Anyone who claims that «[…] la critica di un testo letterario è altra cosa dalla critica o metacritica di un testo giuridico […]» («[…] the criticism of a literary text is quite another thing from the criticism or metacriticism of a legal text […]») is an ignoramus. For anyone possessing even a modicum of academic cognizance, Law and Literature is Literature and Law, and Literature and Law is Law and Literature, as any third-year law student would readily admit. To maintain that the aesthetic act is an Austinian performative (without knowing the Harean distinction between phraestic and neustic) and, simultaneously, that «[…] la critica di un testo letterario è altra cosa dalla critica o metacritica di un testo giuridico […]» («[…] the criticism of a literary text is quite another thing from the criticism or metacriticism of a legal text […]») is the usual double-tongued duplicity. Interpretation is an analytical activity: it is never creative. Bobbio writes: «[…] la interpretazione della legge non ha carattere creativo […]» («[…] the interpretation of the law does not possess a creative character […]») (Teoria generale del diritto [General Theory of Law]); likewise, H.L.A. Hart maintains in The Concept of Law that: «What is necessary [for a social rule to exist] is that there should be a critical reflective attitude […] all of which find their characteristic expression in the normative terminology of ‘ought’, ‘must’, and ‘should’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’» (The Concept of Law, 57). Hans Kelsen decisively puts an end to the creativity of any interpretation: «Legal interpretation is the activity of clarifying the meaning of a legal norm; it does not create law, it merely discovers what the norm already prescribes» (Pure Theory of Law, §35, translated from the original German of the 1934 Reine Rechtslehre).
The conclusions of “legal” analytics derive from, or anticipate, the anti-creative formulations of analytical philosophy. Wittgenstein asserts: «[…] For a large class of cases -though not for all – in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined as the use of the word in the language-game […]» (Philosophical Investigations, § 43); Austin states: «The performance of a speech act consists in the fact that a speaker utters the words in a conventional way, with the intention of achieving the conventional effect» (How to Do Things with Words, 14). Vittorio Villa, in my opinion, settles the matter in 2010 with his essay Una teoria dell’interpretazione giuridica orientata pragmaticamente (A Pragmatically Oriented Theory of Legal Interpretation), published in the Slovenian journal Revus (89-120), wherein interpretation is immersed within the contemporary analytical “paradigmatic turn” of pragmatics.
Based on the analytical theory of interpretation, Tardomodernism affirms that three forms of interpretation exist within literature: authentic interpretation by the author (analogous to the legal principle establishing that the body introducing a norm holds its incontrovertible interpretation) [the maximum threshold of interpretation];
- subjective interpretation (literary criticism and jurisprudence) [the minimum threshold of interpretation];
- meta-subjective interpretation (according to Peirce and Vailati, the majority of the academic or scientific community) [max < x < min].
For this reason, Tardomodernism considers the pragmatist and verificationist “we” (community, sheltered in bunde, kolektivne/kolektivno, or assemblies, through a robust critique of Bauman) within the falsificationist dimension of the new epistemology as an objectivist-subjectivism, or a meta-subjectivism. The creative interpretation of the modernist literary critic collapses before the authentic interpretation of the tardomodernist artist. The tardomodernist artist has a duty to verify/falsify their an-aesthetic activity before the assemblies of art (meta-subjective interpretation). Interpretation—as explained by the intentionalist aesthetics of Carroll, Davies, and Mikkonen, is, in any case, real (or hypothetical, in the absence of the artist). The introduction into literature of meta-subjective interpretation, aimed at limiting the artist’s egopathy and the dictatorship of modernist literary criticism, derives from the methodological synthesis between the analytical theory of interpretation and the hermeneutischer Zirkel (hermeneutic circle), that is, Habermas’s theory of argumentative communication: «[…] Argumentation ist eine Form des kommunikativen Handelns, in der die Beteiligten versuchen, durch die Präsentation und Bewertung von Gründen zu einem rational begründeten Einverständnis zu gelangen […]» («[…] Argumentation is a form of communicative action in which the participants try to reach a rationally motivated agreement by presenting and evaluating reasons […]») (Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns [Theory of Communicative Action], 288-289). The Habermasien solution, mediating between the theory of interpretation and the hermeneutischer Zirkel, recalls, within literature, the meta-subjective dimension of the kommunikatives Handeln (communicative action) between the artist and the assemblies of art. The tardomodernist Gespräch (Apel) annihilates the artist’s egopathy and the dictatorship of modernist literary criticism: tardomodernists across every continent despise the ego-mania of the lyrical/elegiac artist and the tyranny of the double-tongued literary critic.
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Ivan Pozzoni
Picture Joseph Wright
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