Interpretive Anarchy? Virtual/Enacted Reader and the Question of ‘Text’
Speaker(s): Johannes Junge Ruhland
Johannes Junge Ruhland is a first-year Ph.D. student in French. He earned a BA in French and Latin at the University of Geneva, and an MA in French at King’s College London. At King’s, he was the recipient of the Sévigné studentship and was awarded the Mary Bennett prize. His research at èצӰÏñ, on literatures in Old French and Old Occitan languages, explores the politics of interpretation, medieval and modern.
Abstract:The role of models of ‘text’ often goes unnoticed when dealing with textual hermeneutics. Yet enforcing one particular model, through edition or through interpretation, enacts a ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière 2004) that grants some subjects the ability to speak, while relegating others to silence or to insignificance. The question then is: What counts? or, What do we want to count? To the extent that while scripta manent, they also travel through time and space, the number of readers a text encounters is virtually unlimited. Should not every and any reader be granted the right to speak about the text? This paper takes a yes as its starting point, but it critically explores the consequences of doing so. Indeed, do we not face the risk of interpretive anarchy? Can we, then, identify a principle that regulates the text—a ‘rule’ that enacts another distribution of the sensible? What figures of the reader do emerge through this enactment? Who gets to speak, and who does not?
In medieval vernacular manuscript culture, manuscripts were the ‘texts’ readers looked at and convened around. Rancière’s ‘dissensus’ (2010) will be used as a heuristic tool to question the ‘rule’ of paradigms of ‘text’, but also to attend to interpretations that diverge from that ‘rule’. Paying attention to dissensus provides an answer to the objection that a cultural object—‘text’, manuscript—is one thing, while its interpretation is another. This is not to say that everything is interpretation, but that what is made an object of discourse is subject to a politics of interpretation. Debunking creation-oriented interpretive schemes of ‘rule’ and turning to response-oriented criticism do not identify and solve the problem, but constitute steps in bringing to the fore the ways in which subjects can be made to speak.