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Continuing on "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes (1967) and "What Is an Author?" by Michel Foucault (1969), and finally getting to “Against Theory” by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels (1982).
What could it mean to say that a text, once written, speaks itself, that it no longer really has an author? We get into the specific critiques Foucault has of the cult of the author and what kind of open-ended, reader-centric types of analysis he proposes in its place. And then on the weirdness of Knapp and Michaels's thought experiment about a poem written by natural forces on a rock that's supposed to show that the meaning of a work just is (i.e., is numerically identical to, it doesn't just resemble) the author's intended meaning.
Listen to part 1 first, or get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition; becoming a PEL Citizen will also get you access to part 3, in which Mark and Wes relate this to the philosophy of language, consider T.S. Eliot, and more.
End song: "The Auteur" by David J (2018). Listen to Mark's interview with him in Nakedly Examined Music #73.
another way to go at this theme might be a show or two on:
https://larvalsubjects.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/hacking-the-social-construction-of-what2.pdf
Here are 3 uses of “meaning,” the enumeration of which may be of benefit to this discussion. (I’m sure there are others)
1. A man asks his friend, after his friend made a remark; “What do you mean?”
2. A young boy points to an unfamiliar weather pattern and asks his Mother; “What does that mean?”
3. A therapist asks her client about an event he just recalled from his childhood; “What did that mean to you?”
1. If meaning is taken in this way, authorial intention is everything, and meaning is the speaker/writer/performer’s mental content (defined broadly as: desires, analyses, artistic/emotive expressions, commands, declarations, etc) that they wish to impress upon their audience.
2. This meaning is represents truth about the nature of the world. For those who believe in God, this meaning is authorial as well.
3. This meaning is purely determined by the audience of an experience, whether that experience is considered by the subject to be the creation of another intelligent being, or just sand on the beach. It is perhaps something like a mix between the affective and cognitive impact of the experience of anything, including speech-acts, on the subject, in what it feels and learns from the event (though they could be the same thing).
I think the question is: what is the connection between #3 and #2? Certainly, most of the time, the impact of a text on a reader is a function of what they assume the intelligence that created the words was intending. To even recognize words as words I feel it is necessary to imagine a thinker saying them intentionally, which may divide me from Foucault. But words have associations and connotations that impact readers independently of authorial intent, like when someone says “butterfly” and I recall the song “To Pimp A Butterfly.”
I would represent the post-structuralist point this way:
Meaning as impact-on-reader is sometimes tenuously connected to, or not connected to the author at all. The author’s actual intent may not make it through to the reader, who can still validly determine what that text meant to them by meaning #3. The reader in determining what the text means to them may assign the intelligence behind the words to a social milieu or a political movement or culture. This is perhaps distinct from simply saying that they determine meaning from a particular author’s intent while taking that author’s social/political/literary context into account as possible consciously or subconscious determinants of that intent. They seem necessarily distinct when one decides to “assign” the authorship to movements or constructs that predate the author’s life, or post-date her death.
That being said, the only part of that of meaning #3 I consider devoid of authorial intent are the often unconscious connotations that occur even when we ask a friend “what do you mean?” So I can’t agree with a total death of “an author,” though perhaps I can agree with the death of “the author,” as the reader need not assign authorship to a particular person with any attribute but being the unnamed intelligence behind a text.
Hi Avi,
I think you have nailed an important distinction between Meaning-1 and Meaning-3 (a distinction I talked a bit about in my comment on Part I of this episode). There is an important way that the “meaning of an utterance” and the “meaning it has on you” (its effect) can be entirely separable.
A starry sky can mean something to us, just as novels and songs can mean something to us. A song can be meaningful because it was the one I danced to at my wedding. A night sky can make me reflect on the insignificance of human endeavor. Those are both Meaning-3.
But if you and I had different emotional reactions to stars, I doubt we could say we disagreed about the “meaning” (or Meaning-1) of those objects. I’m not sure we could even say that we were having a disagreement about meaning.
I only mention this because you talk about a person being able to have a “validly” determined interpretation of Meaning-3. But wouldn’t all just Meaning-3 effects be equally valid? Aren’t they just descriptions of whatever it is you happen to feel? And thus, are they even interpretative acts?
Anyway, great comment.
Thanks guys for the great conversation: you do your usual wonderful job of presenting compelling readings for positions I am not particularly sympathetic to. In the same way as Robert Williams’ comment on part one – and as alluded to by Wes during towards the end – my general impulse is to bemoan the baleful influence some of these have had on the practice of criticism. I think you made good points on the potential breadth of “intention” and how it could be broader than the conscious. What I found curious though is that the survey (while seeming to be sufficiently broad to take in all of “art”) seems to leave out some very specifically intentional works.
This particularly chimed with me as I read Brian Boyd’s wonderful criticism on Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” (a previous Phi Fic read!) – “The Magic of Artistic Discovery”. Now Wes and Mark described several scenarios where the artist either (i) deliberately uncouples intention from the creative process, (ii) uses free association as a source of raw material which they actively shape into the product or (iii) act as readers of their own work, and create meaning therein. I don’t doubt that this is a major origin in many types of works. But I would argue that in writing prose and poetry, it is not a necessary component.
Nabokov was a notorious perfectionist. He wrote on individual index cards, and would work and re-work everything he wrote, composing (generally fairly short) novels over years of work. His control over everything in the text was legendary [ambiguity intended]: in an interview, he asserted that his characters “are galley slaves”. When the novels were complete, he generally destroyed all his drafts. Whatever the original inspiration of any particular idea, the final product was the polished result of laser-like analytical conscious intention.
I don’t think this is so rare (though it may be one extreme end of the spectrum) – for every Karouac writing spontaneous prose, there will be plenty who agonise in a very conscious fashion over every word – whatever the deceptive appearance of the final result. And does the latter produce inferior art? Given that Pale Fire has been called “The Novel of the [20th] Century”, and Nabokov is generally recognised alongside Joyce as the master of post-modern (!) fiction – indeed, his reputation seems to have well outlasted the fashionable work of the 60s.
Moreover, Nabokov absolutely did see his art as a means of enciphering an intended meaning. He lay traps to show up interpretations based on theories he disliked (e.g. Freudian), and explicitly compares the relationship between the author and the reader of [his] novels to that of the composer of chess problems and a solver. Indeed, the act of finding the *intended* meaning: *solving* the puzzle – is key to his art. He believed that “the unravelling of a riddle is the purest and most basic act of the human mind”.
Boyd’s thesis is that criticism can be a kind of artistic discovery: he’s a biographer of Popper, and this shows. I would wonder how Barthes and Foucault would deal with the example (which in my ignorance I had never before spotted) below:
The homely poet John Shade, having tragically lost his daughter, is fond of taking walks with his German friend and his young son in the local Dulwich forest. His daughter had a formative paranormal experience in the wood. As he reaches a grotto, the boy remarks “informatively”: “here Papa pisses”. The commentator Kinbote remarks how “pointless” this story is.
Boyd points out this is a reference to Browning’s “Pippa Passes”. Browning was inspired to write the poem when walking in Dulwich Woods; John Shade lives on Dulwich Road. The Spoonerism reflects a major theme of the novel, connected to Shade dead daughter, who is also associated with Pippa. Nabokov almost leaves a big flashing sign pointing to this: as well as “informatively”, as Boyd points out, any time when a Nabokov character refers to something as “pointless”, we should take notice.
Now this is an interpretation. Is it a good one? I would argue that the intentional nature of the Browning allusion above is irrefutable. Why? Because the weight and multiple lines of evidence, from both within and without the text, is so strong. Simultaneously, it seems clear that Nabokov intended us to take notice of this evidence, and that his intended allusion is important to understanding of the work – in other words, that this is a *correct* interpretation – even if it is superficially hidden to an ignoramus like me.
Now, if we are to assert that the intention of the author cannot be used to ground an interpretation, how do we regard the example above? There are of course arbitrarily interpretations we could apply to the material above. Are we really happy to disregard such strong and multi-line evidence of authorial intention, and to commit to say, a Marxist interpretation of Dulwich wood as an equivalent explanation?
I think (was it Mark?) really hit the nail on the head in the comparison of the epistemic vs ontological question. Of course it can be hard (or sometimes impossible) to know the author’s intentions – but we can perform an epistemic task by gathering evidence, and subjecting our theories to that evidence in a way that tests them in a Popperian fashion. Distinguishing between good and bad interpretations then seems to be the key question, and in many works – though certainly not all – evidence of authorial intent must surely count heavily.
It may be an unhappy accident that the kind of identity-based lit crit that Wes regrets has come out of this. My response was initially very similar to Dylan: why would you want to do eliminate the evidence of the artist’s intention? Perhaps I am being uncharitable, but to me there is one glaring answer: because the critic has an axe to grind, and carefully gathering evidence doesn’t serve that axe. If you’re obsessed with power like Foucault then it’s all about the “tyranny” of the author. If your hobby-horse is a particular type of politics, then you can use whatever text you are looking at as a political lens. If you’re into psychoanalysis, then the unconscious must figure everywhere (sorry Wes).
Personally, this gets old for me fast: I’m much more into literature (at least) taking me to new places and meetings of minds through the power of the imagination.
This was a very interesting comment on this whole mess of issues. Thank you.
I’m struck by the distinctiveness of Nabokov’s process, and how different it is from some other types of artistic intention. Nabokov’s writing, as you’ve laid it out, is amazingly demanding of his readers. I love my Nabokov… Pale Fire, and especially Ada or Ardor, are among my favorite books. But I think Nabokov would hate me as a reader, because I just gloss over the details and assimilate them as “texture”… and now that you’ve explained Pappa Pisses, I realize there’s probably an infinite depth of allusion and irony that I’m missing. Of course! Because I’m not a graduate student of contemporary Russian literature!
I find something similar in a lot of conceptual art. Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres is similarly demanding… you can impute any meaning you want to a 175-lb pile of candy, but Felix’s relationship to Ross is really the key that opens up a certain privileged interpretation. (info here: https://www.wmagazine.com/story/felix-gonzalez-torres-candy-the-met-breuer)
But this is not the only way to create art, and the whole concept of “polysemy” (mentioned in this episode) represents a vast alternate philosophy of creative production. Taken very seriously, polysemy is sort of incompatible with traditional author-centric ideas of art. The whole point of art, and criticism, that follows this philosophy is to allow meaning to propagate… to empower readers to find their own significance in the words, to create space for infinite interpretations, to allow the work of art to encompass even those meanings that the author didn’t have access to. Perhaps to let go of control over meaning, and in that lack of control, to create something universal (or at least, to be its conduit, channeling the creativity of the cultural matrix).
In fact, I think some contemporary artists and critics would consider Nabokov’s “puzzle-craft” methodology distasteful, just like some find it distasteful when a film is only interesting because of a late twist.
There is a fundamental argument in favor of each of these interpretations, and I think, in the long run, theory will have to learn to encompass them both, in a sort of eternal conceptual gestalt. On one hand, meaning always outlives the utterance itself, and potentially, it outlives the person who performed it. If authorial intention was the limiting factor, why would works like the Odyssey be remotely relevant any more, given how little we know about Homer, and about the psychology of ancient Greeks? On the other hand, without the intentional activity that’s unique to humans, unique to our own social constructs and our ways of reifying meaning, we couldn’t do all those things we do: imputing meaning to individual texts, to bodies of work, and even to nature itself.
So we’ll always have to see meaning as a product of authorship, and also of readership, in order to make sense of it.
Another interesting side-note regarding interpretation:
Ray Kurzweil was deeply involved in an early project to create a program that could write poetry. The process was procedural, and left intention aside in favor of pattern analysis and randomization: http://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/poetry/rkcp_overview.php
I think a couple of things are going.
Meaning or intention is to do with the person encountering the work. The meaning isn’t in the work or in the person – it is a way of meeting.
The privileging of authorial intent is different.
I think it is clear that context is part of meaning. So, having information about an author’s intent makes one sort of meaning possible, which isn’t available to wonderful works like cave paintings.
We don’t need to know the author’s intent to make meaning.
And we can make meanings that have nothing at all to do (necessarily) with the author’s intent e.g. the use of Shakespeare’s plays in modernist criticism.
Thanks guys, that was another masterpiece episode.
It doesn’t sound like the death of the author thing works for classical and modernist musical compositions. Death of the composer? Primacy of the listener? Sounds playing themselves out? You guys mentioned the interpretation of a Beethoven symphony by a particular conductor and orchestra, and a listener can hear different things every listen, but the composer/conductor/performer/orchestra’s intention is usually going to be important to the meaning of the piece.
Here’s a cool interview between Foucault and the excellent composer/conductor Pierre Boulez. It doesn’t have much to do with authorial intent but touches on some of the themes discussed in this podcast regarding Foucault:
https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/excerpter.wordpress.com/2005/12/24/michel-foucault-pierre-boulez-contemporary-music-and-the-public/amp/
GEEZ! You guys don’t seem to be really trying to think about what Michaels and Knapp are saying. You get immediately caught up in trying to spin out counterexamples, assuming that they don’t understand philosophical language, Give it a chance! Maybe get Michaels on the show!
Here are some things that made me grit my teeth.
First, the idea Michaels & Knapp are getting at when they talk about Hirsch is that once you accept that “the meaning of a text is simply what its author intends,” you cannot no longer think of that as a providing a “method” for getting at meaning — something “objective” and separate that you can look for an add to (and hence ground) your interpretation. Intention cannot provide that method; this realization is not theoretically useful. t doesn’t tell you to go look at historical documents, diary entries, interviews, etc, When you try to interpret a text’s meaning you simply *are* looking for its intended meaning. (This is similar to the idea of people like Fish and Rorty when they talk about how anti-foundaitonalism doesn’t have “consequences.)
Second, regarding the “sand poem,” I wish you had simply slowed down to talk about Mark and Wes’s examples. If we see a rust stain that looks like the Virgin Mary or George Washington, do we think about these things are portraits? (Some people *do* see them as portraits — and thus as products of often divine intention. Others see them as merely resembling portraits, the meaningless processes of mechanical action.) Or if we encounter a zebra with stripes that seem to spell out a word, do we think of that word as having meaning — or even being a word per se (as opposed to something that just resembles a word)?
Third, Wes is right (and Mark is wrong) in how Searle is using “intentionality” in his debate with Derrida. Derrida wants to say that writing — unlike speaking — is, in some special way, essentially divorced from the intentions of the writer. Seale wants to argue that both writing and speech are equally and inescapably “vehicles of intentionality.”
Last, Michaels and Knapp are NOT talking only about textual language. It works with all meaningful creations or actions.
Walter Benn Michaels lives pretty close to most of you, down in Chicago. As I said above, why not ask him on the show? He has thought a lot about texts or art that seems to be produced randomly or mechanically or by groups of creators (photography, film, art that is intended to degrade and change). Any then Wes and he could talk about the evils of identity politics, a idea that they share. 🙂
I’m not saying that you would change your view. But you seem willing to dismiss so many of these ideas as confused from the jump, that you hamper your own critical reading practices and willingness to take texts, the ideas, and even thought experiments seriously.
Your loyal listener,
Peter in Milwaukee
A few times, the fellas ask what kinds of “modern writers” Foucault and especially Barthes might be referring to in their essays, suggesting Woolf as a possibility. I suspect that Woolf’s work far too “Authorial” in its focus and style to meet Barthes’ description of the scriptor who wants himself and his work to disappear into anti-expressive (inter)textuality, pure gesture and reference, language itself.
I suspect he is thinking more of the French New Novelists that he championed: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor, and Marguerite Duras. Robbe-Grillet, especially, called for a writing (following late Flaubert, Mallarmé, Joyce) that did away with the author, with expression, even with plot and character — creating a impersonal articulation of surfaces without depth. The author and work that has nothing to say.
Precisely. The moderns in this case are the nouvelles romanciers and their precursors – not Mallarme only but the whole hothouse of late Symbolism, the Surrealist subversion, Bataille, Blanchot with his recit fiction (contra conte, roman), Klossowski, and then as you mention Robbe-Grillet, Sollers, Butor, etc. Foucault himself wrote extensively on Raymond Roussel, another scriptor who fits the bill. Sollers founded and edited Tel Quel, where Foucault, Barthes, Derrida et al published important work. In France, literary modernism refers to so many aesthetic schools and movements, and to work which seems to have been theorized, critiqued, and written concurrently. High Modernism was mostly an Anglo-Irish-American (let’s just say Anglophone) phenomenon, vigorously conducted in France but not often by French writers. Excepting Proust, Gide, Celine, one searches in vein for French names to compare with Joyce, Woolf, James, Beckett, Eliot, Pound, Ford, and the rest of the host. The conscious aesthetic projects of the French avant-guard were not at all concerned, as High Modernism was, to catch at more of the Real through advances in technique, but to upset the very tropology – or in Barthes terms to untangle the tissue of citations – that could predicate Reality of a representation. The trick of the real was to be exposed, as was the fallacy of the intentional subject, the author whose mere mention authorizes his or her discourse in situ – in the book, the work, the text – stabilizing meaning by arresting the play of language at the moment of inception, then freezing it under glass.
Flaubert may be the epicenter of this long process of denuding, well, process, but he is also appropriately the arch-intentionalist. What better warrants could the philologist hope for than the mot juste, yet what better encapsulates the tortured impersonality of literary craft? Here, where one meditates at length on phrasal and lexical aptness, one is driven to distraction by the aporia of aesthetic choice – one cannot judge success except by becoming a reader of one’s own works, a reader who cannot suppose himself decisive. One can always be another reader, and indeed one always is, deciding differently about one’s own work at each interval of encounter. I think Valery, not Mallarme, is the better poetic analogue, since Valery seems to entertain similarly fraught notions about intention and the work, placing a hermetic seal on the text of the poem whose formal perfections translate (as in, carry over) an impersonal poeisis ex nihilo. With Mallarme, Valery is that inaugural ventriloquist of the void, whose act is later taken over, and indeed de-romanticized, by the New Novelists.
As for those New Novelists, Frederic Jameson has read their process programme, where writing itself is supposed to be enabled to speak, as part of a much larger process whereby production itself becomes commodified and consumed. Having done with the intensely curated products of High Modernism, the New Novelists, and the French intellectual culture of which they were a part, moved on to the truly inexhaustible pastures of production, where one could always observe the process of observing in infinite regress. Here mise en abyme becomes a governing metaphor, but also the procedural editing of memory and perception in the act of writing, which last is only a metaphor for the scriptive procedures by which events become experiences. For Jameson, this postmodern obsession with the structures of aesthetic production marks a new phase in alienated labor, but also points up the inevitable complicity of the literary avant-guard with the involutions of late capitalism. I’ve smuggled in Jameson because he offers a really illuminating, and genuinely appreciative, reading of Walter Benn Michael’s The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism – a work which sorts through the socioeconomic bases of American Naturalism and its specious repertoire. Michaels has also been an ardent critic of identity-political criticism, and his use of Wordsworth in the sand may be a grenade tossed at Foucault’s beach of Man image (Archeology of Knowledge), which pictures the last remnants of humanism and the Enlightenment subject dissolving in the surf. While Jameson’s sympathies are not ultimately with Michaels project as such, it is worth encountering Michaels as gifted critic – an not as an febrile dissident, as in Against Theory – in a sort of dialectical relation to the New Novelists (the book in question here is Jameson’s Postmodernism).
One last thing on writers new and old. In France, the old guard does not merely comprise a canon but a pantheon of Immortals exercising a literary authority not unlike that of the Nine Worthies of the medieval period. We in America are only ever aware of French dissidence, never of French conservatism, which in matters of culture far outstrips out own. There’s an essay in the anti-poststructuralist collection The Empire of Theory that sets the Death of the Author within the useful context of the French Academy and the French intellectual habitus, as both illuminate the agnostic space in which Barthes and others were writing. Much of the overstatement objected to by Dylan begins there, as does the dizzy American uptake of so many poststructuralist aphorisms, which had once been playful (and playfully super-subtle) provocations. We mistake punk heresy for dogma (though I am firmly in the camp of the punk heretics).
Interesting but unsatisfyingly thin discussions.
Roughly speaking…
There’s what a writer ‘intends’ to say by a piece of work – what ideas/symbols/provocations s/he wants to say or convey in it.
There’s what the writer in fact manages to say – the writer may want to convey a sense of (say) despair and simply do that badly!
There’s what readers take from the work, whatever the writer intended. That changes as the years –> decades –> centuries and we simply know far less about writers in the deeper past.
There’s also (perhaps) ‘subconscious’ messages being sent by the writer, as well as similar phenomena among readers – but they are hard to analyse and open to people making things up.
All of these are interesting to think about in different ways, individually and combined. There’s no reason (using your dreary p-word) to ‘privilege’ any one of them.
Look at all the fascinating writings on Wittgenstein and his life.
Thus the idea that The Reader View is All is absurd. That’s surely just a power-play to allow ‘critics’ to look at any piece of work as they choose and emit lumpen-ideological ‘analysis,’ as indeed has happened to to ruinous effect across many Western academic literary disciplines.
Think about it another way. Wouldn’t it be VERY COOL to use a time-machine video recorder and ask Plato or Shakespeare or Joyce or De Beauvoir or any great writer to explain in detail what their thinking was about some of their key passages? Would that add nothing of value to the reader’s ‘interpretations’ and ‘theories’ or the meaning of their work?
We all enjoy DVD special features where the makers of a movie talk about what they were doing and how they tried to do it, precisely because their insights DO add some insights/value to what it ‘means’.
If you find out that the writer’s mother was found dead with her beloved enamel parrot in her hand, doesn’t that add something to how a poem referring to parrots and enamel seas came to be written and what it ‘means’?
And so on.