Intention and Interpretation

In A Rhetoric of Irony, Wayne Booth uses a distinction (which he credits to 'the hermeneutic tradition' in philosophy) between a text's ‘meaning’ and its ‘significance’; he is, he explains,

relegating to "significance" all of the indefinitely extendable interpretations that works might be given by individuals or societies pursuing their own interests unchecked by intentions. (1974: 19)

This captures well for me a distinction between instances of critical writing (especially those attempting to make value-claims) that I think are worthwhile or convincing, and those that I might find diverting, but finally consider insubstantial, or indulgent, or at least unconvincing-as-criticism.* If it is to constitute an attempt to grasp a text's meaning, rather than its significance, I think that an interpretation must appear to find some justification in what we can reasonably hypothesise are the text's intentions. While it will forever remain true that even the best hypotheses may turn out to be wrong, I would suggest that it nevertheless remains the critic's responsibility to attempt - in the first instance - this best hypothesis as far as is possible. Of course, one needn't stop there, and there are many reasons why we may often want to take into account significance as well as meaning; nonetheless, one also probably shouldn't start anywhere else.

*That is to say: while it strikes me as uninteresting as criticism, it may seem useful and convincing as an example of something else: political/media critique or philosophy, for instance, or simply a record of how an interesting writer's analytical mind works.

Irony and Reason

"On the one hand, one wants to say that Western reason has been used to domesticate, subordinate and tyrannise its others, but such a judgement also employs the very sense of reason and properly universal justice it would deny." (Claire Colebrook, Irony 2004: 165)

One potential response to this state of affairs is to abandon, or consider somehow tainted, the activity of critiquing tryanny and the accompanying need to fight for a more just world, since one cannot do so without recourse to concepts and values about which one is suspicious. This route, sometimes favoured by critical theory, has the ring of radicalism, but it is also comforting, since it effectively relieves one of the responsibilities of commitment: if all affirmative positions are equally tainted, why should we pursue any? 

Another possible response is to take from this ironic state of affairs the lesson that it is not the concepts of reason and justice themselves that are at fault, but rather merely too many of their applications in practice; this is the more challenging route, since it starts one on the path of having to examine individual cases where  'reason' and 'justice' might be needed, rather than denouncing the ideas bankrupt in all cases. This, though, is surely the necessary starting point for any practical and effective forms of moral and political commitment.