Intention, Intentions and Intentionalism
During the second day of this year’s Master Classes, after Warwick Gould’s presentation a debate ensued in which several very intelligent and well informed scholars argued about whether authorial “intention” should rather be authorial “intentions.” The main proponents of the argument, Sally Bushell and Win Van Mierlo argued that, because texts were the result of a process, surely it was much better to refer to “authorial intentions” as the author often changed his mind, revised and rewrote.
It seems to me that although there is an important point that these colleagues were trying to make –that it is extremely difficult to determine how an author might have changed his mind during the creative process–, they appeared to be arguing a strange point.
The question of whether it is more correct to refer to author’s “intention” or “intentions,” appears to have a straight forward answer. At any given point in time, a normal person has one intention. Naturally, this intention might change in the second that immediately follows. From this, it seems that people assume that there should be more than one intention –which could be accepted if . However, at any given point in time, there is only one. Even schyzophrenics or suferers of multiple personality disorders might have trouble both wanting and not wanting at the same time to write “to be or not to be.” Even if this were possible from a psychological perspective –and I don’t claim to be a psychologist– it would be impossible for us to prove it.
Clearly, textual scholars would fail their physics classes: the speed of a car does not become “speeds” at different points in time. Instead the only speed changes. Textual criticism is better served when the time of the intention is specified.
The problem that the discovery of the “authorial intention” might be an unatteinable goal is a completely different animal.
My rapid response would be that of course you are right to say that
Comment by Sally — July 31, 2006 @ 3:14 pmat any given moment in time we only have one intention (although of
course we might have an unconscious intention at the same time as
the conscious one which we only realise later . . .) BUT the study
of textual process is concerned not with single acts but with a
sequence of acts - and in this case one can clearly reconstruct
changes of meaning on the page. Now you might want to argue for
such material as “writing” divorced altogether from authorial
intentions - but personally I find that a slightly irritating
position! OK, it is separable (iterable in Derridean terms), but it came about because a consciousness decided to enter something on a page. Once you
introduce a temporal dimension then you have to allow for changes
of intention (as well as the unintentional of course). Finally, you need to bear in mind that when I’m thinking about intention within composition what I really mean is intentional acts upon the manuscript page and the reconstruction of those acts to understand meaning. Such acts may have been entered at different points in time but they now co-exist upon the page (and can be reconstructed as a sequence).