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A contribution to: Critiquing Criticism

Edited by Sophie Corser and Lucy Russell

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 10

Modern Humanities Research Association

open

Abstract.  In the digital age, when interpretation of textual significance is oriented no less by a text’s modes of preservation, reception, and proliferation than it is by the workings of authorial intention, what determines the criteria for its criticism? The following essay addresses these matters with respect to recent discussion in the digital humanities on textuality and interpretive methodology, and to Martin Heidegger’s philosophical confrontation with the work of Friedrich Nietzsche – Heidegger’s primary interlocutor in elaborating the question concerning the artwork’s origin and originality as understood in the technological epoch. Such an approach situates these apparently disparate discourses within the optic of their mutual consideration of technology’s influence on the determination of criteria for a work’s aesthetic judgment, and on the critic’s role in the interpretive process of transmitting its truth. Registering a diffusion of its sources and channels of communicative power, both of these discourses are engaged in questioning the measure of critique’s authority – invested in inquiry into the reproducibility of its judgment, and into what first constitutes truthful appropriation of interpretive tradition. A weighing of such questions involves both discourses in attempts to formally posit and algorithmically or world-historically extrapolate ahistorical vantage points from which to evaluate what is entailed in an original relation to the possible future of interpretive tradition. Orienting these interpretive strategies is an analytical notion of the phenomenology of critical activity, conceived as a function of self-determining intention. With regard to this notion especially, the developing terms of the Heidegger-Nietzsche confrontation reflect those of trending debate in digital humanities scholarship on the ‘subject’ of critical authority. A discussion of these affinities and their logical consequences results in a critique of authorial intentionality that understands textual significance as an expression of the respective needs of those for whom a text’s meaning is at stake – needs which are often first articulated and identified in the course of interpretation. For as authorship, critique itself testifies to an always antecedent discussion to which it responds whatever its original intentions, expressing its belonging to an interpretive tradition in relation to which the criteria of criticism, and of the question concerning its necessity and authority are derived – a tradition whose proper understanding in this way remains at issue.

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