This may sound like a glib remark, and it is, but it’s also a legitimate query: where are they hiding all the good arguments?
My lit-crit friend, a Ph.D. student herself, presumably provided this example in the misguided hope that it would offer an insight into the value of her way of thinking. Was it just a bad choice on her part? Is there some secret trove of critical theory observations on debt that I might look at and think “woah! This is knowledge worth having”?
It’s a reasonable question. First, I think that the linked example is not the best of post-modern thought.
More importantly, a lot of post-modern thought is co-opted and the label is forcibly excised. Here are some examples of what I think are good post-modern ideas.
There was a tendency for colonist-era Europeans to ascribe exotic virtues to Near and Far Easterners that had little relationship to the values of those communities. Orientalism is a discussion of this dynamic related to Near Eastern culture. I don’t think the dynamic can be well explained by reference to in-group/out-group, but post-modernism does a good job, in my view. Consider also the phenomena of the Magical Negro (warning: TVtropes)
Death of the Author (TVtropes), the view that the author’s opinions do not control a work’s interpretations, is also heavily influenced by post-modern thought (or so I understand—I’m not very interested in most lit crit of any flavor)
The slogan “The personal is political” is insightful because it highlights that “political” (i.e. partisan electioneering) is not really a natural kind in political-theory conceptspace. Issues of personal identity are just as mindkilling, for essentially the same reasons. Also, post-modern theory helps explain why the legal distinction between public action and private action is not well defined in practice.
Also, post-modernism is often intentionally filled with hyperbole. For example, I’m persuaded that Nietzsche was not anti-semetic or fascist, but reading Geneology of Morals literally can easily leave that impression. There are reasonable methodological arguments about whether hyperbole is a good idea, but post-modernism is usually on the side of more hyperbole (in part because colloquial usage often does not encompass a natural kind).
Finally, post-modernism is closely clustered with anti-capitalism and anti-empiricism. I can’t defend this association, but it exists. I think much of the perceived poor quality of post-modern thought is really disagreement with those other positions. I don’t think those positions are an essential part of post-modern thought—for example, I think Foucault is trying to be a high quality historian. If I were persuaded that his history was bad, that would necessarily cast doubt on his conclusions from the historical evidence.
It’s funny you should mention Death of the Author. I have another friend whose academic background is in literature, and he rants to the point of blind fury about how ridiculous a notion it is. I showed him the above link to get his opinion, and his most pointed comment was how the author’s emphasis on academia, student debt and being forced to work menial academic positions was not a shining indictment of Roland Barthes.
Barthes is good, comprehensible and generally on the ball. He’s actually not a waste of your life to read. Start with Mythologies like everyone does. (No-one who lives on the internet would find it radical these days, but it certainly was when it was published.)
Personally, I’ve long been of the opinion that Death of the Author is, if not exactly wrong, still an idea which has been more harmful than useful with respect to its effects on literary criticism.
The central idea of Death of the Author is to judge the text itself without limiting interpretation to that which is imposed by the author’s intentions. There are certainly cases where one can glean valuable information from a text which the author did not consciously choose to add to their work. For instance, the author might have views on race which will leak out into their writing, in such a way that a perceptive reader will gain insight about their views even though the author did not intend to make any sort of statement about race whatsoever. However, I think that to divorce the text entirely from the context of its creation is an invitation to abuse the basic principles of communication.
As Roland Barthes put it, “To give a text an Author” and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it “is to impose a limit on that text.” But imposing limits on a text is necessary in order to extract any information from it at all. It’s only by narrowing down our space of the possible referents that we can distinguish the meaning of “an indictment of Roland Barthes” from “oogabooga.”
A text has no inherent meaning, so it makes no sense to judge “the text itself” divorced from the context that granted it meaning in the first place. Obviously, we didn’t need to wait for Barthes to come along in order to realize “hey, we can gain information about the social norms of the ancient Greeks by reading the Iliad which Homer never realized he was putting in there in the first place!” When we do this, information is being conveyed from the writers of the text to us, because the narrowness that we and the author mutually impose on the text carries more information than the author was conscious of. But if you decide, for example, “Hey, I can interpret “The Faerie Queene” as a narrative of the history of Communism!” information is not being conveyed. You might as well be spending your time deciding what clouds look like.
There are no limits at all on what meaning we can project onto a text, but if we’re interested in extracting information from a text, limiting our interpretations is necessary. Of course, the information we can extract from a text is not necessarily limited only to things the author consciously put in it, but since the information isn’t in the text, it’s in the text-in-context, then to the extent that you’re independent of the author’s context, you’re only getting out of it what you put in yourself.
This is at the notion level, but I’m wondering where the meaning of a text is.
Candidate theories: In the mind of the author. Readers are constructing (whether consciously or not) models of what the author had in mind.
In the minds of readers. People have access to the mind of at most one reader.
But that’s limited fun for some kinds of analysis, so critics are apt to make guesses about the minds of a great many readers.
I have respect for a professor (sorry, name and university forgotten) who asked people what they loved about the Lord of the Rings, and why they read it repeatedly. The consensus answer was the moment when Sauron’s power fell.
Until I wrote this, I didn’t realize that this is an example of successful authorial intention—Tolkien thought eucatastrophe was crucial.
There are no limits at all on what meaning we can project onto a text, but if we’re interested in extracting information from a text, limiting our interpretations is necessary. Of course, the information we can extract from a text is not necessarily limited only to things the author consciously put in it, but since the information isn’t in the text, it’s in the text-in-context, then to the extent that you’re independent of the author’s context, you’re only getting out of it what you put in yourself.
For fictional texts, I’m not sure that extracting information from the text is really the best way of thinking about the text-reader interaction.
The “Wizard of Oz” movie is allegedly very influential in gay culture in America. Assuming this is true, I find it implausible that this was the intent of a movie made in 1939. Does that show that the movie can’t “mean” something about gay culture?
Which, I suppose, raises the question of whether there’s any value to be gotten from reading fiction, and if so what it is that one is getting of value.
Which might in turn raise the question of whether it’s possible to get that thing-of-value from nonfiction as well, in which case perhaps extracting information from the text is perhaps not the only way to engage with nonfiction, either.
It was useful at the time. Remember that postmodernisms are reactions against modernisms, and reactions date badly. There are few good ideas that can’t be made into bad ideas by overdoing them hard enough.
Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle provides a concrete example, useful for grounding a discussion of the “Death of the Author”. Stealing a paragraph from Wikipedia
In The Jungle (1906), Sinclair gave a scathing indictment of unregulated capitalism as exemplified in the meatpacking industry. His descriptions of both the unsanitary conditions and the inhumane conditions experienced by the workers shocked and galvanized readers. Sinclair had intended it as an attack upon capitalist enterprise, but readers reacted viscerally. Domestic and foreign purchases of American meat fell by half. Sinclair lamented: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” The novel was so influential that it spurred government regulation of the industry, as well as the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.
Author’s really do intend specific interpretations, and can notice, with disappointment, when readers impose a different interpretation by weight of numbers.
I have a hard time sympathizing with Upton Sinclair’s complaint about the specifics of how his resounding success was implemented. He thought unregulated capitalism was bad, and explained why; people agreed, and tore down the “unregulated” part.
Author’s really do intend specific interpretations, and can notice, with disappointment, when readers impose a different interpretation by weight of numbers.
Yep. Any writer of fiction needs to understand the concept of “death of the author”, even if they don’t call it that—the text as all the reader has to go on.
That’s because it’s late and I used a word with exactly the opposite meaning I was reaching for. The sentiment I was trying to get at was the author’s emphasis on debt as it impacts a doctoral candidate, (as opposed to, say, a blue collar worker who has to moonlight in a petrol station to cover their loan repayments), does not bode well for the idea of divorcing an author’s personal opinions and circumstances from the interpretations of their work.
The way my friend has always described Death of the Author (we lived together at University, so I’ve been treated to this for a while) suggests he has been subject to a much, much stronger form than the one you describe, in which an author’s motives, intentions and circumstances should be completely disregarded when interpreting their work.
(I recall he once wrote a poem which, in a pleasantly Godelian fashion, described his own motives and intentions while writing it. He hoped one day to become famous enough as a poet that English undergrads would be forced to try and analyse it without reference to his motives and intentions for the piece. There’s a reason we’ve remained friends for so long.)
Coming at it from an information theoretic perspective, Moby Dick is clearly not talking about the Soviet Union’s occupation of post-war East Germany. Part of my certainty in that statement involves facts about the knowledge and history of the author (most saliently that he wrote the book, and died, in the 19th Century). Any implementation of Death of the Author strong enough to say “that doesn’t matter: Ahab is totally Stalin” is not an implementation I can really get behind.
Well, I think you need to more rigidly designate “they,” but since neither debt nor literature-department-influenced frameworks are my actual bailiwick I can’t in confidence help you out here. I do find that some of the Big Inscrutable Names, like Foucault and Althusser, can be useful to think with.
(If it sounds as though I’m being a really poor defender of Critical Whatever it’s because I’m not, really; I’m more used to being typecast as the guy who thinks the cultural turn was bullshit. But it’s not as bullshit as most intelligent outsiders assume, is my incredibly modest claim.)
This may sound like a glib remark, and it is, but it’s also a legitimate query: where are they hiding all the good arguments?
My lit-crit friend, a Ph.D. student herself, presumably provided this example in the misguided hope that it would offer an insight into the value of her way of thinking. Was it just a bad choice on her part? Is there some secret trove of critical theory observations on debt that I might look at and think “woah! This is knowledge worth having”?
It’s a reasonable question. First, I think that the linked example is not the best of post-modern thought.
More importantly, a lot of post-modern thought is co-opted and the label is forcibly excised. Here are some examples of what I think are good post-modern ideas.
There was a tendency for colonist-era Europeans to ascribe exotic virtues to Near and Far Easterners that had little relationship to the values of those communities. Orientalism is a discussion of this dynamic related to Near Eastern culture. I don’t think the dynamic can be well explained by reference to in-group/out-group, but post-modernism does a good job, in my view. Consider also the phenomena of the Magical Negro (warning: TVtropes)
Death of the Author (TVtropes), the view that the author’s opinions do not control a work’s interpretations, is also heavily influenced by post-modern thought (or so I understand—I’m not very interested in most lit crit of any flavor)
The slogan “The personal is political” is insightful because it highlights that “political” (i.e. partisan electioneering) is not really a natural kind in political-theory conceptspace. Issues of personal identity are just as mindkilling, for essentially the same reasons. Also, post-modern theory helps explain why the legal distinction between public action and private action is not well defined in practice.
Also, post-modernism is often intentionally filled with hyperbole. For example, I’m persuaded that Nietzsche was not anti-semetic or fascist, but reading Geneology of Morals literally can easily leave that impression. There are reasonable methodological arguments about whether hyperbole is a good idea, but post-modernism is usually on the side of more hyperbole (in part because colloquial usage often does not encompass a natural kind).
Finally, post-modernism is closely clustered with anti-capitalism and anti-empiricism. I can’t defend this association, but it exists. I think much of the perceived poor quality of post-modern thought is really disagreement with those other positions. I don’t think those positions are an essential part of post-modern thought—for example, I think Foucault is trying to be a high quality historian. If I were persuaded that his history was bad, that would necessarily cast doubt on his conclusions from the historical evidence.
Thank you for this.
It’s funny you should mention Death of the Author. I have another friend whose academic background is in literature, and he rants to the point of blind fury about how ridiculous a notion it is. I showed him the above link to get his opinion, and his most pointed comment was how the author’s emphasis on academia, student debt and being forced to work menial academic positions was not a shining indictment of Roland Barthes.
Barthes is good, comprehensible and generally on the ball. He’s actually not a waste of your life to read. Start with Mythologies like everyone does. (No-one who lives on the internet would find it radical these days, but it certainly was when it was published.)
He disagrees with “Death of the Author”? You’ve whetted my curiosity—I’ve always thought that it was a fairly reasonable position.
Also, I don’t know what you mean by “indictment of Roland Barthes”
Personally, I’ve long been of the opinion that Death of the Author is, if not exactly wrong, still an idea which has been more harmful than useful with respect to its effects on literary criticism.
The central idea of Death of the Author is to judge the text itself without limiting interpretation to that which is imposed by the author’s intentions. There are certainly cases where one can glean valuable information from a text which the author did not consciously choose to add to their work. For instance, the author might have views on race which will leak out into their writing, in such a way that a perceptive reader will gain insight about their views even though the author did not intend to make any sort of statement about race whatsoever. However, I think that to divorce the text entirely from the context of its creation is an invitation to abuse the basic principles of communication.
As Roland Barthes put it, “To give a text an Author” and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it “is to impose a limit on that text.” But imposing limits on a text is necessary in order to extract any information from it at all. It’s only by narrowing down our space of the possible referents that we can distinguish the meaning of “an indictment of Roland Barthes” from “oogabooga.”
A text has no inherent meaning, so it makes no sense to judge “the text itself” divorced from the context that granted it meaning in the first place. Obviously, we didn’t need to wait for Barthes to come along in order to realize “hey, we can gain information about the social norms of the ancient Greeks by reading the Iliad which Homer never realized he was putting in there in the first place!” When we do this, information is being conveyed from the writers of the text to us, because the narrowness that we and the author mutually impose on the text carries more information than the author was conscious of. But if you decide, for example, “Hey, I can interpret “The Faerie Queene” as a narrative of the history of Communism!” information is not being conveyed. You might as well be spending your time deciding what clouds look like.
There are no limits at all on what meaning we can project onto a text, but if we’re interested in extracting information from a text, limiting our interpretations is necessary. Of course, the information we can extract from a text is not necessarily limited only to things the author consciously put in it, but since the information isn’t in the text, it’s in the text-in-context, then to the extent that you’re independent of the author’s context, you’re only getting out of it what you put in yourself.
This is at the notion level, but I’m wondering where the meaning of a text is.
Candidate theories: In the mind of the author. Readers are constructing (whether consciously or not) models of what the author had in mind.
In the minds of readers. People have access to the mind of at most one reader.
But that’s limited fun for some kinds of analysis, so critics are apt to make guesses about the minds of a great many readers.
I have respect for a professor (sorry, name and university forgotten) who asked people what they loved about the Lord of the Rings, and why they read it repeatedly. The consensus answer was the moment when Sauron’s power fell.
Until I wrote this, I didn’t realize that this is an example of successful authorial intention—Tolkien thought eucatastrophe was crucial.
For fictional texts, I’m not sure that extracting information from the text is really the best way of thinking about the text-reader interaction.
The “Wizard of Oz” movie is allegedly very influential in gay culture in America. Assuming this is true, I find it implausible that this was the intent of a movie made in 1939. Does that show that the movie can’t “mean” something about gay culture?
Could you taboo “mean?”
Which, I suppose, raises the question of whether there’s any value to be gotten from reading fiction, and if so what it is that one is getting of value.
Which might in turn raise the question of whether it’s possible to get that thing-of-value from nonfiction as well, in which case perhaps extracting information from the text is perhaps not the only way to engage with nonfiction, either.
It was useful at the time. Remember that postmodernisms are reactions against modernisms, and reactions date badly. There are few good ideas that can’t be made into bad ideas by overdoing them hard enough.
Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle provides a concrete example, useful for grounding a discussion of the “Death of the Author”. Stealing a paragraph from Wikipedia
Author’s really do intend specific interpretations, and can notice, with disappointment, when readers impose a different interpretation by weight of numbers.
I have a hard time sympathizing with Upton Sinclair’s complaint about the specifics of how his resounding success was implemented. He thought unregulated capitalism was bad, and explained why; people agreed, and tore down the “unregulated” part.
Yep. Any writer of fiction needs to understand the concept of “death of the author”, even if they don’t call it that—the text as all the reader has to go on.
That’s because it’s late and I used a word with exactly the opposite meaning I was reaching for. The sentiment I was trying to get at was the author’s emphasis on debt as it impacts a doctoral candidate, (as opposed to, say, a blue collar worker who has to moonlight in a petrol station to cover their loan repayments), does not bode well for the idea of divorcing an author’s personal opinions and circumstances from the interpretations of their work.
The way my friend has always described Death of the Author (we lived together at University, so I’ve been treated to this for a while) suggests he has been subject to a much, much stronger form than the one you describe, in which an author’s motives, intentions and circumstances should be completely disregarded when interpreting their work.
(I recall he once wrote a poem which, in a pleasantly Godelian fashion, described his own motives and intentions while writing it. He hoped one day to become famous enough as a poet that English undergrads would be forced to try and analyse it without reference to his motives and intentions for the piece. There’s a reason we’ve remained friends for so long.)
Coming at it from an information theoretic perspective, Moby Dick is clearly not talking about the Soviet Union’s occupation of post-war East Germany. Part of my certainty in that statement involves facts about the knowledge and history of the author (most saliently that he wrote the book, and died, in the 19th Century). Any implementation of Death of the Author strong enough to say “that doesn’t matter: Ahab is totally Stalin” is not an implementation I can really get behind.
I like this account of intentionalism.
Well, I think you need to more rigidly designate “they,” but since neither debt nor literature-department-influenced frameworks are my actual bailiwick I can’t in confidence help you out here. I do find that some of the Big Inscrutable Names, like Foucault and Althusser, can be useful to think with.
(If it sounds as though I’m being a really poor defender of Critical Whatever it’s because I’m not, really; I’m more used to being typecast as the guy who thinks the cultural turn was bullshit. But it’s not as bullshit as most intelligent outsiders assume, is my incredibly modest claim.)