hermeneutics as mirrorplay: on a way to manifold vertigo

The hermeneutical situation is mediational. The teacher, the scholar is working between the text and communicative life—a Janus-faced situation (in a non-duplicitous, non-“two-faced” sense of ‘Janus-faced’). On the one hand, the teacher/scholar is a “translator,” inasmuch as reading—as such?—is translating, at least as understanding relative to one’s capability for understanding, which is an appropriation of the text which advances given understanding (or aims to). Openness is vital to learning. On the other hand, the presenter/teacher is translating a work (mediating, appropriating) for an event of presentation.

For the author of the text, there’s also a Janus-faced translation: On the one hand, there’s a consolidation of background work into the cohering thing to be read or heard. The working process [a—> ] that leads to the ostensible authorial work [b] is usefully distinguished, like journey—[a.1] the Work (as I’ve signified the journey in other discussions)—and account of the journey [a.2] that backgrounds (e.g., notebooks, sketches, experiments) the work object [b] (commonly regarded as the main manuscript or work of art). This [a.1]/[a.2] difference is hallmarked by drafts of manuscripts that are preliminary versions of the anticipated “final” work [b].

On the other hand, the retrojective accounting of authoriality [a], consolidated as work object [b] may be made available for enjoyment, scholarship, or teaching in derivative or authorially-translated version, expressing an authorship tailored for a particular audience (or market). The authorship en-stances the Work ([a]—> [b]) as presentational work object [c] (or “work of art”), a version of the work [b], like an autobiographical narrative pretends (in the serious, prospective sense) to represent coherence of the life, yet does so as actually (self-concealingly) giving accessibility to lived cohering of the life that would be nebulous for others, albeit lived as Meaningful life narratable in its own cohering way. (For example, an integration of an author’s journals by the author might seem hermetic. I don’t know of anyone who has bothered.) Authobiography is usually composed to be presented, as if the Meaningfulness of the life is of itself cohering in that accessible way—as if one lives to be readymade for presentation. The tangible work for presentation [c] succeeds in being coherent (if done well)—being of cohering authorship ([b]—> [c]), as if there is no [b]/[c] difference.

I can’t resist: Proust’s Remembrance reads so smoothly. But on the way, in his writing room of cork-covered windows, he would revise pages with little strings of added/revised phrasing taped onto draft pages that would eventully look like pages with spaghetti dangling all over, which his secretary would take back for revision. He would have gone mad with excitement if the notion of electronic word processing was available. As it were, the autobiography [c] is far, far from penultimate work [b] that was derived from a long journey [a].

So, too, for the distance through Heidegger’s notebooks—each a distillation of notes generated day after day by little pocket notebooks carried with him when he hiked into the hills—whose cumulative distillation (Ereignis manuscript, translated as The Event [work object {b}?]) backgrounded the derived way “down” to Contributions to Philosophy [c?], whose cycle is: Echo, Playing Forth, Leap, Grounding, For Ones To Come, and Last God. ([a]—> [c], to be echoed in a new era’s [a]—> [b]? Frame me with having too much hermetic imagination?)

Authoriality as the Work—the creative life [a—> b]—is shaped into an inferrable authorship for the reader as derived work [c]—the “authoriality” that the reader construes from the authorship, which is actually a reader’s re-authoring of that work-for-presentation [c], partly accurate (relative to imagined author response), partly appropriated to the reader’s era of individuation. In any case, cohering of “the” text is thanks to textual coherence intended by the authorship (en-stanced) <—> intended by the reader (discerned/en-framed), but whose authorship is derived by the reader’s construal of liminal intention, different (in principle) from the real authoriality for the work made available.

I know that this is probably confusing: Basically, authors don’t overtly intend a difference between their authoriality and expectation that the reader will construe an authorship that’s immanent to the text which is intentionally distant from the actual authoriality. But this is common in writing fiction, drama, poetry, curriculum, journalistic opinion, or any audience-oriented text (distinct from self-expressive text).

For example, “Heidegger” of the literature about Heidegger is different from Heidegger understanding himself as author. Indeed, how is it that the author of “Time and Being,” Time and Being (1962), is the same author as the author of Being and Time (1926)? Two authorships are expressed, which some scholars labeled “Heidegger I” and “Heidegger II,” but which Heidegger resisted. He claimed that there is one authoriality, the second authorship already enactive in the “first” authorship of Being and Time, which tried to go too far too soon. In other words: He apparently wants Being and Time read retrospectively, as anticipation of what later life fulfilled.

Relative to a difference between inner (psychal) and outer (discerned) interest, the enstancing of the work is inner-directed for outer availability. The reading internalizes the externalized text [c], and the scholar/teacher externalizes the trace of that (which relates relevantly to Derrida’s notion of writing in speech, i.e., speech as a trace of writing, re: Of Grammatology, 1967/1976).

So, you see that the Janus-faced situation can be quite resonant: I’m the student of my reading/scholarship (internalizing the externalized, inner-motivated work of the author), while an author may be a “student” of her own Work.

I’m translator to myself of a text [b] to be translated relative to others [c]. (A text in a survey course is “not” the same text as that text in a discursive seminar. I have cringed at efforts to make difficult philosophy accessible, but those efforts are useful. However, many a comparative literature professor has cringed at translations of poetry.) In other words, I’m the author of my “translation” as reading/scholarship, yet also re-authorial translator to an audience, which is inner-motivated [c] externalization [d] of earlier, outer-sourced internalization of others’ externalized Work.

I’ve now posited an additional relationship [c–> d] which is the teaching/translation relationship that has been ambiguously implicit to earlier indication of [b—>c]. The ambiguity is about whether or not one is teaching one’s own work [b], which is a [b]—> [c] relationship. Normally in education, one is teaching someone else’s work. So, an author’s available work [c] probably self-conceals its [b—> c] difference (and may not have one). The extent to which there is a [b—> c] difference is a common issue in scholarship, e.g., concerning revised versions [c'] or manuscript versions [b', b'']. There were several versions of Heidegger’s “Essence of Truth,” three versions of “Origin of the Work of Art,” etc.

And inasmuch as the author works with her own drafts as if being with another author— e.g., characterization in fiction, playing Socratic dialectician; or authoring a “Country Path Conversation” or “A Dialogue on Language” (OWL)—the mirrorplay of creativity can be more vertiginous for the author than most readers might imagine.

All of this runaround is simply about Janus-faced stances of interaction that can be generative (creative—> educational), having many players: author/reader (external and internal), reader/teacher, and audience (relative at least to an auditor/lifeworld difference).

critique of criticism

Criticism (a very nebulous notion) may explicate something relative to given frames of interpretation, themes, backgrounds (re: some phenomenon) disclosing the other’s (or “other’s”) integrally-implicit gestalt, if not giving a frame, a gestalt to the other that it doesn’t have, but deserves (allegedly). But who/what really belongs to the imputed frame? What’s the difference between enhancement and disclosure? between disclosure and projective identification (i.e., displacement of what’s disowned by the reader)?

En-framing is proximally in the liminality of interaction (or interplay): reading as partly re-authoring; text of the intending authorship by authorial design. There being “the” text belongs to a liminality.

Martin performs “Heidegger” of the 1920s (in the wake of apocalypse). Martin performs “Heidegger” of the 1950s (in the wake of more apocalypse). Is an auditor’s “Heidegger” the same enough as Martin’s? If one “reading” sustains good faith in “Heidegger’s” intent or conscience or evident performativity (as not unethically duplicitous), that’s preferrable to a “reading” which cannot accept tenably good faith reading. There is important difference between good faith reading and bad faith reading.

Anyway, en-framing (a derived mode of primary openness to an other that is truly the other being authentically responsive to one’s authentic receptiveness) is a complement to genuine authorial enstancing, in consideration for or contribution to an audience (be the enstancing by the text’s authorship or by a reader’s cohering of the present text as authored).

In short—as I said to my correspondent (but without any explanation)—“the hermeneutical relationship between a source text (or topic) and mediating that appropriately with-and-for others in teaching is different than readerly enframing the source aptly, like one does in criticism. The situation of criticism is a distancing—like gaining the gestalt that truly belongs to the event or thing.” I didn’t add: The situation in translation or hermeneutical condition is a nearing or taking to heart.

The comment in quote marks above was an enstancing of a more-detailable view that implicitly tropes (as stance) an available elaboration. Here has been a more-detailed view
—also being one substantially revised many days after first writing.

Yet, some degree of unsaid potential belongs to any thoughtful comment—as if assertion itself is always derivative, merely situational (site-ational), tropical, figurative as action (persona of authoriality—self-concealingly framed enstancing); and figurative as cohering (readerly enframing of projectively enstanced authorship relative to reader interest). Being “Derrida” went both ways (very deliberately, to his mind).

Criticism as enframing is more than criticism as critique. The latter implies (if not intends) an alternative view to counterpoint other than the discerned point of the text or other, for the sake of repairing (if not negating) the other’s devalued stance and, in effect, leaving it behind (abandoning the other). Understood Dialectically, this invites nihilism (relative to the other).

Enframing through critique can be part of appropriating the text into a more-cohering partnership of literary enrichment (e.g., drawing critique into a school of thought, which critique is postured to serve), whereas autonomous critique (veritably “framing” in the idiomatic, discounting sense) tends to claim to antedate the other, if not dismiss the other or warrant leaving the other behind, for the sake of critique itself (which has been a legacy of first generation Frankfurt School Critical Theory, including Adorno regarding Heidegger as “jargon of authenticity.”)

But the situation is complex. Critical Dialectic conceals the difference between constructive identity-in-difference (which advances a shared developmental continuum of engagement) and destructive identity-in-supercession (which negates the other in terms of antithetical rhetoric, entailing disengagement or/and abandonment). This difference is vital in psychotherapy, where mirroring is a teachable moment that invites (or evinces or enables) a self-differentiation which owns the difference as part of a development enriched (thus validated) in the mirroring.

Bringing a text or another into a manifold engagement or engaging the other in hybrid creative work is better than autonomous critique—but difficult, perhaps inaccessible for an inquirer, in which case mere critique may be left behind. Jürgen Habermas left Dialectical critique behind by initiating the second generation of Frankfurt School Critical Theory: systematically incorporating critique within developmental dynamics of self-reflective and reconstructive partnership aiming to advance social development generally. Then, he appropriated that new conception of Critical Theory into being supplemental to his meta-theory of social evolution, in The Theory of Communicative Action. Scholars of his work commonly call him a Critical Theorist, but that’s misleading (and tends to conceal Habermas’ Project).

Habermas is amply discoursed by “me” elsewhere.