What is the Meaning of a Text?

At a recent meeting of the U District Philosophy Cafe we discussed various theories of how a person might determine the meaning of a religious text. In my opinion, theories of textual interpretation fall along a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum you've got formalists who claim meaning is contained within the text itself. This is a static meaning that is independent of the context within which the text was either written or read. Formalist meaning is 'embedded' in the text and it is the reader's job to 'extract' it as objectively as possible. At the other end of the spectrum you have subjectivists who claim meaning is defined exclusively by how a reader reacts to the text. This reaction is determined by the person's unique cultural, historical and psychological background. To a subjectivist the text itself has no inherent meaning because a new meaning is created every time a person reads it.

I don't agree with the formalist position. I don't think it is ever possible to eliminate a reader's psychological and sociohistorical background from the reading process. If I'm afraid of wolves, my reading of Little Red Riding Hood is going to be very different from someone who was raised by wolves. Our readings will be different no matter how much psychological therapy or academic training I go through. In fact, if I go through wolf recovery therapy that is going to have its own unique affect on how I read the text. I also don't buy the idea that we can create an objective method (such as New Criticism) that can lead us past our personal biases to an objective reading. There is no such thing as the view from nowhere.

That said, I don't fully agree with the subjectivists either. Meaning doesn't lie solely in the realm of the reader's private psychology. If that were the case, it would be impossible for a reader to discuss the meaning of a text with someone else. The closest we could ever get to a public conversation about textual meaning would be a comparison of the social, historical and psychological backgrounds that led to our individual reactions. I think discussing the meaning of a text serves a unique and useful social purpose beyond just comparing our psychologies.  For me, meaning is neither a static essence embedded in the text nor the simple sum of emotions experienced by a reader at a given moment in time. Rather it is a complex, distributed, dynamically changing assembly that includes many interrelated components such as the intent of the author, the historical background from which the text arose, the psychology of the reader and even physical characteristics of the text itself such as font and paragraph structure. Some of these factors are static but others such as the sociohistoric background of the reader are dynamic. Interpreting a text is the process of assembling these components into a coherent and useful whole.