Lacan webpages banner

SEXUATED TOPOLOGY AND THE
SUSPENSION OF MEANING

A NON-HERMENEUTICAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL
APPROACH TO TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

WILLIAM J. URBAN

2.3 The Epistemological Phenomenology of Interpretation

While there are important differences between Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard and Sartre, they do share an approach that places understanding in the ontological or existential dimension standing a priori to the subject-object dichotomy. In this section we follow the other trajectory of phenomenological thought, one which instead respects this dichotomy as the proper point of departure and thus can be said to take its measure from Husserl's original epistemological method of investigating meaning.

Without question Ingarden falls in the Husserlian phenomenological camp. His The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (1937)241 bears the strong stamp of his former teacher on all its major notional elements. Above it was mentioned that Sartre had effectively developed the rudiments of an existential phenomenology of writing and reading. Ingarden's early work is much more complete on this score, striving for a theoretical rigor and without subsuming it under an explicit political program. His work can be seen as the first and still the best application of strict Husserlian phenomenology to aesthetics in general and to the reading of literary texts in particular. But it is important to note that Ingarden's phenomenological aesthetics is not interested in the quaestio facti of a reading experience so much as the discernment and methodical interpretation of the meaning of a text, which is concretized in that reading experience. The former is of interest to the psychologist. Yet focusing on the total effect of the reading experience too easily slips one into seriously considering the erroneous explanations of verbal meaning offered by the psychologistic school, which in general views the experiencing subject as forming the meanings of words in isolation. In such a view, Ingarden muses, 'the correct understanding of the meaning of a word (in short, the understanding of a word) used by another is almost a miracle.'242 While Ingarden does challenge Husserl's division of all entities into the real and the ideal by saying that his own investigation into the mode of being of the aesthetic object reveals how it does not fall into either category, he wholeheartedly embraces Husserl's notion that meaning is an ideal object 'out there,' 'external' to experiencing subjects and so something that remains identical and transcendent to all their experiences. Moreover, it is an intentional object whose 'successful immediate discovery... is basically an actualization of this intention. That is: when I understand a text, I think the meaning of the text. I extract the meaning from the text, so to speak, and change it into the actual intention of my mental act of understanding, into an intention identical with the word or sentence intention of the text. Then I really "understand" the text.'243

To grasp this last statement, consider how Ingarden's methodology finds no difficulty in utilizing the subject-object schema, in conceiving how cognition adapts to the basic structure of its object. On the object side is the literary work of art, whose essential and necessary structural properties must be sought in an analysis which, as he often stresses in true Husserlian fashion, makes no presuppositions. More specifically, Ingarden asserts that its structure is multi-layered, but its individual strata do form a unity for the work as a whole as well as being ordered sequentially. Nevertheless, 'the literary work itself is a schematic formation. That is: several of its strata, especially the stratum of portrayed objectivities and the stratum of aspects, contain "places of indeterminacy."'244 To put it bluntly, the subject faces off with an object-text that is structurally full of holes, and his job is to 'fill them out' or to at least partially remove them through his individual reading of the literary work in a process Ingarden calls the 'concretization of the literary work.' In other words, we take writing to be expressions or carriers of meanings and reading it runs smoothly until we encounter an obstacle to meaning comprehension, at which point the reading process slows down or even halts. Helplessness ensues, and we attempt to guess at its meaning. Overall, there is 'a natural tendency in us to complete the act of understanding'245 which, as said above, concerns an active extraction of meaning from the text. This does not occur if one ignores both the anticipation of the meaning in future sentences based on those that precede it and the retroactive effect whereby the meaning of preceding sentences are rethought in light of those that follow. Even worse, such 'passive reading,' which reads sentence by sentence and would struggle to provide an overall summary of the text if asked, is unable to make the meanings it takes from individual sentences into objects and thus remains in the sphere of meaning.246 However, 'active reading' does complete the act of understanding and fully extracts the meaning from the text. For when we actively read, we recognize the objects appropriate to and projected by sentences. We also have a sort of intercourse with them and 'project ourselves in a cocreative attitude into the realm of the objects determined by the sentence meanings.'247 Only with active reading does the extracted out meaning change into the actual intention of the reader's mental act of understanding and become identical to the intention of the sentence in the text itself. In this way the places of indeterminacy are filled, and the literary work of art becomes concretized.

As with Husserl, meaning remains half-constituted until a meaning-intentional act is committed by a subject. Ingarden just tailors Husserlian phenomenological theory to the experience of reading literary works of art, first by investigating the object-side of half-constituted meaning via the analysis of the essential structure of those works, then by examining the subject-side of the structured acts through which those works are understood, and finally by describing the convergence of the two sides in the active reading experience through which meaning is fully constituted and objectivated. This completes the concretization of the literary work. Like Husserl, the concern is more with the constitution of meaning than with the meaning of the text per se. The above cited text just before the last quotation already suggests how one is not to 'remain in the sphere of meaning' (in a phrase that certainly brings to mind the precise aim of Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology) but instead to attend to meaning qua object. Yet even this attention to the objective quality of meaning is slightly backed away from, for the quoted text immediately above continues:

'The meaning in this case creates an approach to the objects which are treated in the work. The meaning, as Husserl says, is only a passageway [ein Durchgangsobjekt] which one traverses in order to reach the object meant. In a strict sense the meaning is not an object at all. For, if we think a sentence actively, we attend, not to the meaning, but to what is determined or thought through it or in it. We can say, although not quite precisely, that in actively thinking a sentence we constitute or carry out its meaning and, in so doing, arrive at the objects of the sentence, that is, the states of affairs or other intentional sentence correlates. From this point we can grasp the things themselves which are indicated in the sentence correlates.'248

Husserl and Ingarden break with a need for hermeneutical technique to extract meaning as their phenomenological methodology is deemed sufficient for this task. Moreover, the constitution of meaning, not its understanding, is its objective, and their epistemological phenomenology accordingly seeks to describe the structures of meaning-intentional objects and subjective acts involved in that constitution process. In this extended citation Ingarden expressly considers meaning as a means of arriving at the thing meant of a text. For Ingarden this distinction between meaning qua means and the thing meant should be respected. Yet this does not imply that he considers meaning to be of a secondary nature – an assessment discernible in the projects of many thinkers in the fields to be examined in the remaining three chapters of Part I. Rather, epistemological phenomenology considers meaning intimately constitutive of the thing meant so it is still of primary interest. Ingarden's words above can thus be seen as a caution directed toward the more ontologically-minded phenomenologists, who precisely get bogged down in descriptions of the passageway of meaning and thereby disregard its distinction from the objectivated thing meant. From the perspective of Husserl and Ingarden, hermeneutical phenomenology errs in making what should remain at the level of a technical means into the thing itself.

Ingarden's establishment of a phenomenological aesthetics championing the reader's concretization of literary works of art through cognitive meaning-intentional acts which fill in those places of indeterminacy in the essential structure of those works influences two key members of the Constance School of reception theory, which reached its highpoint in the 1970s. Both Iser and Jauss establish technical methods which also treat the subject as co-creator of the universal, irreducible and shareable meanings the text determines. This is particularly the case with Iser, who adds a level of complexity to Ingarden by no longer considering textual indeterminacies as stable. His essay "Interaction between Text and Reader" (1980)249 describes the processes of a reader advancing through a text, chasing down its shifting indeterminacies so that an aesthetic object slowly emerges from the work. Iser begins by discussing the title of his essay, which provides us an opportunity to reflect on a point implicit in our discussion above. Effectively, he explains that there are not just two poles to consider in the phenomenological theory of art, but three: there is the artistic side of the actual text, the aesthetic side of the actions involved in responding to and thus realizing that text, and finally the work itself, which 'must inevitably be virtual in character, as it cannot be reduced to the reality of the text or to the subjectivity of the reader, and it is from this virtuality that it derives its dynamism.'250 So when phenomenology in the style of Husserl is articulated as utilizing a subject-object matrix just as do, say, hermeneutical thinkers like Chladenius, Dilthey, Hirsch or any other so identified in Chapter 1 above, it must be remembered that for the latter group there essentially are only two poles while for the former meaning is a mediating third element not reducible to the subject- or the object-pole (but capable, of course, of itself being objectivated). As for those thinkers holding to hermeneutical phenomenology, again there is no need to utilize this matrix at all since it directly ontologizes this third element, thereby granting it priority status with respect to any subject-object split.

For Iser, however, 'if one loses sight of the relationship [between the two poles], one loses sight of the virtual work'251 as well as its actualization since this can only occur through the interaction of the text and reader. This dyadic interaction is asymmetrical, giving rise to blanks or gaps since the text itself provides no feedback to the interpretive activity. Attempting to bridge these gaps is what spurs the reading process, to either confirm or negate the content imagined to fill in the blank through further textual evidence. Iser identifies many levels to this process, saying for instance that what is negated nevertheless remains in view and brings about modifications in the reader's attitude to the text, which gives rise to additional blanks. This means that the blanks are not so much pre-programmed by the author so as to appear the same for all readers (as it is for Ingarden) but is due to the relation the reader has to the text, the position he adopts as reader of the literary work. Yet the path he takes is, in the last instance, controlled by the text in a structured way. As Iser writes, these blanks 'are the unseen joints of the text... the unseen structure that regulates but does not formulate the connection or even the meaning'252 the reader takes from the text. In other words, the text pivots around the shifting blank the reader endeavors to fill and thus guides the constitutive activity of reading in a structured manner as a path is forged through the text. In this way, Iser concludes, '[t]he shifting blank is responsible for a sequence of colliding images, which condition each other in the time flow of reading. The discarded image imprints itself on its successor, even though the latter is meant to resolve the deficiencies of the former. In this respect the images hang together in a sequence, and it is by this sequence that the meaning of the text comes alive in the reader's imagination.'253 So while Iser does increase the level of structural complexity on the object-side while perhaps considering the constituting activities on the subject-side more pragmatically, he nevertheless remains clearly aligned with Ingarden in articulating an intimate and constitutive connection between the structure of the text and the reading subject.

However, the debt owed by Jauss to Ingarden is not as clear. His article "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory" (1970)254 argues that a text should be interpreted with respect to its 'horizon of expectations' and thus in terminology that bears the distinctive stamp of Gadamer. Yet this resemblance to his former teacher is nominal. Certainly he makes the general 'attempt to bridge the gap between literature and history' as Gadamer might, specifically challenging literary studies to take up the problem of literary history, as the title suggests.255 But he rigorously maintains, like Iser, the tertiary structure of author, work and the public. This last element is in the pole position of the subject and is privileged in his theory, which assesses a work strictly in terms of the reception it receives by the subjects who read it. While this makes it easy to see why the Constance School of reception theory is so named, it is simply not compatible with Gadamer's focus on the subject matter of the work itself, which is deemed to hold the key to meaning, as we saw in Section 1.3 above.

Jauss arranges his challenge in a series of seven theses,256 the first of which simply asks that a text be placed into its proper context, to not take a literary work as embodying a timeless meaning in itself but to consider it in its aesthetic reception. The second defines this reception as the horizon of expectations which is essentially the set of cultural and literary expectations that readers have of a work. This allows Jauss to set up evaluative criteria with which to judge a work as per his third thesis, based on the distance between a work and its horizon of expectation. For instance, if that distance is small to nil so that the work cannot be said to have disappointed its public, the work is likely in 'the sphere of "culinary" or entertainment art;' but if the distance is so great as to register profound disappointment, this might later prove itself to be an initially misunderstood masterpiece.257 This suggests the importance of establishing the original horizon of expectations of the work in the historical moment of its appearance, which is captured in thesis four. Jauss' notion of comparing the original and current receptions of the work to bring out the 'hermeneutic difference,' which frustrates the notion that meaning is objective and determined once and for all, is a development of Gadamer's fusion of horizons; yet he criticizes Gadamer's elevation of 'the concept of the classical to the status of prototype for all historical mediation of past with present' since it conveniently overlooks how in its original reception there was not yet the timeless truth of the classical.258 The fifth thesis thus demands an individual work be placed into the series of its historical reception (and not just consider its current reception as Gadamer does) to grasp its meaning most fully. This diachronic dimension is supplemented in the sixth thesis by the synchronic analysis of the receptions of the work and other works in the same time period. Jauss' final thesis embodies his boldest claim, that the gap between literature and history can be bridged if literary history does not simply describe and reflect general history; rather, this can be accomplished when it discovers 'that properly socially formative function that belongs to literature as it competes with other arts and social forces in the emancipation of mankind from its natural, religious, and social bonds.'259 Simply said, his exclusive focus on how works have been subjectively received throughout history leads Jauss to conclude that literary history so conceived can influence the course of general history toward the liberation of man.

The subject-side of the subject-object dichotomy is emphasized to an even greater degree in the earlier Geneva School of phenomenological criticism which reached its high point in the 1940s–50s. Having roots with Ingarden as well, its most well-known member Poulet so emphasizes the subject that the object all but dissolves into a self-conscious work. This is best encapsulated in his essay "Phenomenology of Reading" (1969).260 There he evaluates his fellow Geneva School members according to 'a critical method having as guiding principle the relation between subject and object... which is the principle of all creative work and of the understanding of it.'261 He finds that their attempts to attain the subjective principle which upholds the objective structures of a literary work are as faulty as the opposite movement proceeding from the subject to the object since both strategies effectively move from the subject-reader to the subject-author through the literary object. Indeed this is the very mark of the Geneva School whose method of criticism in general seeks the coincidence of the mind of the critic with the mind of the author. Poulet distinguishes himself from this group by viewing criticism as pure identification, which he considers an end in itself. To understand this we can use the subject-object schema to guide us through his descriptive account of the subjective experience of reading. Already in the first moment the text qua object is problematized since 'books are not just objects among others' even when lying on a table unread but rather are 'aware that an act of man might suddenly transform their existence... They appear to be lit up with that hope. Read me, they seem to say.'262 Once the subject actually commences the reading process, the book loses another aspect of objectivity as it seems to emit from its pages the consciousness of another rational being. No longer does the subject hold in his hands an object-book. Rather, a consciousness opens up to him with which empathy is possible as well as cognition of its thoughts. Slowly the subject recognizes that these thoughts are objects of its own thought. It is as if a 'strange invasion of my person by the thought of another' has been effected which subjects the subject to thoughts other than its own.263 Poulet examines a series of apophantic propositions in an attempt to assign to those predicated thoughts an I whose status is equally indeterminate and eventually concludes that the work itself is a pure consciousness presiding over the unfolding of the meaningful aspects of the work. He tells us that 'a work of literature becomes (at the expense of the reader whose own life it suspends) a sort of human being, that it is a mind conscious of itself and constituting itself in me as the subject of its own objects.'264 Recourse to psychology and biography avail us nothing since the consciousness which invades the subject is not the author's consciousness but something ineffable and indeterminate in its transcendence and revelation to itself and the critic. He concludes that criticism then 'needs to annihilate, or at least momentarily forget, the objective elements of the work, and to elevate itself to the apprehension of a subjectivity without objectivity.'265 To reach this consciousness of consciousness, this pure cogito, there is thus no need to consider the historical dimension since the text is not evidence of a prior experience but rather constitutes the very corpus of that experience in the hic et nunc. The subject need only confront an object-text to potentially experience the self-conscious mediating work which emerges from the collapse of a strictly held to subject-object matrix. A moment's reflection makes it clear how this mediating third element leads the subject right back to its own (self-)consciousness. This is what is meant by the text for Poulet, and his phenomenological method is to render this in an orderly and transparent fashion.

As the foregoing has stressed, Ingarden, Iser, Jauss and Poulet all utilize the type of phenomenology championed by Husserl, one which places the knowing subject at the center of a methodological approach which has little use for hermeneutics. So Ricoeur is quite correct in identifying subjectivity as the cornerstone of Husserlian phenomenology in his "Phenomenology and Hermeneutics" (1975).266 As he also goes on to suggest ways in which phenomenology and hermeneutics presuppose one another, a discussion of this essay is thus a fitting way to conclude this chapter on phenomenology as it links it to the previous chapter on hermeneutics and thus provides an opportunity to review some notions which run across the two fields as well as those which prove contentious. In the first half of his essay he identifies five theses of Husserl all of which can be seen as grounded in subjectivity. Then he subjects each of these to a critique by hermeneutics. The point is to show that the critique of phenomenology by hermeneutics only damages this particular type of phenomenology. Heideggerian phenomenology emerges relatively unscathed as it already appropriates hermeneutics at its foundation. For instance, Husserl models his project on the self-grounding of a presuppositionless scientificity, couching his discoveries in 'the conceptuality of the subject-object relation.' Yet the fact that hermeneutics (which Ricoeur everywhere takes in its Heideggerian mode) recognizes 'that the problematic of objectivity presupposes a prior relation of inclusion which encompasses the allegedly autonomous subject and the allegedly adverse object,' this means that Husserl's thesis 'encounters its fundamental limit in the ontological condition of understanding.'267 Concisely said, the hermeneutical phenomenology of understanding of Heidegger and Gadamer trumps the phenomenological interpretive methodology of Husserl since the former recognizes the ontological priority of belonging as encompassing the latter's use of the epistemological subjectobject schema. Without an operative notion of the fore-structures of understanding in his philosophy, Husserl overlooks the primordial dimension of meaning since meaning is structured precisely by these fore-structures. Moreover, if the objectivity of the subject-object relation is rendered doubtful so too is Husserl's reliance on a transcendental subjectivity whose capacity for intentional and intuitive activity implies a distance taken to its object. In contrast, Ricoeur stresses the Heideggerian notion of suddenly arriving in the middle of a dialogue with a text and thus being caught between the understanding we initiate and the proposals of meaning the text offers. Overlooking the fore-structures of understanding thus also implies overlooking the hermeneutical circle which is articulated there. So Ricoeur suggests that the Husserlian conception of meaning-intentional acts as constitutive of meaning be replaced by a conception which grants autonomy to the meaning of the text. This would move the essential question away from the recovery of the lost intention behind the text to the unfolding of the world which the text opens up and discloses.268 Ricoeur also argues that hermeneutics adds a radical dimension to Husserl's claim that the foundational act of the subject tearing himself away from the natural scientific attitude is self-positing, supremely autonomous and thus the ultimate self-responsible and ethical act. Proposed instead is a recognition that subjectivity is a category which emerges from the understanding of the dialogue with the text and not that which initiates it without presuppositions. Hermeneutical selfunderstanding is the understanding of oneself in front of the text, in light of its subject matter and the proposals of meaning which it unfolds. With hermeneutics self-mastery is exchanged for self-discipline by the meaningful matter of the text. We could say that Husserl's transcendental subject becomes thoroughly awash with meaningful content. The argument here is that hermeneutical phenomenology registers a deeper ethicality than Husserlian subjectivity.

Once the demonstration of how Husserlian phenomenology succumbs to the critique of (Heideggerian) hermeneutics is completed, Ricoeur proceeds in the second half of the essay to argue how phenomenology and hermeneutics presuppose one another. Hence the term hermeneutical phenomenology. On the one hand, for instance, '[t]he reference of the linguistic order back to the structure of experience (which comes to language in the assertion) constitutes, in my view, the most important phenomenological presupposition of hermeneutics.'269 Ricoeur effectively says here that a focus on the predicative and apophantic level of meaning, which both (pre-Heideggerian) hermeneutics and Husserl share presupposes a pre-predicative, pre-linguistic level of phenomenological experience. This latter level is where hermeneutics knowingly (as in the case of Truth and Method) or unknowingly begins and, incidentally, is what allows Heidegger to famously say that 'language is the house of being.' On the other hand, phenomenology presupposes hermeneutics since 'Auslegung [exegesis, explication, interpretation] is already at work in the reduction to the sphere of belonging.'270 That is, the primordial antecedent dimension of experience is never given in itself but remains an interpretation. Effectively for Ricoeur, Logical Investigations as a methodological investigation into meaning is deficient as it overlooks its presupposed hermeneutical field. Hermeneutical phenomenology fares much better as it recognizes how the phenomenological experience of being can only be realized as hermeneutics. This is why Being and Time examines not the question of being but the question of the meaning of being.

Book based on this dissertation

Other Lacanian Texts

FREE Lacanian-themed puzzles