Author: Walter Benn Michaels

The worry that underlies the sense that both writers and readers can be irresponsible—the writer by failing to have the right relation to her intention, the reader by failing to attend to the writer’s attention—is incoherent. Everyone who produces a speech act produces a text that means what she means by it; everyone who reads one is understanding (or misunderstanding) what she meant by it. This is the force of the non-optional—the reason why intentionalism cannot be a choice—the reason, really, why there is no such thing as intentionalism.

And the same chapter doubles down on the lure of the incomprehensible by following the transcription of Benny’s speech with long stretches of David himself producing sounds that are not just difficult for him to understand but impossible—his own recitation in Hebrew of verses from the Torah. That’s how Hebrew was taught; what the sounds mean comes later, and in fact, Roth would always compare his own “praiseworthy” performance producing “the sound of the language” to his abysmal one producing its meaning. But what’s striking in Call It Sleep is Roth’s reproducing these sounds spoken by someone who can’t understand them and written by someone who can’t understand them for readers who also can’t understand them, while at the same time making the meaning of what we can’t understand central to the novel’s action.

Another way to get at this is just to say that the identification of what the text means with what the author intends is already in place without our having any recourse to a theory of intention or to a positive account of intention as a mental state. While the work that it does in place—determining the act—makes clear the mistake in imagining that the text we write could be either controlled by or liberated from what we meant.

The reason Derrida does not think intentions are governing is because he thinks the condition of having a (linguistic or semiotic) one entails a form of repeatability that the intention cannot fully master. Yet there also cannot be any text-y things, written or spoken or semiotic, without intention playing some role. Moreover, as an interpreter, Derrida wants both: he wants to interpret faithfully the intention, as Henry pointed out, and read what is not available as an intention but inscribed in a text (which reading also produces). Not one or the other, but both.

The problem, as we’ve already begun to see, is that once you’re committed to the idea that meaning is something you try to control and/or that it’s something you impose, you’re committed also to an account of the text in which the intention must be (what Derrida rightly denies it can be) outside of it. Indeed, this is exactly what the reduction of the text to the mark requires since the act of writing is here conceived as the writer’s effort to impose a meaning on the mark she has made and since the act of reading involves the impositions of other meanings, which need not be the same as the writer’s. The reason the mark is abandoned is because that imposition necessarily fails, leaving a remainder that remains necessarily “open.”

This is what Kenner calls the Gulliver game, embodied in its purest form in the Turing game, which identifies what it is to be human with the ability to produce the Goodmanian letters and spaces that would look just like the letters and spaces a human would produce, thereby making the computer indistinguishable from the human. The computer (and here he anticipates John Searle’s Chinese Room argument, which makes sense since Goodman’s idea of a text is a syntax independent of any semantics) is the most advanced player in the you’re not allowed to understand what you’re talking about game.

If we take the question about art that is supportive of the PMC as a question about art that is supportive of capitalism, we can see that it’s only incidentally a question about art’s compatibility with the self-understanding of one class rather than another. It’s fundamentally a question about what there can be in art that isn’t reducible to the self-understanding of any class.