July 19, 2005
Stanley Fish's teacherly piece on authorial intention (via Sean McCann at The Valve) in re the Constitution is an instructive exercize if you don't have a background in the philosophy of language -- even if it sweeps aside the whole Judeo-Christian tradition of "revealed" word/name that would seem to prefigure the Constitution, or at least certain people's view of it.
But then at the end of his piece he tells us that we won't learn much from the Supreme Court nominees:
If the nominee identifies himself or herself as a textualist or a strict constructionist and pledges to be a faithful interpreter of the Constitution (as opposed to an unfaithful one?), you will know that he or she is blowing smoke and laying claim to virtues no one could practice. If the nominee promises to test the Constitution against the needs of our present situation, you will know that he or she will not be an interpreter but a rewriter, and no one on either the left or right wants that. And if the nominee says, "I am an intentionalist," the declaration will be uninformative, because every interpreter is necessarily an intentionalist -- not by choice but by definition.Hasn't he just spent his whole piece telling us that meaning is about authorial intention? And yet he's dismissing the protestations of these hypothetical nominees by promoting his own set of meanings for these words rather than looking at the authorial -- ie political -- context, in which, of course, the statements are highly charged and dripping with meaning.
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