Hermeneutics (1969) and Structuralism and Semiotics (1977)
Fleeting impressions before they fade...
Two odd little books that purported to introduce American literary studies to two foreign styles of thought.
Two big bullies (potential buddies) of lit-crit: antiquarians unwilling to descend from their masterworks, New Critics trapped in their World of Form.
Hermeneutics is one massive pep rally for Gadamer, the Telos. The following acts open for Hans Georg: Ast, Wolf, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger. Each following hermeneteucian is a little more right.
But be careful: Martin "Nazi" Heidegger wants to turn everything upside down and inside out.
Let's start with hammers, for instance. Let's just say that the hammer comes first, and also that the hammer's meaning anything comes first, and also that the linguisticality of the hammer comes first. Subjects and objects are false consciousness.
I suppose it's a testament to Palmer that he makes Heidegger sound somewhat convincing. Who am I to argue that the World comes before me, that Language was here ere I showed up, that history happens and categories aren't static? It's in the chapter about Heidegger that the book threatens to pull you in.
I'm not sure that this isn't the trick of Being and Time, which I dare not read. The rhetoric: be passive, be patient, let the object change your mind and work its magic. Be generous, be listening, be a good person. Allow things to ask you questions, rather than cross-examining them to prove what you already knew. Practice some epistemological humility - why do you have to act like you know everything? That's what bad people like capitalists and evil scientists do. Oh... okay...
I want to scream, NO! Stop trying to TRICK ME!
Fortunately, then the book goes into Gadamer territory, who is not as evil/hypnotically suggestive. And also the author gets all screedy like he just discovered Jesus for the first time: "Oh, you subjectivists and objectivists are all going to hell! Oh, you've got to be historical and dialogical! Oh, you've got to let the text breathe! Oh, you can't let form destroy content, you've got to live the unity! Oh oh! Oh, Oh! Oh, you've got to experience it for yourself, oh you've got to push your hermeneutical horizon! Oh, come on is such a joy!"
And that kinda mojo doesn't work on me.
Not that Terence Hawkes doesn't have his own gospel to preach: "Signs, signs, signs all in relation to one another in an arbitrary fashion, floating and fancy-free."
There are loose parallels between Vico's and Saussure's reflections on language and lifeworld and the Germans. Yes, man makes his own world and is creative and is the measure, but also, woe, oh whoa, the weight of tradition, the weight of the world...
Also common to both currents of thought is the love of difference, of negativity (but their position on difference is different - the difference between phonemes vs. the difference between the known and the unknowable). Structuralism appear as existentialism's evil twin, and Heidegger's ontology as hero against Kant's metaphysics.
Barthes is the Gadamer of Structuralism and Semiotics - the great pivot connecting a) Saussure, Sapir, Lévi-Strauss b) Shklovsky, Propp, Jakobson, Greimas, Todorov, and c) Derrida.
Both works end chiding the New Critics for all their naïveties (similar and different naïveties - similarly critical because the New Critics are ahistorical and thinking that objectivity is possible, but differently critical because Barthes/Derrida want the New Critics to stop REVERING their texts so much and Gadamer wants them to OBEY their texts), and we also end with a Palmer chiding Lévi-Strauss and Foucault (because subjects disappear into the System) and Hawkes (via Derrida) chiding Heidegger.
And so we get the following set of dichotomies:
HERMENEUTICS STRUCTURALISM
German (romanticism) French (enlightenment)
history structure/system
affective cognitive
pre-discursivity only discursivity
becoming being
from theology from anthropology
hearing/speaking seeing/writing
dialogue monologueWill these schools of thought become friends (complementary) or enemies (antagonistic)? Will they provide anything useful for the historian, or will they merely be so much grist for the pomo mill? Whatever happened to actual people? Quoth Heidegger: "Only time will tell."
Two odd little books that purported to introduce American literary studies to two foreign styles of thought.
Two big bullies (potential buddies) of lit-crit: antiquarians unwilling to descend from their masterworks, New Critics trapped in their World of Form.
Hermeneutics is one massive pep rally for Gadamer, the Telos. The following acts open for Hans Georg: Ast, Wolf, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger. Each following hermeneteucian is a little more right.
But be careful: Martin "Nazi" Heidegger wants to turn everything upside down and inside out.
Let's start with hammers, for instance. Let's just say that the hammer comes first, and also that the hammer's meaning anything comes first, and also that the linguisticality of the hammer comes first. Subjects and objects are false consciousness.
I suppose it's a testament to Palmer that he makes Heidegger sound somewhat convincing. Who am I to argue that the World comes before me, that Language was here ere I showed up, that history happens and categories aren't static? It's in the chapter about Heidegger that the book threatens to pull you in.
I'm not sure that this isn't the trick of Being and Time, which I dare not read. The rhetoric: be passive, be patient, let the object change your mind and work its magic. Be generous, be listening, be a good person. Allow things to ask you questions, rather than cross-examining them to prove what you already knew. Practice some epistemological humility - why do you have to act like you know everything? That's what bad people like capitalists and evil scientists do. Oh... okay...
I want to scream, NO! Stop trying to TRICK ME!
Fortunately, then the book goes into Gadamer territory, who is not as evil/hypnotically suggestive. And also the author gets all screedy like he just discovered Jesus for the first time: "Oh, you subjectivists and objectivists are all going to hell! Oh, you've got to be historical and dialogical! Oh, you've got to let the text breathe! Oh, you can't let form destroy content, you've got to live the unity! Oh oh! Oh, Oh! Oh, you've got to experience it for yourself, oh you've got to push your hermeneutical horizon! Oh, come on is such a joy!"
And that kinda mojo doesn't work on me.
Not that Terence Hawkes doesn't have his own gospel to preach: "Signs, signs, signs all in relation to one another in an arbitrary fashion, floating and fancy-free."
There are loose parallels between Vico's and Saussure's reflections on language and lifeworld and the Germans. Yes, man makes his own world and is creative and is the measure, but also, woe, oh whoa, the weight of tradition, the weight of the world...
Also common to both currents of thought is the love of difference, of negativity (but their position on difference is different - the difference between phonemes vs. the difference between the known and the unknowable). Structuralism appear as existentialism's evil twin, and Heidegger's ontology as hero against Kant's metaphysics.
Barthes is the Gadamer of Structuralism and Semiotics - the great pivot connecting a) Saussure, Sapir, Lévi-Strauss b) Shklovsky, Propp, Jakobson, Greimas, Todorov, and c) Derrida.
Both works end chiding the New Critics for all their naïveties (similar and different naïveties - similarly critical because the New Critics are ahistorical and thinking that objectivity is possible, but differently critical because Barthes/Derrida want the New Critics to stop REVERING their texts so much and Gadamer wants them to OBEY their texts), and we also end with a Palmer chiding Lévi-Strauss and Foucault (because subjects disappear into the System) and Hawkes (via Derrida) chiding Heidegger.
And so we get the following set of dichotomies:
HERMENEUTICS STRUCTURALISM
German (romanticism) French (enlightenment)
history structure/system
affective cognitive
pre-discursivity only discursivity
becoming being
from theology from anthropology
hearing/speaking seeing/writing
dialogue monologueWill these schools of thought become friends (complementary) or enemies (antagonistic)? Will they provide anything useful for the historian, or will they merely be so much grist for the pomo mill? Whatever happened to actual people? Quoth Heidegger: "Only time will tell."