Page 69 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
another language, thus revealing other possible and unforeseen
meanings. Most importantly, the text cannot be contained by its
author because any piece of writing 'is readable even if the
moment of its production is irrevocably lost and even if I don't
know what its alleged author consciously intended to say at the
moment of writing it, i.e. abandoned the text to its essential drift'
(Derrida 1976: 37).
The following ideas summarize some of the principal positions
examined in greater detail later in this chapter. Reading is always
historically located: it occurs within a specific cultural context and
is shaped by the requirements of a particular community of inter-
preters. It is based on mental schemata which constantly produce
hypotheses, project them onto the world, test them by trial and
error, and assess their validity in terms of mechanisms of recogni-
tion, comparison, familiarity, etc. Reading is inscribed in cultu-
rally sanctioned ways of seeing the world (or scopic regimes)
responsible for demarcating what can and what cannot be said,
read, written, or seen in a given context. It is shaped by processes
of socialization and by the cultural grooming of perception: what
and how we read depend on what and how we are expected, made
or allowed to read. We must also be able to recognize the unread:
what we are unable to read because it does not fit in with the
expectations of our culture.
Before looking at some representative voices in the field of
Reader-Response Criticism, it is necessary to examine the princi-
pal philosophical positions that constitute their background. Most
relevant, in this context, are Phenomenology and Existentialism.
In both, the issues of perception and interpretation play an impor-
tant part. Phenomenology maintains that philosophy should focus
on the contents of our consciousness, not on things-in-the-world,
for we only experience things in terms of how they appear to us -
i.e. as phenomena. 2 This approach is principally associated with
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). His writings focus on the search for
essential mental processes and qualities of objects. Husserl priori-
tizes logic over psychology, for logic deals with universal essences
whereas psychology deals with particulars. Phenomenology is the
descriptive analysis of essences in general: it is concerned with

2
1*'This concept is examined in detail in relation to Kant's theories in Part I,
Chapter 1, 'Meaning' and Part III, Chapter 2, 'The Aesthetic'.

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