Join us for a workshop with Todd Cronan (Emory), Walter Benn Michaels (UIC), and Lisa Siraganian (Johns Hopkins) on their forthcoming book, Intention: Three Inquiries in Art and Action.
Registration is required for this event. Email John Schwenkler to register.
About the book:
Whether, how, and how much the intention of the artist matters in making and understanding art has been a topic in literary theory at least since Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946). And, as the title of that essay suggests, the dominant position has been skeptical. That the artist’s intention plays some role in producing the work (“Poems come out of a head not a hat,” as Wimsatt and Beardsley put it) is widely (although not universally) acknowledged. But, after that, the general view—from the New Criticism through deconstruction to postcritque and new institutional studies, has been that the poems (and pictures and novels) are on their own. As Wimsatt and Beardsley put it, “detached from the author at birth” the poem “goes about the world beyond [the author’s] power to intend about it or control it. The poem belongs to the public.” And if, for Derrida, the text “abandoned” to its “essential drift,” belonged instead to no one, his insistence on its “liberation” from the author has provided an even more influential account of the scenes of both writing and reading. In short, a certain anti-intentionalism continues to dominate aesthetic theory.
These three essays are written in opposition to this position and particularly in opposition to its idea of what intention is and how it works. We share a conviction that to speak of the intended meaning of a work is to describe not the artist’s mental state (what she had in mind) but what she did, and that to understand (or misunderstand) a work of art is always and only to understand (or misunderstand) what someone did. It is no accident, therefore, that Elizabeth Anscombe’s contribution to the theory of action in Intention (1957) plays a crucial role in our efforts to explain why the default position in aesthetic theory has tended to be anti-intentionalist, resting on what Stanley Cavell called a “bad picture” of intention. The three essays examine what is gained (as well as what is not gained) by abandoning that bad picture.
We argue furthermore that the emergence of intention as a topic of theoretical debate in the mid-20th century also marks the increasing prominence of technologies (like photography) and institutions (like the corporation) where intention may seem at best attenuated. Here we have an historical as well as a theoretical argument, that anti-intentionality has served and continues to serve a function well beyond debates within art and literary theory. The rise of anti-intentionality more or less coincides with and provides theoretical justification for a range of political ideologies whose consequences reach far beyond the space of art. For this reason, the seemingly narrow debate around intentionality in art has always also been a political debate about the nature of human agency and what meaningful human action looks like. The essays here address the problem of intention from three angles: historically tracing the emergence and ultimate triumph of the “bad picture” of intention; the contemporary currency of sociological and scientific criticism focused on “distributed agency”; and the deep identity behind three seemingly disparate forms of anti-intentionality: deconstructive criticism, industrial photography, and political neoliberalism.