Friday Review: Vanhoozer's Is There a Meaning in This Text? 1

Today (d.v.) we begin a three part review of Kevin Vanhoozer's Is There a Meaning in This Text? My intention :-) is to review chapters 2 and 5 on the author today, chapters 3 and 6 on the text next Friday, and then finish two weeks from today with chapters 4 and 7 on the reader
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Background
Vanhoozer's book was, in my opinion, a kind of watershed moment for a movement in biblical studies (1998), a movement I am calling the "speech-act" approach to the biblical text. It not only defends the legitimacy of talking about authorial intent in texts, but argues that this is the only proper meaning of a text--what its author was "doing" with that text.

Given my current state of knowledge, I consider Anthony Thiselton to be the "Luther" of biblical speech-act theory (Two Horizons), and Vanhoozer I would consider its Melanchthon. We now see the concept everywhere in a particular stream of hermeneutical writing, not least in Jeannine Brown's very well written book that came out this year, Scripture as Communication (an excellent choice for a hermeneutical textbook).

Vanhoozer's book is laid out in two parts. After the introductory chapter, the next three chapters deal with postmodern challenges to authorial intent (chap 2), stable meanings in texts (chap 3), and the reader as interpreter rather than creator of meaning (chap 4). In the second half of the book, he then constructs a theory of textual meaning that claims that we can speak of authorial intent coherently (chap 5), that it exists in texts (chap 6), and that the reader is responsible for trying to determine it (chap 7).

He prefers to relate the domains of author, text, and reader to the three primary domains of philosophy. Authorial intent is the reality behind the text (ontology). We can know it in the text (epistemology). And the reader is obligated to try to determine it (ethics). In today's review, we will look at Vanhoozer's treatment of authorial intent.

Chapter 2: "Undoing the Author: Authority and Intentionality"
I wondered as I read this chapter if it reflected the beginning of Vanhoozer's writing process. It seemed to me to have a tone that does not show up as much later in the book. By this I refer to a rather straightforward equation he seems to make between deconstructive readings and atheism, where the death of the author is coupled with the death of God.

This is such a dangerously simplistic connection that I wondered if he wrote it before he had really dug into the details of his investigation. I certainly would not want to claim, for example, that those who do not believe in authorial intent must thereby surely be atheists. Vanhoozer does not say this, but it is the tone I picked up on here and there in this chapter.

a. Undoing the Author's Authority
Vanhoozer speaks of three types of "hermeneutical non-realists" who have undone the author's authority: undoers, users, and unbelievers. By hermeneutical non-realists he means that these individuals do not believe in the reality of meaning, that meaning truly exists.

1). He spends most of his time in this section targeting the "undoers," by which he refers to deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida. By the end of the chapter, Vanhoozer has explained some of Derrida's signature concepts:

Logocentrism: the idea that there is some stable point outside of language that guarantees meaning, something to which language points, a realm of truths.

"There is nothing outside the text": Words are arbitrary signs connected to signifieds (meanings) that, for Derrida, do not point to anything but more signs. "Meaning" is like a dog chasing its tail or someone who sits and looks up the definition of a word only to find more words to look up. You never arrive at any substance, any "presence" of meaning but only more arbitrary signs.

2). Vanhoozer spends less time with the "users" or pragmatists. These are individuals like Richard Rorty, who believes "knowledge" is a matter of coping with reality rather than truth. Vanhoozer places Stanley Fish in this same domain. An author does not have the authority to tell his or her readers how to read the text. Interpretive communities inevitably decide how they choose to read a text.

I have not fully explored the possibility that Vanhoozer was on the road to contradiction when he first wrote this part of the chapter. The historical roots of speech-act theory go back to Wittgenstein, where Wittgenstein posits the meaning of words being a matter of their function in language games. Indeed, I have not found a negative word toward Wittgenstein in the book (except that Austin and Searle are refinements of his approach to language).

Herein you will find the seeds of my central disagreement with the biblical speech-act movement. It is an impressive meta-edifice to justify one legitimate use of words, indeed, one of the most important ones. But it fails in its attempt to be an overarching theory of meaning because 1) it does not practice what it preaches and 2) the Bible itself does not practice what this theory preaches. Ironically, Vanhoozer's book would have provided Derrida with an easy target for deconstruction.

While I agree with Vanhoozer far more than Derrida, he and his compatriots have only made plausible arguments that 1) there is a stable authorial intent for texts and 2) it is a significant interest in interpretation. They have not succeeded at showing that there are not other meanings for the biblical texts that may in fact be more Christian than the original intent.

3). The third category Vanhoozer styles the "unbelievers," by which he has in mind not only key players he has already mentioned--Derrida and Rorty--but also Friedrich Nietzsche. As I've mentioned, I find this framing distracting. He is correct, of course, that Nietzsche is a forerunner of the deconstructionists. "There are no facts; only interpretations." And certainly Nietzsche did connect the death of God to the death of some sort of God's eye view.

It does not go the other way, however. To argue that we do not have a God's eye view does not deny that God exists and that He has a God's eye view.

At times I have not found Vanhoozer's book well put together on the level of subheading. Don't get me wrong. It takes a lot of mental energy and skill to present such diverse and complicated material in an organized fashion. The headings within each chapter generally make sense. But I've found it hard to discern the logic of the subheadings and sub-subheadings at times. So you can imagine that my students have! The book seems to wander on unnecessarily at times.

2. Undoing the Author's Intention
In this section Vanhoozer presents the thought of E. D. Hirsch as well as what some have called the "intentional fallacy." My students found the section on Hirsch confusing, because Vanhoozer starts with the impression that he agrees with Hirsch and will build on Hirsch. But by the end of this section, it appears that Vanhoozer does not agree with Hirsch. I find myself wondering if V's position toward Hirsch changed a little in the process of writing?

Hirsch (following Husserl) makes a distinction between an act of consciousness and an object of consciousness when authoring a text. By authorial intention, Hirsch refers to the object of consciousness or the message the author was conscious of as s/he wrote the text. It is this shared object in the text that allows a reader to understand the meaning of a text despite his or her differing context from the author.

Reading between the lines, Vanhoozer and others like Thiselton no doubt strongly resist this language of subject-object. No doubt they prefer the language of Gadamer that talks of a fusing of horizons, with less language of Cartesian dualism that sharply divides me as subject from that which is outside of me as object of knowledge.

A second distinction Hirsch makes is between meaning and significance. Meaning is a property of a text for Hirsch. Significance, on the other hand, is the relationship of the meaning to something else, such as a reader. A text, in Hirsch's view, has a single meaning, but it may have as many significances as the individuals relating to that single meaning.

It is only later in the book (frustratingly) that Vanhoozer makes the difference between Hirsch and himself clear. Intention is not a matter of the consciousness of an author, but the concrete act that is embodied by a text created by an author.

The idea of an "intentional fallacy" was raised by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in a famous article in 1946. These two individuals argued that all we had before us was the text an author created, not the author him or herself. They thus believed it was a fallacy to speak of the author's intention. It confuses psychology with the semantics of a text.

Other critiques of Hirsch (who is more contemporary with us than with Wimsatt and Beardsley) include the fact that an author is not always conscious of the forces at work in his or her creation of a text (unconscious forces). Nor is any author objective toward his or her creation.

c. What about the Bible?
At the end of the chapter, Vanhoozer gives us a small taste of how these lines of undoing might impact our approach to the Bible. For example, if a text has no meaning, the Bible can hardly be authoritative. Further, because Christ is the Word, Vanhoozer argues that Christianity is "logocentric" in a way that falls apart if Derrida is right. And, to modify Dostoevsky, V suggests that "if there is no author, then everthing is permitted."

Chapter 5: "Resurrecting the Author: Meaning as Communicative Action"
a. In this chapter, Vanhoozer will try to reconstruct a sense of authorial meaning. We found the beginning of this second half of the book a little disingenuous. Vanhoozer implies that he is going to proceed along the lines of a Reformed epistemology that unapologetically proceeds from Christian premises. For V, this clearly includes certain premises about God's "design plan" for communication, the nature of Trinitarian relationships, and meaning in texts as "properly basic" (showing the influence of Plantinga).

To say that something is "properly basic" means that it does not need to be defended because it is such a foundational item that sane people don't question it. We might spend a few moments questioning whether the world outside us exists or if I am a brain in a vat. But in real life we simply assume the existence of the world around us.

Vanhoozer suggests that meaning in texts is like that. To a large degree, I agree. Communication works... a lot of the time, even in text. To be sure, I've had people seriously misinterpret my comments. But it does seem to me reasonable enough to believe in communication, despite Derrida's important footnote.

Where my students and I found the beginning of V's second half a bit self-contradictory was that he had been reasoning and talking about meaning for almost 200 pages! So now he's just going to impose a structure on reality by faith? That's not exactly what he goes on to do either. He goes on to discuss meaning philosophically throughout the second half, only occasionally bringing in his theological deus ex machina. Jeannine Brown's book seems more consistent in this regard, starting and proceeding with an assumed position, informing of it rather than arguing for it.

b. So a good deal of this chapter addresses deconstruction from a theoretical perspective. We have Ricoeur's sound judgment that a "sentence" represents a higher order of meaning than a word. You cannot reduce the meaning of a sentence to some addition of the words within it. The meaning of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I agree and thus accept Ricoeur's criticism of Derrida on this point.

But Vanhoozer's hero par excellence is undoubtedly John Searl, who built on the speech-act theory of J. L. Austin. Language is far more than just the logical, "propositional," or "locutionary" part of it, the content of what is said. Language is a kind of action. When we speak, we do things with our words. The words, "I do" at a wedding are not simply communication--they enact a marriage (well, the whole license signing thing in the back room afterwards aside ;-). I might add that William P. Alston has apparently tried to extend Searle's classification of text acts even further in his 2000 book, Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning.

More than one movie makes a joke based on this fact (Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Incredibles). It has a conversational "I do" coincide in one way or another with a wedding "I do"--thus the humor.

While Vanhoozer likes a good deal about Ricoeur, he uses speech-act theory to critique Ricoeur's sense that a text is divorced from the event of its creation. The creation of a text for Vanhoozer is not an event, but an action, and we cannot understand the text unless we identify what action an author was doing with these words (asserting, questioning, commanding, promising, etc...).

Vanhoozer also draws on the work of Jürgen Habermas, who tries to avoid Descartes' subject-object dichotomy (unlike Hirsch). Habermas speaks of structures of inter-subjectivity that are implicit in communication. He believes in a universal language game that all competent speakers inevitably play. This universal game makes communication possible, despite our individual subjectivity. Language is thus a social activity rather than one aiming at representing the world. Vanhoozer's exception to Habermas has mainly to an overemphasis on the "propositional" aspect of communication.

Finally, this chapter draws on other scholars like P. D. Juhl, Steven Knapp, and Walter Benn Michaels. The last two suggest that the idea of "intentionless meaning" is incoherent, something we could only talk about in theory--not in practice. Juhl suggests that we can only speak of meaning in terms of whole texts, which automatically leads to the question of a text's purpose, which involves assumptions about an author's intentions.

c. The "Christian assumption" part of Vahoozer's work begins to peek out in this chapter. He speaks, for example, of a "design-plan" for language. Language, like my mind, was designed by God to be used in certain ways. "The design plan of language is to serve as the medium of covenantal relations with God, with others, with the world" (206).

From my perspective, this is a fine "working theology." However, it would be Christianly irresponsible simply to assume this point without further examination. For example, James Smith raises the question of the Fall's affect on the human mind (The Fall of Interpretation). Similarly, we must at least consider alternative conceptions of the relationship between rationality and faith (Kierkegaard, Pascal). This design plan for language seems quite possible to me--in a fallen world it is fantastically messed up.

In one part of this chapter, V considers potential similarities between meaning in text and God's presence in the Eucharist. Is there a real presence in the text? I found this section distracting. On what basis might one defend such perspectives? At best they seem illustrations of a position one has determined on some other basis. Maybe an interesting aside for a long footnote?

d. So after much circling and driving around, we finally arrive at Vanhoozer's definition of a text: "A text is a complex communicative act with matter (propositional content), energy (illocutionary force), and purpose (perlocutionary effect)" (228), which is "fixed by writing" (225).

"Every text is the result of an enacted intention." "Every text is an embodied intention" (253).

The perlocutionary effect may be intended by an author, but Vanhoozer, following Habermas and Searle, does not consider it normally to be a part of the meaning of the text. It rather has to do with the intended significance of the text for its immediate audience.

Vanhoozer acknowledges some of the complications of authorial intention. By avoiding "perlocutions" as part of the meaning of a text, V acknowledges that the effects a text has are not always what an author intended. V also acknowledges potential ambiguity about what an author intended.

The final section of the chapter potentially deconstructs it. Here V talks about the possibility that a "fuller sense," a sensus plenior might "supervene" on the level of the canon. V has invoked the idea of supervening meaning before. It was when he affirmed Ricoeur's claim that a sentence is a higher level of meaning than a word. Now V suggests that the canon might have a higher level of meaning that is greater than any of the individual biblical texts, a meaning that God intended the canonical text to have. "The divine intention does not contravene the intention of the human author but rather supervenes on it."
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What are we to make of Vanhoozer's material on the author?

Well, for the most part, I agree with him. Communication happens. The words we say and write usually have intended meanings. We do things with words.

As I've said elsewhere, Derrida is an important footnote to meaning. Texts are easily interpreted differently than their authors intended. And Fish's footnote is significant too--while I don't believe the quest for the intended meaning of a text is unavailable (contra Ricoeur as well), interpretive communities usually dominate interpretation.

But intended meanings exist. The contrary suggestion deconstructs on life.

I am less concerned about restricting or cataloging meanings, although V and others have already done the heavy lifting. It really does not make sense to speak of the meaning of a text either in terms of something an author psychologically intended that didn't make it into the text or in terms of some intended effect of the text. The intended meaning of a text is an embodied meaning "in" the text.

Where I would differ with V is in the extent to which he sees this as a property of the text. Authorial intention as embodied in the code of a text is a theoretically stable meaning. It is probably the most "natural" reading of a text in most instances. But there are other stable meanings in relation to texts, such as the meanings that particular communities find in texts. An individual can read a text in a relatively stable way for that individual. We will wait for the chapters on the reader to see if V can give us a compelling reason to restrict a text's meaning to the originally intended one.

In particular, the idea of a canonical meaning potentially decontructs V's whole enterprise. The diversity of the canon makes it susceptible to countless systematizations of meaning, as the plethora of Protestant denominations shows.