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May 31, 2006
Where It's At
I've pasted the preface in its current condition into the extended portion of this entry. I wish I’d gotten to this point sooner, so that I could have improved it in conversation with the sophisticated and critical readers who bother to read this weblog, but such wit as I can marshal under the best of circumstances abandoned me over the last few stress-filled weeks. My publishers may indulge a few last-minute changes, if you spot errors or infelicities that can be remedied with relatively little bother — but for the most part, this is what we end up with, for better or worse.
Now, on to Saturday’s sermon and Sunday’s da Vinci Code presentation. I can tell you this much: I will be near-comatose through the all-day faculty meeting we have on Monday.
Anyway, this is where it’s at so far. I’ll keep updating the version in the “extended” entry till it’s finally done.
Throughout the twentieth century, biblical scholars have grappled with the hermeneutical problem of how to connect their technical study of the grammar and historical context of the Bible with the ways that the Bible can and should affect the lives of contemporary readers. They have suggested numerous work-arounds and improvements for hermeneutical deliberation, but none seems to have won general assent. Some people sense no problem with the status quo; they’re content to puzzle over unusual verb forms, odd usages of familiar words, the likelihood or unlikelihood of people raising other people from death. A considerable number of readers, though, express dissatisfaction with an interpretive method that excels at retrospect, but falters when interpreters try to bring the Bible to bear on contemporary life.
In these essays, I propose that readers who want something more than, or something different from what conventional critical scholarship offers may need to rethink some deeply-held presuppositions of twentieth-century biblical hermeneutics. The historical-critical method – which I will hereafter refer to more generally as “technical biblical interpretation,” so as to avoid reinforcing the impression that this array of interpretive moves constitutes a method – serves admirably, but it does not exhaust the work of interpretive reflection, nor does it set the terms on which further reflection must proceed. Indeed, many of the frustrations that students and clergy report involve their expecting historical-critical reflection to provide sustenance that that mode of reading does not provide.
The dominant mode of biblical interpretation miscarries, for several reasons, when scholars invoke it as the definitive basis for theological readings of Scripture. The interpretive process breaks down because practitioners of this sort of scholarship rely on premises that have attained the status of axioms within the discipline – but when examined from a less parochial perspective, these conventions and axioms can no longer sustain the sense that they’re self-evidently true. For instance, many scholars adhere to the myth of subsistent meaning, the premise that “meaning” constitutes a characteristic quality that inheres to a text. An exegete’s job, then, requires her to distill that meaning from its raw form in the text to a purer, more manifest form. As a second example, scholars who subscribe to the myth of subsistent meaning often locate responsibility for interpretive conclusions in the text itself, such that they claim, “the text requires this” or “the text permits that, but not the other.” Figures of speech that ascribe activity to the (inert) text work admirably when deployed as figures, but when they take on the character of literal ascriptions of agency to inert words, they disfigure our understanding of whence meaning comes and of who stands accountable for interpretive claims. Third, contemporary interpreters tend to treat all interpretive deliberation as a more or less close approximation of verbal communication (hence we speak of “body language,” and suggest that “his expression spoke volumes”). Verbal communication, however, is a very peculiar example of communicative behavior; when we permit our experience with words to set the ground rules of interpretation, we conform the prevalent ordinary instances of communication to the extraordinary, highly regularized pattern of linguistic speech. As they take the relatively more precise instance of verbal communication as the paradigm of communication in general, interpreters tend, fourth, to argue as though one and only one interpretation rightly, finally, ascertains the [subsistent] meaning that the text expresses. The norm of monovalence pits interpreter against interpreter in a hermeneutical contest: only one, after all, can be right. Finally, the adherents of current interpretive conventions warn that if we depart from these axioms — if we allow that no lode of meaning lies embedded in our texts, that we (and not texts) sponsor and permit interpretations, that communication and interpretation constitute phenomena of far greater intricacy than the verbal paradigm allows, and that we may honestly and fairly consider the possibility that a given expression may mean several different things — if we yield on these points, the exquisite architecture of human communication (and especially, of course, of God’s communication with humanity) rapidly declines into inarticulate grunts and brutality. To the contrary: interpreters who aim to tell the truth about God and humanity cannot afford to adhere to misleading premises about their interpretive work.
To the first, then: The widely-held myth of subsistent meaning treats “meaning” as an immanent property of a text. A text has meaning as a quality independent of particular readers and particular circumstances. This premise arises from the amply-justified intuition that when we express ourselves, we generally do so with the goal of evoking a particular sort of response, and that we very frequently succeed at so doing. We infer from this intuition that our successful expressions thus possess a particular quality which our interlocutors recognize, and that their assent demonstrates the presence, the soundness of that presence. In its sophisticated forms, the myth of subsistent meaning reasons that the intentional meaning of a textual expression — though not available to immediate perception — must be inferred from the ordered characteristics of that expression. The more striking the apparent evidence of harmony in expression and uptake, the more convincing the case for subsistent meaning. So when we admire the brilliance with which Daniel Defoe depicts the barbarity of religious intolerance in the anonymously-published The Shortest-Way With the Dissenters, we invest more confidently in the notion that there’s some satiric meaning-quality with which Defoe imbued those particular words arranged in that order, and which we accurately discern when we recoil in horror at the prospect of hanging non-conforming preachers (speaking here as a general rule; each of us may preserve a little list of exceptions).
With so much to be said in behalf of subsistent meaning, how do I presume to question its existence? Simply on the basis that it isn’t there, and that the apparent evidence of its existence derives more from the perceived necessity that it be there than from demonstration that it indeed subsists. The proponent of subsistent meaning demands (justly) that I account for correctness and incorrectness in communication if there be no independent touchstone for testing various proposed interpretations, and that I explain the demonstrable success of conversational interaction. The purchasers of this work, after all, located it on a bookshelf or in a catalogue or database on the basis of verbal interactions. Yet subsistent meaning doesn’t constitute a necessary ingredient to explain these phenomena. As I argue in the XX chapter of this book, The Shortest-Way itself uses no obvious textual signals to indicate that Defoe meant the text to be construed as parody; indeed, it closely approximates the language that his Anglican adversaries themselves used against dissenters, and a good number of those High-Churchmen approved of the measures that the tract proposed — until they found out that Defoe, himself a dissenter, wrote it. The apparent satiric meaning of The Shortest-Way derives not from the text of the tract, nor from the name “Daniel Defoe” that was eventually associated with the text, but from the complex of interactions and expectations from which we reckon that the dissenting author of the text, known to be a subtle and provocative writer, would not compose this essay against his own interest, but was using this pamphlet to highlight the barbarity of the High-Churchmen’s intolerance. Defoe might, after all, have had an abrupt conversion experience on the road to Newgate, or the essay might be misattributed. The axiom that meaning subsists in a text does not avail to explain the correct interpretation of The Shortest-Way. Instead, we agree to regard that pamphlet as “satire” on the basis of unstated shared assumptions about how people behave, what we expect them to say under particular circumstances, how consistent we expect them to be, and so on – but not on the basis of a mystical intrinsic quality of “meaning” that some readers overlook and others recognize.
The same principle applies to more conventional communication: we infer meanings on the basis of a tremendous range of expectations and assumptions, tested and confirmed on the basis of frequent repetition and experimentation, but nonetheless only conventional and provisional. As failures of communication demonstrate (lapses that occur much more routinely than overconfident models of subsistent meaning would allow), our expectations and conventions fail us regularly. Indeed, most of us in long-term intimate relationships must confess that even the highest degree of communicative familiarity with another person does not provide a sure basis for inferring meaning from their expressions. If meaning truly subsists in texts as a quality of the expression itself, why does it remain so elusive even under the conditions most favorable to mutual understanding, and how much more elusive must we admit that meaning to be in the expressions of people whom we know hardly at all?
If meaning does not subsist in texts, we must arrive at it some other way. On the approach that I propose here, we infer “meaning” from the experience of attempting to arrive at a shared understanding; where communication proceeds smoothly, to mutual satisfaction, we sense that we apprehended what our interlocutor meant. Where communication breaks down, where one or more participants in a conversation seem not even to be disagreeing, we sense that someone doesn’t understand what the other meant. “Meaning” helps us communicate by standing for the degree to which we believe ourselves to be recognize what our interlocutor wishes us to understand (or vice versa).
The advantage to this account of meaning lies in its capacity to shift attention from hidden properties of a text, toward our role in proposing, approving, and evoking agreement over meaning. If I want my neighbor to mow her lawn and so tell her, “The grass is getting very long,” she can justifiably suppose that I’m simply commenting on the remarkable vitality of her newly-planted Kentucky Blue. If she construes my remark as a compliment, I need to try again, perhaps by saying, “It’s about time to mow that lawn.” This more direct entreaty will not guarantee that she apprehends my wishes – but most of the people with whom I’ve communicated would find the second invocation more clear than the first. We can criticize somebody who thinks the first should suffice to inspire immediate lawn-mowing, and commend the second as a laudably explicit request. We can sympathize with the neighbor who doesn’t take up the subtle hint in the first, and deprecate the neighbor for whom the second doesn’t provide adequate stimulus for home maintenance. Moreover, in all these cases, we can assess the question of meaning as cases of more or less plausible reasoning; we can ask interpreters to give an account of why one should infer such-and-such a meaning, and we can ask those who wish their expressions to evoke particular interpretations (rather than others) to express themselves in ways that provide reasons for deeming the desired interpretation most plausible. Instead of treating the text as a peculiar sort of silent agent that permits some interpretations, advocates, conceals, promotes, or resists others, this model keeps our attention squarely on humans who interpret one way rather than another, and on the reasons they advance for those interpretations.
As several somewhat cumbersome passages in the preceding paragraphs suggest, however, we communicate not solely with words, nor do we infer meaning only from linguistic signs. We have attained such proficiency in arriving at shared interpretation of our environment that we have a hard time recognizing that as a hermeneutical achievement; nonetheless, the interpretive decisions by which we navigate our automobiles along crowded highways, the subtleties of facial aspect that alert us to shifts in our friends’ moods, the environmental features that prompt us to take an umbrella to work, all these and infinitely many more instances of interpretation call on our capacity to draw interpretive conclusions from nonverbal data. Though these instances of interpretation elude our conscious attention, that does not make them less interpretive; and and the staggering omnipresence of nonverbal interpretive apprehension should chasten our temptation to treat words as the pre-eminent example of occasions for interpretation.
The range of our nonverbal interpretation should teach us several vital lessons about biblical hermeneutics. Just as we would not suggest that a thunder cloud, or a tear on a cheek, or a rolling automobile’s sudden swerve admits of one and only one correct interpretation, we should hesitate before we accept the axiom that verbal expressions have a single correct interpretation. Especially if we dispel the myth of subsistent meaning, we have only faint basis for supposing that the field of verbal interpretation uniquely requires a univocal interpretation. Indeed, even the domain of verbal expression inevitably involves dimensions of nonverbal communication. We appropriately sense that the monosyllable “HELP” scrawled in blood at the scene of some gruesome act of violence means something different from the comforting menu item at the top of my computer window. The simple word is the same in both cases, but the circumstantial cues – the shapes of the letters, the medium with which they’re depicted, the rest of the visual field, for just a few – oblige our interpretive conscience to treat the two expressions very differently.
The variety of qualities that inflect linguistic communication range from such prominent features as type design and page layout to the less obvious: for instance, the scent of the communication medium (a musty book, a perfumed letter, the ionized olfactory opacity of a computer screen). Clement of Alexandria points to this aspect of hermeneutics when he complains that some heretical interpreters distort the appropriate sense of a biblical text by their intonation or inflection: “These are the people who, when they read, twist the Scriptures by their tone of voice to serve their own pleasures. They alter some of the accents and punctuation marks tin order to foce wise and constructive precept to support their taste for luxury” (Stromateis 3.29.2).*1* We can reverse the apparent sense of a sentence by sneering as we recite it, or render a vivid narrative painfully tedious by reading it without variation in tone. An illuminating example of this phenomenon comes from the short-lived Rutland Weekend Television program produced by Eric Idle and Neil Innes after the demise of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a sketch fittingly entitled “Gibberish.”*2* The sketch involves actors Eric Idle and Henry Woolf conversing as talk-show host and guest; though they use perfectly intelligible words interspersed with conventional phrases (“Good evening and welcome,” “I see,” “drawn two, lost three”), their repartee makes no sense: “Rapidly piddlepot strumming Hanover peace pudding mouse rumpling cuddly corridor cabinets?” The actors deliver their lines, however, with the comfortable intonation of typical interview dialogue; the nonlinguisitic aspects of the dialogue betray no indication that the words make no sense at all. Contrariwise, both participants in this interaction convey the impression that the short conversation satisfies them both: “Circular cup?” “Circular cup!” A listener can not derive any coherent account of the linguistic exchange, but the general tenor of the dialogue comes across very clearly to anyone who has heard more than one or two broadcast talk shows. If intonation, emphasis, and delivery convey so much with a nonsensical script, they inevitably affect the interpretation of even marginally intelligible examples of verbal discourse.
This interplay of linguistic and nonlinguistic information in interpretation comes into focus in Jullia Kristeva’s distinction of “phenotext” and “genotext,” which I take up explicitly in the last of the essays here. Kristeva identifies a given expression’s rule-governed, semantically- and syntactically-predictable structure as its phenotext. (Most biblical hermeneutics concentrates exclusively on phenotextual elements of the expressions we read from the Bible.) We never encounter a pure phenotext, however; every linguistic expression comes to us by way of particular circumstantial features. Printed texts involve elements of visual design; auditory texts involve articulation, volume, and tone. These aspects of the text – for which we can give no grammatical or lexical account – constitute the genotext. One can, of course, concentrate solely on one of these interpretive axes, but in so doing one clamps a limit on the range of one’s possible interpretations; by bringing genotextual considerations into play, theologically-inclined interpreters can extend the scope of their interpretive exercises beyond the (phenotextual) boundaries that constrain them.*3* Sound interpretation involves questions of how one ought to portray, intone, and embody a text as well as how the verbs should be parsed, and what each word’s semantic range covers.
At this point in my argument, I need hardly submit that the practice of interpretation affords innumerable reasons to expect that reasonable, learned, critical interpreters will develop different interpretations of the same biblical passage. Their disagreements need not imply that one alone has attained a true understanding of the text, whereas all others (now and before) have succumbed to the baneful effects of ignorance, dull wit, cultural accommodation, or perverse will. With a sensible degree of historical perspective, we will observe that the Bible has never known a period of unanimity in interpretation, nor has more than a century of rigorous technical scholarship ushered in an era of stable, scientifically-certain interpretation. The history of interpretations past and the prospects for interpretations to come together give abundant evidence for the conclusion that interpreters will always arrive at well-founded interpretations that diverge in irreconcilable ways.
While the range of possible interpretations is limitless, the range of plausible interpretations extends much less far. An solipsistic interpreter can always make an outlandish suggestion about who the two witnesses of Revelation 11:3 might be, but unless he can advance reasons to assent to that proposition – for instance, the idea that the two witnesses were John Reeve and his cousing Lodowick Muggleton*4* – that proposal remains an idiosyncrasy. To the extent that we can elicit reasons for particular interpretations and measure them against criteria that we can identify and articulate, interpretive difference need not be accounted a weakness. As James K. A. Smith has suggested, the plenitude of interpretations may reflect God’s abundant generosity given in creation every bit as much as it may the confusion of tongues imposed on humanity at Babel.*5*
On the basis of the preceding paragraphs, then, I submit that the risk of Western civilization and the Christian faith collapsing, undermined by the pernicious influence of a hermeneutics of difference, has been greatly exaggerated. For all the bluster about single, univocal, uniquely correct meanings that allegedly subsist in texts, churches (and civilization) have had to get along with the demonstrable daily fact of interpretive difference. Interpreters have worked out differences by arguing over the best reasons to adopt one rather than another, and abundant alternative interpretations seem to flourish all the more in this rigorously technical interpretive environment. If the church and the West are tottering on the brink of catastrophe, it would be hard to make a case that a positive approach to interpretive difference explains its condition.
In fact, by acknowledging the points that I have sketched thus far, interpreters with theological interests in the Bible stand to benefit immensely. Freed from the impossible task of pinning down a single correct meaning for each biblical passage, scholars might devote their efforts to spelling out what makes their proposal the best among various legitimate hypotheses. Interpreters who adopt this position would make themselves accountable for defining the specific contexts and criteria by which they legitimate their readings, rather than pretending to make a case that should convince every single competent reader.
Even more positively, interpreters who attend from the outset to the multivocal, nonlinguistic dimensions of communication benefit from the opportunity to venture readings that do not fit squarely into the competitive and exclusive ethos of biblical studies. An Anglican’s theological interpretation of Scripture will thus appropriately differ from an Independent Baptist’s; neither will need to try to prove that Jesus, had he the opportunity, would surely have belonged to one or the other denomination. Above all, a hermeneutics that acknowledges the significance of gesture, intonation, image, of flavor and of tactile perception, incorporates at the outset the pertinence of the interpreter’s enacted, articulated, depicted, savored interpretive endeavors. No iron curtain separates this mode of biblical interpretation from ethics, from doctrinal reflection, from liturgy and pastoral care, and these considerations enter into critical interpretive analysis not as a belated afterthought but as a positive integral element of the hermeneutical process.
The chapters of this book approach this multimodal differential hermeneutics with various points of emphasis, along various trajectories. Each chapter sets out to clarify a particular puzzle relevant to understanding the transition from modern technical interpretation to a
*1*Stromateis: Books 1-3, translated by John Ferguson. Fathers of the Church, Vol. 85. (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1991), p. 279. I thank my student John Hartman for calling this text to my attention.
*2* The sketch seems to have been aired in the first episode of Rutland Weekend Television (aired May 12, 1975, according to one online source, though the Wikipedia biographical entry for Idle asserts that the program aired only from 1973 to 1974; Idle reprised the sketch (less satisfactorily) with Dan Ackroyd on Saturday Night Live on April 23, 1977. It is included on the Rutland Weekend Television record album, where I first encountered it.
*3* The New Testament itself invokes genotextual features at points, though contemporary printed editions tend to suppress readers’ awareness of that dimension; consider Paul’s injunction to “See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand!” (Gal 6:11), and his acknowledgment that his oratorical presentation is contemptible (2 Cor 10:10).
*4* The example of the Muggletonian sect, of course, also reminds interpreters that what seems stupefyingly improbable to some readers will nonetheless seem quite convincing to others, sometimes to disappointingly vast numbers of others; the Muggletonians survived from the mid-seventeenth century into the 1970’s. On the other hand, the interpreter whom I cite in chapter XX, note XX, seems not to have won many, perhaps not even any, adherents to his cause.
*5* The Fall of Interpretation, (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2000).
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May 30, 2006
Status
Margaret’s helping, but I’m not making enough progress; concerned note from editor today. My brain, however, is intractably stuck; I have no publishable ideas. Will advise when further along.
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May 29, 2006
Stromateis
I should be scribbling away on my preface-essay (and Saturday’s sermon), so for now, I’ll offer mostly just these links:
Zoe Williams of the Guardian explains, “No, it’s not ironic.”
The falcons are back in Evanston.
Elvis Costello’s list of 500 essential albums — I’m chuffed to observe how consistently his taste matches mine, though I’m not patient and well-informed enough to know and appreciate the full jazz and “classical” repertoires he cites.
This will be handy for some people who use YouTube and Google Video, where I spent some time watching old-school music videos yesterday.
Oh, and we went to see that movie yesterday; it was better, we thought, than the book — though still intensely problematic in numerous ways.
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May 28, 2006
No Popular Culture
The church gets lots of advice about what it ought to be like, how it ought to change. Sometimes this advice actually helps clarify a problem, or brings to light a problem where the church hadn’t perceived anything wrong. Much of the time, though, these suggestions come from who have problems of their own to work out, who project them onto the church and tell us how to make the world better by conforming to their expectations.
Somewhere between “helpful” and “neurotic” lies the terrain on which people (very often church people) insist that the church’s leadership should immerse itself more fully in popular culture. On this suggestion, I wish to register a forceful dissent.
I may be kvetching because I’ve become a cantankerous old codger (thereby attaining a lifetime ambition), but I pretend to myself that I have plausible reasons for objecting. For instance, I don’t believe in “popular culture,” at least not as a definable field from which the church is significantly absent. Popular culture manifestly includes both The da Vinci Code and Left Behind, Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart, The Simpsons and 50 Cent and Prairie Home Companion and Keith Urban. I have a hard time believing that the blanket term “popular culture” does much productive work in identifying all these, especially in conjunction with the notion that church people neglect all of them.
When I hear this suggestion, context often suggests two more precise implications for the proposal. The less laudable reduces to the complaint that “the church doesn’t pay enough attention to the kind of popular culture I like.” So a homilist may scold me for not being sufficiently in touch with popular culture because I don’t watch TV or attend many movies — although I listen to rock’n’roll constantly, and spend recreational hours playing online games.
The more responsible version of the complaint entails (though I’ve never not usually heard this point made explicitly) that the church’s engagement with popular culture rarely escapes a stupefying aye-or-nay binarism. For a while, I heard abundant sermons about The Lion King, none of which raised the theologically- and culturally-critical questions that the movie raised. Instead, as best I recall (and I did try to suppress these memories), they drew facile comparisons between the characters in the movie with characters in the gospels, and noted with facile satisfaction the similarity of the young lion’s spiritual journey to Jesus’ (or ours).
If the church were a more congenial ecology for learning and critical reflection, the “popular culture” topos might bring to the surface more interesting issues: what shall we say about earnest disciples of Jesus who enjoy listening to songs with persistently misogynistic themes, or how we should negotiate the complications of Christian involvement with technology. If you’re just going to bash or endorse an ill-defined glob of under-examined cultural phenomena, though, I’d rather turn my iPod on or go play Warcraft.
(Later: I edited my remarks above to reflect that fact that I have indeed encountered people who work critically at the convergence and divergence of the church with popular culture — I just wasn’t thinking of them as the focal subjects of my crankiness at the time. Mary and Dylan come to mind as people who don’t just trade in glib binary alternatives, and Mary nominates Kathy Tanner and I invoke the Archbishop of Canterbury. As I acknowledge in my comment below, I had in mind a string of tedious sermons and sententious columns, rather than the diligent analysis characteristic of scholars such as Mary. My bad.)
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May 27, 2006
Shorts Day
The ether has enveloped and consumed the post on which Steve proclaimed his antipathy to pants (the closest I can come to finding it is Krista’s post alluding to it and this post of Steve’s that evokes a conversation on the topic), but just as Steve regretfully marks the passing of summer by noting the first day of fall on which he’s compelled to wear trousers, so I (more congenially disposed toward long pants) mark the dawn of summer by announcing that today, for the first time, I’ve put on my comfortable cargo shorts.
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May 25, 2006
Just Thinking
Isn’t all change “exact change”? How would you get hold of an “approximately thirty cents” piece? And if someone handed you one, how would you make change? “Let’s see: roughly sixty-five cents minus thirty-four cents makes just about thirty-one cents. Sorry — I have a somewhere-around-seventy-nine cent piece, but all I have for small change is exact amounts.”
Brought to you by the “recently spent thirty hours driving, many of them on toll roads” department.
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May 24, 2006
Invest Now
Margaret and I agree that when we read something such as this, we wish we could invest in the futures market on writers. We feel utterly certain that Steve will catch the attention of an alert agent or publisher, and that he’ll sell an ample share of books — if only we could get in on the ground floor!
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May 23, 2006
For Now
It’s not that the end of the academic year looms ominously over me just now — the end will be a much-needed respite. But between now and then lies a gauntlet of exams, papers, meetings, interviews, writing, editing, and miscellaneous other obligations.
I’ll write about the da Vinci Code movie as soon as I see it, preparatory to a series of church talks about the subject. I’ll post the preface to my book as soon as that is written. I’ll get around to lots of things I’ve been putting off; but for now, I really really need the break that will come when the end-of-year faculty meeting closes on June 5 (even though I have two three more committee meetings later in the week, and will have to submit grades right around then). (OK, so maybe the target date is a little later in June. Sigh.)
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May 22, 2006
Home Again Home Again
Well, he really did graduate!
We had a great time — Nate found terrific restaurants for us both dinners we spent in Rochester (we ate at Veneto on Saturday evening, at King of Siam on the way home), and introduced us to sundry professors, friends, and Laura.
If I were to go into detail about the weekend, I would just maunder on boastfully about my terrific son, so I’ll allow you to take that as read. Further evidence in my Flickr gallery.
So although we spent twenty-four of the last thirty hours folded up into the car driving to and from Rochester, we feel wonderful, proud, and excited about Nate’s prospects in the University of Michigan’s Ph.D. program in music theory. Hats off!
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May 21, 2006
The Big Day
Graduation at 11:00; I hope to post some pictures later today or tomorrow.
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May 20, 2006
Rochester Report
Arrived safely. Nate chuffed that David wished him mazel tov.
And Liz isn’t in town — what a disappointment!
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May 19, 2006
Road Trip
We’re setting out for Rochester this afternoon, to play the part of admiring family at Nate’s graduation. Right now we’re busy getting into our roles; should we be the young, cool parents (“I thought she was your sister, Nate!” or the overinvested, embarrassingly loud family, or the some other variation on the theme? We have thirteen hours in the car to figure that out.
But we’re not sure how much connectivity we can count on away from home, so although there’ll be pictures at the end of the process, there may not be much bloggage. And of course (rolls eyes) the comments will be wearisomely clogged with junk when I get back.
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May 18, 2006
First Reader
Chris Locke points out that Amazon’s Search Inside feature now points to an “Online Reader” comparable to Adobe Reader. Very interesting. . . .
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There'll Be Some Changes
I don’t know when on earth I’ll have time, or whether I can put it off till after classes, but I promise all would-be or would-have-been commenters that I will upgrade to the current version of Moveable Type (with canned-meat prevention features) as soon as I can back up and get someone to hold my hand. And if MT doesn’t keep unwelcome comments at bay, then I’ll move over to WordPress — but the on-going waves of comment pollution must be stopped one way or another.
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May 17, 2006
Genotext and Phenotext
OK, following up my perplexity of Saturday, I am now examining the pertinent section of Revolution in Poetic Language (conveniently excerpted in The Kristeva Reader).
It looks to me as though Kristeva may indeed be using these terms in a way that accords with what I want to do with them. It wouldn’t be a big problem if she weren’t, so long as I take care not to misrepresent my approach as a direct inheritor of Kristeva — more (in a cinematic gesture) “inspired by a distinction that Julia Kristeva develops.” Still, I think the similarity is close enough that I’m reassured that I’m not indulging in headstrong disregard of what heavier lifters have proposed already.
Kristeva construes phenotext as “language that serves to communicate” it “it is a structure.” “[I]t obeys rules of communication and presupposes a subject of enunciation and an addressee” (all these quotations from p. 121 of the Reader). Kristeva’s phenotext entails question of competence, of adherence to convention.
Her genotext derives from the inchoate processes of instinctual drives, of extrinsic constraints (of society, corporeality, formation), and from the “matrices of enunciation,” the patterns of expression that give sense to particular instances of expression: she nominated literary genres, “psychic structures,” and various modes of participation in communication, as examples. She associates “drives” with “phonematic devices (such as the accumulation and repetition of phonemes or rhyme) and melodic devices (such as intonation or rhythm), in the way semantic and categorial fields are set out in syntactic and logical features, or in the economy of mimesis (fantasy, the deferment of denotation, narrative, etc.)” (Reader, 120). Her genotext constitutes “language’s underlying foundation.”
Without pursuing further, then, the ways that Kristeva handles these categories differently from me, I’m at ease with re-employing them to suit the specific way they can help me articulate the hermeneutical point I want to make. Whew!
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May 16, 2006
Joy and Adjustment
My heart’s beloved has come home, not for the weekend, not for a study week, but for the whole summer. This entails a joy and a relief beyond compare!
On the other hand, when we live apart for long stretches, our sleep patterns diverge. I, for instance, tend to wake up early and listen to the radio as I doze toward daytime wakefulness. Margaret sleeps later than I, and can’t have the radio on. She, on the other hand, is accustomed to listening to WUNC’s broadcast of the BBC World Service as she drifts to sleep, but WBEZ plays jazz for its late-night programming. I flop around the bed more when it’s big and empty.
Adjusting will be worth it.
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May 15, 2006
Bluffer's Guide
Kevin referred me to this Very Short Guide to Christianity for people who are, as the author says, “confused and frightened.”
It’s quite imaginative and funny, and it takes a brave contrarian to assert that Blondie’s cover of “The Tide is High” was better than John Holt’s original version — but I think Holyoffice is onto something there.
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May 14, 2006
Appreciation
My mother always makes a point that “Mother’s Day” is a bogus holiday, a commercial institution designed to further the interests of greeting-card companies and florists, and I want to behave as would a dutiful and respectful son, so I won’t contradict her.
So perhaps tomorrow, or the day after, or some spontaneous moment, I will offer a thanksgiving for my mom, and for Margaret’s mother, and for Margaret herself (she’s actually coming home for the summer tomorrow! W00t!). And after church, I’ll probably make some phone calls. But no greeting cards.
Thanks, Mom!
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Idiosyncrasy Goes Mainstream
It’s not a secret that I’m delighted with holy cards, the index-card sized illustrations of religious figures and themes. I favor the Belgian style known as “neo-Gothic” or “goldprint,” published notably by the Société Saint Augustin, or the German Beuron Art-Deco style (definitely not the gauzy pastel style popular in the U.S.A. and southern Europe — this site includes examples of various styles with source information), and I prefer images of various saints to scenes from the life of Jesus. So I was tickled when Margaret pointed out to me that BoingBoing covered the holy card phenomenon yesterday, linking to an article in the LA Times and to the Wikipedia.
For a survey of what’s out there, survey the eBay pages dedicated to holy cards. You can probably skip the entries that offer multiple cards (you won’t be able to get a good sense of the card design), but after a few minutes of skimming you’ll get the knack of spotting the real gems. That’s where I found the card of Cyril and Methodius for my Slavophile father-in-law (Hi, Dick!).
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May 13, 2006
Rutland Weekend Semiotics
As I worked on my preface, I’m struggling over what to do with the distinction that I thought I understood) between genotext and phenotext. Not surprisingly, it turns out to be a more complicated theoretical point than I had understood at first; the rush of illumination that came with my apprehension of what I thought the distinction implied beclouded the exact nuances Kristeva applied to these terms. Kristeva’s interest in semiotics, seminalysis, draws much more heavily on Lacanian psychological discourses than I care to (“genotext as the unconscious of language, phenotext as the conscious”). Barthes, through whose “The Grain of the Voice” I came to the genotext/phenotext distinction in the first place, says of a musical expression,
the pheno-song. . . covers all the phenomena, all the features which belong to the structure of the language being sung, the rules of the genre, the coded form of the melisma, the composer’s idiolect, the style of the interpretation: in short, everything in the performance which is in service of communication, representation, expression, everything which it is customary to talk about, which forms the tissue of cultural values (the matter of acknowledged tastes, of fashions, of critical commentaries), which takes its bearing directly on the ideological alibis of a period (‘subjectivity’, ‘expressivity’, ‘dramaticism’, ‘personality’ of the artist). The geno-song is the volume of the singing and speaking voice, the space where significations germinate from within language and its very materiality’; it forms a signifying play having nothing to do with communication, representation (of feelings), expression; it is that apex (or that depth) of production where the melody really works at the language — not at what it says, but the voluptuousness of it sounds-signifiers, of its letters — where melody explores how the language works and identifies with that work. It is, in a very simple word but which must be taken seriously, the diction of the language. (“The Grain of the Voice,” 182-183, from Image - Music Text)
In a rush of excitement, I took Barthes to be proposing that the pheno-song was the structure, the script, the staves and lyrics and textual apparatus of the song — but that doesn’t seem to gibe with what he writes here. Similarly, I understood the geno-song to comprise the un-specifiable performative aspects of the text (which I inferred from his reference earlier on p. 182 to “the materiality of the body, speaking its mother tongue” and his subsequent comments on two performers, Fischer-Dieskau’s irreproachably exact instantiation of the phenosong, contrasted with Panzera’s reaching beyond the “expressive reduction operated by a whole culture against the poem and its melody,” p. 184).
This all comes up because yesterday I remembered a wonderful example of (what I had taken to be) the distinction between genotext and phenotext, Eric Idle’s brilliant “Gibberish” sketch from the first episode of the Rutland Weekend Television series (aired May 12, 1975, according to one source, though the Wikipedia biographical entry for Idle asserts that the program aired only from 1973 to 1974; Idle reprised the sketch, unsatisfactorily, with Dan Akroyd on Saturday Night Live on April 23, 1977). The sketch involves Eric Idle and Henry Woolf conversing as talk-show host and guest; though they use perfectly intelligible words interspersed with conventional phrases (“Good evening and welcome,” “I see,” “drawn two, lost three”), their repartee makes no sense: “Rapidly piddlepot strumming Hanover peace pudding mouse rumpling cuddly corridor cabinets?” The actors read their lines, however, with the comfortable intonation of conventional interview dialogue. On the imprecise understanding of genotext and phenotext I had worked up before resuming research toward my preface, this sketch demonstrates the divergence of the [meaningless] genotext, the unintelligible sequence of ordinary words, from phenotext, the pattern of emphasis and pitch, the embodied communicative satisfaction of the participants. But after having re-read Kristeva and Barthes, now I’m mostly just confused.
Or, more precisely, I don’t assent to what Kristeva (and Barthes) evidently wanted to do with these terms, and trying to puzzle out the most satisfactory account of her usage and the relation of her theory to mine, all gives me a headache. And I need to write out what I’m thinking in the next week.
By the way, I’m quite confident that the transcription I link above misses several words. Their “rabbit and and futfutfooey jugs” should be “rabbit and ratatouille jugs”;
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Chewing on the Music
I read this article by Alex Ross with interest, and I’m linking it here partly because I’d be interested in talking about it with Nate when we go to his graduation next weekend.
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May 12, 2006
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Then as Big-Budget Disaster Movie?
One of Philip K. Dick’s favorite tropes (one that he recycled repetitively, sometimes effectively, often tediously) involved the premise that the losing side in a war actually wins by provoking the winning side to adopt the losing side’s values and ideology.
I keep thinking about that as the secret history of the Bush administration unreels. This morning an NPR reporter described the recent developments in the NSA phone data-mining operation, saying, “The furor is causing more problems for Michael Hayden” — But I heard, “The Führer is causing more problems. . . .” No, George Bush is not a new Hitler — but we can’t afford to refuse to acknowledge and name certain characteristics that the Bush regime shares with governments against which the U.S.A. has waged war in the name of freedom and human rights. We do not win a “War Against Terror” by sacrificing the ideals to which the U.S.A. aspires on the altar of an illusory, idolatrous “Security.”
In the weeks between now and the Fourth of July, I will re-read the Declaration of Independence once or twice, checking the description of the grievances that the founders charged against King George. “King George. . . .”
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May 11, 2006
More On MacGyver
“You’re a white man, Porgie. Whaddya think we oughta do?”
I owe some feedback (and amplification) on my argument concerning White Guy theology. There were a couple of points I omitted that I’d like to add on, and a couple of responses I need to offer.
First, then, I omitted the MacGyver feature of the Good Cause, the undisputable worthy end that warrants a White Guy marching forward and taking charge. Someone has to do it, after all, and a White Man is willing to, and if he brings privilege and social capital to the task, well, so much the better. Am I saying that White Men should sit on the sidelines with their white hands in their pockets?
No, not a bit, though when might do well to watch carefully when we see White Men exercising leadership in an undisputable Good Cause. Were there really no people of color, no women, who might have stepped forward in their own interest? Is the White Man there because the moment really needs his visible presence, or is he the token of establishment approval, proving that White Power (to some extent) supports this movement, and back-handedly reinforcing the premise that if White Men don’t want something to happen, it won’t? The ambiguous legacy of St MacGyver involves the very good dimension of conscientized White Men putting their resources at the disposal of women and people of color — excellent! It also involves White Men’s power and privilege sapping, diluting the power that people of color and women might exercise over against White Men.
Second, privileged White Men practice a pernicious form of ventriloquism whereby — since they have unique access to public attention — they lay claim to the prerogative to speak for the oppressed (even as they exercise the benefits of their oppressive privilege). I have no reason to doubt that John Kerry feels a sincere commitment to the well-being of manual laborers, of women on the margins, of people who endure racial oppression. At the same time, can one watch him stand on a podium orating about justice and opportunity without the creeping sense that something’s out of kilter? When a White Man speaks on behalf of anyone else, he simultaneously lends voice to a less-audible cause and suppresses the sound of the people of color and women for whom he speaks.
White Men exacerbate the ventriloquism problem when they use their podium to tell us what the real problem is. People who don’t have access to social power evidently don’t understand the true nature of their oppression, but it takes a White Man to explain it to them. White Men likewise need to justify their intervention, to exculpate themselves from their Whiteness, to get the last word in the argument that settles them on the side of all that is good and holy.
MacGyver, I’m given to understand, exemplified both these phenomena. He rolls into town, discovers a deplorable situation (a sweatshop, or a neighborhood terrorized by drug kingpins, or an environmental catastrophe), and steps up to remedy the situation. Risking his life on behalf of the endangered helpless victims (are they not poorer, darker-skinned, and often female?) he confronts the evil powers and undoes their pernicious machinations. The well-intentioned White Man steps out front in a Good Cause, and gives a little speech about goodness and right. Thank you, White Man!
Overall, White Men want to fix things in a way that doesn’t resolve the problem of their dominant social privilege; indeed, the very gesture of fixing tends to reinscribe White Male privilege (presumably, a woman or person of color couldn’t fix matters?) In this sense, “fixing” itself becomes a symptom of a persistent problem with White Men’s social standing. When White Men step forward to fix, to speak for, to diagnose the real problem, to arrogate the last privilege of the last word, they exemplify precisely the problem to which I pointed in the first portion of this argument.
A theology of grace obliges people to recognize that goodness doesn’t depend on us, especially not on White Men — and when White Men cling to the nonpareil importance of their contribution to realizing the Kingdom of Heaven, to identifying truth and goodness, they obfuscate or even falsify the claims they so desperately want to make. Instead of requiring that they maintain the prominence to which they have become accustomed, White Men need to let go their deathgrip on the reins of power, relinquish their control over theological deliberation, and concede that the world’s redemption doesn’t hinge on White Men’s action in behalf of the Good Causes.
None of this should amount to beating up on White Men, so long as they’re willing not to be in the driver’s seat the whole time. Yes, lend your energies to the causes about which you care. Yes, testify to the truth that God has given you to know. Yes, demonstrate your commitment to sharing authority and responsibility with women and people of color by actually participating in shared deliberation without dominating them.
Now, with regard to queries from Ryan and from my Tutor, I should say: I do not by any means suggest that White Men should stand idly by while they observe wrong-doing, nor that they have to seek out an authentic Oppressed Person to serve as a front for their laudable efforts. They do need to get used to operating on other people’s terms, on other people’s terrain, without assimilating it to the native White Men’s culture (that they mistakenly think of as definitive, normative, regulative). In this sense, White Men need to learn to practice patience, yieldedness, humility — not that they disregard wrongs, but that they recognize their complicity in those wrongs and the problems likely to ensue from their residual determination to fix things. Above all, they need to get used to the idea that they don’t automatically get their way, get a hearing, get commendations and gratitude, just on the basis of their historical dominance.
And sometimes, despite all our good intentions, all our insightful analysis of the real problem, all our diligent commitment and our willingness to speak on behalf of the voiceless, still White Men will have to sit quiet when people of color and women don’t respond with fawning deference. Sometimes even when we’re sure that we’re right, that we’re being criticized unfairly or that others are making a mistake, we need to back down (perhaps after gently articulating our dissent) and let other folks dominate in their ways, make their mistakes. It’s not as though White Men haven’t done that, nor as though White Men may not be mistaken in their diagnosis of “unfairness” or “mistakes.”
Grace, not political correctness or white self-hatred, obliges White Men to back down. So long as White Men insist on holding onto the reins, they can’t very well suggest that they’re trusting God to direct the horses.
Posted by AKMA at 11:41 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
May 10, 2006
Down To Business
OK, today I buckle down and make some headway on the preface. I plan on beginning by situating the essays in the context of my work and the field of biblical studies: throughout the twentieth century, biblical scholars have grappled with the hermeneutical problem of how to connect their technical study of the grammar and historical context of the Bible with the ways that the Bible can and should affect the lives of contemporary readers. They have suggested numerous work-arounds and improvements for hermeneutical deliberation, but none seems to have won general assent.
Some people sense no problem with the status quo; they’re content to puzzle over unusual verb forms, odd usages of familiar words, the likelihood or unlikelihood of people raising other people from death. A considerable number of readers, though, express dissatisfaction with an interpretive method that excels at retrospect, but falters when interpreters try to bring the Bible to bear on contemporary life.
In these essays, I propose that readers who want something more than, or something different from what conventional critical scholarship offers may need to rethink some deeply-held presuppositions of twentieth-century biblical analysis. The method -- inasmuch as we can appropriately define this array of interpretive moves as a method -- performs admirably, but it does not exhaust the work of interpretive reflection, nor does it set the terms on which further reflections may proceed.
Practitioners of contemporary technical scholarship frequently shore up the foundations of their discipline with appeals to particular axioms, axioms whose soundness I have come to doubt. Many scholars adhere to the myth of subsistent meaning, the premise that “meaning” constitutes a characteristic quality that inheres to a text. An exegete’s job, then, requires her to distill that meaning from its raw form in the text to a purer, more manifest form. Scholars often locate responsibility for interpretive conclusions in the text itself, such that they claim, “the text requires this” or “the text permits that, but not the other.” These figures of speech serve admirably when deployed as figures, but when they take on the character of literal ascriptions of agency to inert words, they disfigure our understanding of whence meaning comes and of who stands accountable for interpretive claims. contemporary interpreters tend to treat all interpretive deliberation as a more or less close approximation of verbal communication (hence we speak of “body language,” and suggest that “his expression spoke volumes”). At the same time, biblical scholars tend to operate as though one and only one interpretation rightly, finally, ascertains the [subsistent] meaning that the text expresses. Finally, the adherents of current interpretive conventions warn that if we depart from these axioms — if we allow that no lode of meaning lies embedded in our texts, that we (and not texts) sponsor and permit interpretations, that communication and interpretation constitute phenomena of far greater intricacy than the verbal paradigm allows, and that we may honestly and fairly consider the possibility that a given expression may mean several different things — if we yield on these points, the exquisite architecture of human communication (and especially, of course, of God’s communication with humanity) rapidly declines into inarticulate grunts and brutality.
The rumors of civilization’s demise, of course, would be greatly exaggerated. The essays included here explore the terrain of meaning beyond the boundaries enforced by conventional technical scholars. In various ways, with various points d’appui, the essays work toward establishing the claim that “meaning” pertains to human activity and interaction rather than textual inscription; thus, people devise interpretations for which they (not the objects they interpret) must be held responsible. These essays propose that expression and meaning involve vastly more sorts of gesture than verbal communication, such that adopting verbal communication as the paradigm for analyzing “meaning” constitutes a misleading oversimplification. Just as gestures, appearances, smells, and sounds may engender various indeterminable interpretations, so also verbal expression may issue in more than one meaning. All of this holds true not in some dystopian Looking-Glass World where nothing mean anything and everybody runs roughshod over any weaker communicator, but in the world we inhabit here and now. If anything threatens the well-being of the priase of God and the harmonious social order, it is more ominously the imposition of falsely-constricted meaning onto the demonstrably plurivalent economy of signification that prevails outside the rigidly-enforced domain of monovalence and correctness.
(Whew! That’s enough for one go. Plus, I want to say more about White Guy Theology, maybe later.)
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May 09, 2006
Vocabulation
Is “assiduous” the opposite of “basic”?
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May 08, 2006
Drawn?
No, David, if I had expressed myself more clearly, it would have been plainer that I hadn’t thought you were arguing that art uniquely, or distinctively, fuses matter and intentionality.
Let’s look at the point where you do agree that we differ: You observe that in some works of art, “the mute is brought to speech,” that they “carr[y] more meaning than words can express,” a carved stone “speaks more eloquently than does flesh.” (Clarification: you ren’t saying this happens automatically, in every case of supposed “art” — all these examples are governed by your prefatory “sometimes.”) Yes, that’s just where our paths diverge. I don’t want to concede that the power to move you resides in some quality of the carved stone, the painted canvas, the outstanding artwork. I think that the assumption that the item in question itself moves you or me engenders the misleading impression that there’s a quality of “moving-ness” that we might separate from the cultural settings and conventional modes of expression within which we encounter the work of art. “King’s pawn to King’s Knight 7” may be a powerful move, a blunder, an illegal move, or an unintelligible gesture (as my old Flanders and Swann record said, “because they were playing bridge at the time” — what a joy, to discover that Phil Wolff loves Flanders and Swann too!) depending on the situation, the conventions and expectations that govern that move.
I harp on this point because in my field, people persist in ascribing agency to words and artifacts in ways that mystify a more precise characterization of what’s happening, and in ways that direct attention away from human responsibility for those happenings. When someone says, “The Bible demands that I stone an adulterer to death,” such a person exculpates her- or himself for the blood of the transgressor, rather than acknowledging that a myriad of very pertinent human considerations affect every judgment about what the Bible says. They don’t render the Bible “meaningless” or permit people to cite the Bible as a warrant for just any action — but the constraints on interpretation (I repeat) derive not from inherent qualities of “the work,” but from the patterns of social interaction within which we judge particular interpretations justified and other outlandish.
Or as Cole Porter might have said if he were a technologist-philosopher or -theologian, “You say ‘Heidegger,’ I say ‘Wittgenstein,’ let’s call the whole thing drawn.”
Posted by AKMA at 03:26 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Two Things
First, did the national “Do Not Call” list eliminate your unwanted phone calls? Not ours. In fact, if there’s a single Student Loan profiteer in the United States who hasn’t called us, you can be confident that they will call shortly. The Do Not Call list only gives me something to talk to them about; it doesn’t impel them not to call me in the first place.
They always seem astonished when I ask whether we have an existing business relationship. “What?” So I repeat the question. “I don’t think so,” they answer, “We’re just calling because it’s important that you consolidate your loans before. . .” Un-huh; you’re blanketing the population of student-loan borrowers out of the purely altruistic interest in their getting lower interest rates. Right.
Second, I’m linking again to Fred Clark’s Slacktivist site. I don’t know of anyone who engages popular culture, public policy, faith, and politics with such attention to detail such clarityt, such exemplary strong theological grounding. Updates to his reading of Left Behind come less often these days, but I read them avidly, and his commentary on immigration and legality ill