“Interpretive community” is a key concept in Stanley Fish’s writings on interpretation and criticism of texts. The concept of interpretive community is a strategy to engage the dilemma of interpretation in which the roles of “text” and “reader” struggle for the power to determine meaning. Faced with the reality that there are often as many readings of a text as there are readers, Fish explores various reader-response methods, as well as their benefits and problems, and comes to the conclusion that interpretational competition is never between “objectivity” and “interpretation” of the text but between interpretations that are acknowledged as such, and those that are “unaware” of themselves as interpretations, masquerading as “real” readings.[1] Faced with the problem of a never-ending spiral of interpretation-upon-interpretation that leaves no room for the possibility of an actual text, Fish asks how we explain these two “facts” of reading:[2]
1) The same reader will perform differently when reading two “different” (the word is in quotation marks because its status[3] is precisely what is at issue) texts, and; 2) different readers will perform similarly when reading the “same” (in quotes for the same reason) text. That is to say, both the stability of interpretation among readers and the variety of interpretation in the career of a single reader would seem to argue for the existence of something independent of and prior to interpretive acts, something which produces them.
Fish seeks to solve the problem by asserting that “both the stability and the variety are functions of interpretive strategies rather than of texts.”[4] Fish argues that these interpretive strategies are based upon “pre-reading” decisions in which the reader is predisposed to “find,” by looking for, “certain themes” that “confer significances” upon the text.[5] Interpretive strategies are employed prior to and during the act of reading. Instead of being a response to reading, they are the shape of reading and give texts their meaning. This does not deny that there is ‘something’ there upon which reading strategies are practiced, but it does emphasize that there is no such thing as a non-interpretive encounter with a text – to encounter a text is necessarily an act of creation.[6]
Interpretive communities, relatively stable groups made up of “those who share interpretive strategies” for creating meaning in textual encounters, explain the existence of similar strategies and ways of reading at various times, in various places.[7] Interpretive communities are stable but not static, shifting as new ways of reading are learned and people enter and leave. Fish recognizes this approach does not solve all the problems of interpretation, because any evidence brought forth to “objectively” support his claim would itself be an interpretation. Therefore, the only “proof” of membership in such a community is the nod of agreement within it.[8]
Fish illustrates his point with a story from the summer of 1971, when he was teaching two courses through the English Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo. The first course was in literary stylistics and theory, the second in interpretation of English religious poetry from the 17th century. During the first course, he had written a list of assigned authors on the board. For the second class, he left the names on the board, only adding a frame around it with the designation “p. 43.” When the students entered, he told them the list was a poem of the type they had been studying and asked them to interpret it. The students then proceeded to laboriously interpret the poem, successfully concluding it was a hieroglyphic poem posing an iconographic riddle, which they then answered.[9] It was not the objective presence of “poetic” qualities that led them to interpret the “poem,” but paying attention to the list in a poetic fashion.[10]
Merold Westphal proposes a related concept of interpretation he calls “relativist hermeneutics.”[11] Invoking Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur, he begins with the notion that “we are always somewhere (socially, culturally, historically, linguistically) and never nowhere when we interpret.” While we can seek to become aware of our presuppositions and critique them, we can never do it in a way that is ‘absolute’ or separated from yet another position that is “somewhere,” there is no God’s-eye view.[12] Therefore, we cannot escape the circular nature of interpretation in which we are already located. We can move from one circle to another, but can never arrive at nowhere.[13] Of the three, Heidegger particularly radicalizes hermeneutics because, for him, interpretation “is not something we sometimes do but rather something that becomes fundamental to who we are and is characteristic of all modes of knowing.” In other words, all of reality can be likened to a text to be interpreted.[14]
[1] Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Harvard University Press, 1982), 148-67.
[2] Ibid., 167-8.
[3] Regarding whether or not it makes sense to speak of “different” texts if, in the end, one is left with only interpretations, never the texts themselves.
[4] Ibid., 168.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 170-1.
[7] Ibid., 171.
[8] Ibid., 173.
[9] Ibid., 322-5.
[10] Ibid., 326.
[11] Merold Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (Baker Academic, 2009), 35.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid., 35-6.
[14] Ibid., 28n3.
Trackback URL
Comments