As a quietist reminder that we are all just intentionalists anyway, the view of “Against Theory” is that one cannot but act intentionally or read for intention—if one is to be acting or reading at all.1 One might then infer, as Walter Benn Michaels does, that because one cannot fail to act intentionally, intentionality is not a norm to which one bears any responsibility. What I do is what I intend to do; there can be no failure to act on one’s intention, if acting. The implication for the question of literary method is that, if one cannot read a text without reading for intention, the normative question of how one ought to read—whether one should read for intention or against it—is unintelligible. While affirming True Materialism’s insistence on intentionality as a “non-optional” condition of acting and reading, Michaels calls into question and seeks to amend the way that condition is articulated: I am right to insist on what “cannot not be done” (reading for intention) but wrong to exhort readers to adopt an intentionalist “approach.”2

Pawel Kaczmarski, by contrast, does not just seek to supply a “friendly amendment” to some of my formulations but attacks the metaphysical heart of the book: my grounding of intentionality in the internal purposiveness of organic life. For Kaczmarski, the space of nature is conceivable “in terms of purely causal chains,” and three interconnected mistakes follow from True Materialism’s failure to acknowledge this: it mistakenly ascribes purposive organization to living organisms; it then leverages organic purposiveness to illicitly link nature and intentionality; and it arbitrarily asserts the relevance of this link for the activity of interpretation.3

In what follows, I first argue that the intentionalist separation of intentionality and normativity is incoherent and thus that intentionalism does constitute a “non-position,” as Michaels suggests, but in a different sense than he intends: it is a conceptual dead end. While one cannot but act intentionally, one can do so either well or poorly such that intentionality is both a non-optional condition and a normative horizon of human action. Once this is shown, the implications for interpretation become clear: any reader—just in reading—cannot be indifferent to the methodological imperative to read well, that is, to self-consciously read for intention. I call this state of interpretive adequacy “readerly self-satisfaction,” which is no guarantee of success in reading but is a condition of such success—of knowing works as they ought to be known.

Second, I argue that the intentionalist separation of causality and intentionality renders the phenomenon of life unintelligible. Rather than arguing for the alternative—the mechanical explicability of life—Kaczmarski simply asserts it as theoretical commonsense. And in rendering life unintelligible, Kaczmarski is unable to explain how bodies like ours can be bearers of intentionality at all. The result is that, under intentionalist assumptions, our ends become “dead” ends, floating free from embodied life, and so fail to be ends in any meaningful sense.

I. The “Non-Position” of Intentionalism

The first thing to note is that I whole-heartedly affirm Michaels’ now-classic claim that intentionality is constitutive of believing, acting, and therefore reading. Given the force of this claim, “Against Theory” should have been an object-lesson in swamp-draining, but in my view, its own quietism worked against its actual assimilation within literary studies. One way to put the problem is that Michaels is right to think that intentionality is descriptive of action and belief but wrong to think that it therefore has no normative role to play in the exercise of our agency.

For example, to be a friend is to be minimally abiding by the norms of friendship—versus, say, the norms of professional acquaintanceship. I thereby commit myself to doing certain things (showing up in times of need, lending a sympathetic ear, and so on) and not doing others (telling lies, being unreliable). But friendship can be pursued either well or poorly. A bad friend is not simply not-a-friend (a stranger) but someone who is committed to friendship and yet who is not making good on the commitment. Perhaps my friend compulsively lies, or borrows money and refuses to pay it back. His own avowed intention—being a friend—is contradicted by his practices. Given his commitment to friendship, he has internal reasons for acting otherwise. This is not a “moral” point, as Michaels insists, because the standard of assessment is not an imperative foisted on a malicious stranger from without but rather is derived from my friend’s very activity itself.

In other words, the distinction I draw in the book between subjective purpose and objective intention is not a distinction between a private inner state (the “bad” picture of intention) and the objective principle constitutive of an action (the “good” picture). Rather, it is a distinction internal to action itself: my provisional self-conception (as being kind to a rival at a party) is a condition of my action’s being mine, but the further specification of that self-conception—smirking instead of smiling, paying ambiguous compliments—manifests the inadequacy of my own act-description. This does not make my act-description irrelevant, however. We can distinguish between two cases, each of which issues in a distinct action, not the same action with a different subjective “window-dressing” or private “psychological” accompaniment. We can refer to these two cases as the mean girl (meanness under cover of kindness) and the soft boy (self-deceived kindness manifest as meanness), respectively.

The mean girl might want plausible deniability and so does exactly what she intends; her statements are intentionally ambiguous. The soft boy is committed to being kind but is later told he was actually mean. The mean girl might indeed be subject to moralistic criticism since she wasn’t actually in it to be kind. But the soft boy is subject to internal criticism: he failed to live up to the standard to which he had committed himself. And this isn’t a question of his act contradicting some private “inner state”; it’s rather that the act manifests a contradiction with its own objective standard. This might appear in the nervousness with which he paid his compliments, or the quiver at the edge of his lips when he smirked. It’s not that he simply intended to be mean or that he simply intended to be kind; it’s that his kindness, as it unfolded in time and became increasingly determinate, manifested a contradiction. This is the basis for guilt after the fact, a feeling of irresponsibility, not because he has failed to adhere to some arbitrary moral convention but because he has failed himself.

For Michaels, norms are a background condition for the social intelligibility and evaluation of intentional acts, but they are not constitutive of intention itself. Intention constitutes an action as an action; normativity is the basis for its “moral” or technical evaluation—as when, in Michaels’ example, I intend to tell a joke but it falls flat. On Michaels’ account, our bad joke-teller succeeds in realizing his intention (to tell a joke) but fails to satisfy the social norm of funniness. The success of my intention is settled prior to any question of the social evaluation of my act. Yet the example only works if intention is thinned to the bare intention to produce an utterance, while “joke” becomes an external label whose standard of success is imposed from outside the act’s content. This introduces a covert causalism: norms act as external means for sorting or classifying behavior rather than as internal principles in light of which one intends one’s acts. If, however, “telling a joke” names the content of the intention—as it must, if intention is to be more than intending to utter words—then the concept is internally normative. To intend a joke is to be conscious of what counts as a joke within a practice, and in that sense failure to be funny is not merely an external disappointment but, in many cases, a reflection of the indeterminacy and inadequacy of the intentional content itself. The upshot is a dilemma: either intention is so thin that it cannot ground the practice-descriptions that matter for interpretation, or it is normatively thick in a way that makes “what was intended” itself dependent on social criteria. And if the content of the intention cannot be quarantined from social criteria, then what someone intended is not always transparent even to them and will partly depend on its actualization in social space. To intend to tell a joke is to intend an act whose identity is fixed by the success-conditions of joke-telling since those socially sanctioned criteria determine the content of what it is I am trying to do.

Normative standards must thus be taken to supply an internal criterion for failure, if I am to intend anything determinate at all. On Michaels’ picture, failure in action is at best epiphenomenal, a secondary moral or technical consideration, when I am incidentally subjected to evaluation by others in accordance with retrospectively articulated normative criteria. But the situation is really even worse than that: failure becomes altogether unintelligible since to act is simply to do what one intended, full stop. And if I can never fail to do what I intend to—except accidentally, in cases where, say, an external force prevents my exercise of my will—then in what sense am I responsible for my action? If I can never go wrong because I always do what I intend, then I can also never go right since “rightness” only makes sense against the backdrop of possible “wrongness.” Action becomes indistinguishable from mere reliable behavior and causal regularity, whereas what is supposed to distinguish an action from an event is the answerability of the agent to her conception of what she is trying to do. To say that normative standards are constitutive of intention is not to say, therefore, that they impose success conditions from the outside, but that they belong to the identity conditions of action itself. Intentionalism is a dead end because it entails the obliteration of intention.

If this is right, then Michaels’ rejection of method will also need to be reconsidered. If reading is an action and not a mere event—and if actions are intelligible only under success and failure descriptions—then reading is minimally answerable to a norm internal to it. That norm is intentionality. Yes, intention is constitutive of the object of any possible reading; yes, there is no reading that is not keyed to intention; but it does not follow that all intentional readings are equally adequate. One can read intentionally well or poorly. To read poorly is not to fail to read for intention but to fail to read self-consistently—that is, to read without taking oneself to be answerable to the task of recovering intention. This higher-order self-knowledge is not an optional add-on to interpretation; it has consequences for what we believe, how we act, and how we read.

Historically, interpretive practices have become more adequate not merely because empirical techniques have improved but because we have come to better understand what it is to understand. The difference between interpreting rainstorms as tears of the gods and interpreting them as the effects of meteorological laws is not only a matter of observational refinement (there is no “discovering” that the gods are not shedding tears); it is also a matter of becoming adequate to the form of knowledge one is always exercising. Which requires in this instance knowledge of our knowledge of nature as knowledge of, for example, mechanical laws. What changes, in other words, is not just what is known but what it is to know. Where Sophocles could claim about normativity that “not now and yesterday, but forever / It lives, and nobody knows from whence it appeared,” modernity comes to recognize that no norm exists that is not instituted and sustained by historically self-making rational agents.4 The political stakes of such self-knowledge are high. To understand actions not as dictated by the gods or as the blind effects of economic laws but rather as oriented by our own ends (as “intentional”) is to become adequate to the rational agency one already exercises. Indeed, it is such achieved self-knowledge that, from Marx to Lukács, is thought to open up a new horizon for collective change.

“Against Theory” assumes that the only alternative to the incoherent theoretical divorce of meaning from intention is a quietist retreat from methodological debate. But put in a slogan, one can’t be “against” anything without at least implicitly being for something else. While it is right that the identity of meaning and intention is “analytic” and so not subject to possible challenge, it is wrong to think that self-consciousness of such an a priori constraint is practically and theoretically inconsequential. The point, then, is not to deny that there are “transcendental” conditions for reading at all but to insist that attentiveness to what those conditions are necessarily bears on the readings themselves.5 The normative dimension is not exterior to the constitutive or transcendental; it is demanded by it. A practice that refuses to be conscious of its own conditions of possibility does not achieve theoretical neutrality but lapses into contradiction, performing acts of reading that undermine their own intelligibility as readings.

This self-consistent method of reading is what I referred to earlier as readerly self-satisfaction. Take one of the key examples of inconsistent reading discussed in True Materialism: Paul de Man’s interpretation of The Triumph of Life. De Man claims that Shelley’s poem allegorizes the inevitability of misprision—the imposition of meaning on fundamentally meaningless signs. Yet this reading is incoherent. For the poem to be the allegory de Man claims it is, it must be taken as intentionally constructed to that end; otherwise, the interpretation becomes arbitrary and unjustifiable, failing to qualify as a reading at all. But the problem is not just methodological incoherence; de Man’s “method” mars the actual reading. An interpretation that knows in advance that all meaning will collapse cannot register, say, the “root-like” Rousseau’s particular injuries and hesitations, which are flattened into allegorical tokens of misprision. A true intentionalism, by contrast, does not merely permit but demands that the determinacy and specificity of the poem’s figures emerge since what is at issue is not whether the poem can bear meaning but what meaning it was meant to bear. If a poetic intention can only be the intention it is within a norm-bound historical context, then the intentional content of the disfigured Rousseau must be construed not as an abstract emblem of linguistic failure but as a historically situated figure of failed enlightenment.

II. The Dead End of Intentionalism

Now that I have established the legitimacy and indeed the necessity of theory and method, I want to use Pawel Kaczmarski’s response as an occasion to clarify the metaphysics of life I take the concept of intentionality to require. The success or failure of Kaczmarski’s critique of True Materialism hinges on one core claim:

It is perfectly possible to conceive of life—its reproduction, growth, homeostasis, et cetera—in terms of purely causal chains, that is, something that happens under a certain set of conditions rather than something that is trying to happen and can thus meaningfully succeed or fail. (NWL)

This amounts to one gigantic begged question. I’m going to ignore Kaczmarski’s neglect of the enormous body of literature, stretching back thousands of years, that contests this claim—much of which is very recent, like Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life, Robert Rosen’s Life Itself, the entire enactivist tradition, not to mention the current scholarship on life in Hegel, the debates in the philosophy of science about the “hard problem” of consciousness, and so on—and focus instead on why one cannot simply help oneself to the claim that it is “perfectly possible to conceive of life … in terms of purely causal chains.” Kaczmarski fails to clarify the kind of process at issue. Any account of life must explain why biological explanations distinguish between functioning and malfunctioning states of organisms, whereas physical explanations of inorganic systems do not. If living systems were nothing more than aggregates of matter governed by indifferent laws, no such distinction could be sustained: the withering of a plant and the rusting of iron would be describable in exactly the same terms, with no reference to dysfunction. Yet biological explanation treats the former as a failure of the organism as such, while the latter is merely a change in a material substrate. The difference is not introduced by evaluative projection but reflects the distinctive organization of living systems whose processes are intelligible only in relation to the maintenance of the whole.

The further difficulty with this position is that it cannot account for the intentional structure already operative in the most primitive forms of life. By “intentionality” I mean neither consciousness nor representation but the end-directed character of activity that is intelligible only in relation to the maintenance of the system that performs it. Mechanical systems are themselves reciprocally causal and even temporarily self-sustaining, but their persistence is explanatorily fragile: nothing internal to the system determines which states count as success or failure, and their stability depends on narrowly constrained external conditions. Living systems differ in kind. In cellular and vegetative organisms, the activities of the parts are intelligible only as contributing to the continued existence of the whole. In this minimal but decisive sense, the parts of a living system already “intend” the well-functioning of the organism.6 This does not commit us to panpsychism since no appeal is made (or needed) to experience or representation. It shows instead that intentionality, understood as internal end-directedness, is a condition of life itself—and thus cannot be confined to the domain of socially articulated meaning.

The irreducibility of life to mechanical description calls into question Kaczmarski’s Anscombean intentionalism. As Kaczmarski writes, “Whatever I do, it can always be accounted for both in causal terms (the physical and chemical reactions in my muscles, my hand pushing against the air resistance and force of gravity), as well as in the form of a totality bound together by a purpose—that is, intention (me raising my hand)” (NWL). The problem with this account is that in the transition from one type of description to the other, the object of the description vanishes.7 The mistake is to think that there is a highest common factor between the two cases, the same series of physical events. But the mechanical description of Kaczmarski raising his hand must abstract away from the intentional form that individuates the event as the physical event it is. The basic point is that for the happening in question to so much as be that happening, it must be governed by a final cause, which constitutes not an additional mental cause that sets the series in motion but the principle that unifies the series into a whole. There is an internal norm guiding each step—I lift my hand from the table; I flex my elbow to a right angle; I raise and straighten my arm to make my hand visible; and so on. (Perhaps out of nervousness, I do not straighten my arm and instead allow my hand to be hidden within a sea of hands; perhaps I fail to realize my own intention—because I do not, in truth, have anything to add.) In other words, intentionality is not a neutral “description” under which the series can be subsumed but the constitutive principle that allows it to be—and be knowable as—a physical series at all.

It is not only the action that disappears in the mechanical description. More fundamentally, the actor herself is dissolved. The question Kaczmarski’s dualist approach cannot answer is not how intentional descriptions redescribe bodily movements but how human bodies can so much as constitute bearers of intentions at all. If a mechanical description of human life were merely incomplete from the intentionalist standpoint—as Kaczmarski insists—but fully adequate as a description of our lives themselves, then intentional description would be optional in principle, a dispensable overlay on a self-sufficient physical story. On that picture, normativity could only ever be an add-on, never something internally grounded in the form of life it purports to describe. It is ironic, then, that Kaczmarski describes normativity in True Materialism as “materializing out of thin air, while forms and purposes float freely without anyone having established them” (NWL). It is rather intentionalism that renders normativity, purpose, and form alchemical—gold transmuted from nothing—since they are granted no intrinsic relation to nature, life, or human embodiment. Indeed, ends divorced from embodied life are dead ends; they cannot intelligibly be ends at all.

The ordinary-language assumption that such metaphysical questions are resolved as soon as I raise my hand in a classroom or hug a friend when he tells me she has finally left him is given the lie by its own tacit metaphysics: a picture of reality as comprising two independent orders, one mechanical and complete in itself, the other normative and merely supervenient upon it. This is not a neutral description of our world, but a substantive—and historically specific—way of carving it up. By ordinary language’s own lights, moreover, the modern historical situation in which we experience ourselves as estranged from our own bodies, subject to economic mechanisms we do not control, generates a justified skepticism about the intentionality of our own bodily acts. Philosophical questioning concerning our purported “amphibian” nature thus does not arise in abstraction from ordinary life but from within it.8 The point is that for our bodies to be the living bodies they are, they must be internally organized such that they already constitute the potentiality for rational action.

To see how this is supposed to work, consider Kaczmarski’s claim that, to the extent that the parts of an organism are purposive, it is because we ascribe utility to those parts’ mechanical effects:

Glaucoma may cause an eye to be unable to satisfy its function, but it is the function desired and imposed by its owner (who presumably intends to use their eye to see things). No notion of natural, biological form is necessary; either intention is present (and calls for interpretation), or it is not (and a causal account is all that is needed). (NWL)

This claim presupposes a separation between the agent and the activity of seeing that cannot be sustained. It treats the eye as an instrument whose function is externally imposed by an independent subject who happens to “own” it, as though the human agent could first exist and only subsequently decide to make use of vision. But this reverses the order of explanation. I am not an agent who contingently employs an eye in order to see; I am a seeing being, and the eye is the organic expression of that activity.

The eye is therefore not a neutral piece of matter awaiting functionalization by intention but an organic member whose existence—its parts, its organization, the kind of matter it is made of—is intelligible only in relation to the perceptual activity it realizes. The purpose of vision does not arise from an external act of intending but explains what makes this bit of matter an eye at all. One might think that this commits us to some external “designer,” who fashioned the eye so that we might see. But this inference rests on a false dilemma. It assumes that purposiveness must either be imposed from without or else float free of all determination. What it neglects is the possibility—and actuality—of internal purposiveness: a form of organization in which the end explains the parts because it is realized through them.

Intentionalism itself must presuppose this structure. For I can intend to do this or that only on the basis of ends that are already internally mine, not because they have been externally assigned to me by a designer. To invoke design in order to explain purposiveness therefore explains nothing; it merely displaces the problem. The appeal to a designer presupposes precisely the kind of end-directed unity it purports to ground—since any such designer must himself bear an internally purposive structure. To say that glaucoma frustrates the eye’s function is thus not to appeal to a use imposed by an owner but to register a privation in an organ whose form is defined by its role within a living whole.

The intentionality of human activity is formally distinctive. For example, in seeing a chair, I actualize my perceptual power of vision only by realizing my power of reason: I am sensitive to the warrants, shareable with others, for taking the object in my visual field as I do. I see not just something good for reclining given my species-specific ends but specifically a chair, in virtue of the concepts guiding and making possible my perception.

What this shows is not merely that the human eye and its neural organization are compatible with rational seeing but that they represent a higher and fuller actualization of the self-determining character already implicit in the most primitive unicellular organism. Human perceptual organs are not devices that first register stimuli and only subsequently receive conceptual interpretation; they are living powers whose internal organization is such that perceptual activity is inseparable from rational determination. In seeing a chair as a chair, the organism does not merely respond to environmental features but determines itself in relation to them under concepts it can acknowledge as reasons. The “betterness” of human vision, in this sense, is not a matter of efficiency or complexity but of form: it is the most articulated realization of the living organism’s capacity to relate to the world through norms it can itself recognize and sustain. The intentionality of human activity is therefore not imposed on an otherwise self-sufficient biological substrate but is the culmination of life’s own movement toward self-determination. Only the concept of life, understood as internally purposive and progressively self-articulating, can explain how intentionality can be embodied at all, rather than appearing as an inexplicable addition to nature.

Kaczmarski accuses me of courting vitalism and object-oriented ontology by ascribing purposiveness to organic life. But, in fact, my position rules out such views as incoherent. The agency that Bruno Latour and others impute to inanimate entities rests on a category mistake: it conflates the efficient-causal powers of things—such as the power of heat to make water boil—with the final-causal power distinctive of living beings, namely the capacity to act in light of internal ends. Organic purposiveness, as I understand it, does not blur the distinction between life and nonlife; it presupposes it. Precisely because organisms are internally end-directed, they must confront an inanimate world governed by mechanical and chemical forces—forces they must continually resist if they are to maintain themselves as living. If everything were agential, nothing could genuinely count as acting since responsibility would be indistinguishable from mechanical reactivity, norms from causal laws. Far from opening the door to Latourian “actants,” True Materialism closes it decisively by insisting that intentionality is intelligible only as the internal purposiveness of organic life.

Finally, it is worth considering Kaczmarski’s charge that, where literary criticism is concerned, this is all beside the point. Kaczmarski sociologizes my approach in True Materialism, arguing that the book’s metaphysical apparatus is irrelevant to the “materialist” literary readings and is instead an exercise in academic self-aggrandizement meant to attract acolytes and ensure its salability in the marketplace of literary theory. Kaczmarski is forced down the blind alley of ad hominem and sociological diagnosis because he insists that the problem of dualism haunting his own approach is actually not a problem but “just so,” the way things are. As I have argued, dualism is not a problem simply because Hegel has a preference for tripartition and I happen to be a card-carrying Hegelian; dualism is a problem because it cannot coherently account for the relation between its own conceptual components—in this case, between the space of nature and the space of intention.

The metaphysics of rational life that True Materialism pursues is meant, among other things, to overcome the standard base-superstructure opposition at the heart of Marxism (and Kaczmarski’s own view) and to thereby show how a true or self-consistent materialist criticism is so much as possible at all. What would make such criticism “self-consistent” is that it could treat artworks as artworks (and so actually amount to criticism of art) while attending just thereby to their role in our material reproduction. By contrast, Kaczmarski insists that we can neatly separate “causes” and “meanings” in a way that tracks the division between the economic base and the ideological superstructure.9 This is to say that we can either describe a work in terms of the economic causes that produced it or describe it in terms of the meaning it embodies in virtue of an artist’s intentional act. But as I argued in the case of hand-raising and living systems above, we would lose the phenomenon: the economic description would abstract away from everything that makes art art, rendering materialist criticism impossible.

On my account in True Materialism, I argue that the autonomy of art lies not merely in its sloughing off of external ends but in its fulfillment of its internal end. I follow Hegel in conceiving of the end of art as an irreducibly aesthetic form of historical self-knowledge of our freedom—a form of knowledge that cannot be achieved outside the works in which it is embodied. This is to say that art is not just a means to the external end of understanding ourselves; it in itself is that end of self-knowing. And to the extent that we cannot act at all in the absence of a minimal awareness of what we are doing and why, art is thus essential to our collective historical enterprise.

If, as I have argued, metabolism and self-reproduction in our case is dependent on our consciousness of what it is to reproduce ourselves, then art must be understood not as a “mirror” of that process or the mere negative of it but as an indispensable aspect of our self-conscious activity of sustaining it. And entitlement to this claim precisely requires a metaphysical account of how bodies like ours can so much as be bearers of intentions at all—how our productive, metabolic activity is only intelligible as reason-responsive and normative. The upshot for me is that autonomous art is not merely a mode of resistance to commodification (“the market”)—the view Kaczmarski mistakenly ascribes to me—but a way of working out and coming to know that the freedom realized through the production and exchange of commodities is self-contradictory, a “disfigured” freedom.10 It is indeed through the narration of K’s unending trial and Hans Castorp’s Bildung that we partly make ourselves into agents of possible change by taking ourselves to be such agents. The judgment of the modernist novel is that we must understand ourselves as withering in mutually enforced solitude; it thereby tasks us with actualizing ourselves as the rationally intentional animals we always already are.