The Artist-Philosopher and Poetic Hermeneutics

On Trauma

George Smith

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000533750
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Philosophy
• Thema: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Focusing on the aesthetic representation of trauma, George Smith outlines the nexus points between poetics and hermeneutics and shows how a particular kind of thinker, the artist-philosopher, practices interpretation in an entirely different way from traditional hermeneutics.

Taking a transhistorical and global view, Smith engages artists, writers, and thinkers from Western and non-Western periods, regions, and cultures. Thus, we see that poetic hermeneutics reconstitutes philosophy and art as hybridizations of art and science, the artist and the philosopher, subject and object. In turn, the artist-philosopher's poetic-hermeneutic reconstitution of philosophy and art is meant to transform human consciousness.

This book will be of interest to artists and scholars working in studio practice, art history, aesthetics, philosophy, cultural studies, history of ideas, history of consciousness, psychoanalytic studies, myth studies, literary studies, and creative writing.

Part One Technē

1 Paul de Man and the Future of Poetic Hermeneutics

DOI: 10.4324/9780367815479-2

I

Poetic Hermeneutics is yet to be recognized as a style of interpretation, the intention of which is nothing short of existential translation. But that is hardly to say that poetic hermeneutics has been operating up until now without anything but pending effect, that it constitutes an arcane academic variation on the main themes of hermeneutic historical development, or, for that matter, that its long-buried existence was only recently discovered in notes found in a medieval monastery. Once we know what we are looking at, poetic hermeneutics is everywhere visible in contemporary cultural discourse and can be readily traced as far back as Lucretius and Sophocles. Indeed, we can trace its practices all the way back to the shamans of the Greek Dark Age and to the archaic world in general. For our purposes, the more important point is that poetic hermeneutics parries away from the various interpretive methodologies arising from the advent of Socratism and Western Metaphysics. Over the last century or so, this continual stepping away from metaphysics has kept pace with the ever-mounting push to bring continental hermeneutics more strictly in line with the scientific methodology that defines modern metaphysics. While innumerable factors come into play in the now more or less total dominance of science over critical thinking and practice, one key aspect in particular has gone relatively unnoticed—namely, the critical philosophy of Paul de Man. Since the scandal of de Man’s Nazism, very little is said about him. And yet, de Man’s effect on the course of contemporary philosophy and hermeneutics, not to mention the course of history itself, can be felt as a powerful absent cause. In that guise, de Man offers a useful foil, against which we can juxtapose poetic hermeneutics as an imperative alternative to the scientific imperialism that now defines globalized metaphysics. To look at and see poetic hermeneutics in this light, we’ll want to stand it against its historical background. We can start with a brief consideration of reception theory, a type of literary hermeneutics that emerges in the years following Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1945).

Over the course of the postwar years, literary-critical methodology becomes in the West a twofold venture: that of poetics and that of hermeneutics. At least, such is how a growing number of adherents to this kind of literary criticism, beginning in the late 1960s, explained Reception Theory. In the United States, this loosely defined group would include, for example, Norman Holland and Stanley Fish; in France, Roland Barthes; and in Germany, Constance school co-founders Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss. According to Jauss, poetics and hermeneutics are not to be understood as separate analytic procedures so much as they come together as interlaced or collaborative modes of literary analysis. In simple terms, we might say that the literary text weaves together figures of speech that in themselves give rise to the hermeneutic question that asks, in effect: what does a given word or phrase mean according to its function within the literary figure or trope? This, in turn, gives rise to the further question: what does this particular trope mean as it functions within the larger series of tropes that add up to the text as a whole? And then, the question arises: what is the meaning of the text as a whole? Finally, there is the more vexed or disputed question as to what the text means as it functions intertextually, within the canon through which its figures and tropes are interwoven. As Jauss would argue, the intertextual horizon exceeds the limits of texts per se; it includes the text’s existence within its larger cultural and historical context. As these questions take shape and come to the fore in the process of readerly reflection, the aesthetic experience transitions, in any case, from interpretation to understanding. Neither interpretation nor understanding is determinate. Hermeneutics renders out of the question any possibility of the text as a totalized meaning to be ascertained in the finality of its own form. On this account, the text is not a closed structure, does not achieve anything like finality of form, and is in fact an open field of unlimited interpretative possibility.

Not all practitioners of reception theory would agree to the above-mentioned notion of intertextuality. Nor would there be any consensus as to whether hermeneutics postulates a plurality of possible meanings or results in a singularity of meaningful purpose, as in the statement, “The ultimate meaning of To the Lighthouse is such and such.” Nevertheless, we can safely say that reception theory poses itself against critical formalism as per the interpretive strategies spelled out earlier, all of which ask questions of the text that formalism forbids. Reiterating Jauss, we can also say that, for reception theory, there are two fundamental elements comprising the critical practice of interpreting literature: poetics and hermeneutics—poetics being the linguistic study of literary language and hermeneutics being the interpretation and understanding of the literary text. Let’s bear in mind, too, that the poetics of reception theory is not at all the poetics we have in mind when we say poetic hermeneutics. The former refers to the analysis of literature on the basis of grammar and logic, whereas the latter refers to the poetic nature of hermeneutics when it rises to the level of poiesis.

In his Introduction to Jauss’s Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (written, it is worth noting, at Jauss’s personal invitation), de Man distinguishes poetics from hermeneutics in the following way:

Hermeneutics is, by definition, a process directed toward the determination of meaning; it postulates a transcendental function of understanding, no matter how complex, deferred or tenuous it might be, and will, in however mediated a way, have to raise questions about the extralinguistic value of literary texts. Poetics, on the other hand, is a metalinguistic, descriptive or prescriptive discipline that lays claim to scientific consistency. It pertains to the formal analysis of linguistic entities as such, independently of signification; as a branch of linguistics, it deals with theoretical models prior to their historical realization. Hermeneutics belongs traditionally to the sphere of theology and to its secular prolongation in the various disciplines; unlike poetics, which is concerned with the taxonomy and the interaction of poetic structures, hermeneutics is concerned with the meaning of specific texts.

(Toward an Aesthetic of Reception vii—xxvi)

Elsewhere, de Man will raise doubts as to whether any kind of reliable or useful collaborative pattern is ever authentically established between poetics and hermeneutics. He notes, for instance, that “hermeneutics and poetics, different and distinct as they are, have a way of becoming entangled, as indeed they have been since Aristotle and before.” Thus, the “question is whether these two are complimentary, whether you can cover the full work by doing hermeneutics and poetics at the same time” (de Man 88). In this question, we see a subtle baulk, a check against going all the way down the line with Jauss:

One is so attracted by problems of meaning that it is impossible to do hermeneutics and poetics at the same time. From the moment you start to get involved with problems of meaning, as I unfortunately tend to do, forget about poetics.

(88)

Straightforward and innocent as these second thoughts may seem, in fact, several of de Man’s foundational texts speak volumes to the contrary. In these readings it is hermeneutics, and not poetics, that gets lost in the shuffle.

*

There is more to say about de Man’s poetics. But first, we should say something further about where hermeneutics generally stands in relation to poetics. To begin with, we can note that poetics and hermeneutics are inherent to the literary text. That is, the elements of poetics and hermeneutics exist inside the literary work of art as well as in the reader’s response to the literary work as art. In effect, when the reader asks herself about the function of a figure of speech or the significance of a passage or a text, she is reiterating a question that the text has always already posed of itself. Though Jauss would disagree with this point, arguing that texts are not “timeless”—therefore, the questions asked of a text will change according to the times (within, that is, their ever dynamic cultural, historical context)—Bakhtin and Kristeva make what seems the more inclusive and far more convincing case as to the text’s unending intertextuality, which is to say that the questions a text will ask of itself change over time, too. Derrida says, for instance, that the text’s meaning

is already, and thoroughly, constituted by a tissue of differences, in the extent to which there is already a text, a network of textual referrals to other texts, a textual transformation in which each allegedly “simple term” is marked by the trace of another term, the presumed interiority of meaning is already worked upon by its own exteriority.

(Positions 33)

Be that as it may, Jauss and Derrida would probably agree that hermeneutic interpretation marks a clear departure from Kantian formalism but for one similarity: for Kant, form is inherent to beauty, and inherent to the subject who exercises the judgment of taste is the sensibility that ascertains the beautiful as such; likewise, the hermeneutic question is embedded in the text and also native to readerly sensibility.

But again, that is not to say that every text has one fixed hermeneutic meaning constituted within the framework of a given tapestry of metaphor; this would be to confuse hermeneutics with the judgment of taste. The critical upshot of hermeneutics is multifarious, while that of Kant’s judgment of taste is determinate and universal. To put it another way, the judgment of taste is literally de-terminate: either the work of art is beautiful or it is not beautiful. And like the judgment of taste, poetics is determinate (i.e., this grammatical construct makes sense or it doesn’t). Hermeneutics, on the other hand, can give rise to as many meanings as there are readers, and every determined meaning is actually pre-determined insofar as it will always raise further questions. Therefore, the ultimate meaning or the totalization of multifarious meanings is ever deferred and open to future time. Thus, the communis sensus affirms universal agreement as to whether the object of a judgment of taste is beautiful or not (e.g., “Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ is a beautiful poem”), and much the same can be said of poetics (“this figure of speech does or does not make sense”), while a given instance of hermeneutic interpretation might posit a totalized meaning, but not one that assumes universal assent. That is why hermeneutic criticism presupposes a question or an argument (e.g., “Is this, therefore, what Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ means?” or “Therefore, Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ means this”) rather than a mere statement of fact, as is the case with the judgment of taste (“Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ is beautiful due to its formal integrity”) and, for that matter, in the case of poetics (“Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ constitutes an assemblage of poetic techniques that give it aesthetic verisimilitude”).

This just remarked and quite obvious distinction between formalism and poetics on the one side and hermeneutics on the other counts as no small matter. Even though hermeneutics hews to the line of close reading, as does the formalism of New Criticism and its contemporary offshoots, hermeneutics breaks with New Criticism and the Kantian formalism that New Criticism stems from precisely insofar as the critical practice of hermeneutics poses multiple questions with many possible answers. This marks a decided departure from Kant’s either/or judgment of taste, which merely wants to determine whether the aesthetic object is beautiful or not beautiful. At stake here is the status of truth: does art represent an aesthetic form of a kind that underwrites universal truth as scientifically de-terminate in the logic of Western metaphysics (Plato’s beauty = truth)? Or does it represent an ever-differed and deferred or fragilized truth, a contingent truth of the kind that Derrida or Lacan, for instance, would put in place of the Platonic ideal? Here, we begin to see the close proximity between formalism and poetics, though with respect to poetics scientific determination becomes all the more pointed. Just as Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment is predicated on determinate truth, in other words, the same applies to poetics when detached from hermeneutics—but for one crucial distinction: Kant’s sensus communis makes a claim to logic predicated on a priori principles (precisely insofar as all judgments of taste are presumed to be based on formal elements such as symmetry and harmony, the logical or ill-logical integration of which is spontaneously verified according to calculation and measure, i.e., mathematical intuition); now, though, with de Man’s poetics, the claim to determinate truth is predicated on unmediated scientific verification,

Unlike the judgment of taste or poetics, both of which are determinate, hermeneutic practice is not merely a skill but a learned skill, the purpose of which is to derive meaning through interpretation. If one is to derive multifarious or “thick” meaning from the interpretation of a short story or a poem, one needs to know how to do hermeneutics. And so, the question arises, how does one learn to do hermeneutics, how does one come to know how to interpret the text? The simple answer lies in the fact that literature teaches the reader the “how to” of hermeneutics. This is true in general, of course: the more literature you read or the more art you look at, the better at hermeneutics you get. But it is also true that the individual text will teach the reader how to engage with it on its own particular—and often peculiar—terms. A Henry James novel, for instance, will teach the reader how to read the complex discourse that defines James’s notoriously oblique and demanding narrative style. Over the course of the reader’s experiential traverse of The Ambassadors, the text exercises and sharpens the reader’s inherent awareness of the author’s artistic deployment of poetics and likewise heightens the reader’s inward desire to resolve the textual mystifications that constantly trap her in a tangled web of clues and innuendo. Thus, when the reader at last comes to the phrase, “They knew how to do it,” he is by then well-schooled: he “knows how to do it”—knows, that is, how to interpret James’s figure of speech in terms of its double-meaning—the one referring to knowledge of the skills required of river boating and the other to carnal knowledge. This key interpretive moment reveals The Ambassadors as a two-tiered hermeneutic construct: manifest and latent, surface and repressed. While hermeneutics of this depth depends on learn-as-you-go experiential knowledge, the judgment of taste results from inherent skill, and, similarly, poetics is a skill acquired through formal training.

Whether one of its practitioners tends toward the positivistic consistency of poetics or the creative contingency of hermeneutics, what is so innovative about the Constance school is the way it twines poetics and hermeneutics together as a singular though dynamic critical methodology. “Twined” in the sense that no Constance school critic takes up one method of critical focus to the absolute neglect of the other; whether sequentially or simultaneously, both operations are in play. And “dynamic” in the sense of a two-way interpretive continuum, whereby some members of the Constance school tend to lean more heavily on poetics, while others, especially Jauss and Iser, tend more decidedly toward hermeneutics. In much looser and haphazard terms, the combination of poetics and hermeneutics is generally operative in many if not most hermeneutic practices. However, there is nothing the least casual about Jauss’s Reception Theory. It problematizes and clarifies the heretofore willy-nilly relation between these two key elements of critical interpretation. And in doing so, it formulates an altogether new—and many would say highly effective and groundbreaking—theory of criticism, wherein poetics and hermeneutics are deliberately and conscientiously brought to bear as interpretive strategies.

*

Even as he writes as a chief spokesperson for these new interpretive strategies vis-àvis his Introduction to Jauss’s text, de Man has already begun to undermine reception theory. He is pushing for something far more scientific. He wants to develop a literary criticism that goes well beyond Gadamer’s experiential hermeneutics. He intends something that far outstrips the positivist element reception theory brings to the fore in its deliberate deployment of poetics. In short, de Man is insisting on “epistemological consistency.” This kind of criticism calls for a determinant and singular judgment that is verifiable. And this, in turn, calls for scientific (i.e., linguistic) analysis. In this respect, de Man’s philosophy of literary criticism sets aside the fluid and harmonious relationship between poetics and hermeneutics as established in Jauss’s Reception Theory. In the latter, either the science of poetics serves in an ancillary role in support of the relatively non-scientific hermeneutic process or it is the other way around. Sometimes, it is a balance between the two. But de Man’s move toward scientific consistency reduces hermeneutics to a permanently subordinate—one might even say atrophied—position in the interpretive process, and poetics takes on the primary and indeed dominant function of positivist textual analysis. This marks a far cry from reception theory. As Jauss puts it, literary discourse can be properly seen only from a critical viewpoint that is “opposed to the positivist idea of knowledge” (51).

The generally positivist perspective that had long been developing in earlier critical theories, starting with Kant and moving through Dilthey and Husserl, now takes a turn toward a more decisive claim to scientific truth. With de Man’s poetics, aesthetic analysis is reduced to the fine-grained determination of grammatical and syntactical constructs, the compilation of which will, in turn, comprise the objective truth or falsehood of the text as a whole. One could now scientifically prove and then verify that a text makes logical sense or that it doesn’t. Here, we see the basic principle of de Man’s style of deconstruction, which determines whether a given literary text does or does not add up in logical terms. The result is that scientific calculation and measure supersedes general continental hermeneutics as the predominant mode of literary aesthetic analysis. Indeed, de Man’s push toward scientific or epistemological consistency has to be seen as central to the rise of an ever more strictly scientific method of aesthetic analysis. Starting with Jauss’s Reception Theory, we have gone from the question “what does this text mean?”; to de Man’s question, “does this text add up in terms of scientifically verifiable logic?”; and finally, to the current question, “how in cognitive or neurological terms is scientifically valid truth produced in this text?” To put it another way, we began with the possibility of endless answers to the question of aesthetic meaning and have wound up with the certainty of a scientifically verifiable answer to the question concerning the neuro-cognitive production of logic. We are back at Kant, only now Kant’s claim of validity on the basis of formal abstraction can be verified in terms of neurological and cognitive data.

II

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. For while philosophy of criticism is pushing ever closer to pure science, it is also true, as we suggested to begin with, that a strain of critical philosophy is moving toward the essence of hermeneutics as derived from its Olympian namesake Hermes, patron to the poets. And this latter trend, relatively minor though it currently seems, raises a question all the more central to our problem: if literature is defined as a kind of writing that inheres both poetics and the hermeneutic question, then how is it that works of philosophy that poeticize philosophical prose are rarely, if ever, critically and philosophically received as art, as literature?...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents Page
• Preface Page
• Acknowledgments Page
• Part One Technē
• Part Two Poiesis
• Bibliography
• Index