Ep. 189: Authorial Intent (Barthes, Foucault, Beardsley, et al) (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: Pay attention to what's in front of you. That's the main lesson I'm getting out of this. I think maybe we should get in some quotes from Barthes and Foucault to see why we're bothering to read those guys. Wes, you were saying before that they were responding, or at least Foucault was responding, to the New Criticism, to Wimsatt and Beardsley, but they're still on the same side of the debate in terms of should we pay attention to what the author meant to say, or should we just look at the work itself and not worry about the biography and getting into imagining we could get in the author's head? So they're on the same side of that, but yet Barthes and Foucault are. I mean, definitely, they're rhetorically moving somewhere. They're more dramatic, talking about the death of the author. But what else is going on here? Wes, you seem to have some idea of the movement between them.

0:48 Wes: So Foucault is actually just in a certain part where he's talking about the work. That's where I think he's referring to the New Critics, But I don't know. Do we want to start with Barthes? So he starts out with this line from Balzac about who speaks when he gives an example of a character saying something, and then he asks, who's speaking? Is it the protagonist? Is it Balzac's personal experience? Is it Balzac's creative imagination or his theory of femininity? Or is it him channeling universal wisdom or a certain kind of psychology? And the conclusion is that we can't know when we're talking about literature, we're talking about an actual invention of a voice with an origin that we can specify.

And then he'll go on to talk about something we talked about a bit before, which is the use of playful language and the way that the symbolic function kind of comes to rule there, the ways in which the absence, what he calls the absence of the author, transforms the text, and then what that means for interpretation.

1:49 Mark: Here's a quote to illustrate that first point that you make. All writing is itself this special voice consisting of several indiscernible voices. And that literature is precisely the invention of this voice to which we cannot assign a specific origin. Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique, into which every subject escapes the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes. So this is what I thought reminded me of Phaedrus, which I did not review for that podcast that we had on this, but that Plato, in that dialogue, was saying there's something more honest and direct about speaking, because once writing happens, it's like there's something that's.

Well, he would maybe describe it as dead, but, you know, we talked about it, I think, at the. Even at the time, how Derrida was one guy who turned that around. No, no, writing is. Is essential. Well, that's. This is the tradition that Derrida is in.

2:40 Seth: Yeah. It's not dead. It's that you hand it over when you perform a speech act, when you make a performative statement, and it's verbal and it's your voice in the present. Right. Because spoken word is only temporally. It's only available in the present. It's only something it doesn't. It's not recorded. Unless, of course, it is recorded. But you get what I mean. Whereas something you commit to writing, it's something you're handing over. It's a gift, it's a transmission. And when you make that transmission, you hand over the writing, then in a certain sense, you. I'm not saying completely, but you divorce yourself from the same connection that you have with the speech act.

3:23 Dylan: Are you saying that that's different qualitatively from a recorded speech?

3:30 Seth: Well, no. That's an interesting thing. I mean, obviously, these lines get blurred, Dylan. But the idea that if you give a speech and it's recorded and, you know, it's being recorded for posterity, it's similar to writing a text. You know, you're being documented, and that what you say is not just going to be consumed by the immediate audience that you're facing, but also will be potentially proliferated into many audiences, unforeseeable audiences, unforeseeable interpretive contexts. And at that point, whatever it is that the author or the speaker intends, the interpretive context gets transcended.

And at a certain point, you have to say, I believe that the intention of the author in the moment, in that point of time, with that mode of transmission, with that communication of experience, with the recognition that the author himself or herself may not have complete access to all of the intention, that that cannot be an authoritative guidepost by which you interpret what it is that's being said or written.

4:36 Dylan: I agree with that. What I find frustrating, and part of it is a little bit in these two, and then in just what you said, Seth, is that in making the claim, it feels like it's denying that there is any intention or any craft that has happened and that that is somehow relevant to the Interpretation, I mean, Barthes basically goes that far. In fact, Barthes says that in the end, it's not even the act of writing that matters, it's the act of reading, right? That everyone is a spectator.

5:07 Mark: Get rid of works and just read things that are written on rocks.

5:13 Seth: No, I'm sympathetic to that, but for me, Dylan, it's more about the prioritization of authorial intent versus completely saying it's irrelevant. I wouldn't go that far.

5:23 Wes: So I think the word intent gets complicated in this particular essay because. So we know he's doing the post structuralist thing, right? Just very close to structuralism. And the stuff that we did with Lacan, if you recall from Lacan, the idea is that the linguistic signifiers never sort of represent a semantic content. It's always just another signifier. It's as if we're getting the dictionary out and we're saying, okay, a bachelor's an unmarried man, but then I have to define man in terms of other words. It's just words, words, words all the way down.

So at some point, Barthes quotes Mallarme to the effect that it's language which speaks, not the author. And being I is just saying I. This is all post structuralist stuff. So I think that's the basic idea here. There's an impersonality. The idea is that there's something impersonal which functions through us. And that impersonal thing is language. And to a certain extent, culture by way of language, that's what speaks. Not a specific personality, not a specific author, but that. And that's, by the way, the post structuralist version of the unconscious.

So when we were talking about the unconscious before, this is just their roundabout way of talking about that.

6:40 Dylan: Barthes says, from Mallarmé. As for us, it is language which speaks, not the author. To write is to reach through a pre existing impersonality, never to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realistic novelist. That point where language alone acts, performs, and not oneself.

7:00 Mark: Is this specific to writing? Because the way that Wes just described it, it sounds like even if you are speaking in real time, it's still language itself because you're using language. It is, in a sense, language itself that's speaking. Whereas I think Barthes is pointing specifically is following that path set down by Plato. That's common at the post-structuralists in saying there is something distinct between speaking and writing. It is the fact that it's out in the world, that it's deep, personal, that the experience of reading something is very different. It's Even in the experience of listening to a recorded speech, listening to a podcast, there's something about writing itself that causes the death of the author in a dramatic way.

7:41 Dylan: I feel like it just goes so way too far. To say to write is to reach through pre existing impersonality. That point where language alone acts, performs and not oneself. I hardly even know what that means. I mean, it's just so idealized. But go ahead, please explain.

8:00 Wes: It's like letting go when you play guitar, right? And the scale speaks through you. Or suppose you're getting playful with language. You're impassioned and you're inspired and you're just automatic writing and whatever comes into your head is flowing out onto the page and it's so fluid you don't know what you're doing next. You're almost an observer of what you're doing. And so the idea here is that language as a structure, it's almost this sort of like parasite which is, that's probably a bad metaphor, but anyway it just does its own thing. It functions within you without you being the author of it.

And so also just think about this one more thing. When you formulate your intentions, when you formulate your thoughts, they sort of just flow out of the void, right? It's not like you have a pre existing plan, pre linguistic plan of what's going to come out linguistically. You find out as you talk, or as you say or as you speak. In other words, at some level, because we are biological beings, we're machines, the production of language looks a lot like the poem on the beach from Knapp.

9:09 Dylan: So all of that seems true, but it doesn't seem to be true in the sense that it's the language speaking. It seems to be again an activity of your soul, your context, all the things going on around you, the structure, the that you're thinking in, because you're thinking in the structure of language and that that is constraining and acting as a boundary upon you, all focused in a nexus through you. And the experience of observing yourself doing it, just like whether it be playing completely absorbed in a guitar solo or in having there being zero distance between yourself and the keyboard and your writing a story, or you're playing a basketball game and being in the zone and you're doing things that you, you're not thinking about them in the sense that you are rationally intending them.

You are pure action, you're purely acting. And to me the interpretation that that somehow some transcendent structure of the universe acting through you is at best not preferential. No different than the idea that you in your nexus, are acting out in that context of the universe.

10:24 Mark: And I have to think that that's not actually what Barthes means. Because the way you just phrased that, Dylan sounds exactly like the romantic ideal. Right. Nobody says, oh, that Beethoven superego and conscious intention was so genius. No, they actually point to Beethoven as being the conduit, for the heavens are speaking through him. What a wonderful conduit. And that's actually part of what makes him as an individual, great. It's not the fact that he has conscious control and is exerting a tyranny over the notes or something. That would make him a Salieri. That would make him a hack, I

11:01 Wes: suppose even something as simple as it pops into my head, oh, I should call so and so tonight.

11:07 Seth: All right.

11:07 Wes: In what sense am I the author of that sentence? In my relation to other people? I'm the author if I speak it. But it's not something that I have consciously manufactured. It occurred. It appeared in my stream of consciousness, and it was not a product of my will. I think that's really important. That's the sense in which something impersonal acts through us. And so you could call the impersonal our unconscious, our impulses, or you could call it language itself.

11:38 Dylan: So I agree that it's impersonal.

11:39 Unknown speaker: Right.

11:40 Dylan: But to say it's like language itself is just so romantic, so overly romantic. Language itself doesn't exist. It only exists through us. Right. Through our activity.

11:53 Wes: Well, language as a social system, as a system of norms, at certain levels

11:58 Mark: of abstraction, language exists by itself. But, yes, no, in the concrete, it does not.

12:06 Dylan: I'd be completely down with the idea that language is a sort of super manifestation of many, many individuals that has an existence outside of an individual.

12:18 Seth: Right?

12:19 Wes: Yes. Think of it as something that inhabits you.

12:21 Mark: Right.

12:21 Wes: If you had been born in France, you'd be speaking French.

12:24 Dylan: Yeah, that's what I mean by context.

12:26 Wes: So, yeah. But it's in some important sense, it's outside of you and speaking through you because it's a sort of form, it's a kind of functionality that's inhabited you through cultural influences.

12:38 Dylan: So maybe it's a failure of our language itself that, you know, the distinction between it inhabiting me and me inhabiting it, when it seems like it's really. That they're happening at the same time, that the manifestation of language is really maybe a communal manifestation that extends through time and space, that individual people are nodes in that and that they're Participating in it as well as being participators in it. That all makes sense to me, but in the way we're talking about, seems to prefer one or the other. When it's like saying that I'm a molecule and I'm in the water and the water is me.

13:16 Mark: I feel like both of these essays I would call political hermeneutics. That it's taking the same data, Right? So you could describe the person who's doing the great guitar solo and is being so unselfconscious about it. You could describe them both as completely person, less that they've attained some Zen, like, impersonal thing, or they're being the most pure expression of them as a person. And it's exactly the same thing. It's just a matter of what word you want to put on it. Well, why would you want to put particular words here? Well, because these guys, in actually much the same way as the new criticism that we already talked about, but more dramatically, want to get rid of the tyranny of the author's interpretation as being the authoritative one, and they want to give it back to the critics, to the readers, by emphasizing the multivalence of meaning, that even if you're using that symbol or whatever, well, you're just participating as the writer, as the speaker, even.

You're participating in this social thing of language and a network not just of dictionary meanings, but of connotations that goes across the entire field of culture, really. And so when you utter something, there's so much more packed into it than what you might have intended on any level. And so the thing that is in the world, especially if it's not just listening to your voice and it becomes a weird abstraction to say, well, it's your voice versus the speech. I mean, obviously there is that distinction because there are actors, there are people that read other people's speeches all the time.

Time. So we're familiar with that distinction. But it's even more. Phenomenologically, it's more obvious in writing that there's something that seems autonomous there, just in that it has many meanings, and I can go in and explore them and kind of am not entirely free to pick any meanings. There are restraints, but the restraints are put on me by language itself and not by what you intended this particular phrase to mean in writing it.

15:14 Dylan: I'm trying to think about, you know, because I'm having a stronger reaction than I expected. I really found both the Barthes and the Foucault as being. I want to go along with it up to a point, and then I just feel like it just goes too far. And this is why I liked the Knapp and Michaels, because the way they summarize it is saying that someone like Barthes or Foucault, they end up committing the same mistake that other kinds of interpretation do, which is to try to find an external way to interpret it so that you can have a kind of gold plated analysis.

So in the Barthes, when he goes in about the reader, so at the end he says, the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology. He is only that someone who holds, gathered into a single field all the paths which the text is constituted. And that in the end, you have writing as being performative, but even more so, reading is performative. So the act of reading is what constitutes a living text. And there's part of that that I really find makes a lot of sense. But in trying to understand my own reaction is this notion that there isn't an intention, that in the performance of the writing that matters.

Maybe it's just offending my sense of individual action, right. That the obliteration of the author seems like an obliteration of individual consciousness altogether, which maybe that's what just bugs me. I don't know.

16:46 Mark: Page four, just to kind of get at what. What is he trying to actually accomplish here, Barthes? Yeah, the absence of the author With Brecht, we might speak here of a real alienation. The author, diminishing like a tiny figure at the far end of the literary stage, is not only a historical fact or an act of writing. It utterly transforms the modern text, or what is the same thing. The text is henceforth written and read, so that in it, on every level, the author absents himself. Time, first of all, is no longer the same. The author, when we believe in him, is always conceived as part of his own book.

The book and the author take their places of their own accord. On the same line, cast as a before and an after. The author is supposed to feed the book. That is, he pre exists it thinks, suffers, lives for it maintains with his work the same relation of antecedents a father maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer, a scriptor, is born simultaneously with his text. He is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing. He is in no way the subject of which his book is predicate. There is no other time than that of the utterance.

And every text is eternally written here and now. That's something I don't think we've conveyed in the discussion so far what the meaning of that is. And I'm not really clear what the meaning of that is. So.

17:56 Dylan: Well, read the next sentence because it's supposed to say what he means.

18:01 Mark: This is because or it follows that to write can no longer designate an operation of recording, of observing, of representing, of painting, as the classical writers put it, but rather what the linguisticians following the vocabulary of the Oxford School, call a performative, a rare verbal form exclusively given. Anyway, he says what a performative is. I didn't think that was a clarification. I thought he was relating it to something else. But why did you think that actually cleared up what he meant by the first half?

18:28 Wes: Yeah, I'm not sure that he knows.

18:30 Dylan: Well, I thought he was making the distinction between that in the old way the act of writing was as he says, recording, observing or representing. But now in the new authors, the modern writer, that's not what the activity is, it's a performative action. Writing is performative and later on, like I said, he turns it into actually the author is dead because they do that performance, they've died. And so then the only performance that is left is the act of reading.

19:02 Mark: So it's really difficult. This essay he refers to all these other writers as he's going as having exemplified part of his thesis and. And we're not familiar. I'm not familiar with pretty much any of them. And I know he has something very definite in mind when he hear. When he's talking about modern writers versus old writers and when I think of somebody like John Irving who writes very well researched novels that you know they're fictional. He has a point. It's not just recording something that happened, but it's also, you know, what it's like to work in a winery or whatever the thing he happens to be writing about.

I have to think that Barthes would think that that is an old fashioned way of writing, that he's not engaging in the performative in the way. Whereas I picture a Dadaist or, you know, I'm just not familiar enough with Proust. Well, yeah, I've never read more than a page of Proust. So what does he actually have in mind? What's a good example that our audience might be familiar with from American or just something that's in English or very famous that we can point to that would actually. Oh yeah, I can see how that's not merely reporting even it's reporting on a fictional situation, but it's a here and now action.

Like, I just picture kind of surrealist, you know, William S. Burroughs or something like that.

20:18 Dylan: I was thinking of stream of consciousness stuff, like Virginia Woolf stuff.

20:23 Mark: But now, I don't know. I feel like that was kind of a fad, like. Sure, but he. Barthes really thinks that, no, this is the direction of history. We are now in the modern era, and henceforth, you know, it wasn't just a flash in the pan-60s thing, but now we should be feeling that all over ourselves. I mean, is this essay obsolete? Seth, what did you think of this essay?

20:45 Seth: I like the Barthes essay quite a bit. The sentences run on a little long. And you're right, there's a lot of references to Charlus, who imitates Montesquiou, but Montesquiou and his anecdotal historical reality is merely a secondary fragment derived from Charlus. I think the point of this very short essay is essentially, it's like. It's. The question is, what is the act of criticism? What is the act of interpretation? And where does that situate the interpreter and the author and so forth? And he's reacting only to the idea that the author is somehow the framework in which the work needs to be interpreted.

And more importantly, the author's intention sets a standard of truth by which your interpretation is to be measured. So there's the question of authority, all intention with respect to the success or failure of the work to achieve the goal of the author. That's one truth condition, right? The second truth condition is the question of the interpretation. And maybe these are the same things. I'm not 100% sure about that yet. But the idea that the interpretation of the work is somehow guided by the authorial intention as well. And so you might successfully interpret what the author intended, in which case the truth conditions for your interpretation have been achieved.

22:15 Wes: So can I interject here?

22:17 Seth: Yeah, please do.

22:18 Wes: Because he's anti interpretation on page five, he says, once the author is gone, the claim to decipher a text has become quite useless. And he goes on basically, in this paragraph, this is another sort of. So he even mentions New Criticism directly. And he's saying that traditionally critics have treated deciphering the text as discovering the author. And I reject that. But I also reject New Criticism. Let's overthrow that as well. Because I'm not saying that we should just now turn to the text and interpret it without reference to the author.

I'm saying there is no underlying ground. So this is the way he ends it, by refusing to assign to the text and to the world as a Text, a secret that is in ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter, theological, properly revolutionary. For to refuse to arrest meaning is to finally to refuse God and its hypostases, reason, science, the law. And then above that, he says there is no underlying ground. So this is where I part ways. I tend to be more of a new critic. So this is where I think it goes too far.

23:25 Seth: My read of this is that in Barthes's view, the role of authority, intention is similar to. It's the anchor concept. So it's God or the will of God in certain other contexts. Or it's the notion that there's some sort of foundational element that structures the whole way in which you interact with the text and establishes a truth condition about whether or not you're right or wrong. And that what he's trying to say is essentially that the idea that authorial intention can function in such a way that it establishes truth conditions for the text is what's offensive about it. That's it. And that to say, the death of the author, the death of the absolute, anchoring, teleological, foundational, first mover kind of truth in favor of the openness of the interpretive framework is to me not a terrible thing.

24:23 Wes: So, yeah, I just think he goes farther in the sense that he's saying there is no secret ultimate meaning to a text. And whether we make our standard authorial intent or the text itself doesn't matter. Neither of those things are ways to decipher an ultimate meaning.

24:41 Mark: But does he go farther than that and say that the whole process of interpretation is useless? I had originally read him as. Yeah, interpretation as we would interpret a theological text and figure out what the author God meant. That kind of interpretation we don't like. But what his new, new criticism would be an open ended, multivalent, more creative act. So he's still okay with that? He still wants to do that.

25:06 Wes: He says the true locus of writing is not the author, but reading and the reader. So the reader is the one inscribed with the tissue of citations. The unity of the text is in the destination, the reader as a destination, not in the author as source. So here's a quote. He is only that someone who holds, gathered in a single field, all the paths of which the text is constituted. It's not that interpretation is futile, but you're not aiming at a ultimate meaning and the reader has the primacy.

25:37 Dylan: I suspect we just don't get in Barthes the answer to the question of how we judge between different readings that doesn't seem to be part of the question that he's worrying about. He's worrying more about looking for one single meaning, undermining that rather than worrying about once we've given up on there being only one meaning, how do we talk about interpretations or meanings being better than others?

26:02 Mark: So this is just from the Wikipedia article on Barthes, which I read just to get a sense of where this fits in his overall career that he, the way he talked about it is writing is a. Constitutes a multidimensional space. He uses that phrase here. It cannot be deciphered, it can only be disentangled. So earlier in this paragraph that Wes was quoting from, he says it has revealed the whole being of writing. A text consists of multiple writings issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation.

But there's one place where this multiplicities connect. And then he says he picks out the reader. That's what these paths are. And again, if you look at this as that whenever you're using language, it's a quilt of citations. So you're stealing from all this other stuff and all these connotations are sticking to every word you say. And that is the multi dimensional space that you could disentangle. So there is something still for critics to do. I think critics still should learn about, if they're interpreting Aristophanes, should learn about the conventions of ancient Greek theater and about Aristophanes, other plays and things like that to help disentangle some of the various threads.

So you could really still make it much clearer for a reader not what the correct interpretation is, but give them, you could open hermeneutic avenues for them to explore. And from that it does seem to follow that while he might not be like, oh, well, that is just a bad interpretation, he might rule that out. But I still think he's not a complete relativist about it. Like they're definitely going to be. If you're aware of what the tissue of citations is, you could be more or less skilled at disentangling these things. And that's what criticism would end up doing.

Not necessarily to condemn a work. I'm not clear about that. Whether he allows that or not, you know, does everything equal quality, I don't know.

27:49 Wes: I think it's important also to point out that, and I don't know what Barth thinks of this, but it was something that was occurring to me a lot reading all of these readings, is that the writer is also an interpreter and a reader. And so even thinking of the formation of an intention, I think for an intention really to be an intention, it has to be propositional. And in a way, we have to have read that proposition to ourselves. We have had to have interpreted it even to have an intention. And in this case, if you think about just the way writing works, you alternate between these moments of something where it feels impersonal in the sense that just something is coming out.

But then I'm reading it and thinking about it and responding to it. So it's this constant feedback loop of a dialogue between an author as this, if you want to say, this impersonal author in Barthes's sense, and then the writer as the reader who does personalize it in a way, in my view, by responding to it. So I may start, I may open up my Word document, and just some limerick I heard earlier in the day comes out. Something that's just purely part of the. Or just a phrase that someone said to me. It's not even my own. It's just part of the tissue of citations surrounding me.

But then I respond to that, and it's really something about the interpretive reader part of writing that I think makes it personal.

29:13 Mark: So can we say then how Foucault, who gives a similarly dramatic presentation, what he's adding to this picture. Right. He's also talking about creating a space where the writing subject constantly disappears. Writing unfolds like a game that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits, which I'm not sure what actually, that. What did you think of that last quote? What does that even mean? It invariably beyond. Goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. I mean, I can only interpret that in the way that we, you know, back in our Santayana episode, that you might, you know, have some predetermined knowledge of, like what quality art is. But it's the very nature of art that all rules like that have to be post hoc. Yes. You can look at what made Mozart symphonies great or what makes T.S. eliot's poems great and come up with some rules.

30:00 Wes: Well, it always goes beyond the literal, I think is what that means.

30:05 Mark: Okay, but that's not. It goes beyond its own rules.

30:09 Wes: So its own rules are. Here are signifiers. They refer to things. And if I'm going to communicate, I communicate literally. I think. I think in the strictest sense, that's the rule of language. But when I'm inevitably though what I'm doing is metaphorical. And of course, in poems, that's the preeminent Example of that. So if I'm saying. Let me just give an example. So Keats Endymion. Thing of beauty is a joy forever. Its loveliness increases. It will never pass into nothingness, but still will keep a bower quiet for us and a sleep full of sweet dreams.

So the point. Where do we get into the metaphor of the bower? And then he's talking about a flowery band that binds to bind us to the earth. Once we get into the metaphorical, I think we are breaking the rules. Once we get playful with language, the normal rule is that we just try and communicate what we want and we need and tell people what they should do. And we're governed by appetite, we're governed by practical concerns. Once we get impractical and we get playful with language, we're rule breakers. I think that was my take on that.

31:09 Mark: You know, I should have read the context to that. I just. I had pulled out that particular phrase, but I think within the paragraph, he's clearly actually talking about, again, the style of today. Just like Barthes was talking about modern writing versus old writing. Foucault says, first of all, we can say that today's writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression, referring only to itself, but without being restricted to the confines of its interiority. Writing is identified with its own unfolded exteriority. That means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier.

Writing unfolds like a game that invariably. Yeah, it has that quote in writing. The point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language. It is rather a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears. I could see a lot of fans of analytic philosophy really just like, let's just move on. This is not even worth our time to freaking. Seth, what'd you think about this?

32:05 Seth: All right, look. So what Foucault says is, this is a quote from page two. None of this is recent. Criticism and philosophy took note of the disappearance or death of the author some time ago, but the consequences of their discovery of it have not been sufficiently examined, nor has its import been accurately measured. So you say the author's dead. We talk about the notion of the work. It's a familiar thesis that the task of criticism is not to bring out the work's relationship with the author, but rather to analyze the work through its structure, architecture, etc.

At this point, however, a problem arises. What is a work what is the curious unity which we designated a word? What elements is it comprised? Is it not what an author has written? Right? And he starts to go in and say, so if you look at the work, and then you look at the notes in the margins, right, that were written, and then interviews at the time that reflect on. How do you make the distinction between what constitutes the work itself and the quote, unquote, commentary on the work or.

33:16 Wes: Not just that, but what constitutes investigation into authorial intent through the private notes of the. He's taking a poke at the new critics here. So how do you. When the new critics say, just pay attention to the work, what's the work? I can think Dylan kind of made this criticism before as well, too. Why is it just the poem that's the work and not also the margin notes and not also the drafts and not also the diary entries? Why isn't that the work?

33:41 Mark: Because the author intended it to be the word. No, no, we can't talk about intention, right?

33:46 Seth: And then he ties that to the notion of the author, right? And it says, okay, well, where do we stop looking at what the author had to say about the work? Do you read everything? Do you take the notebooks, the unpublished stuff, the letters to other people, the deleted passages? Right. I mean, where do you draw the line?

34:08 Mark: The grocery lists?

34:10 Seth: And so I think he's saying that there's a double challenge here in trying to address this problem. One is in determining the limits of what it is. You know, when we talk about poems, we seem to think we have a sense of, like, okay, the poem is what was published. It's this couplet, or it's this dithyramb, or it's, you know, this limerick, as you've been referencing earlier. But if we find that the author had notebooks where there are 17 previous drafts of the limerick with different things, crossed out, what have you. Then we run into this challenge where it's like, oh, shit.

I have to deal with the authorial intention that's embedded in the evolution, maybe linear, maybe not, of these iterations on this poem. And then also the notion that these things very well might be considered an extension of that text, of the poem itself. There's nothing that strikes me as terribly controversial about what he's saying.

35:10 Dylan: Isn't part of the problem? Is there just often and maybe always isn't just one interpretation that is defensible and then going alongside it is that what you're interpreting depends upon the scope of that interpretation. So arguably, you're interpreting something different when you interpret include the 75 previous drafts of the work when you do that interpretation. And maybe you're interpreting something different when you include all of the personal context of the author or all of the personal context of the reader. And part of the strength or weakness of the interpretation is going to have to do with the way in which those pieces come together. And so the judgment of that interpretation is going to probably have a lot to do with the integrity of the interpretation itself as an act in putting together the. Let's just call it the analysis of it.

36:12 Mark: So is this just a gesture toward holism to say that interpreters artificially isolate elements and actually, I'm using words that sound very much like the Knapp and Michaels. So maybe this. We can make this eventually a transition, so we can talk about that before we get out of here. But that even in Foucault here, we're talking about that the traditional views and even these more advanced views, new criticism of what interpretation is, make certain oversimplifying assumptions about, you know, you have a subject here, and it's contemplating the work, which was back in time, written by an author.

And those are abstractions. And we need to be, you know, so I'm kind of pointing toward what, a William James or, you know, John Dewey, sort of. We need to take a more holistic approach that just recognizes that these are abstractions and that we could create the abstractions in different ways. We could call the work a different thing. We could call. And so actually, what Foucault is getting toward here is considering the author not as a human being, but as a way of categorizing texts.

37:16 Wes: Exactly.

37:16 Mark: This is the real point of the essay. This is the real innovation here. That's not in Barthes at all, that if you say this is an Aristotelian text or this is a Homeric text. I mean, it's interesting to actually know if we could, whether it was one person wrote the Odyssey in the Iliad and wrote all the different parts of it, like, whether there actually was a Homer. But just the fact that we have inherited, like, this is a Homeric text. These are Aristotelian texts. Those give those texts a certain status, a certain categorization. And that is sociologically interesting.

37:48 Dylan: And in fact, you could have a live essay on how Aristotelian Aristotle was himself, right?

37:56 Wes: Yeah.

37:56 Dylan: Like how Nietzschean is Nietzsche.

37:59 Wes: So Mark, with this, he's pointing away to a new sort of interpretation. But, yeah, I think this is the meat of the essay. Basically, the name of the author is just, you know, Shakespeare is just, well, writer of those plays. And then what if he wrote the Organon as well? Well, that would be. Shakespeare's away is just a way of pinning those things down. He appeals to Russell's theory of definite descriptions to get to that, by the way. So then he discusses what he calls the implications for an approach to a typology of discourse, which I see as implications for interpretation.

And he says it's basically it's time to study discourses, not only in terms of their expressive value or formal transformations, but he's getting there at the Romantic and the New Critical, respectively, but according to their modes of existence. So he's offering a third way beyond the intentionalist and the non intentionalist, and this third way according to their modes of existence. I mean, then it gets kind of

38:57 Mark: opaque, right after what you said. What are these modes of existence? The modes of circulation, valorization, attribution and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture, are modified within each. He's interested in sociology and ultimately the politics of this. Like, why do we revere Aristotle? Is the idea of a canon oppressing us in some way? It's issues like that, political issues, I think he's ultimately concerned with.

39:19 Wes: Well, there's a paragraph towards the end which kind of sums it all up. He says all discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur. So this is if we can get rid of what he calls the author function, the sense in which there this constraining figure which tells us what to read, what not to read, what category it falls into, and all that stuff. So in this sort of situation where we've gotten rid of the author function, all discourses, whatever their status, form, volume, whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur.

We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long. Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse? Instead, there would be other questions like these. These questions I really don't actually understand exactly. But what are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used? How can it circulate? And who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects who can assume these various subject functions?

And behind all these questions we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference. What difference does it make? Who is speaking? Do any of you guys know what that means exactly?

40:41 Mark: These sound like ideological questions to me.

40:44 Dylan: I don't know if I'd go so far as to say they're ideological questions. The ones that he says, they seem to be explication questions where interpretation becomes less about trying to say, what does the text really mean? And more a continual activity of explication of its possible meanings. When you ask a question, what are the modes of existence of this discourse? It's an explication question.

41:11 Mark: But it's not just, again, explication, not just the meaning, but, like, what function is it socially serving? So what modes of existence it has, it exists as propaganda. Where has it been used? How can it circulate? Who can appropriate it for himself? This is all about, you know, white people being happy white people. So the non white people are not allowed to appropriate for that. Like, this has actually been influential. This is a lot of the way that criticism takes place now.

41:39 Wes: It has unfortunately been very influential.

41:43 Mark: But I think we saw that already in our Adorno and Horkheimer, like, talking about Alfred Hitchcock as the auteur behind his movies. That's kind of falls in line with the romantic great man theory. But those guys wanted to look at it in terms of, no, he's just channeling things from the culture. And by creating this, it's actually his performative act, at least on one very legitimate, very salient interpretation is, say, enforcing the status quo or something like that. And his status as author puts it in that category of, oh, these are the movies you have to see.

And you could talk about what having that ideology floating out there does. Not necessarily attributing it nefariously to the government trying to tamp us down. But this is Foucault we're talking about. He's super sensitive about all the ways in which people and systems exert power on individuals. So for sure he has that in mind. I would guess so.

42:44 Wes: Let me give you an example. I'm looking at PhD dissertation abstracts for Boston University. The Poetics of Charity and Relief. The Problem of Poverty and Aid to the Poor in the development of the early Romantic lyric. This is what we're talking about, the last paragraph of Foucault.

43:01 Mark: Well, didn't we just have that in Homer in the episode we just had on the Odyssey? And we actually appreciated the fact that Emily Wilson wrote about the roles of women and we talked about the ideology and whether we actually agree with it. And, you know, it seemed like a legitimate way into talking about the text,

43:21 Wes: defining absence, reading female silence in English literature, 1580-1640. These are, I think, examples of exactly this last part. I have a lot of objections to this sort of looking at literature through the lens of a political agenda for the establishment of justice. I have to say my sympathies are with the New Critics. I see that sort of thing as sort of a decimation of the whole practice of criticism.

43:51 Mark: But haven't I interpreting those questions in that way and getting you all pissed off about these things that are being written out? Haven't I pigeonholed his meaning? Isn't the fact that his essay is just suggestive of future projects and future directions where you could go? I think it's meant to be polysemus, one of the words he uses, such that it's not just the Adorno Horkheimer project. That is one of the things that could come out of here, but there are many, many other ones that maybe you would love much more.

44:27 Wes: You guys know how I feel about all that. There's no point. The identity aspect, the identity focus, I think, is an unfortunate turn, and that's what this represents. It's a turn away from the author's personal identity, but to identity in terms of group identity. That's the way I would look at this Foucault thing.

44:47 Mark: Well, so what is the response? The Knapp and Michaels article against Theory is condemning all of these roundly in a way that actually displays a lot of affection for the original starting point that all these guys are rejecting. They just insist right up front the meaning of a text is identical with the author's intention. Where do they actually say that?

45:13 Wes: This is page 724. PDF page 3. But once it is seen that the meaning of a text is simply identical to the author's intended meaning, the project of grounding meaning and intention becomes incoherent.

45:26 Mark: Yeah. So think about that. And that's kind of just thrown out there. And then he just goes through a lot of different authors and show how none of them get this basic truth. But I think it's a really hard truth. It's hard to acknowledge that it's a truth. It's hard to understand. The meaning of a text is simply identical to the author's intended meaning.

45:45 Wes: I can try and give you my explanation of this because I spent a lot of time trying to understand this. I think it was extremely difficult to understand, and I think it's. The essay is extremely confused, but here's what I think they're saying. So they agree with Hirsch. The meaning of a text simply is identical to the author's intended meaning. But then they spend a lot of time criticizing Hirsch and those like him because of the way they interpret Hirsch's position is they think that Hirsch endorses this idea that there can be meaning in abstracto before you've interpreted it.

So an expression will have a meaning in abstracto before you've actually interpreted it according to authorial intent. So this is like an ontology where we say, okay, here's this. Here's something written in the sand, and I want to find out the true meaning of it. But up till then, it's ambiguous, but the ambiguity corresponds to a sort of an actual meaning. It's an actual, like, entity in a way. And that my interpretive goal, my interpretive function is to sprinkle some authorial intent on that and make it grow into the correct meaning. But before and after, there is this entity, this meaning entity corresponding to the expression of the text, and it's transformed by the addition of authorial intent by the interpreter.

So it seems an absurd thing to attribute to anyone. I don't think Hirsch believes that, because I think Hirsch is saying the same thing as him. Yes, the meaning of the text just is authorial intent. It's not that the ambiguous expression that we have this preliminary meaning for it, but it's just we don't know. We don't know what the authorial intent is exactly. So we don't know what the meaning of the text is necessarily in the beginning until we've done some interpretation. And that's an epistemological predicament. That's not ontological in the way that these guys are claiming.

It's epistemological in the sense that, yes, we agree with you about the identity, but we just don't know what it is, and we need to get more information in order to say what that meaning, authorial intention is.

47:56 Mark: So, Dylan, you were very attracted to this essay. Can you tell us more about why and what you took this basic phrase to mean?

48:02 Dylan: So what I liked about the essay is, and I'll say that I found my own enthusiasm a little qualified, especially in talking about it. Well, here's one quote on page 726. The speaker intends to speak, otherwise we wouldn't be interpreting. So I guess I take really seriously that an act of writing or an act of speaking is an act, and it's an act that's done with intention. There may be qualifications of that. And the way we were talking earlier about that, there's something like what we want to call intentionless action. And when we say that, my inclination is to want to expand the understanding of what we mean by intention.

48:44 Mark: Intentionless speech acts not just intentionless action. Right.

48:48 Dylan: Fair enough. My heart is beating without my intention. I can take that. That's fine. I understand that. That's the part that resonated with me a lot with Knapp and Michaels, is that, you know, the act of writing and the act of creating art is an act that is performed by a person, an entity, and in some sense, that's what gives it its status as. As art, as opposed to just being a bunch of stuff out there.

49:15 Wes: Why don't you give their beach. Their beach. Example 7, 27.

49:18 Dylan: They give this example of a poem that appears on a beach. So suppose you're walking along a beach and you come upon a curious sequence of squiggles in the sand. And you step back a few paces, and it comes out with the following. A slumber did my spirit seal. I had no human fears. She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years. And then you would say, well, this seems to be a good case of intentionless meaning. You recognize as writing is writing. You understand what the words mean. You may even identify them as constituting a rhymed poetic stanza.

All of this without knowing anything about the author and indeed without needing to connect the words to any notion of an author at all. You can do all that stuff without thinking about anyone's intention. But now suppose that as you're gazing upon the pattern of the sand, a wave washes away and recedes, leaving in its wake the following. No motion has she now no force she neither hears nor sees, Rolled round in earth's diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees. And you might ask whether the question of intention still seems irrelevant, as it did seconds before.

What you end up doing is you end up attributing intention like something made that act. And you want to know, is the sea alive? Or striving to express some pantheistic faith, was Wordsworth speaking from death through the waves, periodically inscribing into the sand these sentiments? And you can go on with a whole bunch of explanations, but you aren't going to come away with saying that it was just an accident when he

50:49 Mark: says, if you do decide that it might be an accident, then you have to say that those actually aren't words. They merely resemble words. I think that's the theoretical.

50:57 Dylan: Yeah. So then they go on to say, yeah, that if you do say it's an accident, then it's they're not words anymore.

51:03 Wes: This example gets us into quite complicated territory. And of course, there are philosophers who are on the intentionalist side with regard to meaning, and those who are not, including later, Wittgenstein. The whole idea of meaning as use is meant to get us away from this idea. The meaning of something being basically the expression of something in a particular person's head. So it's not that intention isn't relevant. We would have to refer back at least to a language game which supervenes on beings who have intentions, beings who are language users, intentional language users.

It's less clear to me that we need a specific intentional author for those words. So for Wittgenstein, right, what makes something meaningful is just its possible use in a language game. And so again, the interpreter here becomes really important. So those expressions that wash up are legitimate moves within the language game because

52:02 Dylan: of the moves of the reader.

52:03 Unknown speaker: Right.

52:03 Dylan: This dovetails with what Barthes was saying, right? It's the reader that matters, not the writer.

52:08 Mark: Can I just give a variation off this? Just because I think this thing with the rock is just really going to be confusing for people. I think it would be easier to talk about these programs that we have right now that put together words and they know something. You know, you can encode them with syntax so they actually put together sentences. Let's just say that we've set up an experiment where we have somebody just goes up to a computer and the program puts a sentence in front of them. Well, some of the time that sentence is going to make some sense.

It's not going to be a full poem. We already encoded it. So it's going to make syntactic sense. So maybe it'll make semantic sense. And according to this article, if it makes semantic sense, then you attribute intentionality. Well, certainly that's psychologically true. If I tell you actually, no, actually it's just a computer. It's not somebody chatting with you from the other side. A certain randomness, and you just happen to be lucky enough to get a sense of that made sense. Most people who look at the program actually don't even get that. Well, then you would understand.

When you see something that's meaningful, you attribute it intentionality. That's fine. But he's going to say, because it was actually produced by something that is not intentional, then actually it is not language. It merely looks like language. And that just seems wrong.

53:22 Wes: Here are some thought experiments which I kind of went through as I was trying to understand all of this. Suppose instead it's just a picture of George Washington on your muffin. And someone says to you, well, that's not really. In all these cases I'm going to give you, it's all random accident, right? There's no person behind any of this. And someone comes up to you and says, oh, that's not really a picture of George Washington. That would be kind of odd to say because there was no person who intended to do the picture. Or suppose it's a chess puzzle that sort of the wind etches into an outcropping or something and it's like white to mate and four moves and you look at the puzzle and you do the puzzle and it's a real puzzle and you solve it and someone comes up to you and says, oh, that's not really a chess puzzle because it was just a random accident.

And the final thought experiment. What if a hammer washes up and it's like a well crafted, looks exactly like a human being made it and you start hammering with it and someone comes up to you and says, you know that's not really a hammer, right? Because someone didn't make that. It wasn't a person who made that. It just naturally occurred in all these cases. I was thinking of Wittgenstein because again, for Wittgenstein, what it means for a word to mean something is to have certain rules for when it's basically to represent a set of possible moves according to whatever rules.

So it's like the chess piece, like a king. What makes a king a king is just the fact that you can do these certain things with it. Or hammer, hammer. Just the fact that you could actually do hammer things with the hammer. You think of the words as actually a tool and to the extent that they can be used in the language game, they have meaning. I'm agnostic on all this. I don't know how to think this through, in all honesty. And I spent a lot of time trying to.

55:08 Mark: So I was trying to compare this in my head to John Searle, who's mentioned in this article, to his epistemological views. Remember, he kind of dismisses all of epistemology, the epistemological project. And we saw actually a version of this in Rorty when we got to that. But as John Searles was a direct realist and thought that you don't have sense data that you perceive and then make an inference from the sense data to the thing behind the sense data. No, you just perceive the object. And so similarly here Knapp and Michaels are saying when you Figure out the meaning of a sentence.

What you are figuring out is what the person intended in saying the sentence. There is no intermediate step. There is no, I'm figuring out something that resembles the meaning that was in the person's head. But then, you know, the person had something in their head and then they expressed it as a meaning. Like, I think that's what's. And Wes, you pointed this out earlier that you were saying an intention would have to actually be us reading a sentence or something like that. Like it has to be externalized in some way. And I think this is exactly what they're saying here is that you actually don't have, before you create an artwork, a detailed plan in your head.

You might have some, you know, you have an intention. I'm going to create an artwork. You might say, I'm going to create a limerick. You might have actually some quite detailed notes worked out. But until you actually write the sentence down, that is the first line of your poem. And you don't have that particular intention in your head. So the act of writing it is actually the act of coming up with the meaning. And again, that's the same thing. I tried to give the analogy earlier of Mozart wrote everything in his head and then he put it on paper.

Well, even coming up with it in his head, if it really is in its head as a fully blown thing. And so, yeah, you could, before you write the actual first line of your poem, you could think it aloud in your head. But it's that creation, that creative mind moment, coming up with the meaning, coming up with the artwork. That is the thing that if you. Then you write it down and somebody looks at it and they figure out what you mean, they're actually getting at that very same meaning that was in your head, or, you know, that was exemplified through the writing.

There is no extra entities involved of these mental entities of your interpretation. And then there's the meaning itself, and then there's the intention in the person's head. This is all just proliferation of unnecessary of mental entities.

57:34 Wes: On page PDF, page 5, page 726, I think, is a pretty critical paragraph to try to understand how he's criticizing Hirsch. This argument seems consistent with Hirsch's equation of meaning and intended meaning, until one realizes that Hirsch is imagining a moment of interpretation before intention is present. This is the moment at which the text's meaning remains indeterminate before such indeterminacy is cleared up by the addition of authorial intention. But if meaning and intention really are inseparable, then it makes no sense to think of intention as an ingredient that needs to be added.

It must be present from the start. The issue of determinacy or indeterminacy is irrelevant. Hirsch thinks it's relevant because he thinks, correctly, that the movement from indeterminacy to determinacy involves the addition of information. But he also thinks, incorrectly, that adding information amounts to adding intention, since intention is already present. The only thing added in the movement from indeterminacy to determinacy is information about the intention and not the intention itself. I think Hirsch would say, well, of course I'm adding information about the intention.

I'm not adding some ontological entity intentionally to meaning, an abstracto entity. This is what makes no sense to me. He's criticizing Hirsch for having this sort of ontological view when Hirsch is just saying, yes, meaning equals intention. But in the position of an interpreter, I don't immediately know what an author means. I'm ignorant of it, and I need more information. That's all he's saying. It's a complete straw man argument to say that he's saying there's this moment of interpretation before intention is present and blah, blah, blah.

Does my criticism make sense to you guys?

59:19 Mark: Throughout? In here, he seems to be talking about attributing intention. Is attributing there being a creator at all, as opposed to what our very first article was criticizing was in particular what that author is thinking. Do we have to know what that author thought and planned in order to understand the work? And it still seems like, okay, fine, we immediately describe this as the product of intentional action that was never at issue. So this does seem like a total strawman. And can I just point at something that makes me think that really these guys don't know what they're talking about?

The way they talk about Searle? They say, this is on page 727. The claim that all meanings are intentional is not, of course, an unfamiliar one in contemporary philosophy of language. John Searle, for example, asserts there is no getting away from intentionality. And he and others have advanced arguments to support this claim. Okay, so remember, the context here is that Knapp and Michaels are saying that every statement, every utterance that we see written down, we hear something. We're always imputing that there's a conscious being behind it who's intentionally saying something.

Well, that's not one of the two philosophical definitions of intentionality that Johnson Searle would possibly be talking about. I don't know what this quote is from, but I can almost guarantee that John Searle is talking about the aboutness of language. Right. The fact that language is always pointing at something outside of itself. That was one of the. Anyway, it's not this.

1:00:48 Wes: So you might be wrong about this. I might be wrong because it's actually in a debate with Derrida in the New York Review of Books, I think, where they are having a debate about. So in context.

1:00:59 Mark: And if Derrida is the one claiming death of the author and all this

1:01:02 Wes: stuff, I'm not sure, but he might be right. I don't know. Oh, it's in glyph. But they did have a debate in the New York Review of Books as well.

1:01:11 Mark: I mean, I like the idea, as I described it in comparing him to Searle, of really maybe this whole idea of figuring out intentions is not as complicated as we thought, that it really isn't a matter of somebody has a rich and thick plan for their artwork and then enacts it, and you have to. To figure out what the rich and thick plan was. No, you actually just look at the artwork itself. You can figure out, in other words, enough about what the intention was because it is actually realized in the artwork. So I think that that is all in line with, again, what New Criticism was okay with Wimsatt and Beardsley, but yet, I think does justice to this idea that Knapp and Michaels are putting forward that what you are actually encountering when you figure out the meaning of is just the intended meaning.

These things are actually one in the same. But I think it matters so much what examples you have in mind when you're thinking about this, because if you take one of Wes's favorite, you know, symbolism things, and, well, I read this as the pigs represent the head of the Communist Party in Animal Farm, like, well, okay, then there is clearly a potential division between my interpretation of that and whether the author intended that symbolism. I just don't think that's what Knapp and Michaels are talking about at all. So it makes it a little irrelevant to, you know, a pretty central concern of this discussion.

1:02:36 Wes: I mean, there is a way to reconcile those, I think, which is to say, when I talk about the unconscious or about the social, those in a broad sense, are about the intentional. Not intentional in the typical consciously intended sense, but in the sense of something going on in the head of a conscious being that's related to what comes out or in the heads of other conscious beings speaking through them.

1:03:02 Dylan: Yeah, and I think that's right. I think that's the way you get out of it. I still don't think it addresses the Case of getting intentionless meaning out of things, be it artwork or be it just things in the world. I mean, arguably, whenever we interpret the natural world. Right. We would be. Maybe I'm going too far with this. That we'd be finding intentionless meaning in it. Interpreting the world. Maybe I'm making overly broad. The interpretive act.

1:03:28 Seth: Right, Right.

1:03:29 Mark: I think this is specific to language, this thesis that they're making that is interesting to think about how this relates to other kind of meaning, because clearly that was part of the project of this discussion, was to talk about the meaning of a text. Did you mean for it to be a limerick? Did you, you know, other actions of the performative aspect? And now here we are with the last article again, just talking about literal linguistic meaning. And so maybe that should not be the whole story in this kind of discussion. Well, we got a little taste of several different authors here.

It does make me interested in at least reading more art. Maybe we'll get to that someday. I don't feel like I'm so much more illuminated about this basic topic than before we started here. Like, we had some interesting textual puzzles, some interesting philosophical points coming up here, but I still feel pretty much exactly the way I felt unschooled when we were having this discussion during our year end recap, which is that, yeah, you can get most of what you need by just looking at stylistic portions and content portions of the artwork itself, that the artwork itself uses a public language.

It uses public genre conventions. It has a polysemous character admitting multiple meanings, some of which are better interpretations than others. But if you can ask the author what they meant to be doing here, I would want to do that, too. Why not? Why would you not want that extra information? That certainly only helps. So I don't feel that I was, in wanting to talk to musicians on my music podcast or anything, that I'm committing the intentional fallacy. I think that I'm not saying that they are the author. God, otherwise I would just let them monologize.

But no, I'm like constantly pushing them. And here's what I read into it. What do you think about that interpretation? And a lot of times they're like, oh, it seems okay to me. I hadn't thought of that. But so I start at the same place I stopped.

1:05:22 Wes: I mean, I think what you just said is legitimate. It's not that you can't consult all that stuff. And I think the whole new critic thing is just about all of that, gives you good clues to the meaning of the text. It's just they're not clues insofar as I need to discover what the author consciously thinks about the text, but they're clues in the sense of being more information. If you broaden your idea of the work, as one of them puts it, if you have a broader idea, then, yeah, that can become data as well as you like. As long as you understand that this is not the ultimate standard that you're sort of reaching for, it's just another piece of data.

1:06:02 Dylan: Yeah, I agree with all that. And what I found myself reacting to was sort of what I took to be the implicit throwing out of the act of the author as being part of that data point. And maybe that's going farther than what those authors intended. And maybe rather than just taking seriously that they were reacting themselves against a kind of at least a perceived tyranny of one way of interpreting things and an under appreciation of the activity of the reader and other forms of context.

1:06:35 Mark: I think you're not at all misinterpreting Foucault on that. I mean, Foucault explicitly makes the comparison between the death of the author and the death of God. Right. So Nietzsche's project became elaborating. What are the philosophical consequences of the fact that we don't have God at the center of the philosophical system anymore? And Foucault was saying the same thing. Like, even though now the new criticisms has sort of won in terms of the trends within the world of criticism, we haven't gotten all the implications of that worked out. So he really is taking very seriously that we should.

Not just that the author's intentions aren't definitive, but that the author is radically absent in this way that, yeah, I still think we maybe haven't been able to make very much sense of that. Maybe if we had some of those particular artworks that he had in mind that Barthes had in mind as being the modern ones. And you mentioned Virginia Woolf. Maybe that's a good example. I'm just not completely clear again, whether that was actually referring to modern art as we would consider modern writing, or whether it was just these 60s avant garde stuff that these guys are considering.

Like, this is what writing is now.

1:07:43 Dylan: It just makes me feel like there's a continuing conversation to be had about interpretation and what are the marks of a good interpretation, which don't have anything to do with the things that we read about right now. Not that I found it quite interesting. I enjoyed the readings overall, all of them, and I found the conversation interesting. And I guess for me, at Least it was elucidating. But the judgment about whether or not the interpretation is good seems to be a more generic, more general question of both how we go about and how we interpreting and how we go about adjudicating interpretations, which to me will very quickly get into something like aesthetics.

1:08:25 Unknown speaker: Okay, so here's my summary. I was very supportive and interested in the Barthes essay. You know, I agree that the author is dead from the perspective of doing interpretation. It's irrelevant to me what the authorial intention is in doing interpretation. And it felt to me like when I read the Wimsatt and Beardsley that they were just essentially assuming the thesis that was in question. So they just say, you know, the meaning of the text is the author's intent. And anybody who's working around that is missing the point.

1:08:59 Mark: You mean Nap and Michaels? Yes, but go on.

1:09:02 Unknown speaker: To me, that's what's at stake. But what kind of did become clear in the Wimsatt and Beardsley is there's a difference between criticism and interpretation.

1:09:09 Seth: So if your goal is to perform

1:09:14 Unknown speaker: some kind of literary criticism that's intended to contribute to a dialogue about how the work fits in the context of other works and the narrative stream and the structure and all this kind of stuff, then yeah, I do think the author's intention as a is a criteria that you obviously need, and maybe a very important criteria. But for somebody like me who's not operating from within that tradition, but taking the work in itself, like say, a poem, I don't have any responsibility to the author, the author's intent. And the further I am abstracted from the socio historical context of the author, the less likely I am to be able to connect with that intent anyway, whatever it might have been, right?

And so in general, when I read things, I find understanding the historical context and understanding the authorial intent interesting. But ultimately, if I have an experience in reading the work or listening to it or whatever, that takes me someplace, or it has some relevance to me outside of what the author intended, then I don't care about the author's intent. So there.

1:10:31 Mark: Thank you, Seth. Okay, a couple of announcements. First, Wes and I have recorded a follow up to this discussion, just like we did for Free Speech. It's an hour long. We relate this to philosophy of language. His meaning in the mind, his meaning outside the mind. I explore a little more this connection with Searle and the idea that Knapp and Michaels are trying to get rid of this meaning entity. We talk a little bit about criticism today, specifically James Wood. We had a T.S. eliot poem in hand to use as an example. If you don't see that one up already, it'll be there within the week.

So that is a thing that we're going to continue to do. It is for partially Examined Life Citizens or $5 Patreon members. Our next regular episode is also going to follow closely on what you've just heard. We're talking about another movie. Wes and I are joined by Tim Nicholas, who's a filmmaker, he's blogged for us before to talk about Darren Aronofsky's film Mother. Very controversial film. Great case study for how to talk about symbolism, how the symbolic aspects relate to the sensuous, the filmic aspects. And it has a very weird theology that is interesting to discuss in itself.

I will warn you that that's going to be one that only the first half is going to be released to the public. The second half is going to be for supporters, including $1 Patreon members.

1:11:40 Unknown speaker: Really?

1:11:40 Mark: Just because we don't want to take two weeks in the public feed for something that does not involve Seth or Dylan, and a lot of you are not going to care about that film at all. So between these two offerings, you may as well go. And if you enjoy the podcast, support us. I want to assure the rest of you who have no intention of paying anything, that's okay. We're still going to be providing a free thing every week. It's merely that because other people do pay us that we are able to produce additional content, especially Wes and I, who have a little more free time than the others.

I think our mission is very much a dedication to public philosophy, to making comprehension of these great texts as widely available as possible. So at least for the moment, the plan is that the behind the paywall stuff is going to be extra information is going to be, as it has been so far, parts of discussions where we talk about films or other things that are really not so central to our mission. So hang with us, we love you all. We're not trying to exclude anyone, alright? The closing song, speaking of Free to you Content the Auteur is by David J.

And I will soon be releasing an episode interviewing him on nakedly examined music number 73. You might know him from his time in the bands Bauhaus or Love and Rockets if you're old like me. Very cool stuff. Check it out @nickel Exam music.com and of course we want to hear from you about this discussion about what else you want us to Talk about@PartiallyExaminedLife.com. you can comment on the blog post or follow us on Facebook. Comment there. Follow us on Twitter. Lots of ways. Good night, everybody.

1:13:07 Wes: Good night.

1:13:08 Dylan: Good night.

1:13:09 Seth: Good night.

1:13:29 Unknown speaker: He's gonna take you under his wing on the seat of the velvet divine he's gonna make you into a star in the back of a black stretcher Dang. He's going to change you put you in red Cultivate your blood he's going to see you climb all the way Take the goddess from gala school he's the album the matchless.

1:14:17 Mark: The altar king of the body the altar.

1:14:49 Unknown speaker: He's gonna place you in a far from the mat girl there's no looking back when you tasted the sugar of my luck and your son to the gods a sweet smell he's gonna land you in heaven his secret on the giants he's gonna lay you down in the m with the goldust from your he's the author matchless and gun

1:15:37 Wes: the

1:15:37 Unknown speaker: author the king of the body the altar and who God do you have a head for height? God do you want to see the sight I know God. Do you want to see the sight.

1:16:42 Mark: Of.

1:16:48 Unknown speaker: He's gonna take you gonna make you gonna change you gonna see you the go gonna place the ar. The gonna lay you. Gonna lay you gonna.

Lay.