> accessibility of authorial intent includes a denial of the literal meanings
> of simple declarative sentences (the hint of which might suggest something
> of why it has been so vehemently opposed, but I'm not at all sure that such
> a denial is a part of the claim made by you or John O.), it shouldn't
> threaten scientific linguists.
>

Many people would assert that the denial of authorial intent as the
ground of textual meaning is indeed a denial of the literal meanings of
simple declarative sentences, but you're right, I'm not asserting that.
I don't think John O. is either.

> I don't think that anybody has claimed that he was the primary or original
> source. He is the big name attached to the idea, though, which makes him
> relevant to the issue and an appropriate target for the idea's opponents.
>

I can see that, and Matt K. said something to that effect, but Derrida's
handling of "the author" is very, very different from, say, Wimsatt and
Beardsley's (who defined the "intentional fallacy"). Lumping everyone
into the same category obscures meaningful differences.

> What difference does it make? Usually, I expect, somewhere between very
> little and none at all. One difference is that it makes the standard of
> textual support not at all or by any means arbitrary.
>

Take your time replying in full, by the way. That's never an issue.
But I'd like to look at the above sentences, and these below:

> Another difference that it makes is that it gives a solid basis upon which
> we can reject certain readings. If they weren't available at the
> construction of the text, they aren't valid. You might (even rightly, I
> suppose) deny the value of this, but it does seem to me to have a powerful
> and important appeal which I hope to explore a bit in my later post.
>

What you seem to be doing in these sentences is working toward a theory
of reading that grounds textual meaning in specific historical
circumstances. C.S. Lewis, for example, said Tolkein couldn't have
possibly been referring to nuclear weapons in The Lord of the Rings
Trilogy (some have argued that the "one ring" was a symbol for nukes)
because they didn't exist when Tolkein was writing the trilogy.

This is a good example of excluding readings based upon historical
context via, in this case, appeal to authorial intent.

I would also like to say when I first got introduced to hermeneutics as
a discipline, I was taught that authorial intent was the ground of
textual meaning, and that to get to it, you need to study the author's
life, the author's text (in its original language), and the author's
culture and history. This isn't an unreasonable methodology.

What I discovered was that I didn't really need reference to the author
at all to do this kind of criticism -- beyond setting the work in a
specific time and place, identifying a specific audience. Once I've
done that, the method works on its own. I found that appeals to
authorial intent was just a misdirected way of grounding literary texts
in specific social and cultural histories. There's the personal element
as well -- what the text meant to the "author" personally -- but it's
quite often the case we have no way of getting any closer to the author
than his/her historical circumstances. What do we know of Shakespeare
personally, for example, that would tell us how to read MacBeth or
Richard II?

Furthermore, why is textual meaning limited to these narrow historical
circumstances? Most people who've seen or read Shakespeare's plays have
nothing but the vaguest notions about his culture and history -- even if
they've taken college courses in Shakespeare. Does that mean they don't
"get it?" Or, more precisely, are they "not getting it at all" if they
"don't get it the way Shakespeare and his first audiences got it?"
(which probably wasn't quite homogeneous either).

Let me offer a suggestion.

A "text" is:

a space created between an author and a reader in which "meaning" in
some sense resides.

The shape of the space and its content are dependent upon both author
and reader -- they stand at opposite poles, like poles of a magnet or
like separate gravitational fields -- and distort the space by their
interactions with it.

This doesn't mean the space doesn't have boundaries. It does. It can't
mean just anything. But that it means slightly different things
depending upon whose at each end.

What we usually mean by "valid readings" are the shapes of this space as
created by our most intelligent, perceptive readers, and not by people
like the man who thought Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum was written
about the man's first cousin -- whom Eco never met.

Jim

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Received on Sat Mar 8 19:42:52 2003