Objective or subjective intention is a very important distinction in the law. No one can be found guilty of a crime without subjectively intending to perform a criminal act. Private law, however, is concerned generally with objective intention. What the parties to a contract actually intended is less important than what it is reasonable that they would have intended. This is because, after the fact, people obviously lie (or they don’t lie, but they remember things wrong, or they delude themselves, etc.), so what they say they intended is never reliable. Also, it doesn’t really matter what they wanted to get out of the contract when they entered into the contract or how they wanted things to turn out. All that matters is what caused the dispute. The courts have to decide between two (or more) competing interests: this one wants one thing, this one wants the other. Those who judge construe reasonable intentions based on the material evidence and the circumstances. [What is “reasonable” and by whose standards is another problem, the essential problem with the whole thing, I think.]

But anyway, what about authorial intention? Should we readers look for subjective or objective intention? I don’t see how it could be anything but the latter. All we have is the text. Whatever the writer intended when they were writing the text is beyond us. We can look at circumstances, we can look for biographical details, we can scour author’s letters and notes for clues and meanings, but these all lead us to our constructions, not to any kind of truth. And we should never rely on what authors say after the fact, because, obviously, authors lie.

Writing may be a communal activity, in the sense that it connects people to one another and allows us access to one another’s perceptions and habits of language. But. All we ever have is the text, the material fact of the words in their order and form. How we understand the text is coloured of course by the circumstances of its writing and our reading, but the bare text can bear any number of reasonable (or unreasonable) interpretations. Writing is ultimately open. Reading determines.

Not that I think any of this is any kind of insight. It’s just interesting to reframe what I already know into new terms. Would it be trite to say that if reading is a hearing, writers are complainants?