Comments on: On the Intentional Fallacy

By: Brian A. J. Salchert

Brian A. J. Salchert — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 22:51:11 +0000

Michael – “By the ghost of Frank O’Hara” I was not seeking any apology.
Heck, even though I have often done things I later wish I hadn’t,
I one day simply decided I no longer believed in apologies.
You should read some of the negative things I have written about myself.
The brain doctors I’ve conversed with about me think I’m fine; but
I see myself as one who’s a bit unhinged, a Prufrock type, and so on and so on.
The challenge is to always act in such ways that make it impossible to later feel:
Darn, I wish I hadn’t done that. Yah, easier said than done, as they say.
One poet blogger told me last year that he thought the sometimes heated
arguments in comment streams between those who care about the topic
being discussed are good events rather than bad ones, and that neither I
nor a blog owner should be bothered by such. Freedom of speech.
I don’t know. Guess I had better stop. Am sensing the ghost of Frank O
is standing behind me, and’s about to bop me.
Fear not, however, about my ceasing to comment.
Best to you,
Brian

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:28:43 +0000

Brian – Please don’t keep your thoughts to yourself, on anyone’s account. I apologize for the tone of my comments, & hope to continue reading yours. It’s a wonderful thing, to have these conversations among people who actually care about poetry & its place in the world.
Best,
mr

By: Brian A. J. Salchert

Brian A. J. Salchert — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:39:31 +0000

I read certain posts and comments
mainly because I want to learn.
So perhaps I should keep my thoughts to myself,
but here I didn’t.
Therefore, yes, thank you: everyone.

By: john

john — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:12:57 +0000

Ms. or Mr. Onward,
The distinction between “categorical intention” and “semantic intention” is indeed useful and germane. Thanks!

By: onward

onward — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 18:11:46 +0000

If anyone actually IS interested in reading in the most current debates around intention and interpretation of works of art (including poems), the book to look at is Paisley Livingston’s Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study, which usefully synthesizes recent accounts and offers its own.
You might also might take a look at Jerrold Levinson’s generally appreciative but also critical review of same, which defends the distinction (crucial for this discussion) between categorical intentions (intentions to make a particular kind of thing) and semantic ones. On Levinson’s account, categorical intentions are logically prior to semantic intentions: the categorical intention to make a poem (as opposed to a history, say) determines in advance that the meaning of the poem will not simply be identical with the meaning of its sentences, and provides directions (embedded in the history of the genre) that guide readers toward the particular ways in which non-sentential meaning are formulated and (thus) can be read.
The point here isn’t to shame people who haven’t “done the reading.” The point is that these are debates that have been conducted in systematic ways (and are ongoing), and so pointing to Barthes or Foucault is likely to be a way of confirming what we would like to think, rather than a way of thinking.

By: john

john — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 16:55:11 +0000

Michael,
if you want to converse with people who are not experts in your field, it is bad manners to upbraid them for not becoming experts in your field before conversing with you.
Your answer to Brian amounts to: Why are you talking to me when you haven’t read the same books that I have? You didn’t actually say anything intelligible or useful to him.
Do you “intend” to come off as a person with bad manners?
I don’t find the equation of intention and meaning, as presented by you, at all useful. It seems to entail a redefinition of “intention,” and your presentation of it seems internally self-contradicting. You seem to allow that some poets “intend” readers to generate their own meanings from their writings. How could the “intention” and the “meaning” then be the same? I believe you that you believe that intention and meaning are the same in this case too, but it makes no sense to me. You seem to be insisting on redefining common-coin vocabulary and putting them into specialized slots, and then getting huffy that not everybody recognizes the slots!
A lot of academics in the humanities seem to specialize in these para-neologisms. When people get huffy that the whole world hasn’t adopted their subtle, apparently nonsensical redefinitions . . . well, sir, good luck!

By: john

john — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 16:08:41 +0000

Bobby,
That Derrida quote is right on the money, and the reading — not misreading — of the Canto is terrific.
I would add in defense of your reading that Pound partially recanted the Cantos in the last finished Canto, Canto CXVI, with the phrase, “my errors and wrecks lie about me.” Earlier in the same Canto (as you know), he had mentioned, “Muss., wrecked for an error.” Echoing the same words, we can imagine that Pound perceived his error to have been Fascism (though he still admired Muss.), including anti-Semitism. He also explicitly recanted his anti-Semitism in an interview with Allen Ginsberg around the same time, which indicates that Pound may have included anti-Semitism in his own vision of his errors.
Michael,
Are you excluding the possibility of unconscious intentions in poetry? That would seem counter not only to “the rules of poetry,” but to “the rules of language”! Not to mention human behavior!

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 04:44:08 +0000

P.S. And if you want readers to interpret their poem in “their own way,” then that is your intention. And if you want your aleatory poem to make a statement of anti-intentionalism, then that’s a form of intention too. That Brian thinks his closing example actually illustrates anything about intention is indicative of how ill-read in the subject most people are. Everyone thinks up all these counterexamples, as if they prove something, without bothering to discover all the times identical counterexamples have been proposed and refuted. And that’s fine. But it’s a strange way to carry on an argument. As for Arthur’s comment that theory should be abandoned because it’s not useful to poets, I can’t imagine thinking that the study and analysis of literature matters only insofar as it is of use to poets. As if no one could be interested in it for its own sake, or as if only poets are its intended audience. Or as if only poets matter. I write poetry too, we all do. But of all the possible reasons for believing the enterprise of critical theory should be abandoned, I can’t think of many that attend less closely to what purposes the enterprise was rather nobly trying to serve.
OK, OK, I swear by the ghost of Frank O’Hara that this is my last post in this thread. Jay-Z and Michael Jordan are poor role models for the blog comment stream retiree.
Best,
mr

By: Arthur Durkee

Arthur Durkee — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 02:25:53 +0000

If you’re going to bring aleatoric procedures, or indeterminacy, into the mix, a la Cage, then it’s important to be very clear what is intended and what isn’t. The problem of intention here is about WHAT is intended, and how intention is both protected and subverted.
What Cage intends in a piece like “Indterminacy” or “Variations IV” is to remove his own taste from the process of performance and composition. (His own ego-based choices about what he likes and doesn’t like.) But this isn’t random composition, or true chance. It is also a process of allowing the surprising and unexpected (in terms of sound but also silence, and non-sonic events) into the time-frame of the composition and performance. The end result of that is to open the ears, to open the time-frame to possibilities neither planned or intended by the composer. Cage delighted in listening to performances of his work wherein he could be surprised.
Something I’ve found that almost all lit-crit writers get completely wrong about Cage, perhaps from not having read his books or actually performed his compositions, is that it isn’t really all about chance. The performer isn’t making random sounds at all. The performance events have been pre-determined, following strict rules, which are intended (yes, intention) by the composer to be followed strictly once they have been laid out.
Once the decisions are made during the process of preparing the performance, they are meant to be followed precisely and accurately. It is not really up to the performer to make changes “on the fly” in many pieces, but to follow the rules.
Cage often expressed dissatisfaction with performances wherein the performers took “chance” to mean that they could do anything they wanted to. But they misunderstood that they did not actually have complete license to do whatever they wanted—because, bluntly, the whole point was to remove personal taste from the creation of the music, including the performer’s personal taste as much as the composer. This creates a level playing field in which sonic events are as value-neutral as possible, without typical ideas of meaning and intention in play.
So, in fact, Cage’s intention in his music was NOT to remove meaning, but to allow new meaning that Cage himself had not intended, but was there to be found.

By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 22:59:56 +0000

But, Bobby, that’s clearly a misreading of the poem, no? An interesting one, but no one’s denying that creative misreadings are possible. It’s just that you can’t say that’s what the poem means; as you say, it’s “reading in the light of.”
And computer-generated poems don’t trouble the intentional thesis because there clearly has been intentionality in their programming. The programming is intentional, but of course the computer doesn’t “mean” anything by its lines: the intention was to have them generate something randomly. Likewise, MacLow’s or Cage’s aleatory practices realize poems whose interpretations are clearly derivable by intention: it’s just that, in their case, the intention was to produce a poem by chance, & they didn’t “mean” anything in particular, because they didn’t know what lines would be produced beforehand. Not “meaning” anything in particular is a form of meaning, one that you must intend.
Anyway, no fair ambushing me here. Let’s talk this over over coffee or something. Cuz now I’m really Audi, from this thread at least.
Best,
mr