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    43 views11 pages

    Rorty Pragmatists Progress

    Uploaded by

    Sveta Novikova
    Rorty

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    UMBERTO Eco of the brain the whole of his memory and of his speaking ability, Zatesky was nevertheless still able to write: thus ‘automatically his hand wrote down all the information he was unable to think of, and step by step he reconstructed his own Sdentity by reading what he was writing. Likewise, 1 was looking coldly and technically at the book, writing. my description, and suddenly I realized that 1 was rewriting the ‘Name ofthe Rose. The only difference was that from page 120, when the “Ars Comica” begins, the lower and not the uppey ‘margins were severely damaged; but all the rest was the stme, ‘the pages progressively browned and stained from dampness and atthe end stuck together, looking as if they were smeared by 4 disgusting fat substance. Thad in my hands, in printed form, the manuscript I described in my novel. {had had it for ‘years and years within reach, at home. At first thought it was an extraordinary colneidence; then f ‘was tempted to believe ina miracle atthe end [decided that wo Es war, soll ch werden. Uhad bought tat book in my youth, skimmed through it realized that it was exceptionally soiled, and put it somewhere and forgot it. But by a sort of internal «camera I had photographed those pages, and for decades the image of those poisonous leaves lay in the most remote part of ‘my soul, asin a grave, until the moment it emerged again (do ‘ot know for what reason) and I believed {had invented it This story, too, has nothing to do witha possible interpret- sion of my book. Ifithas a moral ite that the private lif ofthe ‘empirical authors is in a certain respect more unfathomable than their texts. Between the mysterious history of a textual Production and the uncontrollable drift ofits future readings, the text qua text stil represents a comfortable presence, the Point to which we can sick 4 ‘The pragmatist’s progress RICHARD RORTY Wheg fread Profesor E's novel Ruaul’s Ped, 1 Acie th Bc mt be sing te wy nich ti scholar, and phlsophers tink of themsies at Cracking cen, pcg away aciens to evel ence, ipingaway ves of sppearace to eve ety read the olsun snl folate apr Sepik aft oton tha there deep anise fo the vulgar meanings which nly thse acy enought ave cracked very di coe con now ook ae pong up {hess Between Robert Ha and Alon, more evry, een th ks yu indi he "Ocal econ SF bonnes and the ones You find in the "Phllsophy Tiaee the novel as a send-up of More specie, 1 inept th suc =f te very Kes of srctre which vad 0 tenor eles shelcons ts bodies, programs tocomputers, tr keys t leks Having reviuly fad evs A Ther of Semis book which smetines res ike an ate to Grok the code af ode to reveal he univer sructure of structures concade ht Fal’ Peds soo that fate book as Witgenti'® Phanphial Investigation o his Tracars Lace Phisophius. decided that eo had Imnagedtoshrull ie dograns an taxonomies of isaler & RICHARD RORTY ‘work, just asthe older Wittgenstein shrugged off his youthful {fantasies of ineffable objects and rigid connections. [ound my interpretation confirmed in the as fifty pages of the novel. At the beginning of those pages we find ourselves ‘aught up in what purports to be an axial moment of history. ‘This isthe moment in which the hero, Casaubon, ses all the ‘earth's seekers after the One True Meaning of Things as sembled at what they believe to be the World's Navel, The CCabbalists, the Templars, the Masons, the Pyramidologsts, the Rosicrucians, the Voodooists, the emissares from the Central ‘Ohio Temple ofthe Black Pentacle-they are all here, whirling around Foucault's pendulum, a pendulum which is now ‘weighted with the corpse of Casaubon’s friend Belbo, Prom this climax the novel slowly spirals down ta scene of ‘Casaubon alone in a pastoral landscape, an talan hillside, Hes ina mood of wry abjuration, relishing small sensory pleasures, ‘cherishing images of his infant child, A few paragraphs from the very end of the book, Casaubon meditates as follows: Along the Bricco's slopes are rows and rows of vines know them Ihave seen sila rows in my day, No doctrine of numbers can ay if they ae in ascending or descending order In Use midst the rows — but you have to wall barefoot, with your heels callsed, from childhood there are peach tees. When you eat the peach, the ‘vet of the skin makes shudders run from your tongue to your ‘groin Dinosaurs once grazed there. Then another surface covered theirs And yet like Belbo when he played the trumpet, when I bit Into the peach I understood the Kingdom and was one with It. The rest is only clevernes. Invent; invent the Pla, Casaubon, That's ‘what everyone has done to explain the dinosaurs and the peaches, 1 read this passage as describing a moment like that when Prospero breaks his stall, or when Faust listens to Ariel and abandons the quest of Part 1 for the ironies of Part u. It reminded me of the moment when Wittgenstein realized that rs ‘THE PRAGMATIST’S PROGRESS theimportat thing sto beabletoxop doing piosphy when ve wana, anda he mame when Heeger conduded that he mur avercome sil overcoming and ave meaphysie teil By reading the passage nts thec paral ae Thiet cl up 2 vison of the great magus of Bolom ‘enouncng struturasm and abjrng taxonomy. Eo, 7 “Keidd ling w that be snow able ey eis, peaches, babies, Symbol and metaphors witout needing etn hc scat lank in search o iden armatures He ‘lng ata abandon hs tng seach the anf the tole of ode i interpreting Foucault's Pedal inhi way twas ing the lame set of thing as done by al those monomaniacl ‘Shean taxonomists who whit ound he pendalum, These Tecpel anything that comes log int the secret Ficony of the Templars, ote ladder of Masonic elghten- ‘ment, or the plan of the Great Pyramid, or whatever their Tartar session happen o be, Shers un rom thc cb cords to ther groin a they share the delight ‘Shee Pacts nd iudd knew = they cover the toe Tgnifeance ofthe frzness of peaches, sein this mic eine aca comesponding to some macrcosmicprnpe Shah peopl take exquisite plese nding tat heir Key haroponed yet another lok that tl another coded mesge pas gle ote sitions and ven up is sere ay own ellen ofthe sxet ory ofthe Templars — the eich impose any Book cme 0 ~ in sMadbogphiea marae tthe Pragati rors, the pinning ot ths partclar quest romance, i dawns onthe Seeker after Enlightenment that all the great_dualisms of “Western Philosophy — realty and appearance, pure. xadiance “nd diffuse reflection, mind and bods sigour and ‘aaal sloppiness, orderly semiotics and rambling semuosis— o RICHARD RORTY ‘can be dispensed with. They are not to be synthesized into higher unitis, not aufgehoben, but rather actively forgotten. ‘An carly stage of Enlightenment comes when one reads [Nietzsche and begins thinking of al these dualisms as just so ‘many metaphors forthe contrast between an imagined state of {otal power, mastery and control and one's own present Impotence. A further statis reached when, upon rereading, Thus Spake Zarathustra, one comes down with the giggles. At ‘that point, witha bit of help from Freud, one begins to hear talk about the Will to Power a just a high-faluting euphemism for ‘the male's hope of bullying the females into submission o the child's hope of getting back at Mummy and Daddy. The final stage ofthe Pragmatst’s Progress comes when one begins to see one's previous peripeties not as stages in the ascent toward Enlightenment, but simply as the contingent results of encounters with varlous books which happened to fall into one’s hands. This stage i pretty hard to reach, for one is always being distracted by daydreams: daydreams in which the heroic pragmatist plays a Walter Mitty-ike role in the ‘immanent teleology of world history. Bu ifthe pragmatis can ‘excape from such daydreams, he or she will eventually come to think of himself or herself slike everything else capable of 5 ‘many descriptions as there are purposes to be served. Theve are Hany deipns sie eee pragmatist ‘might be put, by his or herself or by others. This the stagein which all descriptions (including one’s seldescription as a ragmatist) are evaluated according to their efficacy as instru ‘ments for purposes, rather than by their fidelity tothe object described, ‘So much for the Pragmatist’s Progress ~ a narrative I often use for purposes of self-dramatization, and one into which T was charmed to find myself being able to fit Professor Eco Doing so enabled me to see both of us as having overcome our 9 ‘THE PRAGMATIST’S PROGRESS catlier ambitions to be code-crackers. This ambition led me to ‘waste my twenty-seventh and twenty-cighth years trying to discover the scret of Charles Sanders Pirce’sesoteric doctrine of ‘the reality of Thirdness’ and thus of his fantastically elaborate semlotico-metaphysical ‘System’. I imagined that 2 similar urge must have led the young Bco tothe study ofthat {infuriating philosopher, and that a similar reaction must have enabled him to see Peirce as just one more whacked-out twiadomaniac. In short, by using tis narrative asa grid, Iwas able to think of Eco asa fllow-pragmatis, ‘This agreeable sense of camaraderie began to evaporate, however, when I read Ecos article “Intenio lectris.! For in that atile, written at roughly the same time as Foucault’ Pendulum, he insists upon a distinction between interpreting texts and using texts, This, of course, is 2 distinction we pragmatists do not wish to make. On our view, all anybody fever does with anything is use it? Interpreting something knowing it, penetrating to its essence, and so on ae all just various ways of describing some process of putting i to work, So was abashed to realize that Eco would probably view my reading of his novel as use rather than an interpretation, and that he did not think much of nom interpretative uses of texts. was dismayed to find him insisting on a distinction similar to ED. Hirsch’s distinction between meaning and significance ~a distinction between getting inside the text itself and relating | the text to something else. Thisisexactly the sor of distinction anti-essentialists ike me deplore distinction between inside 1 te tents of He's actual Taner lectures were ot svalable tothe seminars in advance bathe had iggested tat we consul tle Tntenolectre the nate ofthe ar Dif, 2 (988) 147-68 2 oranicesssnct statement ofthis romain view ofnerpeton, se Seey Stout, What the meaning of ext” New Leary Hr. (98) on 3 and outside, between the aon-relational and the relational features of something, For, on our view, there is no such thing. san intrinsic, non-elational property In these comments, therefore, Iam going to focus on Bco's use-interpretation distinction, doing my best to minimize its lmportance. I begin with one of Eco's own polemical applic ations of this distinction ~ his account, in ‘Intentio lectors’ of how Marie Bonaparte spoiled her own treatment of Poe. Eco says that when Bonaparte detected “the same underlying fabula’in ‘Morell’ ‘Ligeia’ and "Eleonora, she was ‘revealing the intentio oper’ But, he continues, ‘Unfortunately, such 3 beautiful textual analysis is interwoven with biographical remarks that connect textual evidence with aspects (known by extratextual sources) of Poe's private life” When Bonaparte {invokes the biographical fact that Poe was morbidly attracted by women with funereal features, then, Eco says, ‘se is using and not interpreting texts [My first attempt to blur this distinction consists in noting thatthe boundary between one text and another is no o clear. Fico seems to think that it was allright for Bonaparte to read “Morella' i the light of ‘Ligeia’. But why? Merely because of the fact that they were written by the same man? Is that not being unfaithful to ‘Morell’, and running the danger of confusing the intentio operis with an incentio auctors inferred from Poc’shabit of writing a certain sort of text? sit fae for me toread Foucault's Pendulum in the light of A Theory of Semiotics and Semantics and the Philosophy of Language? Or should I if want to interpret the first of these books, try to bracket my knowledge that it was written by the author ofthe other two? If it is all right for me to invoke this knowledge about authorship, how about the next step? Is it allright for me to bring in my knowledge of what iti lke to study Peirce ~ of what itis like to wateh the hearty pragmatist of the 1870s ” THE PRAGMATIST'S PROGRESS tansmogrify Into the frenzied constructor of Existential Graphs of the 1890s? Can I fairly use my biographical knowledge of Eco, my knowledge that he spent lot of ime on Peirce, to help explain his having written a novel about ‘ccultist monomania? “These chetorical questions are the intial softening-up moves would make in order to begin to blur Beo'suse-interpretation distinction. But the big push comes when Lask why he wants to rake a great big distinction between the text and the reader, between intento opeis and intento lectoris. What purpose is served by doing s0? Presumably Eco’s answer is that it helps {you respect the distinction between what he calls “internal textual coherence’ and what he alls‘the uncontrollable drives ofthe reader’. He says that the latter ‘controls’ the former, and that the only way to check a conjecture against the intent ‘peri is to check it against the text asa coherent vole’. So presumably we erect the distinction as a barrier to our ‘moniomaniacal desire to subdue everything to our own needs “One of those needs, however, isto convince other people that we are right So we pragmatists can view the imperative t0 check your interpretation against the text as a coherent Whole Simply as a reminder that, if you want to make your {interpretation of a book sound plausible, you cannot just goss ‘one or two lines oF scenes. You have to say something about fwtat most of the other lines or scenes are doing there. If wanted to persuade you to accept my interpretation of Foucault's Pendulum, 1 should have to account for the thirty rine pages which intervene between the climactic Walpurgs- racht scene in Paris and the peaches and dinosaurs of Italy. 1 should have to offer a detailed account of the role of the recurrent flashbacks to partisan activities during the Nazi ‘occupation. I should have to explain why, after the moment of bjuration, the last paragraphs of the book introduce a 95 RICHARD RORTY threatening note. For Casaubon ends his pastoral idyll by forseeing his imminent death at the hands of the pursuing 1 do not know whether I could do all this, It is possible that, ‘given three months of leisure and a modest foundation grant, I ‘might produce a graph which connected all or most of these and other dots, a graph which still profiled Foo as fellow- ragmatst. Is also possible that I would fal, and would have toadmit that Eco had other fish than mine to fry, that my own ‘monomania was not flexible enough to accommodate his Interests. Whatever the outcome, I agree with Eco that such a {graph would be needed before you could decide whether my interpretation of Foucaul’s Pendulum was worth taking, seriously But given this distinction between a frst blush, brute force, ‘unconvincing application ofa particular reader‘sobsession toa text and the product of a three-months-long attempt to make that application subtle and convincing, do we need to describe lin terms ofthe notion ‘the texts intention’? Eco makes clear that he is not claiming that that intention can narrow interpretations down toa single correct one. He happily admits that we ean ‘show how Joyce fin Ulyses] acted in order to ‘create many alternative figures in the carpet, without deciding hhow many they can be and which of them are the bestones.S0 hhethinks ofthe intention ofthe text rather asthe production of | Model Reader, including ‘a Model Reader entitled to try Infinite conjectures. ‘What Ido not understand in Eco's account is his view ofthe relation between those latter conjectures and the intention of the text. If the text of Ulysses has succeeded in getting me to evisage a plurality of figures to be found in the carpet has its internal coherence done all the controlling it can do? Or can it also control the responses of those who wonder whether some 6 THE PRAGMATIST'S PROGRESS given figure realy inthe carpet or nt? Can it help them arcows Boonen competing suggestions elp separate the Best ‘epee vm competitors? Are ts powers exhausted Merit as rejected those competitors which are simpy unable do connect enough dots unable to answer enough questions x does the ext Shoutthefneuon of varius lines and senes? Ordos the ive powers in reserve which enable tsa higs ke that frp doce, indeed, connect mest of my points, but i everthelss gets meal wrong’? My dsicinaion oat haan textcan say such thing istcnforce by te fllowing pastge i co's article. He says “Tac teat ian objet thatthe interpretation buds up in the Minot the deca elo’ f validating sl on the basis of : vs elish this wa phat i makes upasits esl”, We pragmatists relish Wr blaring the distinction berween finding an object and Slaking i We like Eea's description of what he calls ‘the ol Tan vad beemeneutic cir’, But, given this pctre of dente ncng made astey are interpreted, Ido no se any way. ‘Cpreere the metaphor of texts icernalcoberence. should A tha a tent just has whatever coherence It happened to weir during the lat ll ofthe hermenetic whee. just a2 Teapot clay ony has whatever coerence it happened pick ipa the last turn ofthe potters whee should prefer tosay thatthe coberence ofthe text snot something ches before tis described, any more than the dos a caefence before we connected them Its coherence is thane than the fact that somebody has found something tmrestng tay about group of marks noses some way Of describing the marks and noes which relates them 10 stoma he ther ings we aentreted in talking about (or ‘Smiinple we may deseribea given set of marks 8 words ofthe oglu langue, as very bard to read, a Joyce manuscript, teuortha milion dlls, asan carly version of Uses, and 80 0 RICHARD RORTY 0») This coherence iether internal nor external to anything its just a function af what as ben sa so far about those marks, AS we move from relatively uncontroversial and book cat int relatively controversial iterary Rory aed lean -cicaes-what we say muse have Some Feasonsbly systematic inferential connections with what we or others ave ‘THE PRAGMATIST’S PROGRESS within an encyclopedia, rather than in terms of dictionary-like felations of equivalence between sign and thing signified, seemed to me to be pointing inthe right holistic, Davidsonian, Girecton. So did his Quinean remarks that a dictionary i just SS eae er ee about i, except by reference t same particular purpose ome a ee oe ae ee mi eee amen doar Suse ines anaes Teer soracepecalsecnytteantae ee Wana Lame oneal taieey a ees a a pede fee renga ping hgsiranratrag ineregn Prete aod olden ipreerseptees fener conn geek eet oe Settee dele aeinlst ell Pirated yn coat erarai gn ad ecg vate mer eee Manone nase Gemma a teuctaweeaetcae cos abot Gedionteatesnetece aa trna dare batts eninormciniaee meaner tina sar botaipeee ae eee ae ae ea peel bem mrepioenliet Awnby eter Onthconehand Eco seen thotee nae Soar ca eee nnetaeentw ey {i sgutsed encyclopedia, and that ny encyclopedia Uke nancy must blur the ditincion between analytic and -syatbete ropes ‘On the other hand, Iwas troubled by Bco's quasi-iltheyan insistence on distinguishing the “semiotic from the ‘scienti, land on distinguishing philosophy from sciencet ~ an un- ‘Quincan, un-Davidsonian thing to do. Further, Boo always seemed tobe taking for granted that signs and texts were quite diferent from other objects ~ objects such as rocks and trees land quarks. At one point he writes: “The universeof emo, that i the universe of human cutee, must be conceived as structured like a nbyeinch ofthe third ype: a) 15 eactured acceding toa network of iatrpretonts (6) 1 virtually Inne because takes into account mltple interpretations realized by diferent culate, ts alte Because every discourse about the eneylopedia caus in doubt the previous structure of the tncyclopedi sel (It does not register only ‘truths ut, rather, (Shathas ben said about the tuth or what has Been believed tobe “This description of ‘the universe of semiosis...the universe of Jhuman culture’ seems to bea good description ofthe universe tout court ,As Ise it the rocks and the quarks are st fort tle prose Sng oFjects by talking bout them, Granted, one of the things we say when we tlk about rocks and quarks is that they antedate us, but we often sy that about marks on paper as well So ‘making’ isnot the + Umberto Semitic on te Pionophyof Language (oaningtn. Ind tote) pay, Seebids poo.» Thi pp 8-4 9 RICHARD RORTY right word cither for rocks or for marks, any more than is ‘finding’. We don't exactly make them, nor do we exactly find them. What we dois to react to stimuli by emitting sentences containing marks and noises such as ‘rock’, ‘quark’, ‘mark’, ‘noise’, ‘sentence’ tex’, ‘metaphor’ and s0 on. ‘We them infer other sentences from these, and others from those, and soon — building up a potentially infinite labyrinth- ine encyclopedia of assertions. These asctans arc always at _themercy ol bing changed by rsh simul, but they ace nee the mer ‘capable of bi stimull, much less against the internal coherence of something outside the ‘encyclopedia, The encyclopedia can get changed by things ‘outside itself, But it can only be checked by having bits of itself compared with ther bits. You conn check a sentence against am object. slthough an object ca asserting? sentence. You ean only check a sentence against_other sentences, senlence 10 which i connected by various labyrinthine inferential relationships. This Teta t draw a philosophically interesting. ne between nature and culture, language and fat the universe of semicss and some othe univers, is where you windup when, ‘wth Dewey and Davidson, you stop thinking of knowledge as Tight relations to Ue noo-sighs For you also stop thinking that {You can separate the object fom what you say about i the ‘signified from the siga, or the language from the metalanguage. exceptad hoc, inaidofsome particular purpose. What co says about the hermencuti Gc encourages me to think that he might be more sympathetic to this claim than his esent lalis-sounding distinction between Interpretation and use ‘would at first suggest. These passages encourage me to think that Eco might someday be wiling to Join Staley Fish and Jeffrey Stout in olering 4 thoroughly pragmatic acount of THE PRAGMATIST’S PROGRESS Interpretation, one which no longer contrasts interpretation with use ‘Another aspect of Eco's thought which encourages me to think this is what he says about deconstructive literary criticism. For, many of the things Which Eco says about this kind of criticism parallel what we Davidsonians and Fishians say about it. In the final paragraphs of “Intentio lectoris’ Eeo saysthat ‘many ofthe examples of deconstruction provided by Derrida’ are ‘pretextual readings, performed not in order to interpret the text butt show how much language can produce unlimited semiosis’ think this is right, and that Eco is also right when he goes on to say: iso bappened tha egtimate philosophical practice has been taken tsa model for literary criticism and for a ew trend i textual interpretation. tls our theoretical duty to acknowledge that this happened and to show why it should ot have happened * ‘Any explanation of why this unfortunate thing happened ‘would bring us back, sooner or later, tothe work and influence ‘of Paul de Man. I agree with Professor Kermode that Derrida tnd de Man are the two men who ‘give genuine prestige t0 theory’. But I think it important to emphasize that there is 2 crucial difference between the two men’s theoretical outlooks. Derrida, on my reading, never i de Man does, nor docs he wish to divide language, 35 de Man into the kind called Merary”and some othes Kind, 18 ~ particular, Derrida ever takes the metaphysical distinction between what Eco cals ‘the universe of semiosis’ and some ‘other universe between culture and nature ~ as seriously as ide Man did, De Man makes heavy use of the standard Diltheyan distinction between “intentional object’ and RICHARD RORTY ‘natural objects’. He insists on contrasting language and its Tiaminent threat of incoherence, produced by ‘universal semi- ‘sis’, with the putatively coberent and unthreatened rocks and “quarks.” Derrida like Davison, edges away from these distine- | fons, viewing them as just more remnants of the Western ‘metaphysical tradition. De Man, on the other hand, makes them basic ta his account of reading. “We pragmatiss wish that de Man had not sounded this Diltheyan note, and that be had not suggested that there fs a ‘area_of_culture_called ‘philosophy’ which can Tay down {guidelines for Hterary interpretation, More particularly, we Wish he bad not encouraged the idea that you could, by following these guidelines, find out what a text is ‘really about’, We wish that he had dropped the idea that there is special kind of language called ‘iterary language’ which reveals what language itself ‘realy is’. For the prevalence of ‘such ideas seems to me largely responsible for the unfortunate idea that reading Derrida on metaphysics will give you what cocallsamodelforiterar cricin’De Mannie hand lcomfort to the unfortunate idea ‘For us pragmatists, the potion that theres something 2 given text i realy about, something which rigorous application of ‘method will reveal, as bad asthe Aristotelian idea that there is something which a substance really, intrinsically, is as ‘opposed to what it only apparently or accidentally or relaton- ally s. The thought that a commentator has discovered what 2 Seal de Man, lindnsand sigh, (Minneapolis ed 1985) 24 for de Mav's stalghforwardly Hussean way of dsingushing be- tween nati abject sad intentional ety, This tam opponon stich Deri woulé arly wish to leave unquestioned. Se ao de Nan The Rextane 9 Tory (Minnespai 1986) pn, where de Ma cppose language’ 0 he Phenomenal word ar wll a Bliss, po, where he opposes et’ text ‘rt txt ‘THE PRAGMATIST’S PROGRESS exis ding for caample that ts aly denying seca eoarue ory deconstructing he ete aie a of waters mcepht her than ey tang wed forte purport ~ i ae rere bcaian ison ore dam Bae eer rt teeby detected What Realy Cong coe ee sunnce of whe {rnd Bom entting ‘als Pont "But opposition in she idea that texts ane sclly about 2a arab oman othe es ht oe “respect for ‘the internal coherence of the tex bit upon what CE gry, tb epposton othe ea a ca mchingabour at iwi abr aaa loyal whch mak travel ado aay cantare yourlfr rec vi Youre initially inclined to say about it. So Tam di tofind Eco {quoting Hillis Miller with approval when sy: the Tadings of deconructive cetam ae oot NM po ISyUNET TET Pom er hss lke ayng that my Tar of arene to drive screws i ered by the scewdiver lf whereas my wef to py open cabourd chaps nfl impostin by subjectivity’ A deconsts fo ke ir, boul ave though sn mor invoke this sallectiviy-objetty distinction than are ish Stouand mysell, People wl ake he Jens serlualy s eo does shold seems. Te, ao echew “Toenlarge on this point, let me drop the screwdriver and use a better example, The trouble with screwdrivers as an example 15 mts sas, “hear and pace’ Crtal Ing 6 (2986). 61, {quoted in, ten lec 1 103 RICHARD RORTY 's that nobody talks about ‘Binding out how they work’, Whereas both Eco and Miller talk this way about texts. So let ime instead use the example of a computer program. IfT use a Particular word-processing program for writing essays, ‘nobody will say that Tam wilfully Imposing my subjectivity But the outraged author ofthat program might conceivably say this fshe finds me using t to make out my income tax return, a [Purpose for which that particular program was never intended and for which tisill-suted. The author might want to back her point up by enlarging on how her program works, going into detail about the various subroutines which make it up. their ‘marvellous internal coherence and thelr utter unsuitability for purposes of tabulation and calculation, Stl, it would be odd of the programmer todo ths. To gether point, Ido not need to know about the cleverness with which she designed the various subroutines, much less about how they ook in Baste or {in some other compiler language. All she rally needs to do isto point out that I can get the srt of tabulations and computations {Inced forthe tax return out of her program only through anex- traordinarly inelegant and tedious set of manoeuvres, ‘manoeuvres [could avoid if were only willing tose the right tool forthe right purpose. ‘This example helps me to make the same criticism of Eco on the one hand and of Miller and de Man on the other. For the ‘moral ofthe example is that you should not seek more precision ‘or generality than you need for the particular purpose at hand, see the idea that you can learn about ‘how the text works’ by using semiotics to analyse its operation as like spelling out ‘certain word-processing subroutines in waste: you can do it if {You want to, but it is net clear why, for most ofthe purposes ‘hich motivate literary critics, you should bother, I see the ‘dea that what de Man calls ‘iterary language” has as its function the dissolution of the traditional metaphysical oppo- 104 ‘THE PRAGMATIST’S PROGRESS sitions, and that reading as such has something to do with hastening this dissolution, t analogous to the claim that a quantum-mechanical description of what goes on inside your computer wll help you understand the nature of programs in general In other words, I distrust both the structuralit idea that kaon TBechanisms’ i essential for Terary eri aad the post ructuala Ws ar ecg ‘he presence, or the subversion, of metaphysical hierarchies is_ ‘ential. Knowing about mechanisms of textual production or houtmelaphysicscanto be sure sometimes be useful Having read Eco, having read Derrida, will often give you something {intersting to say about a text which you could not otherwise have si. Buti brings you no closer to what is ely going on ‘nthe ext than having read Marx, Freud, Matthew Arpold or RR. Leavis. Eachof these supplementary readings imply gives you one more context in which you can place the text ~ one ‘more grid you can pace on top oft oF one more paradigm to Which to juxtapose it. Neither piece of knowledge tolls you anything about the nate of texts othe nature of reading: For either has a nature ‘~~ Heading ters isa matier of reading them in the light of other «Ses people obsessions is of infomation, or what have errand Te secing wt ppens, What happen may Be “Gicring ea weird aed lotr ecatc to bother with ts is protaly the can with my rel of Fc’ Pe OF Kay be excing td councng ar when De juxtapose Freud tnd Heldgger or when Kermode japon pon and Heldegger. It may be so exciting and convincing that one nthe Mon te feces wh unset 105, RICHARD RORTY between using and interpreting and just distinguish between uses by diferent people for diferent purpose. Think that resistance to this suggestion (which was made most persuasively, think, by Fis has two sourceyGne the Philosophical tradition, going back to Aristotle, BIER says that there i a Big Eilrence Weovecs praca eliberation bout what to do and attempts to discover the truth. Tis tradition i invoked when Bernard Willams says, in criticism of Davidson and me: "Theres clearly such ating as practical reasoning or deliberation, which is not the sm shout fare Iti obviously not the same "The Gnd sourss the set of intuitions which Kant mars ‘Wher ditingulshed berween(aludand Gignify. Things | Manne, but ern ave Tsa fe | Dispur pons, fomeey ws them a rch themselves —isto sctmorli hve invelghal chevhere snort ine tellan practice-theory and the Kantian prudence-morality distinctions and I shall try not to repeat myself here. Instead, 1 want briefly to say what can be salvaged from both distinc: ‘tons. For theres, think, a useful distinction which is vaguely shadowed forth by these two useless distinctions. This is between knowing what you want to get out ofa person or thing ‘or text in advance and hoping thatthe person or thing or ext ‘will help you want something different —that he or she or it will help you to change your purposes, and thus to change your + life, This distinction, Ithink, helps us highlight the diference between methodical and inspired readings of texts Methodical readings are typically produced by those who lack what Kermode, following Valery, calls ‘an appetite for Bema Willams, thes nd th Limits of Peep (Cambridge, MA. 185) P15 106 ‘THE PRAGMATIST’S PROGRESS poetry’ They are the sort of thing you get for example, in an anthology of readings on Conrad's Heart of Derkness which I recently slogged through — one psychoanalytic reading, one reader-response reading, one feminist reading, one deconstruc- tlonist reading, and one new historicst reading. None of the readers had, as far as I could see, been enraptured oF destabilized by Heart of Darknes.Igot no sense that the book nad made a big diference to them, that they cared much about Kurtz or Marlow or the woman ‘with helmeted head and tawny ‘checks’ whom Marlow sces on the bank of the river. These people, and that book, had no more changed these readers’ purposes than the specimen under the microscope changes the purpose of the histologis. ‘Unmethodical criticism ofthe sort which one occasionally wants to call inspired’ is the result of an encounter with an author, character, plot, stanza, line or archaic torso which has made difference tthe critic's conception of who she is, what shets good for, what she wants to do with herself an encounter which has rearranged her priorities and purposes. Such criticism uses the author or text not asa specimen reiterating 2 type but as an occasion for changing a previously accepted taxonomy, oF for putting a new twist on a previously told ‘ory. Is respect for the author or the text isnot a matter of respect for an intenio or for an internal structure. Indeed, ‘respect'isthe wrong word. ‘Love’ or ‘hate’ would be better. For ‘a great love ora great loathing isthe sort of thing that changes us by changing our purposes, changing the uses to which we shall put people and things and texts we encounter later. Love and loathing are both quite diferent from the jovial ‘camaraderie which | imagined myself sharing with Eco when 1 "see Seank Keone, An Appetite for Poetry (Cambridge, MA, 1983) par. RICHARD RORTY seated Foucault's Pendulum as grist for my pragmaticmill~asa splendid specimen of a recognizable, greetabl, type. {It may seem that in saying allthis Iam taking the side ofso- called “traditional humanistic crtielsm’ against the geare for Which, af Professor Culler has suid, the most convenient

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