AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Words and Images 3

"It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions." Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979, p 12

Heres the point of my meanderings and natterings: metaphors such as “the text is a mirror” should help us understand something that would otherwise be obscure, or they risk further obscuring the topic by introducing problems with the metaphorical representation of the topic that aren’t already implied by the topic itself. And that phenomenon matters all the more urgently since “clarity” and “obscurity” are themselves metaphors in this context, deployed to characterize more or less satisfactory appropriations and performances of words and images, texts and pictures (yes, Brad, thanks for the reminder to go back to Mitchell, which I’ll do ASAP!).

So, in the context of biblical hermeneutics, instead of crowding more and more, contradictory and complementary metaphors into an already confused discourse, may we take a moment to check the most obvious and misleading of our metaphors at the door, acknowledge their metaphoricity, and ask what we’re trying to get at when we deploy them?

When we say, “this sort of criticism treats the text as a window on the world of its origin,” don’t we mean something such as, “The appropriate way of reading this text notes what we imagine the author and characters to take for granted, to regard as necessary or given, the circumstances of subsistence and interaction that make the text intelligible to us”? The metaphor, in this case, distracts us from recognizing that we imagine particular features on the basis of our interaction with the text, and that we determine a particular context to which we feel satisfied that the text coheres. The text serves as a window only to the extent that we project a background, and proceed as though that background had a pertinence authenticated by its realness more than by our selection of it and comfort with it. (Here I don’t intend to deny or even depreciate the alleged reality of that background — simply to note that it’s usually, if not always, contested, so that its reality is to some extent constituted by our advocacy of one version of “reality” rather than another.)

Similarly, when we say that another sort of criticism treats the text as a mirror, we suggest that the appropriate way to read the text involves reflection (!) on how we understand ourselves in relation to the text, how we imagine that the author and characters would affirm or disparage our assumptions and values. Here the metaphor occludes the extent to which our self-critical interaction with the text depends on (and is limited by) what we can begin to imagine in ourselves as possibly open to criticism. (The overused example here would be the way that antebellum white slaveholders in the U.S. could perceive a biblical justification for slaves’ submission, but not a critique of chattel slavery in general; more controversial examples might explore the ways that some readers resist “biblical” critiques of patriarchy, heterosexual normativity, and capitalism.) The metaphorical mirror’s capacity to reflect depends entirely on the reader’s willingness (no, that’s too voluntarist) capacity to imagine the “reflected image” that supposedly issues from the text.

(Time for a break.)