Page 76 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes But the point of my analysis has been to show that while "Is there a text in this class?" does not
have a determinate meaning, a meaning that survives the sea change of situations, in any situation
we might imagine the meaning of the utterance is either perfectly clear or capable, in the course of
time, of being clarified. What is it that makes this possible, if it is not the 'possibilities and norms'
already encoded in language? How does communication ever occur if not by reference to a public
and stable norm? The answer, implicit in everything I have already said, is that communication
occurs within situations and that to be in a situation is already to be in possession of (or to be
possessed by) a structure of assumptions, of practices understood to be relevant in relation to
purposes and goals that are already in place; and it is within the assumption of these purposes
and goals that any utterance is immediately heard. I stress immediately because it seems to me
that the problem of communication, as someone like Abrams poses it, is a problem only because
he assumes a distance between one's receiving of an utterance and the determination of its meaning
-a kind of dead space when one has only the words and then faces the task of construing them. If
there were such a space, a moment before interpretation began, then it would be necessary to have
recourse to some mechanical and algorithmic procedure by means of which meanings could be
calculated and in relation to which one could recognize mistakes. What I have been arguing is that
meanings come already calculated, not because of norms embedded in the language but because
language is always perceived, from the very first, within a structure of norms. That structure,
however, is not abstract and independent but social; and therefore it is not a single structure with
a privileged relationship to the process of communication as it occurs in any situation but a
structure that changes when one situation, with its assumed background of practices, purposes,
and goals, has given way to another. In other words, the shared basis of agreement sought by
Abrams and others is never not already found, although it is not always the same one.
Many will find in this last sentence, and in the argument to which it is a conclusion, nothing more
than a sophisticated version of the relativism they fear. It will do no good, they say, to speak of
norms and standards that are context-specific, because this is merely to authorize an infinite
plurality of norms and standards, and we are still left without any way of adjudicating between
them and between the competing systems of value of which they are functions. In short, to have
many standards is to have no standards at all.
On one level this counter-argument is unassailable, but on another level it is finally beside the
point. It is unassailable as a general and theoretical conclusion: the positing of context- or institution-
specific norms surely rules out the possibility of a norm whose validity would be recognized by
everyone, no matter what his situation. But it is beside the point for any particular individual, for
since everyone is situated somewhere, there is no one for whom the absence of an asituational
norm would be of any practical consequence, in the sense that his performance or his confidence
in his ability to perform would be impaired. So that while it is generally true that to have many
standards is to have none at all, it is not true for anyone in particular (for there is no one in a
position to speak "generally"), and therefore it is a truth of which one call say "it doesn't matter."
In other words, while relativism is a position one can entertain, it is not a position one can occupy.
No one can be a relativist, because no one can achieve the distance from his own beliefs and
assumptions which would result in their being no more authoritative for him than the beliefs and
assumptions held by others, or, for that matter, the beliefs and assumptions he himself used to
hold. The fear that in a world of indifferently authorized norms and values the individual is
without a basis for action is groundless because no one is indifferent to the norms and values that
enable his consciousness. It is in the name of personally held (in fact they are doing the holding)
norms and values that the individual acts and argues, and he does so with the full confidence that
attends belief when his beliefs change, the norms and values to which he once gave unthinking
assent will have been demoted to the status of opinions and become the objects of an analytical
and critical attention; but that attention will itself be enabled by a new set of norms and values that
are, for the time being, as unexamined and undoubted as those they displace. The point is that
there is never a moment when one believes nothing, when consciousness is innocent of any and all
categories of thought, and whatever categories of thought are operative at a given moment will
serve as an undoubted ground.

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