Moral Intent . . . and a Lie in Which We Can All Believe?

[alixtii]

I've been thinking about the wank (you know the one) and it struck me as interesting the way in which in literary analysis intent is illegitimate, but in moral analysis it's much more important. Unless you're a consequentialist or a utilitarian or one of the handful of other positions which eschew intent in moral analysis, too, but we won't go there. In general, though, I think we are okay with people making mistakes (underestimating the cultural literacy of their audience, say) and not so much with people doing things that they know are wrong. Unless you're an error theorist, in which case everyone falls into the first case, but we won't go there either.

(The most damning facts about the accused parties in the recent cases is the way in which they are reported to have acted after producing the texts, the comments they made which interpretive conventions lead us to read as to having been made in their own voices and thus cause us to construct their intent in a certain way, as being having not made a good-faith effort. I say this without firsthand knowledge. A fact can be damning without being true.)

But then it occurred to me that when we perform moral analysis we perform the same sort of Foucauldian process in constructing intent as we do when reading a text. We don't have knowledge about the actual intent of a moral agent (even if they are ourselves!) anymore than we do of an author. Only instead of an "author-function," we'd get something along the lines of a "moral-agent-function." Which would be all well and good, but with ethics aren't we much more invested in finding out what really happened (i.e., with the moral-agent-function being equivalent with the moral agent) than we are with literary analysis. Which is (I think?) because literary analysis doesn't compel us to any action that's more significant than hitting the back button (or, at most, writing a review that can wreck a career) while moral judgments lead to categorical imperatives which can literally be a matter of life and death. (Murder or self-defense? A person's life hangs in the balance! Or, you know, flaming a plagiarizer.)

In the soi-disant "real world," while we can't circumvent the theoretical limits of intent (we can't subpoena a ding an sich) we can cut through some of the practical ones--and often do, especially in extreme cases. Also, the law has protections built into that assume that when "the real truth" is obscured from us (as it inevitably is) the defendent at least is given the benefit of the doubt. (Too often the protections are circumvented, but that's paranoia for another day. Note to self: why haven't you mailed that cheque to the ACLU?)

The result isn't necessarily any closer to the truth, but it assuages our fears. We get a truth that we can swallow. We don't need a truth that is Truth, just one that we can unite behind as a community . . . a shared reality, a shared lie, in which we all can believe.

[I think I need a tag for discussing intent issues. "Author-function"? "Authorial intent"? "Intentional fallacy"? I wish I could make polls.]

Comments

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

I'm a bad pomowhateverist because not only do I privilege authorial intent more than one is supposed to these days but also a large chunk of that entry was incomprehensible to me.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

The wonderful thing about an author-function is that it allows one to basically have the same benefits one would have from privileging authorial intent without any of the theoretical downfalls. Basically, it's a game of pretending to privilege authorial intent. That way, one is still free to ignore it if one wants. It all depends on how the author-function is constructed.

Well, it's a hodgepodge of a post in the sense that it's not clear even to me who my audience is (which is ironic since one of the main issues in the inspiring wank is whether the authors involved misjudged their audience or diliberately misled them). Foucault is doing a huge amount of intellectual work here for someone who only shows up in a passing reference, and in general I'm not as clear as I maybe should be.

To some degree I'm using it as an actual journal, scribbling down my thoughts in the moment, and this is the way in which I think, making logical jumps and omitting things that I find obvious.

Which I suppose makes me a good postmodernist, but I don't take that as a compliment.

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

The wonderful thing about an author-function is that it allows one to basically have the same benefits one would have from privileging authorial intent without any of the theoretical downfalls. Basically, it's a game of pretending to privilege authorial intent. That way, one is still free to ignore it if one wants. It all depends on how the author-function is constructed.

That strikes me as first ridiculous and second a case of trying to have your cake and eat it too. Either you privilege authorial intent generally or you don't. If you privilege it selectively then you should just articulate a rationale of when it is that you privilege it. I see no intellectual integrity in merely privileging it whenever you happen to feel like it. It seems to me it would probably make the most sense to just always include authorial intent in the discussion and in each discussion explain how much you're going to privilege it and why.

[Possibly I am misunderstanding this whole "author-function" thing, as I have just about zero background in theory.]

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Hmm, let me think how to better explain. When one reads, one imagines the author communicating through the text. If the villain is a racist, you might imagine that the writer dislikes racism and wants to write a book about how evil it is. You don't know anything about the actual historical author, but you create an imaginary author in your head as you read.

Then you find out something about the actual human being who wrote the book, and realize that she was a racist. Suddenly, you see another way of reading the novel: instead of being a villain, the character is actually the tragic hero. The way you read the novel changes because the way you imagine the author (the way you construct the author-function) has changed. One is interrogating the text with a different hermeneutical lense; unsurprisingly, the meaning the text communicates will be different under these changed hermeneutical conditions.

The text hasn't changed, of course; and one reading isn't somehow "truer" than the other. The only thing which has changed is the fashion in which the text is acting as a sign.

Even though I don't privelege authorial intent, I have no problem with letting information such as in the example above inform one's reading; indeed, I think it would be ludicrous to forbid a critic from using such information in shaping a reading. Is knowledge about the culture in which the author allowed? How about knowledge of the language in which the author wrote? (Of course culture and biography are just sorts of language that are a bit more broadly defined.) One is left unable to take any knowledge at all to the interpretation of the text, which is left indecipherable.

As long as one doesn't think the resulting interpretation is somehow "better" or more pure than the one made without that information, I'm fine.

Of course, many people who privelege authorial intent essentially argue using a line of logic such as, "This is the reading the living author says that they believe they intended, and so all other readings must be wrong and Faith's last name is Lehane whether you like it or not." Which to me seems ludicrous, because of course (he says) a text can signify in ways the author never intended, and an author can create a text which fails to function in the way they intended and actually functions in ways they never intended--and do I have to point any further than As You Like It to make my point?