Can we grasp an author's meaning?

[Robert Charleston <rc3673@student.open.ac.uk>]

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OK,

I am a complete noob at Derrida, but I'm interested in the critique of 
authorial intent in Andy's provocation. As I understand it (please let me 
know where the inevitable errors of understanding are in this - as I said 
I'm new to the topic), the Derridean argument for not being able to grasp 
the meaning of a text goes something like:

1. Context is necessary to understand what an author meant.
2. We only have the author's text, not the context.
3. Therefore the author's meaning cannot be known.

Premise 1 is due to 'differance'. This is the idea that one word should 
not be privileged over another when working out meaning. So the text 
cannot be considered separately from the context (the other words in which 
it occurs?).

Premise 2 is presumably justified by something like:

A. Language is endlessly reinterpretable.
B. Therefore there is always a multiplicity of re-interpretations
C. Therefore it is impossible for the author to determine the meaning of a 
text.
D. This is why there is always a context outside of the text that is part 
of the text's meaning.

So this seems, validly (though that doesn't seem to be a concept Derrida 
would go for, as it is bivalent - something is valid or not, no questions) 
to imply that we cannot just be reading what the author meant when we read 
a text. So far, so reader response theory. But I think there may be an 
objection to allowing the active interpretative role of the reader to deny 
us access to the author's meaning.

I may not know exactly what Locke was writing about in his Essay, but 
there is a multiplicity of things that he *cannot* have been writing 
about. This is partly because, no matter how you follow Lewis Carroll's 
Humpty Dumpty and change the meanings of those words, the relation between 
them cannot support certain interpretations. For instance the Essay 
*cannot* be a cake recipe or a road sign of any description or detail. Its 
structure denies these functions amongst any set of words (context). It is 
also partly because certain words were simply not available to Locke as 
they had not emerged in his language yet, (e.g. space rocket, information 
technology). So there are plenty of interpretations that can be ruled out 
from the multiplicity mentioned in B. The more you think about what the 
text 'The Essay' cannot be about, the more things you find it cannot in 
any context be about. These can be crossed off the list of possible 
interpretations. So the author's meaning can at least be found to be one 
of a fairly narrow set of interpretations, given enough interpretative 
work. This is pretty close to finding authorial intent shining through, 
and a lot different from the open-ended sense of interpretative 
possibility that seems to lie behind Derridean denial of access to 
authorially intended meaning.

So it seems that there is no reason to accept, a priori, conclusion 3. We 
might be able to narow things down closely enough to get to an 
interpretation that meets the author's. We may not. It is not clearly 
ruled out, and that is enough to question the theory that follows.

Hmm, difficult stuff. What does everyone reckon?

Rab.


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