"Interpretation is and should be an exercise in totalitarianism."

(I've placed the bulk of this post below the fold because I wanted to prevent the automatic trackback from automatically tracking back, but also because I realize that not everyone is as invested in debunking the reductio ad absurdum of my own theoretical position as I am. That said, I wrote most of this last week and have spent the past two days beneath a pile of finals, so I'm not sure what exactly happened over here, only that it became not at all the sort of silly I'd intended. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to grading.)

The title of this post (from this comment by Jeff Goldstein) certainly cuts to the chase; unfortunately, that chase occurs in an Antonioni film, which means you need not buckle up because we are about to slow it down and look at it repeatedly and from all conceivable angles until finally we go outside and watch the grass grow for a change of pace:

The New Critics thought they were democratizing interpretation. Thing is, interpretation is and should be an exercise in totalitarianism.

There are two problems with these sentences: in the first, Goldstein makes the mistake of taking the New Critics at their word, because while they claimed to be democratizing interpretation, the New Critics were, in fact, selling a bill of goods that was valuable only because it conformed to an aesthetic theory that already valued ambiguity, i.e. their own. The problem with the second sentence is, on the one hand, the notion that interpretation should be an exercise in totalitarianism, and on the other, more fundamental mistake that what Goldstein thinks should be the purview of interpretation is, for him, identical to what interpretation is. As we all know, the claim that something should be something differs from the claim that something is something by virtue of wishing really really hard. In short, when Goldstein says that his methodology has "properly described" something, he is attempting to naturalize his claims such that they cease being arguments and become statements. The irony, of course, is that in order to do this he must write posts so long even his most devoted readers only ever skim them, which is a good thing: were they to pay too much attention to the argumentative work required to transform an arguable theory into a mundane declaration of fact, they might begin to wonder why the magician needs to climb the curtains and swing across the stage into a barrel of freezing water just to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

But let me give Goldstein his due: his obscenely strict notion of what constitutes interpretation proper is widely accepted by the very theorists he dismisses when applied to the spoken word.* So, for example, Paul Ricoeur argues that with speech, "the subjective intention of the speaker and the discourse's meaning overlap each other in such a way that it is the same thing to understand what the speaker means and what his discourse means" (Interpretation Theory 29). In short, because the original context suffuses the moment when a statement is initially uttered aloud, the intention of the person who made it can be clearly identified; moreover, if confusion as to that intention exists, it can be immediately clarified within that same context, and therefore all "interpretation" necessarily refers back to that speaker's intent.

When discussing contemporary politics with people on the internet, Goldstein's insistence on interpreting according to the standards of spoken language is an arguable position, so long as we 1) devalue the status of written words made of digital bits and 2) grant that online communication occurs in an environment whose immediacy is equivalent to (or approaches the immediacy of) spoken conversation. Goldstein's never argued that—and even if he did, there are many possible objections, especially concerning the idea that context is as immediate online as it is in life—but if he had, I could see that as a possible basis for thinking his position a sound one.** However, he has never seen fit to distinguish between spoken and written language. If you read through his archives, he consistently conflates the two via the process of signification:

What I’ve argued is that meaning is precisely fixed at the time of signification: when I turn a signifier into a sign, that’s what I meant, and what I meant doesn’t change simply because some epistemological system points out that people can do things with texts that problematize the interpretative procedure, or that, even under the most perfect conditions, one can never really prove that they have properly decoded what I encoded, because there is no final judge to whom one may appeal for just such an assurance.

Even if we grant that an identical process of signification governs both spoken and written language (not to mention its bastard child of stuff written on the internet) and lump them together as occuring at "the scene of utterance," there is still the fact that, as Michaels and Knapp argue in "Against Theory 2" (1987):

[T]he claim that intention cannot govern the scene of utterance seems to us correct. Even if, as we have argued, intention determines meaning, there can be no guarantee that the intended meaning will be understood. To say that the author cannot govern the scene of utterance is only to say that the author cannot enforce communication. (61)

Goldstein's theoretical ought only becomes a practical is, then, when he can "govern the scene of utterance [and] enforce communication," i.e. in a conversation in which instant clarification can appeal to immediate context—which, again, could be a category of conversation to which online discourse belongs (depending, of course, on which parent the bastard resembles more). Note, however, that Goldstein's claim that "interpretation is and should be an exercise in totalitarianism" replaces that possible argument with what amounts to a semantic fiat—and an incoherently Kantian one at that—that requires listeners or readers to place absolute faith in the honesty and integrity of the speaker or author who wields it. The practical result of this is, unsurprisingly, that every time someone claims that Goldstein has written something offensive, he responds that not only has that person misunderstood him, but that, by virtue of semantic fiat, it is impossible for Goldstein to have meant what that person thought he did, because "meaning is precisely fixed at the time of signification" and trust him that wasn't it. But what if you don't?

For example, what if you were William Faulkner writing in Life in March 1956, and you conjectured about what you'd say to the the NAACP and "all the organizations who would compel immediate and unconditional integration" and came up with this:

Go slow now. Stop now for a time, a moment. You have the power [of the federal government] now; you can afford to withhold for a moment the use of it as a force. You have done a good job, you have jolted your opponent off-balance and he is now vulnerable. But stop there for a moment; don't give him the advantage of a chance to cloud the issue by that purely automatic sentimental appeal to the same universal human instinct for automatic sympathy for the underdog simply because he is under. (51-52)

Here is where Goldstein's trouble starts: Faulkner's intent is obvious here, but his motivations are suspect; and because his motivations are suspect, it would be interpretively irresponsible for a reader to give Faulkner the benefit of the doubt. A responsible reader will take that statement, weigh the history of race relations in America against a rhetorical appeal to a "universal instinct for automatic sympathy for the underdog," and infer that Faulkner is either an idiot (and therefore lacks ethos in the strong Aristotelian sense of not providing within a single utterance evidence of intellectual and moral competence) or that he is being disingenuous (and therefore lacks ethos in the strong Aristotelian sense of not providing within a single utterance evidence of intellectual and moral competence). Any attempt on Faulkner's part to "govern the scene of utterance [and] enforce communication" would not merely be, to use Goldstein's term of art, totaliterian—it would be tyrannical.

*For obvious reasons, I'm drawing a lot of material from notes titled michaels.knapp.hermeneutics.may.2002.doc, so I'm relying heavily on Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp for my citations here here.

**He could argue, for example, that hermeneutic theories like Ricoeur's require the language in question to be self-evidently literary, such that the distance between the spoken and written word is only created when what's written down is a special category of language that is never, in fact, spoken. This would account for the difference between The Domesday Book and Chaucer, for example, and there is an argument to be made that this distinction is a valuable one.

Comments

[Luther Blissett]

I suppose I'm a pragmatist on this subject. I don't care what intentions or ideas someone has. What matters are the real effects of one's behaviors.

Hamlet pretends to be mad. He acts mad, but his intentions and ideas are ironic -- he's not really mad. Except that by doing mad things, there is, in effect, no difference between being and seeming mad.

It might seem unfair to hold someone responsible for the effects of language outside of one's intentions. But that's the tragic nature of existence: you cannot control the effects of your actions. You tried to do good by meddling in someone's life, and they stabbed you through the arras. Tough noogie.

That's why, in the Jakobson communication model, meaning is only a small part of the total communicative act. There's what I hope to accomplish through communication -- but 90% of the situation is not determined by my conscious behavior. I can tell people to "Fuck off" even if I don't really mean it -- but I can't complain when they act as if I told them to Fuck off.

[Karl Steel]

This has been said hundreds of times before, BUT: given that language, history, psyche, etc., are not created sui generis by every speaker/writer, intention can never be all there is: we think and act and are in circumstances beyond our control, circumstances that also enable us to think and act and be meaningfully among others. There's more than can be said, sure, but this already muddles intention beyond all recovery for strong intentionalists. We are always already in the deponent mode. Duh.

Except that by doing mad things, there is, in effect, no difference between being and seeming mad.
Except that the play plays with this idea by doubling Hamlet, here as elsewhere. Laertes is Hamlet w/out the philosophical anomie (or thoughtfulness) that keeps Hamlet from revenging his father's death; Ophelia is Hamlet if Hamlet had really been driven mad by his father's death. The difference between being and seeming mad in Hamlet is, precisely, suicide.

[Ahistoricality]

As an historian, I'm pretty much automatically a contextual pragmatist when it comes to interpretation, except that nothing I interpret can be clarified in anything like an immediate exchange. And this is where the 'totalitarian' notion of interpretation -- Goldstein's or Ricouer's -- breaks down for me: even in an active, ongoing conversation, not everything said will be interpreted immediately: status differences, for example, may discourage clarifying intent; the listener may alter their interpretation after further reflection; new evidence may arise that the speaker's real and stated intentions differed; other interpretive authorities may intervene to say "no, only I have the authority to say that and mean it."

It's a presumption of transparency of meaning, of unity of thought and action, which is belied by our experiences every day, and could only be invoked, frankly, in an instrumental fashion, because nobody really lives like that.

[Modulo Myself]

Here is where Goldstein's trouble starts: Faulkner's intent is obvious here, but his motivations are suspect; and because his motivations are suspect, it would be interpretively irresponsible for a reader to give Faulkner the benefit of the doubt.

I always thought it extremely fucking obvious that the five millions words he has devoted to the topic exist to attack the responsible interpretation of right-wing doublespeak and bad faith as such. I mean, he's really into being a bigot who gets to endlessly cry about how unfair it is to be called a bigot, right? It's not very complicated.

[SEK]

I always thought it extremely fucking obvious that the five millions words he has devoted to the topic exist to attack the responsible interpretation of right-wing doublespeak and bad faith as such.

That's sort of why I've kept on him, actually: he's twisting a perfectly defensible theoretical approach---and I would know, as it's mine---into something so dogmatic and inflexible that he either has to 1) attribute conscious motivation to unconscious thought-processes, or 2) claim that the transition from thought to language is transparent and uncomplex. Seriously, take a look at his mode of argumentation:

Similarly, let’s say that Stacy McCain had no racist intent when he wrote the statement under review. Frey, by way of declaring Stacy’s statement racist, is necessarily arguing one of two things: 1) that Stacy failed in his intent to avoid racism, because the statement he produced IS racist; or 2) that the statement was racist because it proceeded from racist intent. In the first instance, to argue this you must believe that a statement can be racist in and of itself, without any racist intent attached to it. And that’s not linguistically possible, because someone has to produce those racist signs. If it isn’t Stacy, then who is responsible for making the statement a “racist” statement? The answer, of course, is those who claim to hear in it racism — those who signify it thus. And Stacy is not responsible for their signification. That is to say, we are no longer dealing with Stacy’s statement at all.

The bit I emphasized burns with stupidity: he creates a false dilemma by ignoring the obvious fact that the codification of non-linguistic thought into language is a not a series of tubes in which dump trucks leave the former and arrive at the latter as they left, but a Mad Max version of the Jersey Turnpike in which you're lucky to locate your destination, much less arrive at it intact. Gah. If I had a half-functioning brain, I'd be all over this.

[happyfeet]

I had a non-linguistic thought once but I couldn't tell you what it was.

[Luther Blissett]

Not to sidetrack this into an argument about *Hamlet*, but . . .

Laertes is a double of Hamlet -- but he's also a sign that, for Shakespeare, it's not simply a conflict between though and action, which, as Margreta de Grazia argues, is not a conflict seen in the play until Coleridge. Sure, Laertes jumps right into action, but that very leap is quickly guided by Claudius and manipulated. So Hamlet's concerns are not meaningfully criticized by the foil of Laertes. And while madness drives Ophelia to suicide, Hamlet is clearly *not* mad when he first contemplates suicide in his first soliloquy. He's simply melancholy, a victim of acedia, etc. He's no more mad than, say, Brutus. Fortinbras is the only character simply to act throughout the play, but despite Hamlet's admiration, I don't think he's held up as a symbol of Renaissance humanity. He's more like a king out of *Beowulf*, destroying others for the sake of personal glory. He becomes King of Denmark, but not because of anything he does. If, in fact, he had acted as he intended (simply to pass through Denmark to Poland), he'd not have won. That's the key irony of this and all tragedies: intentions are meaningless, and words and actions reverberate far beyond one's control.

[Karl Steel]

Luther, okay, and a clever wrapup to that graph.

(and I'll agree that Laertes is Hamlet's double/Ophelia is Hamlet's double/Fortinbras is Hamlet's double, but [complications]: I never made any claims that Hamlet is "simply" anything. As for F., I'd say he's at once a symbol of Renaissance humanity AND a critique of that concept of humanity. I'll leave your reading of Beowulf alone except to say it's mostly not mine.)

And, Scott, yes, the stupid, it burns, for your reasons, for Luther's, for aHistoricality, and, heck, even for Happyfeet's (if we recall that 'thought' and 'intention' are being rethought more corporeally through cognitive science and phenomenology, although I honestly don't see the relevance of that point to this discussion), and for mine, since JG's counterargument about Robert Stacy McCain relies, I guess, on the notion that every utterance needs to be analyzed without regard for historical or social context: intent is conscious in that moment, or it just ain't there.

As for probable intents of RSM, well, even if we bracket everything off and just look IF we look at his "personal" context (suspending for the moment the fact that's no such thing), he's a neo-Confederate and opponent of interracial dating and admired by white supremacists for the latter stance, even while other right-wing writers defend him by arguing, in essence, that antisemitism is impossible when nearly everyone's antisemitic, which I'm sure was greatly comforting to Polish Jews. Sorry to go Godwin, but, you know.

[thor]

I've often wondered why with El Jeffe's slippery slope of intentionalism he begins and ends with de Saussure's signification process, well, outside of making his totalitarian theory-swirl friendly and digestible enough for bug-eyed PW retards. And if you've ever witnessed the fanged pork belly pig he keeps on a leash, speaking of Darleen, a.k.a. Duuh-dar, attempt to chime in alongside Jeff during a language theory debate, you know all too well what I'm talking about.

The way I was taught views of singular intent and the expansion of intent was from comparing Husserl's original phenomenology versus Hirsch's probabilities. If I recall it seems we started out intent with Descartes and Kantian consciousness. Which further discounts totalitarian intent - PW being the perfect example - for when you have one whose Kantian consciousness lacks a singular clue engaging audience that has even less posited between the brackets, you end up with a choking coding/decoding fog on authorial intent. Besides, I'm a Marxist, for I've read Terry Eagleton state that an author's intent is a text in itself which can be translated and debated like any other.

Speaking of consciousness and horseshit, if you follow SEK's link to PW you'll find Jeff linking to RSM at post #176. Read the end of RSM's unearthly excuse-larded piece, if you can.

"There are people who are, we might say, unconscious Marxists. They have been schooled in a particular worldview, taught to view the world through a prism of oppression, exploitation and alienation.

Baptized by immersion in such beliefs (which are nowadays widely promulgated in our educational institutions) these people are incapable of thinking outside the schematic system of categories that has been instilled in their minds. Confronted with a phenomenon that does not fit their schema -- e.g., a poor person who opposes socialism, a lesbian who rejects the dogma of the gay-rights movement -- these people must either ignore the obtrusive phenomenon, rationalize it, or attack and destroy it.

These unconscious Marxists are everywhere, including in the comment fields of conservative blogs. Wise men should not allow such ignorant trolls to go unrebuked."

Here the sad little man soils the white bed sheets he wears on his head. It takes no genius to extend his logic and announce that Robert Stacy McCain is so thoroughly schooled in a racist worldview that he's an unconscious racist. And he should be rebuked!

[thor]

engaging an audience

[P.T. Smith]

I had a non-linguistic thought once but I couldn't tell you what it was.

Am I the only one who really likes HappyFeet sometimes?

[Fritz]

Speaking as a political scientist (whose main field of study is something entirely different), while all of this is very interesting (and I have to admit that I'm a little bit at sea), it bears almost no resembelance to how we, that is, political scientists, think about socialziation or public opinion.

And since the latest iteration of this discussion (at least between JeffG and Patterico) began with a conversation about how Rush Limbaugh's statement "I hope he fails" would effect Republicans' electoral chances, I'm beginning to wonder, what is the cash value of all of this?

[Richard Pennyfarthing]

We live in a really dumb society, so dumb things are really important, Fritz.

[SEK]

Am I the only one who really likes HappyFeet sometimes?

No.

And since the latest iteration of this discussion (at least between JeffG and Patterico) began with a conversation about how Rush Limbaugh's statement "I hope he fails" would effect Republicans' electoral chances, I'm beginning to wonder, what is the cash value of all of this?

Um, they pay me to teach, and they pay in cash, therefore ... I'm at a loss. As I noted in the first bit, my only dog in this hunt is the fact that my own interpretive model is closer to Goldstein's than Frey's, at least until Jeff starts describing it in self-interested terms. What I mean is: Jeff's whole theoretical construct isn't a theory of how language works, it's a theory of how, to use his term, Jeff can be a linguistic totalitarian. If someone accepts his theory and Jeff decides that you intended a statement to mean X, because that was your intent, and because if it wasn't, you were speaking in language, then Jeff is always correct both about what he said and what he says you said.

In short, he's playing the part of the earnest, beleaguered, but wholly unselfconscious sophist. His theories work logically, yes, but they only work logically, so once you're dealing with actual human speakers and speech, it ceases to be applicable.

(I need to get back to grading, so let me note this for later: in linguistic terms, Jeff's a prescriptivist who sells himself as a descriptivist. I'll expound on that shortly, then respond to the other comments.)

[Richard Pennyfarthing]

"In short, he's playing the part of the earnest, beleaguered, but wholly unselfconscious sophist. "

It's a rare thing for someone to become an embarrassment to their religion, political party, academic discipline and fighting style in a single day, but I believe Jeff has done it.

[Paul T. Lazaro]

"That is not what I meant to say at all..."

Jeff Alfred Prufrock

[McWyrm]

Just out of curiosity - I'm almost completely unschooled in such matters but ...

Regarding the intention of speakers and the possibility of clarification, why is simple competence or basic fallibility never discussed? I can quite easily say things that I don't mean - in spoken and particularly in written language - by the simple act of mis-speaking. I don't see how intention rectifies this.

Is this just a trivial case that doesn't bare consideration? This is a sincere, if possibly ignorant, question.

[Fritz]

in linguistic terms, Jeff's a prescriptivist who sells himself as a descriptivist. I'll expound on that shortly, then respond to the other comments.

While the Patterico/JeffG battle has devolved into bitter recrimination and ever more hysterical accusations, some of us are still waiting for the promised expounding.