Chapter 1
Reinterpreting Interpretation

I

Give or take a little in the way of precision, there are at least three bits of advice that ought not be ignored in constructing a theory of interpretation of any size. First, it is impossible to disjoin the account of the nature or logic of interpretation from one's theory of the nature of what it is that may or must be submitted to interpretation. Second, there are only two sorts of pertinent theories of interpretation. One holds that interpretation is practiced on relatively stable, antecedently specifiable referents of some sort, and that the requisite account identifies the practice by which distributed claims about them are responsibly assigned truth-like values of some sort; the other holds that interpretation is a productive practice by which an entire "world" or what may be distributively referred to in that world is or are actually and aptly first constituted (not ex nihilo or by pure fancy but by Intentional technologies, by painting and sculpture, for instance) for certain further claims or use, possibly for interpretation in the first sense—but in ways that may be affected by referential puzzles due to the ongoing interpretation or reinterpretation of what has already been "constituted." These are not yet theories in their own right, I admit, but they are remarkably economical directives about what to explore. (They are no more than promises, of course.) The first sort of theory identifies the traditional genus of interpretation; the second is notably, even peculiarly, fashionable in our own time and is sometimes thought to disallow theories of the first sort.

The second option, separated from the first or some analogue of the first, cannot possibly be right, for the simple reason that there is no socially sustained discourse that does not provide for orderly reference and predication. Since that is so, the extreme contemporary worry that we may have to abandon altogether statement, assertion, judgment, claim, and the like on the grounds of the need to avoid any and all forms of cognitive privilege or transparency is a conceptually extravagant retreat that misses the point of the ineliminability of effective reference. One cannot do without reference, predication, description, interpretation, explanation, analysis, evaluation, although saying that disallows nothing in the way of arguable views about what may be described or interpreted or how description and interpretation actually proceed. The point would be entirely trivial except for the annoying fact that it is no longer unusual to hear it denied or implicitly rejected.

In any case, the first sort of theory is the classic one. It admits the complexity of what we interpret, but it does not extend the notion of interpretation to include the very constitution of that. It ranges over properties, but it does not extend to realism itself. In contemporary exchange, however, the cognitive intransparency of the world and the symbiosis of world and word oblige us to make room for theories of the second sort. (Bear in mind that I am using the terms "intransparency" and "symbiosis" in the sense marked in the Introduction. I do not deny that that sense may be challenged.) Characteristically, the work of such theories is inseparably linked to the viability of the work of theories of the first sort. You can appreciate, therefore, that the barest beginning of an account of interpretation plunges us at once into a conceptual swamp. For how can we interpret what has yet to be constituted and how can anything be constituted by way of interpretation? Still, there are no interesting theories of interpretation in our own time that do not—or will not—consider combining both senses of "interpret."

The third bit of advice reminds us that, whatever the slackness of linguistic usage, what are interpreted in either of the senses given are distinctly cultural (Intentional) phenomena of some sort, interpretable just in virtue of their having cultural features or because they are treated as having such features or because they have features sufficiently like cultural features to warrant being similarly treated.

These are all, of course, deliberately elusive but quite safe initial pronouncements that convey an air of imminent system and scope and a promise of detail that a streetwise audience is likely to be polite and

patient enough about while awaiting full delivery from the vendor. Also, it is not likely to be ignored that, regarding all three bits of advice taken together, the first sort of theory of interpretation identifies referents conceptually apt in some antecedent sense for interpretation, whereas the second sort of theory treats interpretation as a process of actually constituting things by interpretation, by a constructive activity by which certain phenomena or entities are first and merely posited. There need be no incompatibility or equivalence between these two sorts of theory. The kind of contribution the first might make can hardly be supposed to be entailed or precluded by the work of the second; and the point of the second would be entirely lost if it did not accommodate some form of the work of the first. Both are keyed to what would be distinctive of any plausibly realist account of the cultural world in a way that need yield nothing in favor of, or against, the reality of mere physical nature. The simple point is that to say that reality is "constituted" is to say at least that there is no principled distinction between the structure of the world and the structure of our conceptual schemes that must be in place prior to inquiry or that is reliably disclosed, within inquiry, to be such. It is entirely open to us (presumably that is the work of science) to propose (interpretively) what, within the terms of inquiry, we should treat as real or "independent" of inquiry. Hence, to admit that the world is in some sense artifactual is hardly to deny that its structures are real or to affirm that it is a mere fiction. (This is an accommodation of the supreme Kantian thesis. Of course it need not adopt what I construe to be Kant's undefended alternative to "symbiosis.")

I have moved rather quickly, here, into the neighborhood of the principal puzzles of interpretation that have taxed the most recent accounts in the arts and history, without much of a preamble. In that sense, what has so far been said is no more than a small clue, a warning of matters we must return to in good time. Still, there is an advantage in its being made at once clear that the question of the logic of interpretation is now very different from what it had been taken to be as recently as thirty or forty years ago. Also, this local change depends, we may anticipate, on larger conceptual changes that have affected the whole discourse of philosophy and science. In focusing on interpretation, then, I believe I am featuring the most strategically placed cognitive ingredient of the entire set of conceptual questions that confront us in a fresh way at the end of the century. What they are and how they are linked to the puzzle of interpretation have yet to be told. They

invite a certain patience and generosity of vision. For the idiom that favors the older account has not yet accommodated the new puzzle, and the sympathetic formulation of the new puzzle must bring in its wake a new vocabulary capable of escaping the limitations of the other. My "advice" is meant to mark what is salient in the transition.

At the very least, then, it comes to this: we must make provision for the assignment of truth-values in interpretive contexts, although to say that says nothing (as yet) about the nature of interpretable things or the conditions under which truth-values are rightly assigned. We must consider how interpretable things are constituted, seeing that they possess properties (what I am calling Intentional properties) that are not normally assigned physical objects (that are also both "brute" and "constructed"); and we must make provision for the sense in which both interpretable things and the interpretation of them obtain in the emerging "space" of real cultures. At bottom, therefore, the central questions are these: (1) in what sense are cultural phenomena real—as real as physical phenomena? and (2) what are the comparative advantages of a theory of interpretation committed to the flux rather than to invariance? Also, of course, if we admit that both cultural and physical phenomena are interpretable (which I support), then we are bound to account for the differences and similarities between the two practices.

Let me suggest that the first sort of theory is adequational, meant to assign (for the purpose of ensuring objectivity) a "nature" to the referents of our discourse, such that their features (their "natures") would be conceptually and evidentially congruent with our making and supporting interpretive claims about them. The adequational question is the question of the conceptual fit entailed in predicating this or that of things of this or that nature: whether, say, "smiling" may be falsely predicated of stones as of people, or whether it involves a sort of conceptual impropriety.1 Given the warning already collected, there is no reason to suppose that there is anything illicitly privileged in formulating an adequational theory. This is not to say that there is no metaphysical or epistemological bite to such a theory, only that it cannot reasonably be supposed that every metaphysics or epistemology necessarily violates the common injunction against privilege. Otherwise, since such discourse cannot be avoided (that is, discourse that raises the adequational question), and since it cannot proceed without a stable practice of reference and predication, it appears that it cannot fail to yield metaphysical and epistemological findings, privileged or not.

If one relativizes such findings to the saliencies (Erscbeinungen )

of our shared world, one may reject the tricks of cognitive privilege without giving up the benefits of an adequational theory. The point is modest enough, though enormously important. Indeed, it is nearly universally ignored. What it signifies is that the admission of reference and predication is the logical or formal admission of a need for the processes of description and interpretation: it is the admission that a world apt for interpretation must be stable enough to support such processes ("adequation"). It is a complete non sequitur, therefore, to suppose that admitting that much is tantamount to admitting some further metaphysical or epistemological privilege or fixity. Correspondingly, we may characterize the second sort of theory as constructive in the sense that we and the things of our cultural world may be taken to be constituted somehow, possibly serially reconstituted, as what they are, or thereby become, as a result of some initial (profoundly tacit or deliberately productive) interpretive act ("symbiosis"). Admittedly, the idea has an alien ring. But you may see in it the prospect of reconciling the requirements of discourse with the admission of the flux and, because of that, the ineluctability of metaphysical and epistemological questions ("adequation") otherwise fashionably dismissed (for instance, by postmodernists like Richard Rorty2 ) as both dispensable and unavoidably committed to some claim of cognitive privilege.

The reason for all this care is plain enough. Interpretation, in the strong sense in which it is practiced in the arts and history and human sciences, addresses the interpretable features of real things. But those features or properties are frequently treated as dubiously real. If they were spurious in this sense, then, since the adequational question would no longer seriously obtain, interpretation could never rise beyond a purely heuristic or rhetorical effort; hence, questions of objectivity and truth-value would have to be abandoned. However, if interpretive concerns were robustly sustained in the arts and history, then some sort of adequational account could not fail to be needed: some form of cultural realism would be required. Dialectically, so far, the matter remains neutral to the prospects of reduction and emergence.

Interpretation in the adequational sense must be referentially reliable, though it hardly requires, for that reason, that referents have fixed or unchanging natures; and interpretation in the second sense specifically admits an initial production, or a constitutive change in the nature, of things by virtue of some as yet unspecified activity, though it hardly requires, for that reason, that what is (thus) constituted be altogether lacking in natural properties—or be only doubtfully real.

Clearly, there is no reason to suppose there is a univocal sense of "interpret" that usefully serves both theories at once.

But if an account of interpretation may be fashioned for both sorts of theory—which seems both promising and generous—then it would be a considerable convenience to be able to identify, by the same term, the referents addressed in the first sense of "interpret" and whatever may be constituted in the second sense. Call such referents texts. Recapitulating what has already been said: texts and interpretation in the first sense must be adequated to one another; the ways in which texts are constituted yield referents apt for interpretation in the first sense; and texts are constituted as such by some suitable cultural activity, by interpretation in the second sense. Certainly, these very neat adjustments do not yet produce any noticeable incoherence or contradiction; and yet, they have somehow reconciled (on paper at least) the two senses of "interpret." I count that a welcome gain.

It helps to add that description and interpretation are not, in any obvious sense, alternative species of a genus of speech act or assertion. For "description" signifies at the very least the accuracy or validity of what is predicated of this or that referent, whereas "interpretation" signifies the imputation, to this or that referent, of attributes or predicables of a certain apt sort (Intentional attributes). Description concerns, we may say, the truth or falsity (or accuracy or aptness) of what is predicated, whereas interpretation (in the first sense) concerns only the use of a certain set of predicates. So interpretations may be descriptions, though they need not be; and both description and interpretation raise the adequational question. Putting matters thus avoids the inflexible view (favored in New Criticism and Romantic hermeneutics for instance) that interpretation presupposes description in a strong sense that disjoins the predicates of description and interpretation, or that the predicates of interpretive claims are logically identified with those that noninterpretive description admits.3 The advantage of these caveats will become clearer as we proceed.

This is all very general but still noticeably tighter than our first intuitions. I may perhaps add one further, quite preliminary distinction to save a little time down the road. The only other general constraints we need to impose on what we take texts to be—in order to accommodate interpretive discourse of a suitably comprehensive sort—are these: first, texts must be taken to be sufficiently unitary, in a logical sense, that is, individuatable and (thereupon) reidentifiable numerically, though this hardly settles the question of bow unified in a substantive way,

how fixed or unchanging, their internal "natures" must be; and second, however unified, variable, alterable, even enlarged or affected they may be or become as a result of ongoing interpretive activity, their "natures" must intrinsically include attributes of a suitably cultural sort (Intentional attributes) that render them apt for interpretation in the first sense ("adequation") and that account for their peculiar alterability and openness in the second ("flux"). They could not be unitary without some internal unity: so the warning about the distinction between a metaphysics and epistemology of privilege and a metaphysics and epistemology of discursive practice is well taken. But equally, they could not be texts adequated for interpretation if they did not intrinsically possess linguistic, language-like, semiotic, symbolic, representational, expressive, rhetorical, intentional, or similar properties: these are indeed just the sorts of property interpretive theories of the first sort and metaphysical theories of the second take for granted. My thought is that, metaphysically, texts are, in some important regard, intrinsically "indeterminate" (or, residually indeterminate) but determinable (in the productive sense) by interpretation. The hint comes from Peirce's extraordinarily perceptive account of vagueness and indeterminacy, though I am not prepared to subscribe to Peirce's own optimistic, evolutionary resolution of the puzzle of indeterminacy.4 In any case, the individuation of texts takes precedence over their reidentification and accommodates their "nature's" changing (without affecting their "unicity," their singleness as distinct "careers") under the practice of interpretation and reinterpretation.

I suggest we say, emphatically now, that texts possess Intentional properties intrinsically.^[5] Here again, I am trading in promises—this time, regarding a matter known to be difficult and contested. I shall return to it in a more effective way later, but for the moment I mean only to flag certain interlocking issues that must be grasped together. (I have already sketched, in the Introduction, a number of the distinctive features of the Intentional.) I should perhaps add that, by "unitary"— clearly a term of art—I mean to designate that feature of the changing career or persistence of a text (or anything else, for that matter: a tree, say) that remains one and the same through change. Bear in mind that the generic "nature" of any particular thing cannot, logically, determine its numerical identity (since, of course, many different individual things may share a common "nature"). The idea of the "unitary" accommodates that fact but also (on the argument intended) further facts about the persistence of things (texts) that lack a "nature" (in the

sense in which, say, camels are said to belong to a natural kind). I hasten to add, first, that, in calling things "texts" (accommodating symbiosis and the sense of "interpretation" that answers to the constituting function of locating determinate things within a symbiotized space), I do not mean to favor philosophical idealism or to construe "real" things as mere fictions; and, second, that, in distinguishing between the "unitary" and the "unified," I mean to draw attention to the fact that the logic of individuation is quite different from the logic of identity and reidentification.

A theory of interpretation, then, is a theory that: (1) accounts for originally constituting or reconstituting texts as such by constituting would-be referents possessing intrinsically Intentional natures; and (2) accounts for the interpretation of such texts in virtue of which pertinent claims about them may be assigned truth-like values and may be duly supported in an evidentiary way. It is a matter of considerable importance that texts may, on an opposed theory, be said to be produced by some sort of socially pertinent labor (poiesis) that is not originally interpretive itself—for instance, on the mimetic theory. In that case— classically, of course—only the adequational and assertive aspects of interpretation are needed. In our own time, because the world's transparency has been so radically denied, actually constituting what we can address by intelligent act or inquiry requires an original "mixing of cultural labor" with the physical world (the Kantian-like theme I have adopted) or the repeated reclaiming of such a mixed world by further mixing of the same sort (the fluxive doctrine Kant could not admit).

Those already engaged in the advanced argument will find these first remarks little more than a postponement of the essential issue. Still, managing things thus suggests very strongly that any alternative option is either defective, incomplete, inadequate, untenable, unresponsive, unconvincing, not pertinent—or worse. It is not an altogether innocent observation: I have in mind theories that mean either to preserve interpretation but deny the need for an adequational constraint in discourse about art and history (but not in the physical sciences, where interpretation is said not to apply) or to replace adequation with an entirely rhetorical strategy. (I shall return to these possibilities in due time—for instance, in Arthur Danto's company.) A great deal hangs on the presumption, of course, but we could never get started on an actual theory if we stopped to examine all the arguments that might lead in other directions. I anticipate an unavoidable barrage of puzzles that will need to be met.

II

So much for preliminaries. Now for a little scaffolding. Consider two very popular claims drawn from recent theoretically minded views of texts (or, more narrowly, artworks). In one, Rosalind Krauss, pressing into service what (reflecting on the views of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida) she takes to be the postmodernist intention to "blur the distinction between literature and criticism," speaks of "a kind of paraliterature," that is, a literature that is now neither criticism nor noncriticism but a sort of analogue of what criticism would have been for the modernist (preeminently, for Clement Greenberg) now that the distinction between artworks or texts and criticism has been blurred:

The paraliterary space [she says] is the space of debate, quotation, partisanship, betrayal, reconciliation; but it is not the space of unity, coherence, or resolution that we think of as constituting the work of literature. For both Barthes and Derrida have a deep enmity toward that notion of the literary work. What is left is drama without the Play, voices without the Author, criticism without the Argument. It is no wonder that this country's critical establishment—outside the university, that is—remains unaffected by this work, simply cannot use it. Because the paraliterary cannot be a model for the systematic unpacking of the meanings of a work of art that criticism's task is thought to be . . . there is not behind the literal surface, a set of meanings to which [the paraliterary] points or models to which it refers, a set of originary terms onto which it opens and from which it derives its own authenticity.^[6]

Clearly, in opposing the views of theorists like Greenberg, Krauss means to dismantle altogether (not merely to reverse) the high modernist the sis in all of its forms—for instance, as it appears in T. S. Eliot's famous remark that a work of art "is autotelic" and that "criticism by definition is about something other than itself" (a notion Eliot considerably changed in due course);^[7] or to oppose the thesis of New Criticism—for instance, as it appears in Monroe Beardsley's so-called Principles of Independence and Autonomy—"that literary works exist as individuals and can be distinguished from other things" and "that literary works are self-sufficient entities whose properties are decisive in checking interpretations and judgments."^[8]

Krauss's thesis is at least a first specimen of what I have called the constructive or "second" sense of interpretation, although to admit that is neither to support her particular thesis nor to suggest particular weaknesses in the second sort of theory as a result of weaknesses in her version of the theory. What is easy to miss, what Krauss misses, is that: (1) the rejection of the fixed disjunction between criticism or in-

terpretation and text or (2) the rejection of the fixed nature or fixedly bounded nature of texts independent of particular judgments or interpretation is not tantamount or equivalent to (3) the rejection of any functional (or logical) distinction between criticism and text—or, of course, not tantamount to simply rejecting all reference and predication. This may not be obvious, but it bears on the difference between description and interpretation and the logic of reference. It also bears, by example at least, on the distinction between postmodernism and poststructuralism.

Roughly put: the "paraliterary" need not—indeed cannot, logically—disallow, at any moment at which it is pertinently pursued, distinction (3). The very nature of assertion forbids it. Krauss risks—the evidence of her extended discussion indicates that she more than risks, she actually loses—the point of the paraliterary insertion itself. When she says that what is "left" is "drama without the Play, voices without the Author, criticism without the Argument," we may understand that she thereby opposes the pertinence or adequacy of modernist theories of the would-be referents of criticism—the objector distinctions (1) and (2); but, in dismissing them, she must hold (so must we all) to some version of (3), the logical distinction of paraliterary comments (criticism or interpretation, if you like), if, as she obviously also means, she means to speak (and does speak) of the work of Duchamp and Pollock and Stella and Serra and LeWitt and others. She must preserve reference, in short. She apparently does not grasp this and wrongly attributes the same opposition to Barthes and Derrida. I do not wish to deny that there are other uses of language besides that of making statements; but discourse concerned with truth and falsity cannot, I contend, avoid the resources of reference and predication. The matter is logically but not philosophically trivial. (I acknowledge that many philosophers—in our time, Quine, notably—have thought to retire reference in favor of supposedly adequate predicative resources. But, quite apart from the success or failure of such maneuvers, the intended work of ordinary reference is certainly admitted—for instance, by Quine himself. Krauss risks, therefore, impoverishing our discursive resources altogether, in a peculiarly profound way.)

Thus, reviewing a variety of postmodernist work, Krauss speaks of the "index," the "shifter," "traces, imprints, and clues," and similarly attenuated referential devices.^[9] She shows by her discourse that she cannot—she is hardly disposed to—abandon the devices of reference (captions and titles included); but her dialectical maneuvers against mod-

ernists are intended to leave the impression (there is reason to think she herself is convinced by the argument) that she has actually abandoned the logical referent we call "the play," in abandoning the high, complex, modernist entity "the Play"—as well as authors and criticism and the rest. Simply put: the logical distinction and pairing between interpretive discourse and interpreted referent is both entirely different in purpose from and perfectly compatible with the so-called postmodernist (or, more generally, the poststructuralist) insistence on denying an unbridgeable disjunction between criticism and text or artwork. The denial of the inherent fixity of texts and artworks is not equivalent to the denial of the heterotelic work of criticism; and modernist and (so-called) postmodernist criticism both rely on the same devices of reference and predication.

What Krauss fails to notice (or to acknowledge) is that the constraints of discourse, whether paraliterary or high critical, must retain an effective reference to what is unitary (is individuatable in a logical sense) sufficient for making such discourse pertinent and operative; also, that it makes no difference at all what we suppose is the internal unity of artworks, or what internal order remains when art departs from the high unity modernist usage presumes, so long as our theory (and practice) permits reference and predication to succeed. What post-modernists of Krauss's conviction confuse—which is not equivalent to an accusation against either Barthes or Derrida—is the difference between merely judging or interpreting artworks and trashing modernism, or the difference between formulating the difference between modernist and postmodernist art and judging or interpreting works of either sort, or the difference between favoring or opposing, for cause, particular theories about art of either sort.

The denial of a principled disjunction between artwork and criticism has to do with the possibility of changing the "nature" and properties of particular artworks as a result of interpreting them (or reconstituting them by interpretation). That, the so-called postmodernist theme (really more "poststructuralist"), is in complete accord with what I have termed the "second" view of interpretation. But interpretive work could never be pertinent or effective if we could not fix the referent to which it applies—even under a change of "nature." I admit that speaking of reidentification under such a change is unorthodox. That is, what is unorthodox is the idea that the "nature" of a text may be altered by being interpreted, not that a thing may change over time (without yet changing its nature). That may be what has misled Krauss.

Nevertheless, to abandon reference and reidentification is to court logical disaster.

Fussy though it may be, the quarrel is a strategic one. (I am, I confess, more interested in the ineliminability of reference than in doing full justice to Krauss's entire picture of the postmodern. What I wish to make clear is the neutrality of the referential matter to the quarrel between the modernist insistence on the fixity and autonomy of artworks and the "postmodernist" denial of such fixity.)

Krauss's intent is to reject the fixed demarcation between criticism or interpretation and text or artwork. Fine. The idea is that what, in the "paraliterary" manner, is said about a would-be artwork at time t may need to differ from what may be said about that "same" artwork at t' later than t, as a result of already baying defensibly interpreted (or commented on ) the work at t. That hardly precludes reference; it actually presupposes it. The first notion is indeed very close to Barthes's well-known contribution about "writerly" texts, but it is also entirely distinct from the matter of referential resources.

I agree with Krauss, then, to this extent: texts may be altered by being interpreted. That is a heterodox thesis, both because of the strong reading of intentionality (or, better, Intentionality) and because of the strong discounting of fixed "natures" in the cultural world. There are, nevertheless, two mistakes that Krauss commits. First of all, she wrongly supposes, in rejecting what a modernist critic offers in "a reading [of a particular painting] by [as she says] proper names," that she is also somehow committed to rejecting the need for proper names and other referential devices in critically discussing that painting or its details. For example, she shows, regarding Picasso's La Vie, a 1904 Blue Period portrait of Picasso's friend Casagemas, who committed suicide but whose portrait was modeled on an earlier self-portrait of Picasso himself, that a standard, somewhat psychoanalytic interpretation of the "meaning" of the work pretty well trades on what she herself wishes to avoid and rightly condemns as "the art history of the proper name." In context, she actually mentions and briefly discusses the principal philosophical theories of proper names and links them to what she terms disapprovingly "an aesthetics of extension."^[10] But she confuses the requirements of reference with the presumptions of (modernist) privilege. We do not automatically settle the nature, essence, or boundaries of artworks merely by ensuring that we identify and refer to them. Reference, we may suppose, is a grammatical distinction, al-

though many have taken it to have metaphysical import (or to convey metaphysical intent).^[11] But that is hardly necessary.

The truth is, the extensional function of proper names and referential devices readily obtains within complex intentional contexts (for instance, as in the fragmenting of BEAUJOLAIS in a Juan Gris collage— which counts against modernist simplification); and where, as with titles or captions, it serves to individuate an artwork, we need not suppose that the very nature, structure, Intentional detail or unity of the work is fixed or bounded by, or somehow determinately specified or specifiable in accord with, or unalterable with regard to, or unalterably linked to, that extensional function. The extensional function of proper names (naming La Vie, for instance) is not the same thing as fixing the extension of what the name names (whatever we may suppose that to be—the "painting," say); and the formal extension of a name (whatever that is) is not the same as, and does not determine, the Intentional complexities of what the name names (for example, what one or many nonconverging interpretations of La Vie may reasonably impute, synchronically or diachronically, to La Vie ).^[12] Of course, in saying this, we see that the force of these distinctions depends on what we concede to be interpretable—what I have labeled "Intentional." But for the moment, I am more interested in drawing the connection than in debating the scope of the Intentional. Nothing will be risked by that economy.

This, the complexity of interpretation, is precisely what is to be accommodated by distinguishing between the unicity and unity of an artwork, where what "unity" designates may be contested by modernist and postmodernist theorists of art, all the while some referential fixity regarding the bare logical "unicity" (or "career") of a work enables that contest to be actually and first joined. It is entirely possible that the purely referential function may be secured by paying attention to reliable markings that are not even part, in any pertinent sense, of the painting in question (a peculiar mark on the reverse side of a canvas, say). In a word, criticism and interpretation require referentially successful discourse; but providing for that says absolutely nothing about, and sets no significant constraints on (though it does require constraints on), the intrinsic "nature" of artworks and other cultural entities.

By "unicity," I mean to flag the fact that things having complex "careers" through time and change are individuatable, have "number," as such, and that they are reidentifiable in virtue of that, and have

"natures" (are "unified" in some measure) in accord with their admitted careers. It is an extraordinary fact that standard theories of interpretation have been focused on the "natures" of interpretable things, whereas I am recommending that they focus instead on the "careers" of interpretable things. (I take this to be central to Hume's deliberately primitive "official" objections to discourse about numerical identity under conditions of change.)

A theory of how to interpret the Picasso, eschewing a literal-minded "art history of the proper name" applied to the representational content of the painting goes no distance toward demonstrating that the use of referential devices for fixing the painting's identity, or even for fixing certain of its details, commits us to the doctrine that paintings have or must have fixed natures.

No, that is an utter non sequitur that draws us on to Krauss's second mistake, namely, her supposing that the play of paraliterary criticism in what she believes conforms with Barthes's practice is, in its own turn, incompatible with the mere referential fixity of the artwork itself or is capable of proceeding without genuine referential resources. The truth is that many have been wrongly persuaded (it is the error common to Krauss's two mistakes) that the extensional function of reference somehow fixes once and for all the substantive or Intentional complexities (the nature) of whatever (referents) are thus individuated—if, indeed, they actually are the sort of entity that possesses such (Intentional) properties. Take a moment more to identify Krauss's mistakes as clearly as possible: the one maintains that postmodernist criticism (but not modernist criticism) is actually able to forego referential practices altogether; the other maintains that postmodernist criticism actually entails the abandonment of such practices in abandoning modernist fixities. It is easy to suppose that the two are the same, but they are not.

The referential (grammatical) fixity of a text or artwork is a matter quite distinct from the substantive fixity of what may be thus fixed. The two are doubtless closely linked in the sense that nothing could be referentially fixed that did not exhibit a certain stability of nature; but how alterable (or by what means altered) the life of a person or the restored Last Supper or the oft-interpreted Hamlet or Duchamp's theoretically intriguing Fountain or the marvelously elastic Sarrasine may be is not a matter that can be decided, or that is actually determined, merely by marking such texts or artworks as the reidentifiable referents they are. Modernism does indeed appear to have been too naive

or too conservative about the conceptual link between the two notions, and postmodernism may have Liberated us in that respect; but, for its own part, postmodernism has failed (in Krauss at least) to acknowledge an ontic conservatism (a need for adequation) implied in referential success insofar as the possibility of such success constrains the very nature of texts apt for reference—which of course (sadly perhaps) the modernists were never even tempted to disown.

Unicity and unity are yoked concepts all right; but they need not, running in tandem, be taken for the same horse. By the same argument, to say that interpretation (in the sense of the first theory) presupposes description is not to say that description must, to be valid or true, be timelessly fixed or unchangeable or designate the fixed or unchangeable properties of whatever we go on to interpret. That would depend on the particular nature of what we mean to describe or interpret—for whatever we describe or interpret must have a "nature" of some sort, must submit to predication. Admitting description—or, better, describability—is, first, a purely logical concession to the minima of discourse; it is only secondarily, beyond that concession, disputatiously, a further—a hardly entailed—-concession to modernism or any other privileged metaphysics of art.^[13] If so, then the requirement of the first sense of "interpret" cannot be denied; the modernist thesis is at least not entailed by the concession. The formal fixities of discourse, of reference and predication, have nothing to do with deciding what the intrinsic nature of texts or particular texts may or must be—except for the fact (the hardly negligible fact) that whatever we say is the nature of a text must be compatible with so saying and with the interpretive discourse it is meant to support. Interpreted texts must have somewhat stable properties but they need not have altogether fixed natures,^[14] So we must go beyond Krauss.

III

Consider, now, a second claim, this time from Barthes's well-known essay, "From Work to Text," which is as close to a canonical formulation of what Krauss originally wished to borrow as one could possibly find:

In opposition to the notion of the work of art or literature [says Barthes] there now arises a need for a new object, one obtained by the displacement or overturning of previous categories. This object is the Text. . .. The Text must not be thought of as a defined object. It would be useless to attempt a

material separation of works and texts. . .. A very ancient work can contain "some text," while many products of contemporary literature are not texts at all. The difference is as follows: the work is concrete, occupying a portion of book-space (in a library, for example); the text, on the other hand, is a methodological field.^[15]

Two distinctions need to be made: first, there is no doubt that Barthes never means to abandon a reliance on referential facilities, all the while he clearly intends to subvert conventional views about reading a text (for instance, views somewhat like Monroe Beardsley's New Critical view of interpretive reading); second, there is no doubt that Barthes does mean to constitute, by a certain sort of reading and serial rereading, that "object" that thereby becomes (what he calls) the Text. The notion of the Text, for Barthes, therefore, is not the notion of an antecedent referent to which interpretation is directed but rather the notion of what is productively yielded by interpretively addressing "something else" that, in the ongoing (serial) process of reading and rereading, is uniquely affected by that very process.

It is impossible to pursue the theme without citing Barthes's famous distinction between the "readerly" and the "writerly" (the lisible and scriptible ) offered at the very opening of S/Z, which is close in spirit (and even language) to the paper just mentioned:

Why is the writerly our value? [asks Barthes.] Because [he answers] the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. Our literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and its reader. This reader is thereby plunged into a kind of idleness—he is intransitive; he is, in short, serious: instead of functioning himself, instead of gaining access to the magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing, he is left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text: reading is nothing more than a referendum. Opposite the writerly text, then, is its countervalue, its negative, reactive value: what can be read, but not written: the readerly. We call any readerly text a classic text.^[16]

Of course, Balzac's Sarrasine is the classic readerly text that Barthes ingeniously shows us how to read as a writerly Text. In doing that, Barthes confirms: (1) that writerly reading does not eliminate readerly reading or its eligibility and contribution; (2) that reading of either sort presupposes a referent—the point of mentioning the "signifier," necessary for both readerly and writerly reading; (3) that the readerly text, which may have been derived, at some earlier time, from a writerly

Text, is now a fixed or bounded text the unity of which (in the modernist sense) has become a function of its particular interpretive history; alternatively, its (Sarrasine's ) being reread now (as a readerly text) commits us to recovering what constitutes it as a canonically fixed text; hence (4) that even a writerly Text is constituted (in our second sense) by interpreting something else—the "signifier," in Barthes's Saussurean usage; (5) that, for Barthes, the "Text," taken as the internal accusative of reading, is not an actual referent for further writerly reading (though the signifier is) but is collapsed into such a fixed referent only for readerly reading; and (6) that reading in the writerly way is not in the least incompatible with admitting readerly texts; in fact, it may be practiced on such texts.

A great deal of nonsense has been spread abroad maligning Barthes's intelligence, when what is wanted is a careful understanding of the remarkable thesis Barthes has bequeathed us. As it happens, it affords the best clue we are likely to find regarding the second sort of theory of interpretation. (I shall say nothing against Barthes's literary playfulness. Barthes was clearly impatient with or amused by the rigidities of structuralism. I see no evidence that his verbal games adversely affected his argument; and I see no evidence that Barthes ever played fast and loose with the constraints of coherence.) In any case, in his terribly freewheeling way, Barthes shows us how to entertain the idea that a text (in our sense, not quite in his, though congruently enough with his own notion) need not be presumed to have a fixed nature throughout a responsible reading (that is, in what we—once again, not Barthes—are calling interpretation) in spite of the fact that, however that nature may change, it remains a changing or changeable nature assignable (by reference) to this or that text (as we are prepared to say) or "signifier" (as Barthes would say). What shall we make of that?

Barthes does speak of interpretation but only either to dismiss it or to allude to what he calls "the Nietzschean sense of the word."^[17] What he means is that conventional interpretation (interpretation somewhat in my first sense) addresses readerly texts, texts construed as "products," referents with fixed natures; whereas writerly "texts" (texts treated in a "writerly' way) invite interpretation in the "Nietzschean' sense (in something close to my second sense), a sense applied to "production without product, structuration without structure": "To interpret a text [in this sense, says Barthes] is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate

what plural constitutes it. . .. This text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach; they are interminable . . . their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language."^[18]

Barthes is most exact here, despite the extravagance of his prose: "as nothing exists outside the text [he says: his remark follows Derrida's into print by about three years^[19] ], there is never a whole of the text [; that is,] for the plural text, there cannot be a [fixed] narrative structure, a grammar, or a logic."^[20] His meaning is plainly designed to preserve adequate resources for reference ("a galaxy of signifiers") but also to disallow a complete fixity of predicable nature ("a structure of signifieds"). He rejects the idea of exhausting the interpretive undertaking practiced in a cultural world that acquires new resources without limit, new "codes" of meaning drawn from its ongoing experience.

Interpretation in the "Nietzschean" sense subtends a responsive reading all right, but it is a reading that employs (as Barthes's own reading of S/Z shows) a selection from the "codes" of reading that gather and increase (somehow) in the life of our society—that do not and cannot lead to closure, to hierarchical preference, to mere correctness by way of reference to an antecedently closed textual nature. There is no longer an explication de texte, except by fiat: there is only a reading of the signifiers that thereby constitutes, reconstitutes, leaves indefinitely or "plurally" open to endless further reconstitution, the signifiers that acquire that interpretive history (that yield a text). This is the meaning of that otherwise impenetrable remark (playfully Rousseauesque): "narrative is both merchandise and the relation of the contract of which it is the object."^[21]

What Barthes means but will not say outright is that the interpretation of a "text" ("a galaxy of signifiers") is inseparable from a society's interpretation of its own open history. The meaning of whatever is singled out as a readable referent is, by that very act, judged apt for bearing whatever further signification its evolving "codes" dare ascribe to the evolving history of such ascriptions. That history is collected, referentially, as this "text" or that. The practice presupposes that texts may be individuated and reidentified as remembered histories (or careers), as referents that lack fixed natures. Barthes does not discuss the rigor of such a practice, it's true: he is more interested in its emancipatory power. But he never violates the limits of coherence, and we have (in S/Z ) the paradigm of the practice he recommends.

So seen, Sarrasine is not a standard story or a two-part story that contains a story within a story inviting explanation; it is a story "of a contract [says Barthes] of a force (the narrative) and the action of this force on the very contract controlling it": we are invited (in effect, by the writerly contract) to invent, by applying to certain signifiers the codes of reading of our world, whatever functional equivalences of structure may be imaginatively produced in an exchange of readings applied to the admitted structures of Sarrasine (the apparently "nested narratives").^[22]

It is helpful to notice that Barthes's way of reading—"writerly" reading—is entirely capable of its own characteristic discipline. It is indeed opposed to the exclusionary rights of "readerly" reading, though Barthes does not exclude such reading. The pertinent discipline depends on our sharing in some generous sense the consensual cultural resources of our own society. But that, as will gradually become clear, is also necessary for the preferred discipline of the "readerly' strategy. In short, the two ways of reading cannot be entirely disjoint. It is true, however, that Barthes is not interested in featuring any particular constraints—historical, traditional, intentional—on the interpretation of texts, in the manner favored, one way or another, by those who work within the hermeneutic tradition. There is that difference between the modernists and the poststructuralists.

It would be wrong to say that Barthes's sort of playful interpretation abandons reference or predication or a disciplined reading: it merely abandons the full fixity of texts favored in readerly readings in standard modernist accounts, and it shifts the focus of reference from finished text to enabling signifier. What Barthes alludes to is the neglect, among modernist theorists and literary commentators, of the changing context and history of reading—hence, of the contextually and historically changing "codes" of reading accessible to a living society. There is the clue to the infinite "plural" that is a Text, on Barthes's account. The very practice of reading—an entire society's practice, its Lebensform, we may say—ensures it. (I hasten to add that we must read "Lebensformen" or historical "traditions" in a much less conservative sense than Wittgenstein seems to have favored.) The "infinitude" of interpretations is simply the openendedness of a text's interpretability within a historical society's practice of reading. (This is also what Krauss attempts to assimilate.)

There are two pressure points in Barthes's theory of Texts pertinent to my second sense of interpretation. First, there is literally nothing to be interpreted (in the first sense of "interpret") until after a "text" is

"constituted" (Barthes's own term) by interpretive work (in the second sense of "interpret"); secondly, constituting a "Text" in Barthes's sense does not yield a "product," an ordinary text to be further interpreted (in the first sense of "interpret"). The point is regularly neglected by the would-be anarchists and irrationalists of interpretation. Remember: Barthes never disallows the disciplined option of readerly interpretation practiced on a textual product in accord with the first sense of "interpret."

Barthes's thesis holds only that the two sorts of reading arise together within the same societal practices (what he playfully identifies as its "codes" of reading) and may even be regarded as sequentially ordered phases of reading (or interpretation) within an increasingly normalized use of particular texts (or "galaxies of signifiers"). Barthes's emphasis is on the jouissance of (preferring) the writerly over the readerly, not the ineligibility of the latter.^[23] (The sexual joke is Barthes's, of course.) Liberty with texts or signifiers does not escape the normal constraints of discourse—only the presumptions of jejune literary theory. In a logical sense, reference has its rigor but is unavoidably informal; in a confirmatory sense, predication may be consensually apt or inapt but its possibilities evolve and are culturally openended.

Consider the following remark:

Reading a text cited by Stendhal (but not written by him) I find [says Barthes] Proust in the minute detail. The Bishop of Lescars refers to the niece of his vicar-general in a series of affected apostrophes (My little niece, my little friend, my lovely brunette, ah, delicious little morsel!) which remind me of the way the two post girls at the Grand Hotel at Balbec, Marie Geneste and Celeste Albaret, address the narrator (Oh, the little black-haired devil, oh, tricky little devil! Ah, youth! Ah, lovely skin!). Elsewhere, but in the same way, in Flaubert, it is the blossoming apple trees of Normandy which I read according to Proust . . . this does not mean that I am in any way a Proust "specialist": Proust is what comes to me, not what I summon up; not an "authority," simply a circular memory [that is, a memory that "circles" or stalks a text]. Which is what the inter-text is: the impossibility of living outside the infinite text—whether this text be Proust or the daily newspaper or the television screen: the book creates the meaning, the meaning creates life.^[24]

Reading in the writerly manner is a form of living, not a form of research; it involves know-how (savoir aller, not savoir, at least not in the sense of assuming the predicative fixity of objective texts). But it is disciplined. It involves a practice interesting to others (for instance, in S/Z ) only if the reader is really civilized, witty, inventive. We, then, re-

trace the play of S /Z in order to become similarly motivated and (perhaps as) expert. But reading in that way resists the (readerly) "bifurcation" of the reader/read text—in order to allow that same distinction to be made again in a freer (writerly) way. There is no "explaining" the Text (Barthes's "Text"), and there is no "knowledge" of the meaning of that Text: because, of course, there is (then) no definitive "text" and no one way of motivating readings "which would be definitive" of any meaning.^[25] Nevertheless, there are "galaxies of signifiers," socially habituated practices, disciplined options of reading, and above all the customary meanings of sentences and sedimented readerly texts. One sees at once Krauss's mistake—as well as the mistake of such postmodernists as Jean-François Lyotard.^[26] For, savoir faire and savoir lire do presuppose savoir—at least referentially. Writerly reading presupposes readerly reading—again, at least referentially.

Barthes effectively acknowledges the point: it is the only possible condition on which a complete chaos of reading (or of cultural life in general) can be avoided. It is in part at least what Wittgenstein means by "forms of life," what Bourdieu means by "habitus," what Marx means by "praxis" and "modes of production," what Hegel means by "Sitten," what Gadamer means by "wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein," what Husserl means by the plural of "Lebenswelt," what Foucault means by "epistemes." It is no more than the acknowledgment of the preformative historical practices by which culturally apt individuals first become apt. Their world is already culturally preformed for them: that is the reason they may be said to learn their native language and their native culture; that is the reason they can specify the "signifiers," the culturally (already) prepared materials, that, by interpreting (in the productive sense), they first constitute texts or artworks as such—what thereupon prove to be usable as referents apt for interpretation (in the adequational sense). In a word, they learn to share the consensual memory of an encultured society. If you press the point, you grasp in a single step the impossibility of modeling such interpretation computationally, for there is, and can be, no algorithmic accommodation of a genuinely emergent, historicized culture. If interpretation is open in anything like Barthes's sense, then, unless some very strong nativist account of concepts holds (Fodor's, for instance), which is most unlikely for the concepts favored in the interpretations of the arts, computationality must fail.^[27]

Barthes's emphasis, of course, is on the initial process of writerly reading. On the evidence (on his view), the process has been forgotten

or ignored or misconstrued. My own emphasis, for the moment at least, is focused rather on the option of continuing a critical discourse about whatever (a "text") is thereby so constituted—without in the least reneging on Barthes's fine lesson. On the argument, we preserve both themes merely by distinguishing with care the logical requirements of unicity or individuation from the prejudice of certain substantive (modernist) presumptions about unity or fixity of nature.

The constraints of reference and predication are not violated by Barthes, only displaced from produced or finished texts to interpretable (openendedly interpretable) signifiers—from "natures" to "careers," as I should say. Barthes himself does not tarry long enough to give us a theory of the social habituation of the practices of reading that support the distinctive discipline of readerly and writerly reading. He presupposes such a theory—or such theories—but he moves on to offer examples of what be recommends. For my part, we could easily pause to construct a theory of social practice—from Hegel or Marx, or Nietzsche or Foucault, or Weber or Lukács, or Husserl or Heidegger, or Adorno or Benjamin, or Lévi-Strauss or Althusser, or Wittgenstein or Bourdieu, or Gadamer or Kuhn.

The point remains quite constant, however: the waiving of texts in the sense suited to (a modernist view of) the first sort of interpretation does not eliminate referential discourse elsewhere (for readerly texts, say), does not preclude referential and predicative discipline within the writerly reading recommended (as in the identification of relevant signifiers, the identification of other readerly and writerly read texts, a certain civilized familiarity with the details or "codes" of one's culture); and it does not even preclude a rapprochement between readerly and writerly reading before and after the play of a particularly agile exercise of the latter sort (the charm of S/Z, say). Certainly, in yielding in an openended way at least minimally hospitable to speculations of Gadamer's and Foucault's sort, Barthes deliberately opposes any structuralist conception of interpretation (the point of the playful use of the term "codes"). He is, in effect, exploiting his own idiom of an earlier phase of work; and he is also accommodating (within an enlarged vision) all alternative practices of interpretation, so long as they do not entrench false presumptions of fixity or totalizing. (I shall have occasion to reconsider the matter when I examine Michael Riffaterre's late-structuralist model.)

In short, Barthes's preference of the writerly is not even a denial of the ontology of texts—or of the likely dawning of gradually normal-

ized texts for which such an ontology could be retrospectively constructed (if we wished); and it does not itself supply an adequate analysis of what a signifier is, or a practice of reading, or even a human being capable of reading in either the readerly or writerly way. It is one thing to grasp the fresh discovery Barthes bequeaths us; it is quite another to make a shambles of every effort to understand interpretation. After all, the "bifurcation" of the signifier and the would-be reader remains, after the provisional "bifurcation" of the readerly text and the reader (and author) is first disallowed—and then (of course) civilly permitted to be recovered again in Barthes's educated sense.

Barthes offers an instance (in S /Z )—after the fact of a readerly deposit of Sarrasine in the canon of conventional texts—of what it would be like before such a reading, to have read Sarrasine in the writerly way. The "galaxy of signifiers" lacks fixed meaning; but, as the competent readers we are, we possess the know-how for grasping what may be taken to be their meaning. Barthes suppresses this hermeneutic or habituative dimension of reading—but it is surely there. The semantic and semiotic potentialities of signifiers are already built into the minima of any socialized habit of reading and using language. Nevertheless, Saussure, whom Barthes had taken his original departure from (but now supersedes), had never successfully explained the "original" relationship between writing and speech or writing and thought that he insisted on; and without that "originary" source—or the effective replacement of it more perspicuously advanced by Wittgenstein and Gadamer, say—there remains a critical lacuna in Barthes's own account. Certainly, the familiarity of Wittgenstein's and Gadamer's views considerably domesticates the question of a "writerly" discipline. (Saussure's "failing," of course, is just what Derrida had so mercilessly exposed in Of Grarnmatology.^[28] )

But the deeper theme, missing also in Derrida, is this: that the deconstructive or poststructuralist or antimodernist rejection of the bifurcation of reader and text itself entails a competent practice or activity on the part of readers vis-à-vis something (signifiers, say) within a preformed or habituated cultural space in which (and by using the processes of which) what Barthes calls the "plural" or "infinite" Text is first constituted (and what we are now calling a "text" may be constituted for "infinite" or, better, indefinitely many interpretations). In a sense, "the deconstruction of hermeneutics" is therefore reversed and outflanked by being shown to require and presuppose a "hermeneutics of deconstruction."^[29] It is not, however, thereby disallowed

or repudiated. What the argument shows is that the rejection of a cultural world bifurcated between inquiring subjects and subjects inquired into—or between such subjects and what they do or produce (texts, in the idiom I have proposed)—is itself the work of subjects (competent selves) active in such a bifurcated world and affected by their own work in it.

We theorize in a critical moment about a preformative condition we cannot originally fathom (that Saussure thought he could fathom, that Husserl also thought he could fathom) within which the bifurcation of world and word (or text and reader) first arises. Barthes's splendid game of writerly reading tenderly texts serves a double purpose: for one thing, it affords a miniature exemplar of the impossibility of radically disjoining the double function of subjects as observers and observed (in much the same sense in which one cannot beat oneself at chess); and, for another, it subverts the fixities of privilege, of readerly reading, of the "metaphysics of presence," of all the bugaboos of failing to remember that the steady structures of our now-bifurcated world depend impenetrably on whatever we critically postulate as the preformed world within which our own salient "objective" world arises.

So seen, Barthes's invention is an attractive toy—no more than a toy, no more than a toy for Barthes himself: for we could easily (and would need to) interpose a conception of numbered, reidentifiable texts that could support interpretation in the first and second senses and that would, at the same time, subvert a "metaphysics of privilege" (the notion of fixed and bounded texts) just because—for reading purposes at least—texts do and must remain referentially accessible. Barthes's conceit of the infinite Text (that is not itself a referent) is, then, merely the deliberately posed extravagance of a disappearing limit for the more modestly interposed texts I am now recommending. Barthes nearly says as much:

The Text (if only because of its frequent "unreadability") decants the work from its consumption and gathers it up as play, task, production, and activity. This means that the Text requires an attempt to abolish (or at least to lessen) the distance between writing and reading, not by intensifying the reader's projection into the work, but by linking the two together in a single signifying process.^[30]

The point is, a theory of texts adequate for interpretation at the present time would favor Barthes's double lesson—but would do so in an ampler and more systematic way than Barthes actually does. We must:

(1) detach the full theory of the nature of texts (literary, visual, musical) from the mere referential and predicative constraints of discourse about them, so that all notions of fixity, essence, analogy with physical particulars are attenuated as far as possible or challenged as much as necessary; and (2) we must develop a positive theory of texts, of how texts (or culturally emergent phenomena and entities in general^[31] ) are actually constituted—first, from precultural physical materials and, second, from culturally prepared materials. Item (1) trades on the lesson drawn from Krauss and Barthes: namely, that unity and unicity are distinct though not altogether separable notions; item (2) requires an entirely fresh start and cannot fail to center on the peculiarities of Intentional properties and their incarnated relation to material properties.^[32]

All this may seem unnecessarily heavyhanded, because Barthes was so ponderously intent on being lightfingered. But there is no philosophical carelessness in what he says. On the contrary, what Barthes conveys by his practice is the logical viability of preserving reference and numerical identity and yielding on fixed natures. (He mistrusts theory, but he never violates the constraints of coherence.) I accept Barthes's innovation: I reconcile the two notions by treating texts as individuatable histories. (You will have noticed, by the way, two important terminological adjustments: first, that "interpretation" need not be confined to linguistic acts only—in the most literal-minded sense; second, that "texts" include any and all culturally constituted entities—intrinsically apt for interpretation. Thus, the ballet is interpretive, and persons are texts.)

IV

We may collect our findings a little more deliberately. An adequate theory of interpretation will explain: (1) how it is that we can referentially fix, identify, or individuate artworks or texts for interpretation without at the same time insisting that their nature, their collected properties, their essential boundaries must also be fixed, determined, changeless, or at least unaffected by merely interpreting them or commenting on them in the normal critical way; (2) how it is that artworks or texts are first constituted as such, so that they become the relatively stable referents of subsequent interpretive discourse; and (3) how it is that discursive interpretation can alter the "natures" of

individuated texts and artworks and, in doing that, reconstitute their natures or properties without disorganizing their numerical identity and (of course) without inviting total chaos.

What has been shown is the sheer coherence of the intended answer: the bare unicity of referents accommodates the absence of any fixed unity or fixed nature of the particulars thus identified. In the biological world, we capture the limits of tolerance for changing natures and fixed reference by adjusting our notions of natural kinds: spatiotemporal continuities, as Hume more or less admits, aid us in allowing fixity of identity to range over the shifting sequences of instantiated properties. In contemporary physics, among the quantum-mechanical puzzles of reconciling particle/wave anomalies, we exploit (with Heisenberg, for instance) punctuated identification for the sake of descriptive control and then permit identification to become as story-relative as can be tolerated at a theoretical level at which such identification would be altogether disallowed. In the cultural world, both with regard to persons and artworks, we borrow whatever similar conveniences we can; we maintain, for instance, wherever we may, "one person/one body," or "one sculpture/one block of marble," or "one poem/one inscription from a set of possible inscriptions." But texts and artworks do not form natural kinds and cannot be identified merely physically or as physical bodies. They differ from natural objects essentially in possessing Intentional properties. It is in virtue of that that, paradigmatically, texts are subject to interpretation in the two senses supplied and that those two senses are interrelated in the manner sketched. (These are the themes of adequation and symbiosis.)

I have now come to the most strenuous part of the thory needed. Since I cannot attempt a full account of the ontology of artworks or cultural phenomena in general,^[33] I may as well be candid about the upshot of what such an account would yield. It would, without endangering the rigors of numerical identity or the critical testing of particular claims or of coherent discourse in general, make possible our assigning numbered texts indefinitely many interpretations in principle, and (then) their entering into indefinitely many histories; also interpretations and histories assigned particular texts at t' later than t may be affected by interpretations and histories assigned at t. Barthes's notion would accommodate all that.

The fascinating thing is that it is possible to make such a notion coherent, manageable, even plausible and disciplined. It would require a number of substantial concessions regarding the logic of general dis-

course that would not be narrowly occupied with the theory of art or interpretation. They would include at least (1) abandoning as fixed principles the principles of excluded middle and tertiurn non datur; (2) admitting the adequacy of, and the impossibility of exceeding thelimitations of, story-relative reference; (3) admitting the viability of relativistic truth-values and the compatibility of distributively employing such values together with the (distributed) use of bivalent or bipolarvalues where wanted; and (4) challenging, if not repudiating, the adequacy of would-be strict extensional rules for regimenting all languages
descriptive of the real world. I freely admit that these are heterodox suggestions. My only point at the moment is that they are not incoherent and that the terrain of interpretation may actually favor them.

The project would also require a number of substantial concessions of an ontological sort reconciled with the adjusted logic of discourse. For instance, it would require: (5) denying the adequacy of all physicalisms (as opposed to materialisms—that is, theories of the fundamental "stuff" of the universe), whether reductive or not, in order to accommodate the reality of the artworld and human culture in general; (6) admitting cultural emergence, as distinct from physical emergence, as a process that yields indissolubly complex embodied or incarnated phenomena or properties; (7) admitting that what distinguishes artworks, texts, and other cultural entities from natural entities depends essentially on the complex incarnation of so-called Intentional properties; and (8) admitting, in addition, that Intentional properties are such that they can be constituted, altered, affected, generated by the processes of critical discourse or interpretation applied to given texts or cultural referents, without adversely affecting the numerical fixity of such referents and without altering merely physical properties. The beauty of holding to a theory in accord with 1-8 is that it is not a Cartesian dualism or in any way primarily centered on a disjunction of the mental and the physical. It is concerned rather with the difference and relationship between the natural and the cultural— within the space of which the other may be accommodated.

There are baffling and unanswered questions here. I don't deny it. I must leave them for the time being. I regard it as a considerable gain that the theory of interpretation that is dawning is not obviously incoherent. Many will be surprised. I believe the argument pretty well comes to this: first, that the distinction between culture and nature is different from, not reducible to, and in fact more inclusive than, the distinction between mind and body; and, second, that what is culturally

"emergent" with respect to physical nature is not tantamount to what is merely "supervenient" with respect to physical nature. I shall offer a further word about the second theorem in a moment.

If physicalism and extensionalism were philosophically correct, or at least adequate (in real-time terms) for all discourse about the cultural world, then everything so far said would be entirely pointless. That must be conceded straight off. But if those programs are neither correct nor demonstrated to be correct nor demonstrably correct nor even demonstrably adequate (in real-time terms), then we are left with a world for which theses 1-8 may be peculiarly apt, however quarrelsome and contested. I have been careful to put this option in the best light—to make it appear as a natural continuation of the familiar debate about interpreting texts. It is certainly true that attacks on physicalism and extensionalism are widely and honorably resisted. But it is also fair to say that there is no known demonstration that shows that opposition to those doctrines is incoherent, irresponsible, unfruitful, or calamitous. That is as honorable a stand as the other—probably a more resourceful one at the present time.^[34] In any case, the admission of 1-8 leads directly to the startling prospect that artworks or texts may be assigned indefinitely many interpretations and may enter into indefinitely many histories.^[35] This is just what Barthes was getting at when, notoriously, he affirmed that "the Text . . . practices the infinite deferral of the signified."^[36]

It is also, however, close to what a theorist like Gadamer means, speaking from the altogether different vantage of hermeneutic ontology, when he declares that

to understand a text always means to apply it to ourselves and to know that, even if it must always be understood in different ways, it is still the same text presenting itself to us in these different ways. . .. The linguistic explicitness that the process of understanding gains through interpretation does not create a second sense apart from that which is understood and interpreted. The interpretive concepts are not, as such, thematic in understanding. Rather, it is their nature to disappear behind what they bring, in interpretation, into speech. Paradoxically, an interpretation is right when it is capable of disappearing in this way. The possibility of understanding is dependent on the possibility of this kind of mediating interpretation. . .. Interpretation is contained potentially in the understanding process. It simply makes the understanding explicit. Thus interpretation is not a means through which understanding is achieved, but it has passed into the content of what is understood.^[37]

Notice that, unlike Barthes, Gadamer insists on the reidentification of one and the same text under plural, potentially infinite, interpretation

and reinterpretation. The openness of texts—in both an interpretive and historical sense (ultimately the same)—is ensured by the notion of reflexive "application": the Intentional import of a text essentially incorporates into its developing, endlessly reconstituted meaning what its recovery for our own historical experience and prejudice can make it out to be. Its meaning is heuristically schematized in the intersection between our present power of reading and what, from that evolving perspective, we posit as its collected past.

In this regard, my proposal about interpretable texts is closer to Gadamer's usage than to Barthes's. Quite unaccountably, however, Gad-amer is, at every step, much more reluctant than he ought to be to accommodate a frank relativism: he is arbitrary about the point; his thesis actually favors a relativism, although he denies it. In this regard, my substantive proposal about interpretation is closer to Barthes's vision than to Gadamer's. (But there is a measure of convergence that must be acknowledged.) Still, it is Gadamer rather than Barthes who answers the third of the three questions posed a moment ago, namely, how it is that discursive interpretation alters the nature of individuated texts without affecting their numerical identity and without producing conceptual chaos. Gadamer's answer depends on repudiating the Romantic recoverability of authorial intent, on reclaiming the historicity of human existence and cultural texts, on admitting the intransparency and preformative forces of the human world in which, in a Heideggerean sense, we are "thrown," and (most important) on featuring the natural or perspectival "prejudice" (Vorurteil) of all understanding and interpretation—in a word, on the function of "the fusion of horizons" (Horizontverschmelzung ). Thus Gadamer maintains: "It is part of real understanding . . . that we regain the concepts of an historical past [understand or interpret a text] in such a way that they also include our own comprehension of them. [This is what is meant by] 'the fusion of horizons'."^[38]

The meaning of a text, Gadamer says, is the "fusion" of its perceived past and its perceived present application to ourselves; but it is we who monitor both elements of the effort. Plainly, what is most important about Gadamer's proposed solution is that it is coherent, apt, and manageable. It shows us a way of answering our third question without loss of rigor. It opens the way, therefore, to a variety of alternative strategies. We shall have to weigh their merits, of course; but for the moment I am merely preparing the ground for a pertinent choice. I am not pretending that the full significance of Barthes's and Gadamer's options is easy to fathom. I claim only that no paradox of reference

or predication or individuation or numerical identity has surfaced as a result of invoking the second sense of "interpret." The gain seems to be a sturdy one. Barthes confirms by example (S/Z) and informal argument the sheer coherence of the general theory; Gadamer provides a generous but not infinitely plastic sense of the presence of a historical tradition within which interpretations may be tested and reasonably validated. Barthes does not actually address the conceptual puzzles I have broached, but he never violates any formal constraints on discourse. Gadamer does not explicitly formulate criteria for rigorous confirmation of particular readings, but turns instead to the authenticity of historical existence. I am trying to provide in a tactful way what is missing in both.

The upshot is: (1) that it is in virtue of the Intentional nature of texts that they require interpretation in order to be understood; (2) that since interpretable texts and textual interpreters exist historically, there cannot be a uniquely correct or uniquely convergent reading or interpretation of a given text; and (3) that since interpretation and understanding require the historicized recovery of the Intentional import of a given text, it is quite impossible to fix that recovery except in terms of the salient or convincing fusion of—or what, from the perspective of present interpreters, is posited as the shared or continuous or intersecting—horizons of the past and the present. This resolution of our third question, along Gadamer's lines, appears to reconcile the ontology of texts and the methodology of their interpretation.

We must remind ourselves that I have said nothing reliable about the "nature" of interpretable texts, beyond the veiled allusion to their "Intentional" properties. But it must also not slip our notice that the gains so far made have not depended in any way on the details of any particular theory. I emphasize the conceptual generosity of the distinctions so far advanced, the hospitality with which diverging and opposed views may be canvassed, rather than any prematurely urged argument in favor of this or that particular interpretive practice.

Gadamer, without the least defense (as already remarked), affirms that there is a "universal" or "classical" tradition that can always be historically recovered—indeed, that must be recovered (that was never, and could never have been, lost)—for a successful resolution of the hermeneutic task.^[39] Naturally, I reject his claim. But what could he have meant, having admitted the constructed nature of human selves?^[40]How could he, for instance, have disallowed the more daring conjectures Michel Foucault advances? For, puzzling over Velázquez's prob-

lem in representing pictorial representation within the Classical (that is, the baroque) canon (in Las Meninas ) , Foucault remarks: "Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist. . .. He is a quite recent creature, which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with its own hands less than two hundred years ago. [Before that time] there was no epistemological consciousness of man as such [he says]. The Classical episteme is articulated along lines that do not isolate, in any way, a specific domain proper to man."^[41]

The meaning of Foucault's remarkably apt perception (even if we should disagree with his interpretation of Las Meninas ) is that the historical past, which is both real and not the same as the physical past in which it is incarnate, can be retroactively affected (without violating physical time or physical causality) by future sensibilities that could not have been recognized as potentiated in a particular past present. Merely to mention the complication is to appreciate the task of a seriously contemporary theory of interpretation.^[42] (I shall return to this important issue.)

I must add here that, more or less in accord with the incipient theme of invariance just mentioned (the "classical" theme—regarding which my own reading is certain to be contested by many), there is evidence that Gadamer is in the process of retreating from the relativism implicit in his own theory (which he means to avoid) and of reinforcing a fairly conventional philosophical reading of poetry not terribly distant from the spirit of New Critical reading, both in terms of the "autonomy" of a poem and of a rather bland sense of historical change. (One might also say, I admit, that Gadamer has never been altogether consistent on the matter: perhaps, then, that he has not really "retreated."^[43] )

Notions of historicity, therefore, as variable as Krauss's, Barthes's, Gadamer's, and Foucault's strongly favor the need for, and the plausibility of, a theory rather like the one being sketched. The "canonical" view—what I have called interpretation restricted in the first sense (largely modernist)—does not permit these subtle questions even to surface; and interpretation in the sense here championed—that unites the first and second senses given—would secure the stability of texts and interpretation by way of the salient habits of life of a society rather than by way of a privileged discovery of independently fixed entities. The argument, therefore, leads directly to a reconciliation of the would-be objectivity of interpretive claims and a frank relativism about truth-claims (which is to say, not a relativism regarding the meaning of "true").^[44]

Without the sheer conservative contingencies of life itself, human history would be an utter chaos; the disorder of critical interpretation would be instantly matched by the loss of science and rational prudence. That admission is certainly much more than the recovery of a pragmatist aesthetics, but it is at least that. (I shall need to say more about relativism, of course.)

Before moving on to other topics, however, I must secure a theorem (broached a moment ago) that I regard as particularly strategic: namely, that the culturally "emergent" world of art and history is not equivalent to any mental world "supervenient" on physical nature. What I mean to oppose is the presumed adequacy of what has been called "nonreductive physicalism."^[45] The doctrine of "supervenience" (in contemporary philosophies of mind) is perhaps the best-known version of what I am identifying as nonreductive physicalism—which is normally not applied to the problems of history and interpretation but could be. Nevertheless, the notion of interpretation I have drawn from Barthes, and associated congenially (if somewhat loosely) with Gadamer and even Foucault, would be challenged along the lines of "supervenience" fashionably favored by philosophical physicalists who do not regard the mental and cultural life of humans as mere fictions or delusions of any sort. In the interest, therefore, of attracting a wider appreciation of the puzzles I have in mind, I must insist on the following: (1) that, as remarked, the Intentional is social or societal or collective or historical, in the sense in which language is its paradigm; also, that the psychological aptitudes of encultured persons are already characterized in cultural ways that cannot be explicated in terms of individual mental or neurophysiological states prior to their having internalized the Lebensformen of a particular society (in virtue of which they first "emerge" as selves); and (2) that, as a consequence, what is first identified in Intentional space is, however emergent with respect to the physical world, not supervenient on that world.

What I mean is this. There is no known procedure (rule, criterion, algorithm, law, or the like) by which, from a description of any physical events, we could infer in a reliable way any culturally significant events we spontaneously (normally) recognize; nor, for any culturally significant events, could we infer any reasonably detailed and pertinent physical events in which they would be embodied and by reference to which they could then be indexed. The implied difficulty was dubbed by Herbert Feigl, many years ago, the "many-many" problem. Feigl regarded this problem as the principal difficulty confronting any unity-

of-science or physicalist account of the mind; he did not consider extending the problem to cultural matters (interpretation and history, in particular), because he did not envision that the cultural world could not be reduced to the psychological (effectively, the solipsistic). But, for my present purpose, Feigl's admission is instructive enough.^[46] Now, Feigltreats the ("many-many") problem as empirically contingent. Those favoring supervenience do not favor contingency: they hold instead that there is a modal or necessary invariance (de re) between what "supervenes" and that from which it does so.

"Supervenience" was introduced, in its present usage, in Donald Davidson's well-known paper, "Mental Events." There, applying G. E. Moore's famous account of "good" as a nonnatural property "supervening" on natural properties, Davidson says the following:

Although the position I describe denies there are psychophysical laws, it is consistent with the view that mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics. Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respect, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respect without altering in some physical respect. Dependence or supervenience of this kind does not entail reducibility through law or definition; if it did, we could reduce moral properties to descriptive, and this there is good reason to believe cannot be done; and we might be able to reduce truth in a formal system to syntactic properties, and this we know cannot in general be done.^[47]

Colin McGinn, who accepts Davidson's argument, emphasizes the modal nature of the claim: "if x and y have the same physical constitution, and x has mental property P, then y must also have P. " This McGinn calls the principle of "the supervenience of the mental on the physical."^[48]

Now, if even the "many-many" problem cannot be resolved in physicalism's favor, then the supervenience thesis is surely false; but it is also false if the modal interpretation of nonreductive physicalism cannot be confirmed: that would hold for both the mind/body problem and the culture/nature problem. It is for that reason that I say that, first of all, the admission of the coherence of Barthes's and Gadamer's theories of interpretation entails the falsity of the modal interpretation of nonreductive physicalism and, afortiori, the supervenience thesis. I draw the conclusion in a merely dialectical way in order to emphasize the pertinence of the interpretive question for a very large run of philosophical issues (of some importance currently) that would not

normally be perceived to be relevantly affected. But I should add at once that the interpretive question—in the arts, in history, in the human sciences, in language—is almost never brought to serious attention in terms that give priority to physical events by means of which the mental or the cultural is first identified as such. In short, the bare admission that the Intentional "natures" of texts are alterable under interpretation instantly renders untenable the supervenience thesis. This is a splendid and inexpensive gain, for one sees at once that any robust form of cultural realism (that is not reductive) ensures ontic and epistemic complexities that the "naturalizing" tendencies of current analytic philosophy cannot possibly accommodate.

It is our cultural fluency that enables us to recognize, individuate, identify, and reidentify spontaneously events and phenomena of the relevant sort—regarding which, thereupon, the supervenience thesis and its physicalist analogues are first pertinently broached. In that sense, the thesis is always raised after the fact of cultural fluency; whereas what I mean by "cultural emergence" is just that fact and whatever it entails—if nonreductive physicalism fails—regarding the structure of a science.^[49] For the moment, however, I mean to draw attention to the fact that, within the space of cultural life, our discursive fluency is capable of coherently supporting—both with regard to the rigors of reference and predication and with regard to larger philosophical issues touching on the mind/body and culture/nature problems—interpretive practices in accord with Barthes's conception of "writerly" reading and Gadamer's conception of the "fusion of horizons." There may be reasons to oppose Barthes's and Gadamer's theories, but I cannot see that they can be drawn from an analysis of our linguistic resources or from an analysis of what it is to be a science.

I have brought two themes together by introducing my heterodox proposal regarding interpretation: for one thing, I have now shown that the theory bears in a surprisingly direct way on certain presumptions favored in analytic forms of physicalism that might not have been suspected; and, for another, I have shown that the theory is patently coherent and promising. I want to emphasize, before I move on, that the nerve of the argument rests with challenging the idea that interpretable "things" (artworks, texts, histories, persons, utterances, actions) need, when "objectively" interpreted, to be assigned fixed meanings. Once the analogy with physical objects is abandoned (New Criticism), the fixity of authorial intent denied (Romantic hermeneutics), and the closed system of pertinent semiotic "codes" subverted

(Francophone structuralism), whatever objectivity interpretation may claim for itself depends entirely on the reasonableness with which the changing historical experience of interested societies may be tapped. The rest of the story requires attention to: (1) constraints on interpretive relevance; (2) the coherence of our theories of the "nature' and "career" of texts; (3) the viability of standard forms of reference and predication; and (4) the benign complexity of Intentional properties.