Presence, meaning, and interpretation

Presence, meaning, and interpretation This is an excerpt from W.T. van Peursen, “Text comparison and digital creativity. An introduction”. In idem et al. (reds.), Text comparison and digital creativity. The production of presence and meaning in digital text scholarship (pp. 1–27). Scholarly Communication 1; Leiden: Brill. ‘Traditionally textual scholarship is concerned with interpretation, the attribution of meaning. In The Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht uses the terms ‘presence’ and ‘meaning’ to refer to the role of materiality (‘physics’) and meaning (‘meta-physics’) in textual scholarship. ‘Presence’ refers to the materiality of things, to the physical aspects, to ‘what meaning cannot convey’. ‘Meaning’ refers to that which goes ‘beyond’ what is physical. It is related to metaphysics, which Gumbrecht describes as ‘an attitude that gives a higher value to the meaning of phenomena than to their material’. Gumbrecht does not reject interpretation (unlike some other authorities, see below), but his main concern is the rehabilitation of ‘presence’. He argues that Descartes’ dichotomization between ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ led to the introduction of the subject/object paradigm, in which ‘to interpret the world means to go beyond its material surface or to penetrate that surface in order to identify a meaning (i.e., something spiritual) that is supposed to lie behind or beneath it’.1 He describes this development as follows: Medieval Christian culture was centered on the collective belief in the possibility of God’s real presence among humans and in several rituals, most prominently the Mass, that were meant to constantly produce and renew such real presence. (…) In modern culture, in contrast, beginning with the Renaissance, representation prevails over the desire for real presence. Representation is not the act that makes ‘present again’, but: those cultural practices and techniques that replace through an often complex signifier (and make thus available) as ‘reference’ what is not present in space or time. (…) My innovative thesis lies in the claim that, ever since the historical moment that we call the ‘crisis of representation’, around 1800, our culture has developed a renewed longing for real presence.2 Susan Sontag (1933–2004) Although Gumbrecht sketches a long pre-history of the re-awakened interest in ‘presence’, we think that it is only since the second half of the twentieth century that the hegemony of meaning has been threatened seriously. Interpretation, the academic, analytical and intellectual activity that concerns the attribution of meaning, has come under attack. In her 1966 essay ‘Against Interpretation’3 Susan Sontag calls interpretation ‘the intellect’s revenge upon art’. The final words of her essay are: ‘in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art’. Robert Alter speaks of ‘the heresy of explanation’4 and claims that Gumbrecht, Production of presence, 26. Gumbrecht, Powers of philology, 11. 3 Cf. Gumbrecht, Production of presence, 10. 4 Alter, The Five Books of Moses, xvi. 1 2 ‘the unacknowledged heresy underlying most modern English versions of the Bible is the use of translation as a vehicle for explaining the Bible instead of representing it in another language’,5 the result being that ‘the modern English versions—especially in their treatment of Hebrew narrative prose—have placed readers at a grotesque distance from the distinctive literary experience of the Bible in its original language’.6 George speaks of the ‘Byzantine dominion of secondary and parasitic discourse over immediacy, of the critical over the creative’.7 And Gumbrecht ‘challenges the broadly institutionalized tradition according to which interpretation is the core practice, the exclusive core practice indeed, of the humanities’.8 The ‘re-awakened interest in presence’ is visible in the attention paid to texts as artefacts and the material aspects of the carriers of texts, which hardly receive any attention in traditional textual scholarship. In the field of biblical scholarship, for example, most standard works on textual criticism hardly pay any attention to miseen-page, delimitation markers, paleography, and codicology. In the last decades this situation has changed and various research groups dealing with these aspects of textual transmission have been established, such as the Pericope Research Group (focusing on unit delimitation in biblical manuscripts)9 or the COMSt Network (dealing with the interdisciplinary study of Oriental manuscripts).10 Besides the understanding of a text as text, that is, ‘as reduced to linguistic sign sequences’, there is the concept of text as document, that is, ‘as a meaning conveyed by those linguistic sequences in conjunction with layout, typeface, colour and the rest of the graphical and material appearance that the document provides’ (Dahlström; cf. also Talstra on the distinction between ‘text’ and ‘document’). Dissatisfaction with the analytical academic attribution of meaning has led to suggestions to avoid distance-creating interpretation and to strive for immediacy. However, opinions differ about what this immediacy is. For Gumbrecht it is the material, physical presence of the objects of the world. This reminds us of Walter Benjamin, who speaks of the perception of an object’s aura, that is: its unique existence in time and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) Alter, The Five Books of Moses, xix Alter, The Five Books of Moses, xvii. 7 Steiner, Real presences, 38. 8 Gumbrecht, Production of presence, 1. 9 See www.pericope.net. 10 http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/COMST. 5 6 space. For Walter, too, presence (‘Das Hier und Jetzt des Originals’) is a prerequisite of authenticity (‘Echtheit’).11 In his essay ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’), he argues that the distance or unapproachability (‘Unnahbarheit’) of a work of art cannot be overcome by mechanical reproduction because an object’s aura cannot be reproduced.12 For Steiner, however, the mystery of ‘real presence’ means having access to that which transcends the physical reality. For Alter the immediacy is achieved by the appreciation of the artistic value of the literary work, including all its ambiguities that philologists try to explain away in their quest for clarity. Some readers of the Bible justify their avoidance of the analytical interpretation and their search for direct, spiritual access to the biblical text through the centuries-old tradition of the lectio divina.13 Both Gumbrecht and Steiner advocate ‘Real Presences’. Both will agree that going to a concert where Händel’s Messiah is performed gives a better access to that work than any musicological analysis of it and that visiting the National Gallery of Berlin to see Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea gives a more direct access to this painting than reading an interpretation of it by an art historian. And since also every mechanical or digital reproduction is necessarily always only an interpretation (see below, ‘The creation of digital research objects’) we could add with Benjamin that a mechanical reproduction of a performance of the Messiah or a digital image of the Monk by the Sea also lacks presence. When, however, it comes to texts, the differences between the views of Gumbrecht and Steiner come to the front. For Gumbrecht, ‘presence’ refers to the spatial relationship to the world and its objects and hence to the material carriers of texts. In Steiner’s view the effect of the confrontation with the primary (e.g. a literary text) is twofold: It gives direct access both to the physical material, avoiding the detour of interpretation, and to that which goes beyond description and interpretation, namely the transcendental real presence. Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk’, 352: Das Hier und Jetzt des Originals macht den Begriff seiner Echtheit aus’; English translation (ed. by H. Arendt; transl. by H. Zohn, p. 220): ‘The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity’. 12 See especially the Zweite Fassung in Gesammelte Werken 1/2, 480, note 7. 13 Cf. Reedijk, Zuiver lezen. De Bijbel gelezen op de wijze van de vroegchristelijke woestijnvaders. 11