Hermeneutics v. Semiology

According to Michel Foucault, what Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud introduce is an age of interpretation. He develops one of the implications of this by suggesting there is a “fierce war” between semiology and hermeneutics, between treating words as signs and treating them as interpretations. Nietzsche in particular, Foucault claims, develops this point:

“This is also what Nietzsche means when he says that words have always been invented by the ruling class; they do not denote a signified, they impose an interpretation . . . .

“Consequently, it is not because there are primary and enigmatic signs that we are now dedicated to the task of interpreting but because there are interpretations, because there is always the great tissue of violent interpretations beneath everything that speaks. It is for this reason that there are signs, signs that prescribe to us the interpretation of their interpretation, that enjoin us to overturn them as signs. In this sense one can say that allegoria and huponoia are at the bottom of language and before it, not just what slipped after the fact from beneath words in order to displace them and make them vibrate but what gave birth to words, what makes them glitter with a luster that is never fixed.”

Suggesting that “Perhaps this primacy of interpretation with respect to signs is what is most decisive in modern hermeneutics,” he notes that one implication is that the sign is no longer simple and benevolent. Up to the 16th century, the abundance of signs “proved the benevolence of God and separated the sign from the signifier by only a transparent veil.” But in the 19th century, the sign becomes malevolent: “there is in the sign an ambiguous and somewhat suspicious form of ill will and ‘malice.’” Signs apparently exist to mask the fact that interpretation has occurred, to cover over the violence of the original interpretation; what was considered a veil now becomes a mask.

Hermeneutics must renounce the sign, or treat the sign rather as the trace of an interpretation: “The death of interpretation is to believe that there are signs, signs that exist primarily, originally, actually, as coherent, pertinent, and systematic marks.” Interpretation lives on the belief that “there are only interpretations.” Hence, hermeneutics and semiology are enemies: “A hermeneutic that in effect falls back on a semiology believes in the absolute existence of signs: it abandons the violence, the incompleteness, the infinity of interpretations in order to enthrone the terror of the index or to suspect language.”

In part, Foucault’s premise here is both correct and helpful: Correct because there are various senses in which interpretations precede signs, and that signs and names are crystallizations of interpretations. Helpful because hermeneutical suspicion must definitely be among the stances a reader adopts; only the most naive reader will accept that something or act (eg sodomy) simply is how it is signified (“alternative lifestyle”). Helpful too because language arises not from the world but from people; language is not merely the product of a coalescence of signifier and signified but communication by persons with all sorts of biases, interests, hatreds and loves. Helpful too because allegory is, as Foucault says, the solid ground of language and not its frothy surface.

What is not correct or convincing is Foucault’s unargued claim that the interpretation embodied in a sign is necessarily an act of violence and dissumulation and oppression. Or, the assumption that if the interpretation embodied in the sign is imposed by the victors it is necessarily unjust. Perhaps the right guys won, and perhaps too the interpretation they imposed on the rest of us was the right one.

Foucault seems to assume that the mere fact of an imposed interpretation is an injustice; which means that injustice is inescapably written into the fabric of language. Language simply is violence – not just to the individual things that are violently herded into the abstract category of a word (“leaf” does violence to all individual leaves) but because somebody violently requires us to operate by their interpretations. But to characterize language as violence assumes a subject far more radically autonomous than a Cartesian or Kantian subject.