|
4.67 |
At least two factors destabilize Ricoeur's concept of
appropriation: readers who test the trajectory of
the escape from childhood or narratives which project
modes-of-being and worlds undominated by teleologies of
growing up. Both are hesitant interpretants of
journey narratives couched in a therapy frame, in
particular a frame that situates loss at the beginning
and at the end, gain. Ricoeur's concept of
appropriation rests on his overdetermination of a path
he attributes to Freud.
|
4.67 |
|
4.68 |
As expressed by Ricoeur, Freud's will is open to limitation. Ricoeur declares that What Freud wants is for the patient to make the meaning which was foreign to him his own and thus enlarge his field of consciousness, live better, and, finally, be a bit freer and, if possible, a bit happier. ("Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Culture" 150)
First, acceptance is independent of revelation.
Second, constant revelation might best be coupled to
some active forgetting, else the reading subject is
bloated with passivity. Finally, at what limit
does expansion no longer coincide with health? On
the way to substituting enlargement of field by
enlargement of self, Ricoeur does not stop to pose the
question. Based on the figure of the analysand,
the reader is pathologized or deemed in need of
instruction. Contra Ricoeur and based on the
figure of the analyst, the reader as therapist offers a
cure for the text. The paradigm case is that of
the critical editor as reader. Such readers are
aware that changes in the materiality of the text
affect the projected world of the work. Ricoeur
assumes a text without variants.
|
4.68 |
|
4.69 |
With their investments of labour and libido,
analyst-readers offer a basis for pride in
interpretation or at least an assertion of ego in
choice. However Ricoeur's reader in need of
instruction leads to the scenario of the humiliation of
the ego ("Psychoanalysis and
Contemporary Culture" 152-153). It is
not quite clear how Ricoeur attains an ascesis of
denial, figured as the gamble of ego dispossession for
the promise of an enlarged self, from the scene of
analysis's recapitulation of the classic injunction to
know thyself. The clue is perhaps to be found in
the wandering character of such a reader.
|
4.69 |
|
4.70 |
In the "Preface to Bultmann" Ricoeur writes of Christian hermeneutics: this appropriation [of the Biblical text, of the Christian kerygma] is only the final stage, the last threshold of an understanding which has first been uprooted and moved into an other meaning. (397)
Wandering is the prerequisite to appropriate
appropriation. Closure comes with appropriation
which is the last step of an understanding unsettled in
an alien sense. Even if appropriation is only
remotely a prodigal homecoming, there is no denying
Ricoeur's stress on reorientation. Migrant
readers, nomadic interpreters, have no need of enlarged
selves. The text is not a refuge. It is a
way.
|
4.70 |
|
4.71 |
One holds a way, one is possessed by it. The way may be a home and search for it, pointless. The game of appropriation, shorn of its home-finding, need not appear as an inexorable cumulation of surplus. Ricoeur's secular formulation of appropriation bears repeating: The reader is rather broadened in his capacity to project himself by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself. Thus appropriation ceases to appear as a kind of possession, as a way of taking hold of... ("Appropriation" 97)
What do those suspension marks mean? They are
those of Ricoeur's text. Indeterminacy? Are
they, these marks, a gesture? Or simply the space
between the event of speech and the written text since
this piece was first presented as a lecture (n11). Are
they to be read as hesitancy, lack of assurance that
appropriate interpretation is a being held, a being
possessed? Or are they not a mode of letting go,
a pause offered for reflection upon the metaphors of
ownership and dispossession?
|
4.71 |
|
4.72 |
They are, those marks, a hold. They are a space
for the hook of questions. They become only
meaningful through the labour of an interpreter.
Readerly work is possible because texts are
manipulatable and their projected worlds
analysable. Work-centred notions of reading and
especially rereading thrive on recursivity. Their
own workings enter into the play of
interpretation. Not so Ricoeur's model of
appropriation which shares with the models of
interiorization deployed by some feminist
epistemologies a masking of the labourer. For the
former, the labourer is libidinally invested in the
products of interpretation thus incapable of
dispossession of the ego, incapable of appropriation
and understanding. For the latter, the labourer
is of the domain of culture, is an instance of
instrumental reason, a rejection of the mother.
Others arrive at a similar condemnation of instrumental
reason by reinscribing the intellectual and manual
labour distinction onto gender.
|
4.72 |
|
4.73 |
The alignment, child of psychoanalysis, labourer of
sociology, reader of hermeneutics, is suggested by
their common concern with transformation. And, no
matter the discursive object, from child to reader, the
relation between techne and consciousness pivots on the
key question as to whether the transformer is
transformed. Is the user of tools changed by
their use? Of course to answer such a question
requires the application of critical tools.
|
4.73 |
|
4.74 |
At a metadiscursive level "tool" and
"question" are apt to become
equivalent. However before "answer" is
made analogous to "consciousness" it must be
recognized that questions solicit addressees as tools
do not. Another angle is possible. Access
to consciousness occurs through language. In
language according to Karl
Bühler's analysis of
the triangulation of communication one addresses
someone about something. Likewise it could be
said one is conscious of something for some
reason. That tool use should transform tool users
unconsciously should not deter one from at arriving at
similar conclusions. As one speaks so one remains
silent vis-à-vis someone about something;
one is unconscious about something for some reason.
|
4.74 |
|
4.75 |
Whatever the truth-value assigned to the link between
language and consciousness, there exists a structural
homology between the position of
interlocutor in language and that of
reason or motive in acts of
consciousness. For someone, for some reason,
something is said, something is the object of
consciousness.
|
4.75 |
|
4.76 |
How does a link between tool use and asking questions
relate to reading? First, the analogy is not
between text and tool but between tool use and
reading. A tool-use environment has three
components. They may be described as the tool
proper, the instruction, directives or demonstrations
of tool use and the material on which the tool is
used. Directive and tool are often conflated in
the concept of techniques. Regardless, effects of
transformation should be ascribed to a combination of
proper directives, competent tools and pliable
material.
|
4.76 |
