Hermeneuts Ahoy! - notes

In a post entitled Hermeneuts Ahoy! AKMA posted some provocative thoughts on interpretation, particularly regarding models of Biblical interpretation. At the time I sent him some rather hasty notes. Since he's following up and responding in part to my comments, I'm putting what I sent here for context and, I hope, interpretive utility.

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(Integral and diff. hermeneutics - used here as I understand them from yours - not familiar with them otherwise)

Integral hermeneutics posits a meaning “contained in” or “visible through” or “audible from” a text, and further posits that that meaning can in some way be “viewed” or “understood” via some unification as some totality.

• Then “all” the integral hermeneuts have to do is examine opposed readings and seek to refine away the dross, leaving the gold.

• The “best” interpretation is the most adequate reflection of the unified meaning “in” the text.

Differential hermeneutics seems to start without positing a unity of meaning, and turns (rather quickly?) from the unintelligibility of the text itself to the apparently easier task of deciphering the origins of the “interlocked set of suppositions” of each of the various differing interpreters.

I.e., it’s almost as if one posits that every reading of the text can only err, but that one can still evaluate the relative validity of the various errors by reading them very carefully. Reading a text, then, seems to get displaced to a careful reading of erroneous readings, which in the end might well offer some insights into the sources of each interpreter’s error. Of course each of these readings of each interpreter is in turn subject to a similar explication of its own error, en abyme.

The choice: endless failures to agree on a meaning, or endless efforts to elucidate individual intepreters' errors.

At the very end of your entry, you say:

"unity of presence of Christ lies in church (with all its varying interpretations) not in the text."

If I follow, you appear to suggest that the “meaning” of the sacred text lies not in the meanings posited by the interpreters, whether integral or differential, but in the community of those readers who either agree or disagree about the meaning of the text. I.e., the text, whatever it ultimately “means” in any authorial, intentional sense of the term, in practice means the practice of its active interpreters. And since this body is hardly unified itself, it may indeed “reflect” – but only the way a sort of combustible shockwave might reflect some underlying physical root cause -- both the problems inherent in assumptions underlying theories of hermeneutics (however these are constructed) and the forces within the text that work against the likelihood of any satisfactory consensus on authorial integrity.

Then one turns to interpret the Church, or the community of interpreters, in hopes of gaining some sense of the complexity, tension, dissonance, alterity, inscrutability which might be attributable to the text, since those attributes appear to reasonably describe the evidently un-unified community - the very“meaning” unleashed by the text.

That is to say, the Church as metaphor of the meaning of the text becomes its own subject, and in seeking to read itself, is subject to the aporia between integral and differential hermeneutics. The practice of the community is the hermeneutic pursuit of the meaning of the text, but that meaning, it turns out, is the various incompatible practices of its reading.

This seems a conundrum.

- email to AKMA, 7.11.02

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