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Friday, April 27, 2007
Meaning and Intention
I’m writing - as I have been for a very long time - about meaning and intention and literary interpretation. I’ve just finished a section in which I discuss E.D. Hirsch at some length. Now Validity In Interpretation (1967) is a bit dusty. No more so than Of Grammatology (1967), in absolute temporal terms. And no one think Derrida isn’t ‘contemporary’ any more. I talk about Knapp and Michaels, “Against Theory” (1982), of course. That’s more current, but still a quarter of a century old. It strikes me that a surprising number of the works I am citing are quite old - except for the works by more or less ‘analytic’ philosophers I am citing, which are more current. A book I read and liked a few years ago is Reed Way Dasenbrock, Truth and Consequences (2000), in which the author argues that 1) discussion of a these issues, within literary studies, has come to a somewhat curious standstill. That is, reading stuff about meaning and intention that is a quarter century old doesn’t really put you behind the curve. 2) Literary theorists have borrowed from ‘analytic’ philosophy, but their borrowings are about 30 years out of date. So we get a great deal of How To Do Things With Words but not a lot of more recent work. Dasenbrock is a Davidson booster, so I’m very well inclined towards him, without seeing that he has actually made much that is exciting out of the Davidson he has appropriated, admittedly. It does seem to me generally true that when literary theorists borrow from analytic philosophy they tend to borrow the old stuff, and to be unfamiliar with the new. (Badiou is not really a literary theorist, of course, but he exemplifies this sort of behind-the-curviness. He has a certain cachet in literary studies at the moment. So I don’t see that things are exactly getting better.) Another example is Rorty. As I’ve said before, I think the most exciting Rorty since Mirror of Nature is Rorty and His Critics (2000). Rorty is locked in all these interesting debates with Davidson, McDowell, Brandom, others. And literary theorists keep citing Rorty. But they don’t seem to be bothering to keep up with Rorty, frankly.
Looking at the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, I find: surely enough, Hirsch, Derrida, Knapp and Michaels, Austin - the usual suspects. Here we have an anthology published in 2001, about literary theory, but it’s discussion of meaning and intention stops around 1982. (Not that you couldn’t think you had good reason to give up on approaches in those terms. Still, since I don’t think they should be given up, it’s rather notable to me.)
So this sets the stage for my question: what am I missing? Some of the contributors to Theory’s Empire actually crop up: Paisley Livingston, for example. I’m settling down to give his Art and Intention (2005) a look [click for an NDPR revew]. I would be gratified to learn that my impression that the field is a bit dead is just an illusion of the star system. That is, figures like Derrida and Fish loom large because there was a period in which figures became celebrities. Now they aren’t making stars any more, for whatever complex sociological reasons. But they might be making perfectly respectable, interesting articles on meaning and intention, socked away where I’m not seeing them somewhere. (Honestly, I’m not really a literature hound. I’m rather slovenly at doing complete literature surveys. Please correct my impression, if it needs correcting.)
UPDATE: Before someone misunderstands me, my request is somewhat ambiguous. I am looking for members of that nebulous, canon-ish class of ‘things that you’ll look like a fool if you don’t cite’, and am bemused to come up rather dry post early 80’s. (About the time the Fixx released Reach the Beach.) And I am also looking for interesting things to read. It’s not that I’m unaware that there are plenty of articles out there. Most of them aren’t very interesting, probably. And few seem to have attained canon-ish status, as have Hirsch, Fish, Knapp and Michaels, Austin, Derrida et. al.
Comments
Couple of things.
1. Maybe the era of superstars is over...there could be more diffusion.
2. Maybe theory in lit crit has moved beyond the local discipline to people in STS or anthro or sociology.
3. Actor-network-theorists? Especially Latour, but also people like Star, Strathern, Callon, Law, and now a broader list there as well?
4. Redone treatment of people like Goffman and Garfinkel? Appadurai? Theoretical historians like Cronon?
5. Maybe the new intellectualism in lit crit is unboxing the article into less tortured chunks of blog rather than heavyweight pages that lumber along carrying lists of citations to people and work that no one really cares about?
I’d go for 5 (which is a restatement of 1).
Perhaps at that time “impacted theory” was attained. “Impacted theory” is intellectual ice-nine—it changes liquid thought everywhere into solid, stable thought. It’s what Aquinas and Nietzsche attained during the last “batshit crazy” stages of their careers.
This is obviously just a provisional explanation, and further study is required. I don’t have time to mess with this kind of thing myself; I’m just generously slopping you guys pearl.
John, I’d be interested in trading works-in-progress next month. I’m doing something consciously anachronistic (by lit theory standards) on Hawthorne, racism, and responsibility in my first and second chapters. Let me know if you’re interested--you can see previews at CitizenSE....
John I’m more slovenly than you no doubt but my impression is that your impression is correct - for whatever reason, there are no recent set-pieces in that nebulous canonish category. For my purposes the interesting work which follows on from the 1980s debates is not so much on literary topics as such, but happening in the little enclave of film studies which concerns itself with validity (truth or rhetoric) in interpretation. Stanley Cavell, Noel Carroll, George Toles, Raymond Bellour, Victor Perkins, those kinds of people.
I’d be very interested to hear if you come up with anything more appropriate.
I’m sorry, no one is more slovenly than me....
Oh. I’m not “John” around here.
This may not be what you are looking for (and it really is on the cusp of the time period you mention), but Gadamer’s essay Hermeneutics and Logocentrism touches, quite interestingly, on these topics. In it Gadamer discusses the role of hermeneutics in textuality and opposes it to deconstruction. I don’t know if it is canonical for lit crit types, but maybe it should be.
Nehamas came to Stanford to give a talk about his new book in January and at lunch he said that he found much analytic philosophy discussion of interpretation and intention unsubtle and unsophisticated (I can’t remember exactly what he said, but I don’t think he’d object to that characterization) compared to what was going on in the literary or art-historical worlds.
He didn’t, alas, mention anyone whom he found particularly interesting or insightful, at least not in that regard.
My thesis on the relative lack would be that the relative abundance is less a property of the cited or canonised thinkers and texts than a function of a disciplinary assumption that has itself since been identified, diagnosed and displaced (or should that be “repressed”?).
In other words, a great many of those canonical books and/or theorists that were regularly held up as grand treatises on meaning and intention weren’t really all that much about meaning and intention. Or rather, they became books about meaning and intention by way of their incorporation within literary studies (albeit, not only lit. studies) as “theories” of meaning and intention. Certainly that’s how I’d characterise the Grammatology (as some of us are now painfully aware).
So, John, I’d like to give you some suggestions on post-80s quasi-stars and canon-ish books on meaning and intention, but all I can offer are some sources you might find interesting.
Horst Ruthrof (1997) Semantics and the Body: Meaning from Frege to the Postmodern. U of Toronto P and Melbourne UP.
Horst Ruthrof (2000) The Body in Language. Cassell.
The first of those two, in particular, will be right up your alley, I suspect, John. Fabulously erudite and in touch with many, many key philosophers of lnaguage, etc. And if you’re at all interested in pursuing some ultimate “theory of meaning”, then I can’t recommend strongly enough Ruthrof’s Body in Language.
Another argument you might (or might not) like to read, partly because it’s much more directly concerned with the question of literary interpretation and partly because it’s from a quasi-star, is this one:
Michael Berube “There is Nothing Inside the Text, or, Why No One’s Heard of Wolfgang Iser.” Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise, edited by Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham. SUNY 2004 pp. 11-26.
Believe it or not, I’d never even heard of Berube until about a year ago, and I certainly knew very little about him when I read that paper. S’quite interesting, though.
Thanks for the suggestions. This is useful. (I’ve been meaning to get hold of that Olson book on Fish for a while, Rob. Somehow our library doesn’t have it, and I keep forgetting to get them to order it.)
Ben, I agree with Nehamas that analytic writers tend to be - well, usually they are utterly - lacking in practical critical sensitivity. This is a problem, although sometimes it’s just mostly harmless. But I wonder what he was happy about. Did he mean literary theory about interpretation and intention, when he said that? Or did he just mean it’s easy enough to find practical critics who handle these matters delicately enough, in practice (but perhaps if you asked them how they knew how to write so well about art, they wouldn’t give you anything very theoretically satisfactory.) Not to get all Plato about the artists and their inspired ways. But it is true that most practical critics negotiate interpretation and intention competently enough, but most of them probably couldn’t say anything unconfused about sticky, tricky philosophical issues hereabouts. That’s just how it goes.
Also: constructivist, please feel free to drop me a line about your stuff. An exchange might be a very good thing.
If I am “the constructivist” (and I’ve been called worse) my work is at the URL listed on the comments. Please stop by. It entails buying into what is called actor-network-theory (ANT) which is sort of blend of deep environmentalism mixed with deep skepticism about point of view in anthropology. Said another way, it is Said-like in trying to destroy categories that enforce points of view (e.g. genres).
I was trained some years ago as an analytical philosopher and I, too, agree with Nehamas, but for different reasons, I’d guess. Though I think “subtle” is code for “I know better...listen to my blather...I’m at Princeton...(etc.)” Such code words are rarely articulated...even subtly. Overall, that sort of thing used to make me angry; now it just makes me despair.
More recently, I’ve spent my time trying to figure out what the point of any of it is. I read some fiction but more poets, and increasingly, more multimedia and video stuff--the very content the MLA tells us we don’t know how to judge--suggesting at least to me that we do know how to judge something else… I like to find literature in social science, but that is rather challenging.
I don’t know enough to read the right poets nor to have a theory of what they are up to. I am suspicious of those who do.
What I would suggest would be fruitful for your publication is futurizing. I think trying to discern where art can go and why can be helpful for the light it sheds on questions of what is creativity versus innovation, for example.
Criticism seems too willing to look backward without much historical sensitivity. By that I mean people aren’t trained to understand the sociology of time very well. But it could be worse. The writing here is pretty and that’s mostly why I read it. Pretty writing is such an anachronism but like pretty paintings, it is soothing. It is nice to see people try to make utterances without strong theories. That is very ANT-like.
John, the Berube piece rob mentioned should be available at his blog; I know I downloaded it a year or so ago.
But it is true that most practical critics negotiate interpretation and intention competently enough, but most of them probably couldn’t say anything unconfused about sticky, tricky philosophical issues hereabouts. That’s just how it goes.
Yes. That’s how it goes. The practical critic is interested in what statements to make about texts and how one justifies those statements. Intentional argumentation places constraints on what statements you can make and has you justify those statements with evidence about authorial intention. The most obvious sort of evidence would be statements the author makes about what they were trying to accomplish in a given text, but less direct evidence can be and certainly has been invoked. It is one thing to reason about such evidence, it is quite a different matter to reason about intention-in-itself.
Being able to use intentional evidence very skillfully is quite different from knowing how to justify any use of such evidence at all—or, alternatively, knowing how to argue that such evidence is irrelevant. The practical critic needs to have a lot of experience with literary texts, statements about them, statements by and about authors, etc. None of that is a requirement for framing subtle philosophical arguments about intention.
Bill, I checked Berube’s blog before I posted, but couldn’t see it…
John, line coming when I get into the office, but for a preview you can read these posts from the bottom (oldest) up (newest)....
I suspect that Robert Brandom’s “Making It Explicit” will be the next crossover hit from philosophy to lit theory.