Episode 189: Authorial Intent (Barthes, Foucault, Beardsley, et al) (Part One)

Partially examine life relies on your support. To find out how to help, in ways that are cheap or even free for you, check out partiallyexaminedlife.com/support. [Music] You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are set on doing philosophy for living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 189 is, do the author's intentions determine the meaning of an artwork, and we read four essays, the Intentional Falsacy by Wimbsat and Beardsley, 1946, the death of the author by Roland Barthes, 1967, what is an author by Michel Foucault, 1969, and against theory by Stephen Neb and Walter Ben Michaels, 1982. For links to all of these, and more information, please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com. This is Mark Linton-Meyer, whose intent is seldom quite the same as the contents of my utterance in Medicine, Wisconsin. This is Seth Paskin, giving you permission to interpret anything I say or do in any way that you wish in Austin, Texas. This is Wesaw and Epsenting Myself by presenting myself from Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is Dylan Casey, full of intentionless meaning in Medicine, Wisconsin. Since I moved, I'm no longer in middle-ten Wisconsin. Congratulations. Did you move into the big city? No, I didn't move downtown. We were considering that in the list of things, but it was a little bit unintended to move when we did. They discovered their old house was haunted. You got to get out when the mirror says, "Get out!" You get out. This is something we've wanted to do for a little while. Since we've already been talking about fiction, we've been talking about movies, we wanted to do something per our discussion of. Sort of about this in the end of your episode. These readings were suggested by listeners, in particular, the Wumsat and Beardsley, Barth and Foucault were suggested by probably six different people. Seth, those three, and there were some other suggestions here, which we thought the against theory by Napa Michaels was kind of helpful because it was a dissenting opinion of sorts, though not maybe the dissenting opinion you would think. So the other three articles all have the thesis that the intentions of the author do not matter, and they are reacting to a tradition, a romantic tradition, a long tradition that said, "Yeah, to figure out what an artwork means, go ask the author, or better yet, look at the author's psychology, look at the author's biography, and you can say, "Oh, yeah, that poem means this thing because Shope and Hauer is complaining the way he does, because he was such a grouchy person. He was so put off in his professional struggles with Hagle, and you can see just looking at his biography and what a grouchy person he was, and that just explains his philosophy. Of course, these are not about philosophies, in particular, in fact, they're all about poems and works of fiction, but I think we could extend the same logic." Yeah, I think it kind of makes more sense with poetry or fiction. So if you have a poem and you're asking what it means, the question is whether you do it simply using the textual evidence or whether you might want to go outside of the poem, outside of the work of art, to write a letter to the author, you could email them, you could just look at their biography, their letters, things like that. I think the way to think about this is where you're looking for evidence inside the poem or outside the poem, and this suggestion is when you go outside of the poem that the gold standard, as you put it, Mark, of the meaning of the poem is the author's intention. I am aggressively and firmly entrenched in the camp of authorial intent is completely irrelevant to the process or of interpretation. It's an interesting data point that you could bring amongst others, but that's my firm conviction. So we'll see whether that gets unsettled during this conversation. I found myself really, really, really liking the nappin' michels, and I found myself agreeing that the blanket dismissal of the author and that there's such a thing as authorial intent, and there are different versions of that for each of the other three papers. I found it a claim that's very similar to the claim that they were arguing against, which was a different kind of gold standard, and that they just wanted to pick another gold standard that was outside of the work itself and the author, and that it may be not surprisingly given how often they use the word pragmatic, I find, nappin' michels, more rough and ready, account of the way in which interpretation happens, much more convincing and palatable. I generally find claims like the author doesn't matter, or the author matters completely as just going too far. To me, three minutes of thinking makes you disagree with both those claims. Thank you for letting me know that I haven't thought more than three minutes about this, though. I'm on the Seth side, so that's six minutes. I'm actually, no, I'm kind of in between you guys. Just to put the four articles in some sort of chronology, so the Wimzat in Beersley is part of what is called new criticism, which just looking at Wikipedia here, I don't actually know that much about it, but is, for instance, the movement derived its name from John Crowe, Ransom's 1941 book, The New Criticism, and TS Eliot was a big name in that, and apparently, again, they were reacting to the Romantics, to Milton, to Shelley. I guess there's some elaboration in at least one of the readings of what the Romanticism mounted to, but you can sort of imagine the idea of the great man theory. Let's give author biographies where we used to give heroes biographies. The Romanticism is the idea that the standard for the evaluation of a poem is how well it expresses this internal state of the particular author. You can see how that would correspond then to, first, somebody who can express that is going to be a genius, and then they have to have something really impressive to express, probably. So you would get people like Nietzsche pointing to somebody like Mozart as, wow, that is a magnificent human being, not even just as a craftsman, but somebody that has something to express. So, yeah, so I'm a Romantic poet, and I have this incredible experience of nature, let's say, raging ocean or something like that. And then my job is to communicate that experience on this theory. And so I want to convey a certain emotional reaction, and maybe some ideas for those for whom the intention of the author is important. And this Romantic sense, the idea is that when I come to that poem, I'm looking to know that they do what they set out to do. And so I need in some sense, where they successful. Yeah, I need in some sense to know, well, where are they feeling? And sometimes I might be able to infer. So what is it that they were trying to communicate and did the poem do that? So to me, a good example of this kind of thing is musical interpretation, right? Where you would talk about how good of a version of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, a given performance was. And part of that interpretation would be is how well they rendered what's called the symphony itself, because that has notes and parts and that sort of thing. And a big part of the judging of the success of the performance of the symphony in judging that performance has been a successful or a great rendition of the symphony. Second, tell Dylan that you've internalized the napkin Michaels because I feel like that by using that as an example, in other words, the score itself as what the author's intention was, that's exactly napkin Michaels thesis. Whereas this romantic thing, the intention, at least what three of these articles are arguing against, seems like it is something external to any realization of the work. It's purely an idea in Mozart's head. I like the idea of Mozart because if you've ever seen the movie Amadeus, did you write your symphony yet? Oh, yeah, it's all up here. It's all right in my head. And then he just has to write it down. So there's something separate between the intentions and the work itself. In fact, maybe that doesn't even work. Maybe the example I just gave, there's an idetic artwork that is in his head. And the intention is prior to that when he's thinking about, I want to write a really somber thing. That apparently, we're not reading any of the romantics, but seems like the way that Wimzaten Beard's Lee and then Bart and Foucault characterize what this romantic view was. And then Nappen, Michael's after that are coming along and saying, "Look, this whole idea of a division between the intention and the work itself is ridiculous." One camp is arguing, "You have to figure out what the intention is." And in fact, some of them are saying, "You have to figure out what the intention is, but you can't." So therefore, interpretation is impossible. The other camp is saying, "Don't worry about the intention. Just look at the work itself." But Nappen, Michael's, are saying, "The intention and the work are actually identical." No, the intention and the meaning of the work. What is intended and the meaning of the work are identical. Yes, you're right. You're right. I think jumping to that essay, which is quite complicated, I don't know if we should do that right now. Yeah, I'm just throwing out. These are what we're going to talk about today. I think the intentional fallacy is the simplest and it's the oldest, so maybe we should start with that. The Bart and the Foucault, I'm not clear on the history between Wimzaten Beard's Lee or Americans. Bart and Foucault are French and they're coming with a lot of different influences to it. Well, Foucault, at least, is responding to the new critics, even though he doesn't mention the new critics directly. He's definitely. That's his intention. Yes. Yeah, it's clear that he's aware of the new critics and he is critical of the new critics. So he's trying to stake out a stance, which is not even though we're getting rid of the author, he's saying, "Well, I'm not a new critic. We should start with the intentional fallacy." All right, who wants to sum it up? They put it all in a line very early on in the essay, which is, "We argue that the designer intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art." So we're talking about literary art specifically and we're talking about success, which it turns out will be closely related to meaning. They also have a definition of intention here. Again, at the beginning, they're sort of setting out their criteria. So what Wes just said is what they're going to talk about and their thesis. And then they define intention. Intention, as we shall use the term corresponds to what he intended in a formula which more or less explicitly has wide acceptance. In order to judge the poet's performance, we must know what he intended. And they have that in quotes as a way of characterizing what we mean by speaking of the intention. Intention is a design or plan in the author's mind. It is obvious affinities for the author's attitude towards his work the way he felt and what made him right. Yeah, so intention could mean a lot of things, right? It could be as simple as what's the meaning of this phrase, the literal meaning of this phrase. I want to convey an experience of what it's like to feel pure, unconditioned love. An allegory would be another example where I'm putting aside the word intended and author self-consciously created an allegory in which different animals were symbolic of different kinds of people and yeah, you know, a book like Animal Farm by Orwell. You have speaking animals, but you would have it in understanding that short book is you would have a discussion about what is it about the characteristics of the individual animals that he has in there and the political intentions there. Why does he pick certain groups to be pigs and why does it pick others to be cows? And I read an interview with him. He was asked about that and he just said, "Oh, I was just taking the piss." That's all he said. Well, that's the right answer. It was that what Orwell's accent was like in your head market. Yes. And I didn't realize he was cockney. So they go on to give these five. Axiomatic propositions. So he said, "We begin our discussion with a series of propositions, summarize and abstracted to a degree where they seem to us axiomatic." And they are essentially the first one is that it intentions. So obviously our intentions are the cause of our artistic works. Like we go about things with intentions when we're doing that work, but that doesn't mean that they're the standard for the judgment of the work. That's the first idea. The second is that if the poet succeeds in their intention and the poem expresses it, and the third is that when you judge a poem, you're essentially judging it like they use a phrase like a pudding or a machine. You're judging whether it works. So it's the same criteria that you would judge a pudding or a machine. And so if it works, we can infer the intention. Fourth, a poem might express genetically, it might express a personality or state of mind. It might have a personal meaning. But the speaker, that's the personal meaning of the persona, the person who's actually speaking. So if I write an impassioned poem and first person about a personal state of mind, what you're expressing there, what the reader has is of course a persona. Is it me speaking or am I, I'm inhabiting some state of mind of an alternative version of myself or something like that, any permutation of that. And then finally, let's say, I think I'll leave it at those four. So yeah, I feel like we should make a case for the thing that he's arguing against because I find these deeply problematic and it might just be because I'm not thinking about poetic criticism specifically, but lyrics are similar enough. So for instance, the first one, to insist the designing intellect as the cause of a poem is not to grant the design or the intention as a standard. Why would you possibly think that it sets up the standard? Well, because you could be trying to write a limerick or you could be trying to write an epic poem. And if you start your epic poem and you write, what is it? Five lines, what the lyrical, five lines. And then you die and people discover this and say, wow, is this supposed to be a limerick? I'm like, no, I was actually supposed to be the beginning of an epic poem. It would be nice to know that it was the beginning of an epic poem and not a limerick. What is the response to that? I mentioned before we started using a specific example. A poem, is that something that's agreeable to you guys? I would read two stanzas of this. No, poems are disagreeable to me, Wes. I think I just gave an example. I'm just wondering why we can't. Well, did you give a, you didn't read something though. All right, all right, go ahead. So the Indian to his love. So I'm just going to read two stanzas, short stanzas of a four stanz of poem. This is Yates. The island dreams under the dawn and great boughs drop tranquility. The Peehens dance on a smooth lawn, a parrot sways upon a tree, raging at his own image in the enameled sea. Here we will more our lonely ship and wander ever with woven ends, murmuring softly lip to lip, along the grass, along the sands. Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands. So there's two more stanzas there. So the reason why I bring this up is I just thought the couplet, a parrot sways upon a tree, raging at his own image in the enameled sea, would be a good example for us to try and think about meaning and the different layers of meaning here. One is just the literal layer and another is the question of symbolism and what that couplet is meant to be, what that couplet is meant to mean. And whether authorial intent is the best criterion for figuring out what that couplet means. My quick loss on it is at the very least you see this contrast between this mute animal looking at what's essentially a mirror in the sea except this word enameled is kind of this connotative of something artistic. And in contrast to the lovers who have each other. So you might interpret this as being about the state of the artist or the state of someone who's a more narcissistic state, right? That's evocative of narcissists looking into the on versus the outward loving activity of two lovers. Of course, it might not mean that. It could mean other things, that's my first reaction to it. And then the question is, well, how do I solve that problem? To figure out if I'm right, do I need to go read the eight's biographies and things like that? Or do I stick to the text of the poem? After all, if it's a successful poem, the evidence should lie within the poem. Do I need to consult external evidence of the eight's intentions? Well, that's an interesting question right there. I want to agree that some of this poem should speak for itself and its success should be plain. But as soon as I say that, as soon as I excise, say, going up and learning something about the eight's as part of understanding the poem, I wonder, well, why do I need to excise that compared to all the other contexts that I need to have in order to understand the poem at all? Why should I prefer some context to others? The context like speaking English, knowing what love is, generally having some knowledge of. Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of. Now, you might argue that some of those contexts are somehow broader, less specific, they're less liable to be overly relied upon. And that's why you would prefer those and excise the going and reading about the eight's. Not so much that you would have a problem with having that giving you a window into understanding the poem, but that it would somehow become preferential. And then this is where I feel the force of the intentional fallacy or maybe criticizing authorial intention is taking it as the gold standard for the secret teaching of the poem has to do with whatever Yates was thinking in his life and how he was revealing that in this poem. So I want to highlight before we pursue this too far, just the jump that you made that Wimzaden Beardsley are asking about how do you judge a poem and they're seeing the critics job is to say, "This is a great poem, this is not a great poem." And part of that, of course, would be, well, not necessarily coming up with a meaning, right? Maybe the poem is a surrealist thing and there is no literal meaning and actually the author's intention was that there was not a literal meaning. In fact, maybe it was put together from words taken out of a newspaper and to cut up poem and it was put in a semi-random order. There could be all these things that would play whether there even is a meaning, but yet Wimzaden Beardsley can still address this because they're concerned with, "Is it a good poem?" And so my point, before you brought in this example is you have to know something about what genre it's supposed to be in order to judge it, which I think is directly against. At least it looks like the first point here. And I'm not sure, so it seems to me just as one subdivision within the overall critical enterprise here. Well, they do make a pivot to meaning because to judge the success, if you're judging the success of a poem, you're essentially doing poetic, so you're interpreting, you're figuring out what things mean and that's the means by which you actually have to judge the success. And I think that's pretty clear from the letter part of the essay when they're looking at John Donne and just to throw this up out here early on. What if he hates is actually not that good a critic? What if he doesn't know what his poem is about? Like when we do art, we start out in a mode in which you think of muses or you think of poetic inspiration in which we're something like mediums and something like that. how the world simply speaks through us. And I've written poems like that and then I go back and go, "Here's the symbol for this." And then look at these connections when it all just sort of came out in the torrent. And now when I recognize those connections, I can edit the poem to sort of, "They'd become my design or my plan." I look at it and then I accentuate those connections. They become my intention, but only after I've been the interpreter of my poem. So in other words, there could be unconscious meanings. There could be a sense in which either there are certain social and cultural factors speak through the artist and he's good at channeling those. Or he has this very active unconscious, which is good at manufacturing these very potent meanings, but he himself consciously wouldn't be good at interpreting them. So then going and asking yates, "Hey, what does your poem mean?" And Mark, you probably know this from talking to musicians. It might not be the best way to actually get in the meaning of the poem. There might be things in the poem that you can figure out that he, that I wasn't, occurred to him or that he would just get wrong. The context you just painted was, was imagine a circumstance where you're a contemporary with the artist or the poet. You can have that conversation and then you can realize that perhaps that person, it doesn't have access to their own intentions. You don't have access to what it was, the intentional path that brought them to express themselves the way they're. But what happens when the author is in the distant past of a culture that you can't necessarily access? This shows up in one of the other essays I don't remember which about being able to put yourself in the mind frame. Part of the critics job is to try to identify the contemporary milieu of the artist in order to be able to understand what. It made me think of an example where you interpret Shakespeare and you say, "Oh, well, this is actually a satire on a certain very specific political thing that was happening at the time." Whatever political parties or maybe political figures or something like that. Then you say, "Well, I have no access to what those particular people, that particular political party was about." But it's a great satire in general of conservative or liberal, that kind of thing. Then you say, "Well, there's no way that Shakespeare could have had any intention to make a satire of future political environments that align with whatever he was parading or satirizing at the time." That's the point at which I say, having access, even if the author himself or herself has access to their own intentions and says, "I have a very strong idea about what I meant by this, when I said this, when I wrote this." Then there's a kind of historical context that sort of negates that almost immediately. We also have this distinction between written and spoken word. If you say something, you have a right to say, "There was an audience that I knew it was in front of me and I intended it for that particular purpose." This is what I meant to say when I said this. But when you write something down, particularly when you write it for no particular audience, like a poem, for example, or like a work of philosophy, then you cannot expect to have some kind of connection to the way it is received by this unforeseen audience over the course of history. Really? Yeah. I agree that there can be unintended interpretations. There might be unconscious ones. The contrast is not that it does not come into existence by accident. Therefore everything about it is intended. I agree with that. But the notion that there wasn't something that was to be communicated and that is relevant to understanding it just seems crazy. The act of writing, the act of making art has some performative, active quality to it by the person who did it. That is relevant to what the activity was. It's relevant to what the activity was and to understanding what they did. I'm not saying that it is the only and maybe in some cases, sometimes people have a very little ability to communicate what they actually intended to do. Therefore, at some level, it's left to understand the work on its own. By itself, absent some clarity about what was intended. But it's not as if it wasn't part of what we're trying to get to and trying to understand what was said, what was done, what's going on with that piece of art or literature, whatever. It's a heap of words without that. It sounds like Seth, you're trying to channel the sentiment that's in Bart and Foucault, which I think is what is Plato's fadres as well, where it's once something is put in writing, then whatever the author's intentions were. You actually could have had very specific intentions. I think this is what Dylan is objecting to in how you want to speak to the ages and you really want to make a particular argument. Again, we're thinking about philosophy, not poetry when we're talking about this. That makes it a little difficult to apply this directly. And once anything enters writing, then as Foucault as Bart describes it, the author is dead. As far as there's an autonomy that the written word has, such that it is always its own speaker, something like that. So both Bart and Foucault talk very dramatically about this in a way that as far as the experience of the reader goes, again, when I say this aloud, this sounds not at all clear. When I read Nietzsche, I very much have Nietzsche in mind. However, because I never knew Nietzsche, what I have in mind is author Nietzsche. It's not even actually the guy Nietzsche. It's something that I've constructed out of my own experience and out of what people have taught me about him. And so it's still not actually Nietzsche talking. There's still something that is autonomous about the written word. Well, I think Bart is a good place to go here because what he's channeling, so this kind of thing goes back to our Lecon episodes as well where we talk about the autonomous role of language. On page two, Bart basically says, is when we're using language playfully, when we're not using it just to get what we want or to just fill some everyday practical communicative function, then basically there's a kind of internal symbolic functioning to language that reigns, that becomes the ruler and more than the appetites of the particular author. And this goes back to the con and Chopin-Harr and this idea of artistic activity being something in which we absent ourselves from our own will. We get away from our own particular, repetitive will. So language does its thing when we let ourselves be aimless and playful. There's an aimlessness to it. And I think that's the idea. There's a sense in which this is channeling something other than the author himself or herself. No, see, that's interesting because when I think of that playfulness, I immediately think of something like improvisation in music. And when you say that you're channeling something other than himself or herself, I feel like it's exactly the opposite. When you're being playful, you are fundamentally only acting, whether being improvisation or in writing a poem or in writing your story, that it is an action that is sourced through you and an activity of you as an entity in this moment at this time with all the influences but conduit it through you. So in some deep way, it's a manifestation of you, your consciousness, your subconsciousness, your context, all those things, all the ones. Not something absent to you, not something authorless, right? It's quintessentially authored in that respect. Bart's point would be, you know, you're member of learning those scales, right? And in a way, the scales are their own little system and they work very similarly if you play the blues in the work of a lot of different people who play the blues. It is true that you use those patterns, those different pentatonic and other scales to express something personal. And that's the great thing about it. This intersection of something that in a way you have no control over, that's why I mean I've had experiences like feeling like I'm having an out-of-body experience when I'm soloing and not being the author of my own actions as if something is speaking through me as if sort of instinct is rising up to meet this pre-established set of patterns which are not my own, right? They're the language. They're the thing that's outside of me and produce something expressive and unique. So I don't think it contradicts that idea that there's something expressive about it for me in that actual act. And to give the less romantic side of Bart's accounts here, he draws an analogy between text and textiles declaring that a text is a tissue or fabric of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture. So both Bart and Foucault are talking about this romantic moment where we focused on the author as corresponding with the enlightenment focus on individualism. That if you look at the way we talk about Homer as this. creative genius like michael angelo or something is i don't know how they talked about home we're back then but certainly for the most part part says when we were reading something it wasn't focusing on who exactly wrote that particular thing it was this is a traditional thing that is recited a lot you know that's kind of the nature of folk art so even if ultimately homer was one guy that put this stuff together the number of people the settings in which you would hear homer it wasn't like yeah play that homer no it was like play the story about Troy play the story about Odysseus coming home play the cyclops part you know it was it was focused on the content rather than the individual and so Bart takes this and focuses on the fact right if you're jamming on the blues and again i'm not sure how well actually being in a performance and improvising and being an author poet up there improvising i think that once it becomes written language like that's where the whole fadris point comes in where you know that's autonomy that was talking about before but putting that aside even if you are you know jamming the blues are using a playful word game is to give a poetry on the spot you're not necessarily drawing on some deep well of your own personal private soul that's unlike anybody else's soul that would be the romantic interpretation you can still give us psychoanalytic interpretation that recognizes the commonality that people have and the fact that actually what you're doing according to Bart is regurgitating you're quoting right if you're playing the blues as west was just saying like that's the scale there's only so many things you can do with the scale and you might be expressing your own energy but the proper way to interpret this is not wow what was going on in his life that he felt so bad he must have just had a divorce or something like that you know that's kind of a distraction from the work of art itself sorrow is more universal than a particular situation and so just hearing it as an expression of sorrow does not necessarily point to the author as a sorrowful person it points to a common experience that was being channeled and it could be channeled conceivably it could be channeled by someone who's never experienced sorrow just to get a certain thought experiments here oh sure at least consciously because people may be good ciphers so they may be good at refracting cultural influences or even the social influences of people around them they may be good at expressing in art other people's emotions without expressing anything about themselves so then the question of intention becomes well as it the author's intentions or is it social is it their unconscious intention or is it social intention more broadly the social intention speaking through them whether through the just the mere formalism of language that we all acquire and share or other social influences I think that's the type of thing baritists focused on well feels like we're conflating two things one would be the writing and the intention of the artist in what effect they're trying to have what they're trying to communicate and whether or not they they manifest that themselves and those are two separate things it's certainly true you can express a powerful poem through empathetic activity you don't have to have killed a person in order to express in art poignantly something communicates the effect of that on a person's soul you don't have to have experienced I don't think every emotion or experienced every experience in a person's life in order to write about it and write about it effectively they'll soon be two different kinds of things conversely as a critic or as an interpreter you don't have to have intended that for me to take that from what you created sure I mean this is one of the things that I feel challenged about this whole conversation is I want to say it was Bart talking about the death of the author is the birth of the critic or the birth of the interpreter or something like that but the idea that authorial intention is really a framework for interpretation of a text so it gives you an anchor it gives you a structure a starting point to say this is what I I'm going to use as a a guide for how I interpret this text I'm framing it this way but you could just as easily invert that and as say as a reader and this would be the hermeneutic approach this is what I'm bringing to the text this is the framework in which I interpret it this is how I'm structuring my reading of the text and it's not clear to me that if you can buy into that that it's the author's intention is a framework the hermeneutic structure of the reader is a framework that one should be privileged over the other although I certainly think that the reader's privilege should be and when you think about again I'm going back to this historical example even the Bart and Foucault essays were in translation when they wrote in French you know were they intending this to be for translation and could you possibly extend an intention through a translation is that even possible and then thinking about of course it is is it of course it is they're trying to communicate right I mean I I completely grant that the activity of reading brings other things to the table but that they didn't intend to communicate something no of course I grant that they intended to communicate something or may have or may have sometimes not the question is should we privilege what they intended to communicate over other meanings that we can get from the text if you're a translator you probably should right if you're wondering like what does this sentence actually mean so that I can translate it from German in English or French in English it would be helpful if the author had written something else that explained what the hell that was about so you knew how to interpret that word absolutely what if there's more data so let me let me translation is more complicated so it's back up to the the parrot on the tree so I say it's a symbol for narcissism to overly simplify it and Yade says no it's not so like I said he may be wrong and he may be wrong for a number of reasons one of them is like I said he may be a back critic and the symbol is a product of his unconscious but it may also just be someone else a symbol it may be society's symbol but he's channeling it may be his wife's it may be some other group of people and that is what the parrot stands for he doesn't know that he channels it but it's outside of his intention in some sense except in a broad sense yeah what do you think of that well so I was gonna ask then Seth did you have that kind of because I think what west is talking about symbolic intention like well that's just how symbolism works you can't just say this is what the symbol means as the author whereas when we're talking about translation like no I meant by Joe Joe Rogan not Joe Paturno whatever there's just clear issues with expository what about connotations of the word I mean translation would be about well can I really translate logos into something in English it had all these multiple meanings and the fact that there are multiple meanings means if I just translated into reason in one context in English we're missing all those connotations in those links but you know if a poet comes along he may have the wrong idea about how to translate logos into English in fact in translation you know from what I understand it's much more important to be good at understanding the language you're translating into rather than the language you're translating from and then again the author may have bad ideas about the connotations of that word and so then bad ideas about how it should be translated the idea is about the proper translation of the word may it may be better situated reading about ancient Greek culture you may do better with historical context all that sort of stuff than with the intention of the author in particular I like having a specific example there because I mean logos is something that yeah the ancient Greek word has these connotations but it's not a matter of as a translator hey I'm a reader my reading is just as valid interpretation is what you meant by logos and you Heraclitus meant the multifaceted many different words and I'm just going to translate it as logic because that's the meaning that I'm running with and that's just as valid as your damn meaning and so my translation is just as good as the original like clearly something that's gone wrong there now it's more like Aristotle in he's saying well when I used the word logos in the sentence I was parodying Socrates's asceticism over concern with the truth you know the point of philosophical rigidity blah blah blah you know stepping into the holes while looking at the stars and maybe that's not how logos was working in that sentence actually in the context given the data of the poem it could have been Aristophanes unknowingly was talking about something else even valorizing reason at that moment that's what I mean Aristophanes is not aware necessarily of everything that he's doing sure so I think eventually we're gonna have to get was unbeared these distinction between the internal and the external and the intermediate out I think that should be something that comes up here but clearly even if Aristophanes was saying it wrong the facts by virtue of which you would say that he's saying it wrong is the use of the word logos in that culture so for instance his contemporaries listening to him would have a privileged access to the meaning of that term over us trying to figure out what the hell logos is based on third hand 16th-hand retellings of this. But it might just be the context of the play though, and that's the way a new critic would try to read it. The Aristophanie says, "Well, this is the way I was using it, but all the data in the play, everything that's going on suggests the opposite interpretation." Yes, we could appeal to the culture as well, but that's, I think that's entirely possible. I think there's another possibility here, so if we're thinking about the intentional fallacy article, which is you could say that in some broad sense, intentionality is important, because when I've talked about the unconscious and the social stuff, someone might say, "Well, that's still intention." It's authorial intention. Yes, maybe you want to call culture the author, you want to call the unconscious author, that's fine. But then the question is just, it's more a methodological question. So when I'm trying to figure out the poem, it's not that authorially intent, and this broad sense is not important to me. It's the best way to figure that out, to go look at the author, dash persons, that particular physical person, to go look at their letters or their claims or things like that. When the text may betray more about their intent, unconsciously, or society, or whatever, the relevant stuff, than that. So it becomes a methodological question. You might say, "Well, yes, intention is important to me in the broad sense, but I don't know that asking the author is the best way to figure that out." That's another position which I'm inclined to. Right. So let me answer my own objection from earlier. I had pointed to there on the second page of the article, the point about insisting on the designing intellect as the cause of a point, is not to grant the designer or intention as a standard. And I gave the example of a poem that maybe it's the beginning of an epic, or maybe it's a limbic, and you have to decide on which. Well, the way that you decide on which is by looking at stylistic things in the poem itself. So yes, it is important to know what genre it's supposed to be. And yeah, one way that you could find out is by asking the person, what genre is this supposed to be. But you've covered that, Wes, that just like you might not know the literal meaning of a symbol, you might not be as the author, the best one to talk about that, you might, in a broader sense, not know what you're doing. And this is why I want to put it, you know, if you're just talking about the meaning of a poem, it's kind of like talking about the reference of a declarative sentence. And I want to enlarge this in the same way that we did in the Austin episode, and talk about a poem is a whole performative act. And so part of what you're doing is not just conveying a meaning, but you're conveying it in a certain way. You know, you're doing a whole gesture such that if we're going to count playing a blues guitar as an instantiation of the same kind of thing that we can talk about in the same way, well clearly there's no literal meaning of that at all, but yet you're still doing something. So I think we can talk about meaning in the broader sense that we already talked about in the Austin episode where, you know, you've got not only the locutionary, the literal sense and reference, but the meaning of the gesture as a whole, you might say. So this is supposed to be a limerick is a component of that. And yeah, so this distinction that they make between internal and external is the actually what you're talking about west that if you're like, I don't know if this is supposed to be a limerick or the beginning of an epic poem, I better look at what dire entry that he wrote about that time to say, I don't know about to start my epic poem. That kind of thing might come up, but it would only give you so much and you're never going to really know what was in the author's soul at that moment. So it's kind of silly to think about that too much to, you know, it's almost pornographic. Like, ooh, what was in courage is so when he was going through. No, just look at the damn poem, look at the stylistic, you know, the poet, no matter how creative was relying on all this publicly available language as a shared thing, the stylistic traditions are shared things, genres are shared things, all those things give you quite enough clues to figure out what the performative act was supposed to be. And potentially, you know, whether it was supposed to have a literal meaning or was supposed to be symbolic, it gives you a good enough basis without consulting the author's intentions. I'm not sure what I think about this, but let's consider an example where you ultimately judge that the author completely failed in their intentions, whether it was something in their unconscious or whatever, they just executed completely wrong. I mean, Mark's example of they're being confusion regarding them doing the limerick when they intended to do an epic poem because they have a fragment that maybe that fits. So one question would be, well, what do we learn about the piece and what do we learn about the interpretation? When we judge that the author's intention was a complete failure. Can we use the room? Does anybody see the disaster artist or the original movie, the room? That's sort of the classic example that this guy wrote this thing, trying to be like cat in a hot tin roof, like a real drama, you know, everything about it is bad, bad acting, bad direction, bad script. And so it ended up being a successful comedy. And if you've watched the disaster artist, which I saw with no sound on a plane, so I don't really know. I have my own interpretations of that, but they have the scene of him watching the film and everybody in the audience is laughing and he's just looking around like what's going on here? And he's pretty disturbed. See, this is the extreme edge where something could be great, quad bad. So then nothing fails, you know, if it fails, it's great in a different way, it becomes comedy. Well, has the potential of being great in different ways? I know, I know. It's not always, it doesn't always. But I think this is where they're right that intentions of the author aren't the standard in the sense, like they don't have to fulfill what they set out to do. So if Yates thought that the parrot represented something else and thought that was critical to the design of his poem and he's wrong about that, that's still a great poem. Yeah. So in that respect, we would say that the intention, well, let's call it the explicit intention of the author. He's not the criteria of whether it's successful or not. Yeah. Whether the philosophy example with forms, right, is I build a table that turns out to be a much better chair. So which is it? Is it the form of a table? Is it a form of a chair? Is it a mistake? Yeah. In this sense, it's end to sort of imply an instruction and it succeeds according to its own end rather than to the ends of the maker. Yeah, or it succeeds or fails according to other aspects of the context. So Wumsai and Beardsley recognize in addition to this purely external looking at journal entries of things the author wrote at the same time and internal just paying attention to the work itself without any knowledge of where it came from. Maybe you just find it inscribed in a rock somewhere. You have no idea. There's the intermediate category, which you should read. An intermediate kind of evidence about the character of the author or by private or semi-private meanings attached to words or topics by an author or by a codery of which he is a member. The meaning of words is the history of words and the biography of an author is use of a word. The associations which the word had for him are part of the words history and meaning. He says, look, these three types of evidence, especially this intermediate kind and the external kind, really shade into each other. But he still says it's very different at critical's concerned with evidence of type one in other words, internal and moderately with the intermediate. Well, in the long run, produce a different sort of comment from that of the critical's concerned with the external type two and the intermediate and where they shade into each other. So he really is allowing you to talk a lot about, if you want to figure out what this person meant by logos, you really should learn a lot about ancient Greece and about its use in drama and linguistic conventions in drama. There's all sorts of things external to the poem that you should find out about to really help you understand the poem, to understand the use of that word in that context. So it can get into biographical. They're not even really against that because even again, the private use of the word. If you want to look at the way Aristotle and he says, use this word in previous plays, like there might be a running joke that's going on that he's referencing his own work and that would be really good to know that's still not the same as asking about his mind, which once you open it up to this large intermediate term, to me, it almost looks like a straw man. But clearly, it's not a straw man. Like these guys are reacting to a whole actual tradition of criticism that they find objectionable, that bugs them. It's just that criticism, focusing much too much on biography, just might not be what I have in mind to say when I think about, I really like to know what the filmmaker, the musician, or the poet, or whatever intent, what genre they thought they were writing in. Like that kind of request, that actually sounds like it's arguing against what Wimzahn Beardsley are arguing for. But I think this intermediate category allows that kind of stuff that I want to be able to draw on. So really, what they're arguing against, probably is not even a live option for us. And he says the intermediate category is dangerous, right? So he gives examples where it could lead you to, for instance, a bad interpretation of a John Dunn poem. So knowing about his interest in astronomy actually could hurt you. It could make you look beyond a clear meaning that's there in the text. He gives an example of a critic making this mistake and their alternative interpretation, which is meant to be better even though it's not sourced specifically in Dunn's thoughts about astronomy. Yeah, and certainly we're all familiar with examples like that. If you know a little about Ted Nugent, if you go and listen to his music, which you probably shouldn't, but if you, and just impose what you know about his personality on every single thing in there, and that is perhaps not doing justice to what is actually being said, that people can say things they're outside of, you know, they're not one dimensional fanatical about one thing. So even if you know Bob Dylan is a Christian, don't read every single line of his as Christian. It might not be. They give the example, which is similar to T.S. Eliot, who, because he's so elusive, elusive ALL, they think he's a good example of someone who can lead you into intentional fallacies. So if we know T.S. Eliot is into John Dunn, and John Dunn writes a certain way about Mermaid's and we see in the left song, "J Alfred Prufrock" a reference to Mermaid's and we think, "Oh, he must be alluding to Dunn." And then we realize that, well, actually, the Mermaid's and Prufrock are symbols of romance and dynamism, not at all like what Dunn is doing with them. So we might be led astray with those sorts of connections. To the work itself. Pay attention to what's in front of you. That's the main lesson I'm getting out of this. Good time for a break. Yeah, that sounds like a good place to stop part one. Come back next week here, part two, become a partial exam life citizen. You can hear the whole thing right now. Go do it at partialexamilarife.com. Thank you. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. 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