In the beginning was The Word

It's not just "the left" who engages in language games. Meditations on linguistics, hermeneutics, and intentionalism, from the protein wisdom archives.

This post is the first in a series of essays that will deal with language, what we think we’re doing when we interpret, and why what we think we’re doing when we engage language is absolutely crucial in arming ourselves against the predation of the left — and too many on the right.

Let me begin thus: even after all this time — and even after all the damage that has been done to the country by the left and the various and variegated intrusions and infiltrations of its ideology throughout our culture, our language, and our very epistemology — there are those on the right who are still so committed to covering for their mistakes about Obama (a “good man” who loves the country; a garden-variety liberal Democrat to be juxtaposed against the vicious hard-right Visigoths), about the way forward for the GOP (don’t be “unhelpful!” Watch what you say: it’s the only way to constrain the speech police!), and in maintaining their own power, prestige, and sophistic faux-intellectual advantages, that they would actively undermine what has been a growing epiphany for many of us who are daily under siege by the left’s rules of etiquette and engagement: that the way we interpret — and the way interpretation actually works — not only matters, but is in fact crucial to understand as a tool for defeating the now accelerated encroachments on our liberty of expression. It is no accident that as we continue to allow an incoherent view of language to insinuate itself deeper into our epistemological foundation, we are more and more beholden to the whims of those presuming to police our thought and speech.

For years I have made this case — and for years all of the resistance has come from two sources: those on the left, who favor the very kind of post-structuralism and anti-foundationalism that allows them to avoid any guilt pangs over logical inconsistency and who enjoy the power that is galvanized by a mob usurpation of meaning; and those on the right who benefit from the very same dynamic, largely because they find it crucial for their professional and pedantic careers to lay claim to the meaning of others so that they can rework those meanings to fit their own personal desires. The former, naturally, is to be expected: the leftist worldview of identity politics, anti-foundationalism, Gramsciism and Marcuseanism, the “diversity” project, hate speech law, manipulating narrative, manufactured consent — all of these things rely on what is insidiously referred to in the most American of ways: “the democratization” of interpretation and meaning. The latter, however, is both unfortunate and deeply disturbing: this same democratization of meaning, and the same constraints to expression that are impelled by the left, are supported and aided by some on the right — mostly lawyers, as it turns out — who themselves rely on being able to usurp individual meaning and proclaim it in “democratic” terms, the formula for which I’ll again explain.

Over the weekend, and presumably launched on the occasion of John Roberts’ Burwell opinion, a center-right California Lawyer who once boasted in private emails that he would “drive [me] off the internet,” pulled from his archives a post he called “prescient” — one that was wrong and disingenuous back in 2010 when it first appeared; one that is equally wrong and disingenuous today. The post, and the new post touting it, both of which argue that intentionalism has no place in legal hermeneutics, very purposely ignore points about intentionalism that have been explained to its author over and over again. Too, it uses the instance of John Roberts’ very clearly faulty (and mistaken) appeal to intent to try to marginalize the only coherent linguistic model for interpretation that exists — and the very one that insists upon process, that how you get there matters, in its admonitions about proper interpretative mechanics.

The author of the post is a self-styled textualist, which in terms familiar to those who’ve studied the history of interpretation theory places him in the realm of reader-response proponents, the Barthean French post structuralists, or the New Critics, all of whom revolted against the authoritarian author and his presumptive control over the meaning of his own text. The argument went something like this: the author’s meaning matters only inasmuch as we allow it to matter. What matters more is what the “text itself says” — that is, what a speech act newly untethered from its origin can “say” to us. In the legal realm, constraints are put on such a formulation that are not put on to the same formulation in the literary realm: in the case of legal hermeneutics, the Ideal Reader posited is a set of “reasonable people who engage the text fairly”; in other arenas, as with the interpretation of art or literature, all sort of other textualist impulses are foregrounded: one may read what a text (and it’s important here to distinguish between a text that exists by itself as text alone, with an authorship that is of necessity bracketed or ignored, as per textualism, and one that we presuppose was intended by some agency wishing us to receive its message, as per intentionalism) “says” through any number of discipline specific lenses: post-colonialism; critical race studies; psychiatric/psychological phenomenology; feminism; queer theory; and so on. In each of these cases, the Ideal Reader uses his own discipline — be it law or gender feminism — to focus on the messages implicit in the text qua text, that is, that exist in the text as it is divorced from intent. It is important to note: there is no structural difference whatsoever between a gender-fem “reading” of a text (the kind that finds all sort of latent sexism in various canonical works, then drives them out of the canon) and the kind of legal hermeneutics that calls itself “textualism”. In both cases, the text is said to mean and say — to “speak” — without any indexicality to its author(s) (or in the case of law, authors and ratifiers).

But in truth, the very notion that a text can speak apart from the signification of that text by some agency — some human with some intent that he attaches to a set of arbitrary marks or sounds — is an absurdity: A text is no more alive and capable of speech than a lump of coal, and documents are no more alive than the paper or pixels they’re written on or in. The fact that in legal hermeneutics, interpreters who consider themselves “textualists” are more rigorous and constrained in the latitude they give themselves (and on occasion, they give up this pretense altogether) to ascribe their own meaning to those marks in their decoding doesn’t make their textualism any more coherent than the textualism that allows queer theorists to see a homoerotic relationship between Huck and Jim, or between Curious George and the Man in the Big Yellow Hat. All it does do is better approximate the intentionalism that is at the heart of ALL TEXTUALISM, and in so doing often reaches the very same conclusions.

Still, how you get there matters: And a textualist is nothing but an intentionalist who has chosen to privilege his intent over the intent of the agency responsible for producing the speech act.