Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
B a g w e l l : At the lecture you gave (Is T here a Fish in This Text?),1 I asked
you about Stanley Fish because I and oth er people had assumed you would
talk about Fish.
SCHOLES:
BAGWELL: T o d r a w u s i n I b e lie v e y o u sa id .
SCHOLES:
13
I still find the distinction useful, even though one cant make an absolute
categorical distinction betw een the two. I find all efforts to dam n literary
approaches that involve generic o r categorical criticisms misguided because
they insist that the categories be logically w atertight and o f course they can
then show that they are not. The fact is that the serious genre critics have
always know n that they were dealing with what W ittgenstein called family
resem blances rath er than logically exclusive categories. Now if Fish wants
to say that there is no difference betw een an ironic statem ent and a straight
forw ard statem ent, then I think h e d be in difficulty. I think the whole history
o f the study o f language and rhetoric has too m uch o f a stake in a difference
o f that kind to ju st throw it out the window. I think our ordinary acts o f
interpretation have too m uch o f a stake in that difference. We need to know
when som eone is talking to us w hether theyre joking or not, or we feel that
we need to know.
B a g w e l l : Fish would say that there is no explicit meaning: the explicit one
is the one you are taking as irony. But we do that all the time. We juggle
two things: we u nderstand how som ething m ight have been meant, and then
we see how it really seems to have been m eant.
S c h o l e s : T h ats the way I think it works, and a lot o f the evidence for that
would lie in the fact that irony is frequently m isinterpretedthat people do
interpret straightforwardly and sometimes with serious consequences. T heres
a brilliant essay by Barbara Jo h n so n in her new book The Critical Difference,
an essay on Billy Budd, in which she suggests that the whole structure o f Billy
Budd is based on Budd and Claggart having two different interpretive m eth
ods that Billy Budd essentially reads everything straight, thinks that the
signifier and the signified are always motivated, always tightly tied togeth
e r and that Claggart interprets everything ironically. S o that Budd reads
Claggart as m eaning w hat he says, as intelligible, and Claggart reads Budd
as the total opposite o f w hat he is supposed to be: because Budd looks
beautiful, Claggart reads him as villainous and the opposition betw een them
is n o t simply betw een good and evil, but, you m ight say, the opposition
betw een m otivated language and arbitrary language, betw een two theories
o f interpretation.
Bagw ell:
14
codes that enable meaning. Youre the director o f the program in Semiotic
Studies at Brown University. W hy a program in that?
SCHOLES: It d idnt arise in a progam m atic way. It w asnt the case that, aha,
he re s semiotics: how can we publicize it, how can we dramatize it, how can
we spread the gospel o f semiotics. It really came about in another way,
trying to devise a program that answ ered certain student needs and student
desires for particular kinds o f study. We then tried to find a nam e for the
program that answered those needs. The needs are present in lots o f places.
O ur way o f responding to them is relatively unusual, perhaps even unique.
The needs are needs for serious ways to come to term s with com tem porary
media, with film, with video, with various mass and pop forms o f discourse.
T h eres a need to understand how one is situated am ong all these things.
T here is a need to penetrate through the messages that come from all
sidesfrom the media, from politicians, from institutions o f all kinds. T h eres
a need for a way to understand w hats happening to us in these institutions.
Semiotics is a reasonably appropriate term for taking an interest in all o f
these things.
Every institution has attached to it either explicitly or implicitly a code
o f behavior which manifests itself in the utterances that it emits or that the
people in it emit. One can study institutional behavior through texts as well
as through observing individual hum an behavior. W hat we do in the sem io
tics program is to look at texts and try to generate a theory o f how these
texts com m unicate and also how the people who utter texts, emit texts, have
themselves been shaped by the institutions which enable them to utter those
texts. The English language is one large-scale institution, but with all sorts
o f small-scale institutionscom m unities o f interpreters, all kinds o f social
groups. T heres a medical com m unity which has its own kinds o f texts,
th eres a literary-critical com m unity, th eres a baseball community, and so
on. To be a baseball fan is to be constituted in a particular way by a
particular culture, and in som e sense to desire to reduce the whole thing to
num bers if possible. The statistical dim ension o f baseball fandom is one o f
the rem arkable features o f its code. I think to a greater degree that in any
other sport that I know, baseball fans like num bers. One m ight ask why that
is, what it does to baseball fans, and w hat it does to people who grow up
thinking that you can reduce ultim ately the value o f an individual to a set
o f num bersprovided you have enough num bers.
I think what we try to do is take people who are fans, say movie fans
almost every student who comes to college is a movie fan and I use that
w ord fan very advisedly. It comes from fanatic, it implies an unthinking
behavior, behavior which is very m uch a coded behavior with very little
room for freedom, critical thought o f any kind. We try to take people who
have gotten so used to getting their pleasure from films and other image
texts a narrated pleasure take those people and in some way destroy that
15
pleasure for them or m ake them suspicious o f that pleasure, make them
critical o f the pleasure, m ake them ask: W hat am I paying for this pleasure?
W hat am I paying in an aband on m ent o f possibilities o f critical thought for
subm itting to these narrative texts which are produced by Hollywood and
other places in order to extract m oney from m e in return for my pleasure?
W hat am I paying in addition to the m oney in terms o f a loss o f political
freedom o r other kinds o f freedom ?
B a g w e l l : D o w e w a n t to d e f e n d o u r s e lv e s a g a in st litera ry cla ssics in th e
sa m e w ay?
SCHOLES: My theory is that we d o n t do things like look at Shakespeares
ideological com m itm ents enough; we d o n t even read some o f the plays in
which th ey re m ost obvious. We d o n t, for instance, read the H enry VI plays
to see what he does to Jo a n o f Arc. Henry VI is as blatant a piece o f
religious/political m anipulation as you could hope to see. We never look at
Shakespeare that way. Im n ot saying th a ts the only way we have to look
at him, but as long as w ere caught up in the m asterpiece syndrom e, as long
as Shakespeare is our m ajor exam ple in the m asterpiece syndrome, I would
say that he, m ore than anyone else, ought to get a m ore critical scrutiny from
us.
BAGWELL: B ut y o u w o u ld n t e x c lu d e th e p o s s ib ility o f sn a r in g s o m e o n e in
a lite r a r y /a r tistic /a e sth e tic n e t fo r s o m e n o b le p u r p o se .
S c h o l e s : All rhetoric and propaganda can serve a cause we approve o f or
a cause we disapprove of. The sam e with literature. I d o n t think theres any
difference. The thing about literature is that the degree o f pleasure that it
provides is greater that makes literature m ore dangerous than rhetoric.
W henever som eone gives you pleasure, watch out. I still inhabit a couple o f
literature departm ents myself. I think that literature can be a discipline. I
think som etimes we lose sight o f that. I believe enough in the liberal arts to
think that any genuine intellectual discipline is useful, but my feeling is that
for literature studies to be a discipline, the literary texts have to be supported
by either history or theory. O ne has to teach either literary history along
with social and political history and m ake it a discipline by reaching out to
culture and beyond the pleasure o f texts o r to interpretive theory, which
then bears on other kinds o f texts as well as literary texts. Semiotics is simply
the move to theory from a literature departm ent. I can see an equally valid
m ove tow ard culture and history. W hat I cant see is a literature departm ent
which is simply belletristic. In fact there is one other move, which is the
functional move tow ard instruction in writing and expression, but I think
that that move has to be supplem ented by either theory or history too.
16
SCHOLES: The Semiotics D epartm ent at Brown is the place where film is
studied at Brown, for instance. The Com parative Literature D epartm ent at
Brown is not ready to adm it that film is literature or that that distinction isnt
a significant one. The Comp. Lit. departm ents in m any schools are not ready
to abandon a sort o f high belletristic position. Comparative Literature
emphasis on literaturem eans high art; and popular forms, so called low
e r forms, and m edia such as film which do no t stress the letter in literature
are excluded. If a Comp. Lit. departm ent were to em brace film and various
form s o f popular culture, and to take them seriously, I think it would be very
close to being a semiotics program .
BAGWELL: D o e s th is m e a n th a t p r o fe s s io n a l o p p o r tu n itie s o th e r th a n t e a c h
in g are a v a ila b le to y o u r stu d e n ts?
SCHOLES: A fair num ber o f o ur students end up working in some aspect o f
m edia and pratical com munications: they w ork for radio stations, television
stations, magazines, and the like. We d o n t train people in that way. We are
really, I hope, in certain ways alm ost as useless as philosophy departm ents.
We are really trying to train people in ways o f thinking and in the use o f
media, the limitations o f m edia, the critiques o f m ediaand I include the
w ritten w ord as a m edium am ong m edia there. The m ajor at Brown requires
out o f ten courses that there be four in theory and at least two in production,
which can be speech, writing, and filmmaking and several other things, and
the rem aining courses in interpretations o f texts in various media. We are
looking to produce a graduate who is effective in communications, but who
also knows the theory.
BAGWELL: Are you afraid o f creating semiotic m onsters who will take their
knowledge o f the way codes m anipulate people and go off and change the
advertising industry such that the rest o f us, who d o n t have that insight,
becom e helpless?
SCHOLES: Sure. Any kind o f knowledge, if its genuine knowledge, can be
used for good o r bad ends, depending on how you define end . I think that
conscience is no t som ething that you teach, because that am ounts to brain
washing. You hope that it develops and you try to set a reasonable exam ple
in term s o f your own thought. You try n o t to be cynical and manipulative
in the way that you teach. But yes, I think if we really are teaching people
effectively to understand the processes o f com m unication, that can be mis
used. But I think that any study can be misused.
I have m ixed feelings about usefulness. I think that in certain ways we are
unfitting people to m ake a com m itm ent to an advertising agency. And I
have mixed feelings about that. Its a good thing in certain ways, but I hate
to think o f leaving people totally unfit to live in this culture. W hat we w ant
is to make them just dissatisfied enough to w ant to change society for the
better and no t so dissatisfied that they opt out completely.
17
18
W ould you w ant to say som ething about how this interview as it
appears in print will be an interpretation o f Robert Scholes?
BAGWELL:
SCHOLES: Sure. Semiotically speaking, one o f the things that will be missing
will be all the intonations in the w ords that I say, the pauses, the gestures,
our situation vis a vis one another. T heres going to be a lot lost in that
translation and it is definitely a translation. T hat you elect to eliminate
certain replies o f m ine and certain questions o f yours or questions o f m ine
or replies o f yours is ano ther kind o f constraint, but its also a form al
constraintyou have size requirem ents, relevance requirem ents, interest
requirem ents which m ay m ake a w ritten version m ore interesting that the
oral version, but som ething has to be done to com pensate for the interest
that we m ay have generated by sitting here and being with one another
while we talk. The history o f w ritten narrative forms consists partially o f
attem pts to com pensate for w hat is lost by no t being in an oral situation in
which you get im m ediate audience feedback.
B a g w e l l : H ow d o y o u th in k a h is to r y p r o f e s s o r m ig h t te a c h a little d iffe r e n t
ly a fte r a tte n d in g y o u r s e m in a r in r e c e n t n a r r a tiv e th e o r y ?
SCHOLES: Well, narrative theory calls into question the possibility o f ever
telling the whole truth about anything. This has implications for law as well
as history: we need to operate law courts with the m yth that one can tell
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing bu t the truth. Semiotics would argue
that those propositions are impossible.
19
NOTES
1 Scholess title alludes to Stanley Fishs recent book, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1981).
20