Robin, thank you for your generous reply on this subject.
I see that the partition is still the following: producer and user.
If the user can be without the producer, in the sense that we are in Fish's
land of Is there a text in this class? then can the producer do without the
user? It seems that authorial intention being subtly hierarchical can
indeed pilot and manipulate the readers even in a non-intentionalist
landscape. Neo-hermeneutics apart, the reader cannot range too far away
from what the author has programmed, since the text is produced in a
culture which sets the standards and the meanings, which are therefore
shared within a limited range of variations. This happens when of course as
you say we have authors in the academia planning ahead their hidden
theories (Geoffrey Hill is an example of it, but also Craig Raine, of
course). Had Eagleton been a poet he would have produced the same identical
set of self-generating books, no matter what genre they belong to. And we
readers would have bought each book thinking it was a new one, while since
the very beginning they are all the same identical book, with variations
due to historical facts over the authorial intention. So this is
strategies, ideological manoeuvres imposed through intellectualized forms
of poetics, that is visions of the world so complex that they can rest on
the borderline of several different disciplines. The same for both post-
structuralism and deconstructionism in the hands of the French philosophers
whose work I regard as forms of trans-poetics, trans-genres, hybrid
forms. I hope I am making sense. Heterogeneous thinking, progettualita’.
The politics of theory, as stressed by Jameson, is unavoidable in
postmodernist debates. It seems to me that the dominant deconstructionist
idea of the breaking down ideological narratives it is politically valid
but aesthetically too optimistic.
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