The following was originally intended as a comment about a post titled 'The Invisible Blogger' (which can be found here: http://snarkyoptimist.blogspot.com/2010/03/invisible-blogger.html )
written by a friend of mine. I have deemed this response so necessary, and the currents I therein detect both so contrary to reason and inimical to human freedom, that I have decided to make a post of it.
Now, there are two different contentions which my friend conflates here:
Contention the first: That the purpose of a blog is to convey information to people, thereby provoke some kind of engagement with that information, ideally creating an attitude, action or series of actions as a byproduct of this engagement. This is pretty straight forward, and is, more or less, the aim of all writing. Writing is the technology we use to transcribe speech, and no one employs any technology just for shits and giggles; technology is by nature teleological. Even, if one writes out of sheer vanity (as I do) there is still a target reaction which I aim at eliciting in my audience (whether or not I succeed is another matter entirely).
Contention the second: That there may or may not be an 'objective meaning' in a piece of writing, but this consideration is secondary to its impact; 'because intent does not equal content'. [Italics not my own]. Further, that a reader's interpretation of a written passage is not necessarily invalid, nor even of less value than that of the writer: in fact, it is more important, because giving the author 'complete authority on what their writing means is to squash discussion and limit the potential of the text'.
My response to all this is threefold:
a) adopting this mentality paves the way to manifold violations of human rights
b) there is indeed a meaning in every text, and that interpretation is an entirely separate, if not always irrelevant issue.
c) that is is a writer's job to limit text
Firstly, by privileging a reader's interpretation of what a righter says, we are handing over an unreasonable amount of power. If any more than a handful of writers believed that such a degree of power resided with the reader, there would be no journalists, anywhere. Just imagine, you write a blog post...say...justifying the consumption of horse meat (who could imagine such a horrific thing!) and your readers take you to be offering incitement to commit acts of animal cruelty. Maybe you write about how you think that Canada needs to very clearly delineate and legislate it's beliefs, and stop according so much respect to foreign cultures just for the sake of their oddity when their mores are very clearly contrary to, and in danger of destroying our way of life. But your reader on the other hand knows (better than you) that you are actually discriminating against or inciting hatred against the islamic faith and takes you to the rampantly abused human rights tribunal. Or perhaps you write a newspaper article about Hezbollah, and you are jailed for supporting the state of Israel; because, after all, Hamas knows what you mean better than you do! (see: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2644160). Cool with all this so far?
Next: years ago I read a book called 'Validity in Interpretation' by an E.D. Hirsch Jr. [buy it here: http://miniurl.org/3wJ ] I forgot everything about it till I read my friend's article a few days ago. Was the book of inferior quality or was it not worth remembering? Absolutely not. On the contrary, this little book is so correct in it's debunking of nonsense of this kind that it seemed like common sense. I didn't recall having read it, because the question of meaning in writing is so painfully obvious [to a positivist like myself] that I confess I was honestly shocked by the fact that anyone who has ever spoken to me could set down such an irrational theory of meaning. I don't know whether this has been occasioned by carelessness, the relaxed vigilance at the gate of possibility in English departments everywhere (watch your average English student miraculously perform miracles that even the most erudite positivist philologist would claim impossible! Let us no longer be bound by reason! The impossible - not the mere improbable, but that which is actually logically impossible - shall henceforth be performed before our very eyes!), or if this is particularly endemic to Ottawa (after all, Francophones do seem more susceptible to embrace nonsense like this). Just because someone like Derrida, Barthes or Eagleton have published books doesn't make them authorities on this matter; we are all educated, and therefore equally prone to saying extremely stupid shit.
Hirsch distinguishes between two things (which above I noted that our Snarky Optimist has conflated): meaning and significance viz. what a text means and what a text means to you are to entirely separate matters. Let me explain: I once had the misfortune of seeing Shostakovich's Ledi Makbet Mtsenskovo Uyezda. The only scene which I enjoyed was a satirical portrayal of the Soviet police. It wasn't funny. Not even a little bit. But I could not contain my laughter. It reminded me of the police force in Flann O'Brien's outrageously funny novel, The Third Policeman. My reaction, in this instance, was utterly unrelated to the stimulus which caused it. This is fine, and happens to everyone. But to mistake our reactions as something that stems directly from, or is inherent in a text is utterly absurd!
Now, I agree that misreadings have their uses. After all, the history of thought (excepting that which is inferred by anthropologists) is a history of misreading. Tracking people's inability to access the meaning of a given text is both interesting, and an extremely useful tool that can describe (among other things) what has gone horribly wrong with the world (and perhaps some of our few successes). e.g. we can explain the French revolution by a widespread misreading of Rousseau, and the second world war, by a frighteningly correct reading of Hegel and Fichte.
Lastly: while my friend would have us writers hand over the reigns of discussion to people incapable of leading, I hold that the very act of communication assumes the power of the writer. The writer chooses words, and, excepting a few trashy 20th century poets, he does so for a reason; would it surprise you to discover that the entire opera Bukowskii was in fact written in conjunction with my dog, tearing (after his own wont) words out of a dictionary I left lying on the ground? Yeah...I wouldn't be either. If I say to you that 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune', I am limiting your response; you cannot say 'Pizza? That is an excellent idea! I'll grab the phone. Shall we order wings too?' Writers select words from a wide range of them and set them down in particular orders to communicate specific things signified by those words. This itself is an act of limiting. Now, a writer may or may not have specific ends in mind: I write with the intent of converting my reader to my (and the quite obviously correct) view, my friend writes with the aim of increasing awareness about constructive applications of technology and other such things and causing people to give thought to such matters. Just because a writer may not tell you what to think, does not mean that his meaning is at all variable.
Observe:
scientist - someone who introduces combinations of known quantities in a planned-out situation with the end of causing something to occur in a manner hypothesized.
mad scientist - someone who introduces combinations of unknown quantities into the first situation at hand in order to see shit happen.
Every writer, like every legit scientist, sets out with a very specific purpose. He may not always - in fact he may never on a single occasion - achieve the desired result, however, authority of the writer in deciding meaning and directing discussion is enshrined in the very nature of language. Were it not, I might has well just give you a dictionary and tell you to make what you damn please of it.
