From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 02 2003 - 21:51:08 BST
For some reason, my head hurts,
DMB said:
It seems to me that "strong misreadings" are misrepresent the case whether one warns in advance or not. I mean, how can such a practice be construed as fair or honest? How is it NOT cheating? How is it different than a distortion or a lie? When is talk of heros and villians anything other than fiction?
Matt:
It has to do with intention. As I have said. Many times. Quite recently.
For instance, if my intention is to reconstruct Pirsig's philosophy as written in his books, I'm doing what I called biography.
However, if my intention is to construct my own philosophy by using some of Pirsig's philosophy, I'm doing what I called philosophy.
In my essay on the Forum, footnote 27 reads:
"A “strong misreading” is a stance taken towards a text. Rorty describes three such stances: the traditional “humanistic” conception, “Newreading” or “textualism,” and “strong misreading.” A traditional, “humanistic” reading asks the reader to attempt to understand what the author intended for his language and symbols to mean. Texualism asks the reader to concentrate only on the text; to treat the text as internally coherent with itself. “Alternatively,” Rorty says, “the textualist may brush aside the notion of the text as machine which operates quite independently of its creator, and offer what [Harold] Bloom calls a ‘strong misreading.’ The critic asks neither the author nor the text about their intentions but simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose. ... He does this by imposing a vocabulary ... on the text which may have nothing to do with any vocabulary used in the text or by its author, and seeing what happens. The model here is not the
curious collector of clever gadgets taking them apart to see what makes them work and carefully ignoring any extrinsic end they may have, but the psychoanalyst blithely interpreting a dream or a joke as a symptom of homicidal mania.” CP, p. 151"
Pirsig uses strong misreadings. Its what he does to Plato and Aristotle in ZMM. Its what he does to the hippies and Victorians in Lila. Its what everyone here does when they offer a "MoQ interpretation".
On heroes and villians, if you don't count Pirsig as a hero, as being a standard-bearer of good philosophy, a kulterbarer of the 70s, then what is he?
That's a rhetorical question.
Matt
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