Hermeneutics

RELATED TERMS:

“Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. It is easier to show their common opposition to a phenomenology of the sacred, understood as a propaedeutic to the ‘revelation’ of meaning, than their interrelationship within a single method of demystification.”

Ricoeur, 1970: 32)

By way of general introduction to the idea of a history of the techniques of interpretation from the Greek grammarians to our own day, Foucault proposes that it would be possible to say that language, in the Indo-European cultures at least, has always given birth to two kinds of suspicions: that language does not mean exactly what it says; and that language exceeds its verbal form in some way, so that there are other things in the world which speak and which are not language.

The first suspicion is that the manifest meaning that one grasps is perhaps only a lesser meaning that protects, confines, and yet in spite of everything transmits another meaning, the latter being at once the stronger meaning and the ‘underlying’ meaning. This is what the Greeks called ailegoria and huponoia, Foucault explains.

The second suspicion is that, for example, nature, the sea, the rustling of trees, animals, faces, masks, crossed swords, and so on, all speak. Perhaps there is language that articulates itself in a manner that is not verbal. Very roughly, this could be taken as the Greek notion of semainon.

These two suspicions, already appearing with the Greeks, have not disappeared. They are part of the hermeneutics with which we continue to be engaged, a system which, Foucault proposes, first took shape in the nineteenth century, with the techniques of interpretation of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. In order to understand this system of interpretation, Foucault considers it useful to take a remote reference point: the system which prevailed in the sixteenth century, in which a place for interpretation was provided by resemblance.

The corpus of resemblance in the sixteenth century, Foucault notes, was organised through five notions: convenientia, sympatheia, emulatio, signatura and analogy. The theory of the sign and the techniques of interpretation at this time were based on a clear definition of all the possible types of resemblance. Together, they formed the basis of two distinct types of knowledge: cognitio, the lateral transition from one resemblance to another; and divinatio, knowledge in depth, going from a superficial resemblance to a deeper one.

These sixteenth-century techniques of interpretation were bracketed out and left in suspension by the evolution of Western thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, the Baconian and the the Cartesian critiques of resemblance. However, nineteenth century writers, particularly Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, have returned us to a new possibility of interpretation, re-founding the possibility of a hermeneutic. Thus, the first volume of Capital, Nietzsche’s oeuvre, particularly The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, and Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, bring us back into the realm of interpretive techniques. Since these techniques of interpretation concern us ourselves, this puts us into an uncomfortable position: we, the interpreters, have begun to interpret ourselves through these techniques.

To Foucault, it would seem that Marx, Nietzsche and Freud have changed the nature of the sign and modified the way in which the sign can in general be interpreted.

First, compared to the sixteenth century, signs were ranged in a much more differentiated space with Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche This space is organised according to a dimension that could be called that of depth, as long as it is accepted that depth is only a game and a surface fold.

Second, beginning with Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, interpretation has become an infinite task. Signs are linked together in an inexhaustible network, itself also infinite, because there is irreducible gaping and openness. The incompleteness of interpretation can be found, Foucault contends, in a somewhat analogous fashion in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in the form of the refusal of beginning.

This essential incompleteness of interpretation is, for Foucault, linked to two other fundamental principles, which it could be argued constitute, together with the above two, the postulates of modern hermeneutics.

Third, the act of interpretation has primacy with respect to signs. This is perhaps most decisive in defining modern hermeneutics. There is nothing absolutely primary to interpret. Everything is already an interpretation. Each sign is in itself not the thing that offers itself to interpretation but an interpretation of other signs. Interpretation does not clarify a matter to be interpreted, which offers itself passively. Interpretation can only seize violently an already-present interpretation, which it must overthrow, upset, shatter.

Fourth, the idea that interpretation precedes the sign implies that the sign is not a simple and benevolent being, as was the case in the sixteenth century. Beginning with Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, the sign becomes malevolent. There is in the sign an ambiguous and somewhat suspicious form of ill will and malice. This tendency can be perceived in the way that Marx treats money in Capital, the way that Freud treats the symptom and the way in which Nietzsche treats words, all of which are signs that are already interpretations that do not appear as such: “Signs are interpretations that try to justify themselves” (Foucault, 1998: 277) .

Two important consequences follow on from the fact that interpretation finds itself obligated to interpret itself to infinity: the basis of interpretation is nothing but the interpreter; and interpretation must always interpret itself and therefore turn back on itself.

Hermeneutics, understood in this sense, acknowledges the violence, the incompleteness and the infinity of interpretations.

Hermeneutics and Design

The implications for understanding designs could be paraphrased from Foucault as follows: ‘Designs are interpretations that try to justify themselves’. This is part of a shift in understanding design that prioritises action, intervention and purpose (praxis; doing) over materiality-substance, form and function (poiesis; making).

Designs may seek to justify themselves, as ‘objects’ appearing as part of material public discourse. This justification may be in terms of public pedagogy or public education, in the form of, for example, collective memory, collaborative learning, shared instruction and communal guidance. Alternatively, this justification may be in terms of regulation and governance, whether legal, economic or ecological.

Such regimes of education-governance articulated through public space, or public spatio-temporality in the form of narrative environments, shape the ethical and political frameworks, that in turn, shape design as professional, social practice.

References

Foucault, M. (1998) Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, in Faubion, J. D. (ed.), Hurley, R. and others (tran.) Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. New York, NY: New Press, pp. 269–278.

Ricoeur, P. (1970) Freud and philosophy: an essay on interpretation. Translated by D. Savage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.