“Every critic who ever reads anything is, practically speaking, dealing with the author’s intention,” writes Walter Benn Michaels in his essay partly on my 2022 book, Free Indirect, and Jensen Suther’s more recent work, True Materialism.1 This claim has been a contention of Michaels’ work ever since the 1982 publication of “Against Theory,” co-authored with Steven Knapp. Almost every critical text he has published since then contains a version of the claim, just as so many of his texts have returned to the “thought experiment” (as he calls it in The Beauty of a Social Problem) of a Wordsworth poem miraculously written on the sand by the retreating waves. That imagined scenario, according to Knapp and Michaels, dramatizes the existence of only two possibilities: either the poem is unintentioned (and so meaningless, made up of random marks that resemble words), or it is intentioned (and so meaningful) in which case “some agent capable of intentions”—either the sea or a ghost of the poet—must be responsible.2 In both cases, meaning and intention are “identical” (AT, 731).
Michaels’ claim is also at the center of the distinction he makes between my work and Suther’s. For while Suther conceives of intentionality as a “non-optional condition” of the work’s meaning, a principle that meets with Michaels’ qualified approval, Bewes’ “whole idea,” he writes, is that “postfictional” texts, or the thought of which they are capable, are not defined by any such interpretable intention. My “idea,” as he styles it, is self-defeating because if an author does not “mean us to see” something, “we cannot possibly be supposed to see it.” This tautological formulation (a work means what you are “supposed to see” when you read it) entails the following crowning assessment towards the end of his piece: “Bewes cannot succeed for a second in establishing an alternative ‘mode of reading’” based around something other than the author’s intention. According to the authors of “Against Theory,” the possibility of a choice between “alternative methods of interpreting” is an illusion (AT, 730), one that only a “theorist” would entertain, for a theorist is one who “denies the possibility of correct interpretation” (AT, 723). Theory, that is to say, is any approach that proceeds under the impression that it’s possible not to read for intention.
What does Michaels’ central claim amount to, and why has it been so important to his work and for so long? Why does he return to it again and again, and what is its basis? And does Michaels really believe it? Since he repeats the claim so often, it might seem perverse (or overly provocative) to ask this last question. Indeed, let us suppose, for the time being, that he does. But if he means it, it’s a position that he is able to hold and make his own only under specific conditions, of which more below.
Under those conditions, it is with Michaels, more than any other contemporary critic, that we associate the view that the author’s intention is the definitive element in the work’s meaning. The unmistakability of the association is important, for it is what makes Michaels’ insistence on intentionality a singular idea, one that is more creative and perhaps weirder (in a good way) than anyone has really noticed. When other critics, including Suther, come up with their own versions of the claim, they nuance their understanding in ways that Michaels does not necessarily find unacceptable. When, in his 2020 book, Autonomy, Nicholas Brown supportively glosses Knapp’s and Michaels’ concept of intention, he does so with the proviso that intention need not designate “an event in the mind of the artist.” The “immanent purposiveness” of the work itself would count.3 And who could possibly object to that? Perhaps such a concept of intention would even include the ways in which a work signals—or fails to signal—its internal tensions or the ways in which it fails to cohere ideologically, in which case, I would be on board. When Suther doubles down on the topic of intention, in opposition to Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” he does so by invoking the reader’s “responsibility” to the text (TM, 280). Michaels, fascinatingly, rejects this, for the logic of his understanding of intention is not that we “should” read for the author’s intention but rather that we cannot not do so. If intention is so capacious as to include every possible attempt to account for the “meaning” of a work, then intention begins to seem like another translation of what Hegel calls Geist—spirit or mind—an entity whose every sensuous (and even nonsensuous) appearance is sufficient to demand that we pay attention to it. Again, I would be happy to be counted among such (non-intentionalist) intentionalists.
But in that case, the following positions begin to seem not like hard-nosed empiricism but “articles of faith” for Michaels (I use this phrase to talk about my own commitments in Free Indirect, a usage Michaels quotes in his article). That is, they are “principles” of Michaels’ approach which depend on particular understandings of terms such as “subject,” “intention,” “speech,” “knowledge,” and “theory”:
For Michaels, then, there is a “good” (capacious, implicitly Hegelian) understanding of intention and a “bad” (subjectivist, Wimsatt and Beardsleyan) one. And then there is the “worst possible” picture of intention, which is what he thinks I have when I ask whether there might be something unsaid in the work of Jacques Rancière that is nevertheless operative in it. (If there were, asks Michaels, how could we possibly know it?) This understanding is the “worst possible” idea of intention because it allows for the possibility that something unspoken by a person, and even a critic, might be meaningful precisely in its unspokenness.
But in Free Indirect, I do not frame my relation to the question of intention in terms of opposition but in terms of inconsequence. Nowhere do I say that Rancière (or any other writer) “intends” something different from what my reading of him suggests. That’s not because I’m an anti-intentionalist (Michaels is right: anti-intentionalism is inherently self-contradicting). It’s because I do not recognize intention as having any priority in literary interpretation for the simple reason that intention is not one of those “inseparable” terms that Knapp and Michaels identify as responsible for the generation of a redundant field (“theory”) when they are split apart. On the contrary: intention, like desire, is eminently separable from itself; we need only read Marx, Freud, or René Girard to know that.
Thus, contrary to Michaels’ account of my work, I don’t “hope” for anything from critics such as Mark McGurl or Franco Moretti since I believe that the innovations of their work, which may have nothing to do with their overt objectives, consist in their generation of a critical register that surrenders the authority of its claims at the very moment they are asserted most strongly.
To take another, very different example, one I also mention in Free Indirect: the crucial insight of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, a theoretical essay on the American literary canon, is that the long history of Africans and African Americans in the United States is legible in works by Edgar Allan Poe or Willa Cather or Ernest Hemingway (Herman Melville is a more complicated case), “irrespective” of the intentions of these authors and of the existing critical tradition (FI, 31). “Irrespective” does not mean that intentions do not exist or that a work’s meaning is necessarily other or “opposed” to what the author intended. It means that, while intentions “no doubt” contribute to the work’s meaning (FI, 45), they do not determine it.
Similarly, the question of whether an Israeli fighter pilot’s actions amount to genocide is a relevant one to ask, irrespective of whether he or she was setting out to slaughter innocent civilians. This example is not, let me point out, a “thought experiment.” The investigative journalist Yuval Abraham reports many conversations with Israeli soldiers and pilots who, over the past two years, have participated in the shelling of residential neighborhoods in Gaza, which in some cases involved the likely death of “some 300 civilians” in order to kill a “relatively senior Hamas commander” who may have been hiding beneath one of the buildings. “The soldier conceded that the attack amounted to a massacre,” reports Abraham. “But in her view, this was not the intention; the goal was to hit the commander, who may not have even been there.”4
If this last illustration seems over-determinedly topical, let me cite another example from Free Indirect. In my account of Howards End, a real work by the author E. M. Forster, the decommissioning of what I call the “instantiation relation”—a structure of critical interpretation that presupposes something like Michaels’ notion of intention—takes place irrespective of E. M. Forster’s manifest intention to cement and embed that relation into the fabric of his work.
It is quite wearisome to have to argue this point not only since I have taken such pains to account for it in Free Indirect but because it seems to me that Michaels essentially agrees with it, or at least, he will be able to point to some codicil in his understanding of intention that will allow for it. Does Michaels really believe that Israel can reasonably use “intention” to argue that it is not committing genocide in Palestine? Of course not. Does he believe that a work of literature cannot be read for dimensions of the work that its author was not aware of, or would not have wanted us to pay attention to two hundred years later? I doubt it. Does the intention that is manifest in Forster’s Howards End comprehend both what is in the letter of the work and what may only later become apparent? Yes, in principle. Would Michaels think a Hegelian concept of spirit were disqualified because, in some part of himself—a manifest, sensuously-expressed part—Hegel intentionally excluded Africa from it?5 No, not from what I have been able to understand of Michaels’ notion of intention as an internally inseparable entity, one that transcends both intentionality and non-intentionality.
So, why has he continued to insist on a rhetoric that will perpetually open up these questions and others like it? The interesting thing about this latest essay by Michaels is that it clarifies the fact that his understanding of intention, at least in the way it has evolved, is not exactly a subjective concept. “Intentionalism is not an approach because there are no other approaches,” he writes. And this is also why, in the original “Against Theory” essay, he and Knapp state the following: “In practical terms … the stakes in the battle over intention are extremely low—in fact, they don’t exist. Hence it doesn’t matter who wins” (AT, 730). Why, then, spend four decades repeatedly returning to the fray? And why spend weeks, in 2025, debating works and fellow authors over a battle whose stakes, in 1984, seemed not to exist?
An answer suggests itself irrepressibly. What if Michaels, in some small part of himself and irrespective of what he maintains on the page, believes that this forty-year scholarly project might equally have been pursued not in the direction of an ever-expanding notion of intention but in the direction of an ever-diminishing one, a direction whose end would be its elimination altogether?
Notes
“Every critic who ever reads anything is, practically speaking, dealing with the author’s intention,” writes Walter Benn Michaels in his essay partly on my 2022 book, Free Indirect, and Jensen Suther’s more recent work, True Materialism.1 This claim has been a contention of Michaels’ work ever since the 1982 publication of “Against Theory,” co-authored with Steven Knapp. Almost every critical text he has published since then contains a version of the claim, just as so many of his texts have returned to the “thought experiment” (as he calls it in The Beauty of a Social Problem) of a Wordsworth poem miraculously written on the sand by the retreating waves. That imagined scenario, according to Knapp and Michaels, dramatizes the existence of only two possibilities: either the poem is unintentioned (and so meaningless, made up of random marks that resemble words), or it is intentioned (and so meaningful) in which case “some agent capable of intentions”—either the sea or a ghost of the poet—must be responsible.2 In both cases, meaning and intention are “identical” (AT, 731).
Michaels’ claim is also at the center of the distinction he makes between my work and Suther’s. For while Suther conceives of intentionality as a “non-optional condition” of the work’s meaning, a principle that meets with Michaels’ qualified approval, Bewes’ “whole idea,” he writes, is that “postfictional” texts, or the thought of which they are capable, are not defined by any such interpretable intention. My “idea,” as he styles it, is self-defeating because if an author does not “mean us to see” something, “we cannot possibly be supposed to see it.” This tautological formulation (a work means what you are “supposed to see” when you read it) entails the following crowning assessment towards the end of his piece: “Bewes cannot succeed for a second in establishing an alternative ‘mode of reading’” based around something other than the author’s intention. According to the authors of “Against Theory,” the possibility of a choice between “alternative methods of interpreting” is an illusion (AT, 730), one that only a “theorist” would entertain, for a theorist is one who “denies the possibility of correct interpretation” (AT, 723). Theory, that is to say, is any approach that proceeds under the impression that it’s possible not to read for intention.
What does Michaels’ central claim amount to, and why has it been so important to his work and for so long? Why does he return to it again and again, and what is its basis? And does Michaels really believe it? Since he repeats the claim so often, it might seem perverse (or overly provocative) to ask this last question. Indeed, let us suppose, for the time being, that he does. But if he means it, it’s a position that he is able to hold and make his own only under specific conditions, of which more below.
Under those conditions, it is with Michaels, more than any other contemporary critic, that we associate the view that the author’s intention is the definitive element in the work’s meaning. The unmistakability of the association is important, for it is what makes Michaels’ insistence on intentionality a singular idea, one that is more creative and perhaps weirder (in a good way) than anyone has really noticed. When other critics, including Suther, come up with their own versions of the claim, they nuance their understanding in ways that Michaels does not necessarily find unacceptable. When, in his 2020 book, Autonomy, Nicholas Brown supportively glosses Knapp’s and Michaels’ concept of intention, he does so with the proviso that intention need not designate “an event in the mind of the artist.” The “immanent purposiveness” of the work itself would count.3 And who could possibly object to that? Perhaps such a concept of intention would even include the ways in which a work signals—or fails to signal—its internal tensions or the ways in which it fails to cohere ideologically, in which case, I would be on board. When Suther doubles down on the topic of intention, in opposition to Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” he does so by invoking the reader’s “responsibility” to the text (TM, 280). Michaels, fascinatingly, rejects this, for the logic of his understanding of intention is not that we “should” read for the author’s intention but rather that we cannot not do so. If intention is so capacious as to include every possible attempt to account for the “meaning” of a work, then intention begins to seem like another translation of what Hegel calls Geist—spirit or mind—an entity whose every sensuous (and even nonsensuous) appearance is sufficient to demand that we pay attention to it. Again, I would be happy to be counted among such (non-intentionalist) intentionalists.
But in that case, the following positions begin to seem not like hard-nosed empiricism but “articles of faith” for Michaels (I use this phrase to talk about my own commitments in Free Indirect, a usage Michaels quotes in his article). That is, they are “principles” of Michaels’ approach which depend on particular understandings of terms such as “subject,” “intention,” “speech,” “knowledge,” and “theory”:
For Michaels, then, there is a “good” (capacious, implicitly Hegelian) understanding of intention and a “bad” (subjectivist, Wimsatt and Beardsleyan) one. And then there is the “worst possible” picture of intention, which is what he thinks I have when I ask whether there might be something unsaid in the work of Jacques Rancière that is nevertheless operative in it. (If there were, asks Michaels, how could we possibly know it?) This understanding is the “worst possible” idea of intention because it allows for the possibility that something unspoken by a person, and even a critic, might be meaningful precisely in its unspokenness.
But in Free Indirect, I do not frame my relation to the question of intention in terms of opposition but in terms of inconsequence. Nowhere do I say that Rancière (or any other writer) “intends” something different from what my reading of him suggests. That’s not because I’m an anti-intentionalist (Michaels is right: anti-intentionalism is inherently self-contradicting). It’s because I do not recognize intention as having any priority in literary interpretation for the simple reason that intention is not one of those “inseparable” terms that Knapp and Michaels identify as responsible for the generation of a redundant field (“theory”) when they are split apart. On the contrary: intention, like desire, is eminently separable from itself; we need only read Marx, Freud, or René Girard to know that.
Thus, contrary to Michaels’ account of my work, I don’t “hope” for anything from critics such as Mark McGurl or Franco Moretti since I believe that the innovations of their work, which may have nothing to do with their overt objectives, consist in their generation of a critical register that surrenders the authority of its claims at the very moment they are asserted most strongly.
To take another, very different example, one I also mention in Free Indirect: the crucial insight of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, a theoretical essay on the American literary canon, is that the long history of Africans and African Americans in the United States is legible in works by Edgar Allan Poe or Willa Cather or Ernest Hemingway (Herman Melville is a more complicated case), “irrespective” of the intentions of these authors and of the existing critical tradition (FI, 31). “Irrespective” does not mean that intentions do not exist or that a work’s meaning is necessarily other or “opposed” to what the author intended. It means that, while intentions “no doubt” contribute to the work’s meaning (FI, 45), they do not determine it.
Similarly, the question of whether an Israeli fighter pilot’s actions amount to genocide is a relevant one to ask, irrespective of whether he or she was setting out to slaughter innocent civilians. This example is not, let me point out, a “thought experiment.” The investigative journalist Yuval Abraham reports many conversations with Israeli soldiers and pilots who, over the past two years, have participated in the shelling of residential neighborhoods in Gaza, which in some cases involved the likely death of “some 300 civilians” in order to kill a “relatively senior Hamas commander” who may have been hiding beneath one of the buildings. “The soldier conceded that the attack amounted to a massacre,” reports Abraham. “But in her view, this was not the intention; the goal was to hit the commander, who may not have even been there.”4
If this last illustration seems over-determinedly topical, let me cite another example from Free Indirect. In my account of Howards End, a real work by the author E. M. Forster, the decommissioning of what I call the “instantiation relation”—a structure of critical interpretation that presupposes something like Michaels’ notion of intention—takes place irrespective of E. M. Forster’s manifest intention to cement and embed that relation into the fabric of his work.
It is quite wearisome to have to argue this point not only since I have taken such pains to account for it in Free Indirect but because it seems to me that Michaels essentially agrees with it, or at least, he will be able to point to some codicil in his understanding of intention that will allow for it. Does Michaels really believe that Israel can reasonably use “intention” to argue that it is not committing genocide in Palestine? Of course not. Does he believe that a work of literature cannot be read for dimensions of the work that its author was not aware of, or would not have wanted us to pay attention to two hundred years later? I doubt it. Does the intention that is manifest in Forster’s Howards End comprehend both what is in the letter of the work and what may only later become apparent? Yes, in principle. Would Michaels think a Hegelian concept of spirit were disqualified because, in some part of himself—a manifest, sensuously-expressed part—Hegel intentionally excluded Africa from it?5 No, not from what I have been able to understand of Michaels’ notion of intention as an internally inseparable entity, one that transcends both intentionality and non-intentionality.
So, why has he continued to insist on a rhetoric that will perpetually open up these questions and others like it? The interesting thing about this latest essay by Michaels is that it clarifies the fact that his understanding of intention, at least in the way it has evolved, is not exactly a subjective concept. “Intentionalism is not an approach because there are no other approaches,” he writes. And this is also why, in the original “Against Theory” essay, he and Knapp state the following: “In practical terms … the stakes in the battle over intention are extremely low—in fact, they don’t exist. Hence it doesn’t matter who wins” (AT, 730). Why, then, spend four decades repeatedly returning to the fray? And why spend weeks, in 2025, debating works and fellow authors over a battle whose stakes, in 1984, seemed not to exist?
An answer suggests itself irrepressibly. What if Michaels, in some small part of himself and irrespective of what he maintains on the page, believes that this forty-year scholarly project might equally have been pursued not in the direction of an ever-expanding notion of intention but in the direction of an ever-diminishing one, a direction whose end would be its elimination altogether?
Notes