Thanks for your indulgence. Rest assured, you're doing a good deed. :)
Tony
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Tony said:
>
> Greg, I'm curious. What's the difference between Fish's
> "unacknowledged Interpretation" & a "wrong interpretation"? I'm
> trying to understand this because I'm excited by Fish's
approach:
> it might allow me to lay aside my subjectivism and re-find my
place
> in the scholarly enterprise (not to mention that it might have
an
> internal calming effect, inasmuch as my internal life is
precoccupied,
> sometimes seemingly involuntarily, by philosophizing ;) ).
> Still, "unacknowledged" & "wrong" has to come down to the same
> old same old with some semantic hair-splitting thrown in
*unless*
> subsequent critical practice is transformed by the operative
distinction
> here.
For continuity's sake, allow me to use the examples I've been
using all along. My student says "Maxine Hong Kingston is a
confusing writer" or you say "Hemingway and Faulkner are clear
and engaging to anyone."
Fish (and I) would say these are subjective interpretations.
Period. However they are stated as objective fact. Therefore,
they are interpretations that are not "acknowledged" by the
interpreter as such, they are instead presented as "objective."
This is one reason why I always demand that my students explain
the criteria for their judgment for the interpretation to be
considered valid. Now, I fully realize that this puts me in
somewhat of a paradoxical situation, because the standard "you
must explain the criteria of judgment for the interpretation to
be valid" is *itself* a subjective interpretation of validity.
Fish also acknowledges this. At one point in _Is There a Text in
This Class?_ he even says something like "I realize what I am
saying now kind of invalidates everything I've said in my first 3
chapters."
The catch, though, is that while everything is subjective, we
(humans) form interpretive communities where we treat
interpretations "as if" they were objective. We look up at the
sky and say "That's blue." Blue, of course, is subjective, and
there's no way we could really "prove" that the blue I see and
the blue you see are objectively the same, but we've made a sort
of compromise [the interpretive community] to agree that "The sky
is blue" so we can talk about it and other blue things and not
spend all our time arguing what blue is.
Extending this to text, Fish argues that what formalists (who
roughly say meaning is embedded in the form of the text and can
be unlocked by the reader) are utterly wrong. Form is just a
function of reading within a certain interpretative model. His
famous example of proving this is where he listed the names of
several theorists on the board as a reading assignment for one of
his classes. The names were still on the board when the next
class--a 17th century religious poetry class--came in. He told
the religious poetry class the names were an obscure 17th century
religious poem and the class proceeded to spend the entire period
building a critical analysis of the previous classes assignment
*as if it were a poem*.
Were they "wrong"? Fish would say no, because they made it a
poem by their act of interpretation. There cannot be a wrong
interpretation (because that would imply an objective right one
out there that you could compare yours to).
However--and this applies back to my own class--they may be
"wrong" in the *context* of the standards of the interpretive
community they are in. "Kingston is confusing" is not a wrong
interpretation (because there can be no such thing as a wrong
interpretation). If the student were to say that to another
student (i.e., someone in their same interpretive community) then
that might be a perfectly valid response. But, it is not
sufficiently rigorous analysis in the average university's
interepretive community. So while you cannot argue that it is
*objectively* wrong, and while it may meet the criteria of the
"18-year old inexperienced reader" interpretive community, you
*CAN* argue that it does not meet the criteria of the "academic
university" interpretive community. While an interpretation may
be valid in one interpretive context, it could be invalid in the
other.
With this in mind, we could define "learning" as the process of
shifting from one interpretive community to another, a process by
which the same text may take on new meaning by the application of
the new interpretive model. As a freshman comp teacher, one of
my roles is to guide the students into a new interpretive model
(a model which is more widely accepted as valid in the university
than the one they normally arrive there with).
This is really a meta-cognitive step. They have to first be able
to "acknowledge" their own interpretive model as just that--an
interpretation. Hence my suggestion that they consider that
their "confusion" is not a weakness of the writing (i.e. an
objective problem in a static text), but a weakness of their
reading (i.e. a problem in their dynamic reading/intepreting
process). You have to first get them to acknowledge that the way
they interpret it on their first read is NOT objective fact.
And you'd be really surprised by how many freshman think that if
they don't "get" the meaning then it is either (a) not there, or
(b) "hidden." This "hidden meaning" idea is widespread, a result
of formalism that treats texts as objects encoded by the author
and subsequently decoded by the reader.
Fish is a reader-oriented critic. The author and intentionality
are irrelevant in his view; meaning is constructed by the reader
only. So, actually, when you said I was putting the burden on
the reader, in a way I was.
The typical response to "meaning is constructed by the reader
only" is cries of SUBJECTIVISM WILL LEAD US TO UTTER RELATIVISM
AND MEANINGLESSNESS. Which normally is a pretty valid response,
IMO, but in Fish the idea of interpretive communities deflates
that rebuttal. It is *theoretically* possible to devolve into
relativistic meaningless, but *practically* it is a moot point,
because to get anything done we have to put aside subjectivism
and utter relativity and agree to behave "as if" certain things
were objective (language, meaning, etc.). That doesn't mean they
*are* objective, but it's the next best thing.
The reason I am so fond of Fish is that his ideas embrace the
multiplicity and subjectivity and *play* of the
deconstructionists, but temper it with *practicality*.
Basically, what Fish (and I) are saying is "Yup, the world is a
totally subjective place with no objective meaning, but that
doesn't get us anywhere interesting, so instead let's pretend
that things have meaning."
The easy stuff (the sky is blue, things fall down not up, "cat"
means a furry four-legged feline not a leather foot covering,
etc.) we don't have to bicker over because just about everyone is
included in that interpretive community from birth. It's only
when we get to the not-so-easy stuff: how a text makes meaning,
how we define what life is, etc. that our normally useful
interpretive community standards breaks down and we have to start
bickering.
The key is to remember that what we are bickering over is never
objective fact, but just which interpretive model is going to
prove the most effective. I think that is the "transformation of
critical practice" that deconstruction always brings around.
It's just that most deconstuctionists seem to toss the baby out
with the bathwater; Fish gets rid of the bathwater (objectivity),
but let's us keep the baby (practicality and meaning).
Though, I think it does make the baby a little more ethereal than
she was before.
This was probably way more of an answer than you wanted, and I'm
not even sure if it answered your question, but I'm really trying
to avoid reading my freshmen's work this morning & this was more
fun.
-- Greg Ritter gritter@hibbs.vcu.edu ritter@urvax.urich.edu