Intention and Interpretation
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INTENTION AND INTERPRETATION nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities 6 affiliated with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2014 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668 EDITORIAL BOARD Bridget Alsdorf Ruth Leys James Welling Jennifer Ashton Walter Benn Michaels Todd Cronan Charles Palermo Lisa Chinn, editorial assistant Rachael DeLue Robert Pippin Michael Fried Adolph Reed, Jr. Oren Izenberg Victoria H.F. Scott Brian Kane Kenneth Warren SUBMISSIONS ARTICLES: SUBMISSION PROCEDURE Please direct all Letters to the Editors, Comments on Articles and Posts, Questions about Submissions to [email protected]. Potential contributors should send submissions electronically via nonsite.submishmash.com/Submit. Applicants for the B-Side Modernism/Danowski Library Fellowship should consult the full proposal guidelines before submitting their applications directly to the nonsite.org submission manager. 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ISSN 2164-1668. 2 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #6: INTENTION AND INTERPRETATION (SUMMER 2012) ISSUE #6:INTENTION AND INTERPRETATION SUMMER 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS ISSUE DESCRIPTION Intention and Interpretation . 8 Charles Palermo ARTICLES Introduction: Intention and Interpretation . 12 Charles Palermo Intentionality and Art Historical Methodology: A Case Study . 16 Thierry de Duve Intention at the College Art Association (2010) . 36 Walter Benn Michaels Intention, Interpretation, and the Balance of Theory . 44 Stephen Melville Best Intentions . 56 M.D. Garral Intentionalism and Texts with Too Many Authors . 76 Samuel Wheeler III Re-Turning the Hermeneutic Circle . 92 David Summers FEATURES Engendering Pliage: Simon Hantaï’s Meuns . 104 Molly Warnock REVIEWS 4 We are all proletarians . 152 Todd Cronan 5 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #6: INTENTION AND INTERPRETATION (SUMMER 2012) ISSUE DESCRIPTION ISSUE DESCRIPTION 6 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #6: INTENTION AND INTERPRETATION (SUMMER 2012) ISSUE DESCRIPTION INTENTION AND INTERPRETATION CHARLES PALERMO This issue is loosely the result of a double session on Intention and Interpretation at the College Art Association meeting of February 2010. (The original call for papers appears below.) The line-up of speakers was somewhat different from the authors of this special issue, but these remarks describe the developments to which both sets of papers address themselves. Thierry de Duve, Michael Garral, Stephen Melville, and Walter Benn Michaels were all participants in the sessions and contributed arguments substantially like those they present here. David Summers was scheduled to take part, but was unable to attend the gathering in 2010. Samuel Wheeler contributes an entirely new piece on the topic. Also in this issue, Molly Warnock on the pliages of Simon Hantaï. Intention and Interpretation Session chairs: Charles Palermo and Todd Cronan Is the meaning of a work of art just exactly the intention of its maker or makers? Does anyone (still) believe that? Yes. In fact, it has been argued that everyone does, but no one wants to admit it. Further, since the question will determine not just how you go about interpreting works of art, but what you think a work of art is and what you think an interpretation 8 CHARLES PALERMO - INTENTION AND INTERPRETATION is, this question is fundamental to the practice of all art historians. So, if you don’t know how you’d answer the question, you don’t know what an art historian does. This session invites strong statements and arguments for and against intentionalism, and will look for their consequences. Papers should articulate a stance on intentionalism and defend it with a challenging example or an argument. Charles Palermo's two current research projects are an account of the importance of authority in the work of Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire before cubism and inheritance as a metaphor for understanding in and around photography, from Peter Henry Emerson to Douglas Gordon. His Fixed Ecstasy: Joan Miro in the 1920s (2008) appeared in Penn State University Press' Refiguring Modernism series. He has spoken and published on Cézanne, cubism, Michel Leiris, Picasso, Apollinaire, Eugène Carrière, P.H. Emerson, Eugene and Aileen Smith, and James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities affiliated with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2014 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668. 9 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #6: INTENTION AND INTERPRETATION (SUMMER 2012) ARTICLES ARTICLES 10 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #6: INTENTION AND INTERPRETATION (SUMMER 2012) ARTICLES INTRODUCTION: INTENTION AND INTERPRETATION CHARLES PALERMO The following is roughly the text of the remarks I read to introduce the double session on Intention and Interpretation. The line-up of speakers was somewhat different from the authors of this special issue of nonsite.org, but these remarks describe the developments to which both sets of papers address themselves. Thierry de Duve, Michael Garral, Stephen Melville, and Walter Benn Michaels were all participants in the sessions and contributed arguments substantially like those they present here. David Summers was scheduled to take part, but was unable to attend the gathering in 2010. It is on that account a special pleasure to be able to present those remarks now. Anyone who is familiar with them will recognize in the call for participation the echo of a pair of essays by Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp titled “Against Theory” and “Against Theory 2,” the first of which was originally published in Critical Inquiry in 1982. 1 Todd Cronan and I chose to frame the call in these terms both because we are sympathetic to the aims and the argument of “Against Theory,” but, even more to the point, because putting the problem in such terms makes clear how unavoidable the debate about intentionalism is. It’s not an issue one may take a pass on. 12 CHARLES PALERMO - INTRODUCTION: INTENTION AND INTERPRETATION That is not to say, however, that it does not have a history, or that certain moments have not felt its force more acutely than others. A seminal event in the modern history of debate over intentionalism was the publication of W.K. Wimsatt’s and Monroe Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” in 1946. 2 It is generally taken to articulate a distinguishing belief of the New Criticism in the irrelevance to criticism of external evidence, such as evidence about an author’s life, that might support an argument that the work of art meant one thing or another because the author intended one thing or another. Later, Roland Barthes’s 1967 “Death of the Author,” Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” and works of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man in the 1960s and ’70s all questioned intentionalism, generally disputing that a real, historical author’s internal states can or should determine, whether via the agency of a critic or not, the meaning of a text. 3 If one adds to these contributions developments in structuralism, semiotics, reader-response theory