Lecture 05: Interpretation and Bullshit

Lecture 5:
Interpretation and
Bullshit
PATRICK MOONEY, M.A.
ENGLISH 10, SUMMER SESSION A
29 JUNE 2105

Some interpretive problems
“literature involves both properties of language and a
special kind of attention to language.” (Culler 56)
●
By this, Culler means to suggest that for something to
count as “literature,” it needs to both
– be (socially) designated as “literature” (we must pay “a
special kind of attention to [its] language”),
– use language in ways that support this additional
attentiveness and make them “pay off.”
●
We’ll read Culler in more detail on this question in week
6.

What is “meaning”?
“So, we have the meaning of a word and the meaning
or provocations of a text; then, in between, there’s
what we might call the meaning of an utterance: the
meaning of the act of uttering these words in
particular circumstances. What act is this utterance
performing: is it warning or admitting, lamenting or
boasting, for example?” (57)
“We have different kinds of meaning, but one thing we
can say in general is that meaning is based on
difference.” (57)

“A language is a system of differences. […] What makes
each element of a language what it is, what gives it its
identity, are the contrasts between it and other elements
within the system of the language.” (58)
“For Saussure, a language is a system of signs and the key
fact is what he calls ‘the arbitrary nature of the linguistic
sign.’ This means two things. First, the sign (for instance, a
word) is a combination of a form (the ‘signifier’) and a
meaning (the ‘signified’), and the relation between form and
meaning is based on convention, not natural resemblance.”
(58)
“A language, Saussure insists, is not a ‘nomenclature’ that
provides its own names for categories that exist outside of
language.” (59)

“The linguistic code is a theory of the world.” (60)
“Language is not a ‘nomenclature’ that provides labels for
pre-existing categories; it generates its own categories.
But speakers and readers can be brought to see through
and around the settings of their language, so as to see a
different reality. Works of literature explore the settings or
categories of habitual ways of thinking and frequently
attempt to bend or reshape them, showing us how to think
something that our language had not previously
anticipated, forcing us to attend to the categories through
which we unthinkingly view the world. Language is thus
both the concrete manifestation of ideology—the
categories in which speakers are authorized to think—and
the site of its questioning or undoing.” (60-61)

Hermeneutics and poetics
“Poetics starts with attested meanings or effects and asks
how they are achieved. (What makes this passage in a
novel seem ironic? What makes us sympathize with this
particular character? Why is the ending of this poem
ambiguous?” (62)
“Hermeneutics […] starts with texts and asks what they
mean, seeking to discover new and better interpretations.
Hermeneutic models come from the fields of law and
religion, where people seek to interpret and authoritative
legal or sacred text in order to decide how to act.” (62)

“The ‘about’ game”
“interpretation may ultimately involved playing the
‘about’ game: ‘so, what is this work really about?’ This
question is not prompted by the obscurity of a text; it is
even more appropriate for simple texts than for wickedly
complex ones. In this game, the answer must meet
certain conditions: it cannot be obvious, for instance; it
must be speculative. […] What are commonly seen as
‘schools of literary criticism or theoretical ‘approaches’ to
literature are, form the point of view of hermeneutics,
dispositions to give particular kinds of answers to the
question of what a work is really ‘about.’” (65)

Some positions
on truth
in The
Children’s Hour
Let’s take a look at the
end of Act II, scene ii (pp.
46-49 in particular).
What is The Children’s
Hour “about”?

“To articulate, more or less sketchily,
the structure of its concept”
Some (quick) things Frankfurt says about bullshit:
– it’s a term sometimes used quite loosely (“a
generic term of abuse, with no specific literal
meaning”)
– There are multiple words (“humbug,” etc.) that are
more polite while being rough equivalents.
“The difference appears on the whole to have
more to do with considerations of gentility, and
certain other rhetorical parameters, than with
the strictly literal modes of significance that
concern me most.” (5)

Black’s definition of humbug
HUMBUG: deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying,
especially by pretentious word or deed, of
somebody’s own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes. (6)
– Frankfurt then gives an extensive reading and
commentary on this definition (7-18).
– Much of what Frankfurt does with this definition is
establish it as a basis for his later discussion of
bullshit throughout the essay.

●
With humbug, misrepresentation occurs not only in relation to
an actual state of affairs (as with lying), but also makes an
implicit misrepresentation about the contents of the speaker’s
state of mind.
“It is clear that what makes Fourth of July oration humbug is
not fundamentally that the speaker regards his statements
as false. Rather, just as Black’s account suggests, the orator
intends these statements to convey a certain impression of
himself. He is not trying to deceive anyone concerning
American history. What he cares about is what people think
of him. He wants them to think of him as a patriot, as
someone who has deep thoughts and feelings about the
origins and the mission of our country, who appreciates the
importance of religion, who is sensitive to the greatness of
our history, whose pride in that history is combined with
humility before God, and so on.” (17-18)

What Max Black misses
“there is something more to be said about this.
However studiously and conscientiously the
bullshitter proceeds, it remains true that he is
also trying to get away with something. There is
surely in his work, as in the work of the slovenly
craftsman, some kind of laxity that resists or
eludes the demands of a disinterested ans
austere discipline.” (23)

“Now assuming that Wittgenstein does indeed regard Pascal’s
characterization of how she feels as an instance of bullshit, why does it
strike him that way? It does so, I believe, because he perceives what
Pascal says as being—roughly speaking, for now—unconnected to a
concern with the truth. Her statement is not germane to the enterprise of
describing reality. She does not even think she knows, except in the
vaguest way, how a run-over dog feels. Her description of her own feeling
is, accordingly, something that she is merely making up. She concocts it
out of whole cloth; or, if she got it from someone else, she is repeating it
quite mindlessly and without any regard for how things really are.
“It is for this mindlessness that Pascal’s Wittgenstein chides her. What
disgusts him is that Pascal is not even concerned whether her statement
is correct. […] Her statement is not ‘wrought with greatest care.’ She makes
it without bothering to take into account at all the question of its
accuracy.” (29-30, 31)
“Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even
trying.” (32)

The excremental metaphor
“Is the bullshitter by his very nature a mindless slob?
Is his product necessarily messy or unrefined? The
word shit does, to be sure, suggest this. Excrement is
not designed or crafted at all.” (21)
“Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all
informative content, so excrement is matter from
which everything nutritive has been removed.
Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of
nourishment, what remains when the vital elements
in food have been exhausted.” (43)

And so then …
“What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the
state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the
speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what
lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit
need not be false, it differs from lies in its
misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not
deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts
or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does
necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise.
His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a
certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.” (53-54)

Lecture 05: Interpretation and Bullshit

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Lecture 05: Interpretation and Bullshit