‘Negative Hermeneutics’: Themes, Figures, Codes and Cognition

What is it about?

Many readers are uninterested in whether their interpretation somehow reconstructs a posited original meaning, because they do not believe in the authority of the author and prefer to pursue their own thematic readings, either in accordance with the linguistic potential of the text (and an unlimited number of ‘intertexts’), or with their own political, psychological or philosophical beliefs and interests, or because their interpretive strategies and assumptions are determined by the contingencies of their individual unconscious desires and defences. In this chapter I consider readings such as these, which relevance theory can account for because it is also a theory of cognition, designed to explain how individuals make sense of the phenomena around them (including literary texts), independently of anyone else’s intentions, according to a notion of maximal (rather than optimal) relevance. Importantly, however, relevance theory’s demonstration of the inferential nature of comprehension shows that (relevance-maximizing) interpretations based on potential meanings enabled by linguistic ‘codes’ are not in fact normative, and need not necessarily destabilise meanings perceived as intended or optimally relevant.

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