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Network hermeneutics: interpretation of texts as social practice and performance in the age of digital media

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Network hermeneutics: interpretation of texts as social practice and performance in the age of digital media

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Network Hermeneutics: Interpretation of Texts as Social
Practice and Performance in the Age of Digital Media
William McClain
University of Southern California

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Study of Interpretation at the Turn of the Digital
Age…………………………………………………………………………………….…………… 1

Chapter 2: Hermeneutics, Textual Interpretation and the Problem of Other
Minds ...................................................................................................... 20

Chapter 3: Hermeneutics in Crisis…………………….…………………………….... 49

Chapter 4: Network Hermeneutics …………………………………………………… 77

Chapter 5: Realism and Reality: Re-Conceptualizing the Digital Text in
Network Hermeneutics ………………………………………………………………….. 127

Chapter 6: The Hermeneutics of Power and the Power of Hermeneutics in
Digital Documentary ……………………………………………………………………… 158

Chapter 7: A Place for Textual Interpretation: Art Games and Meta-Textual
Reunion ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 189

Chapter 8: Conclusion …..………………………………………………………………. 230

Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………… 250

1

Chapter 1
The Study of Interpretation at the Turn of the Digital Age

Digital, networked communication technology has driven the study of the
interpretation of texts to a point of crisis, but also to a point of promise. The study of
textual interpretation or textual hermeneutics stands on the verge of a paradigm shift
unprecedented since advent of critical cultural theory in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. The foundational assumptions about the nature of texts and the
relationship between text and interpreter that sustained textual hermeneutics as a set of
theories and methods appropriate to the study of book or mass media texts do not
adequately account for the role of text and interpretation in a digital media landscape.
This dissertation revises some of the basic epistemological and methodological
assumptions of textual hermeneutics in an effort to envision a revised hermeneutic
theory capable of studying texts in all their myriad forms old and new. The result is a
“social turn” in hermeneutics that acknowledges that textual interpretation is always
already a mode of social practice and performance taking place in dense inter-
connecting networks of social, cultural, and technical systems rather than a more or less
individual, psychological process influenced by social or discursive factors. I call this
social and relational hermeneutic model “network hermeneutics,” a theoretical and
methodological approach to the study of textual interpretation that takes interpretation
of texts itself as its object of study.

2

Network hermeneutics represents an attempt to realign and reinvigorate textual
hermeneutics through the articulation of a new approach: a general theory for the study
of the interpretation of spoken, written, and audio-visual texts.
1
By focusing on
interpretation as a set of social activities it becomes possible to articulate observable
phenomena through which interpretation can be studied and to address the relationship
between social life and the practices and performances of textual interpretation. As a
new approach to general hermeneutics, network hermeneutics does not seek to replace
the body of existing work on textual interpretation; instead, it provides a common
medium through which those studying texts and interpretation in diverse disciplines
can meaningfully communicate. This common context can be achieved with a few
critical theoretical modifications to commonly accepted premises, but once these
threads are pulled the garment of hermeneutic theory as a whole starts to unravel. This
study attempts to pull those strands, and to reweave the whole. The concepts of text and
textuality must be defined in specifically “network” terms. The relationship between
text, interpretation, political economy, and hegemony must be refined both to
accommodate digital media ecology and to provide the acuity necessary for studying
relatively horizontal power relationships that arise in this new ecology. The potential
truth claims of both textual and social interpretive methodologies must be revised to
account for the epistemological problems of hermeneutics without a defined normative
interpretive approach. The reward for this work is considerable: a new general
hermeneutic theory capable of accounting for digital and analog media, for both macro-
and micro-social relations, and that ultimately provides a common language in which
textual hermeneutics can be discussed across disciplinary divides.

1
As opposed to the very different project of attempting to create a specifically digital hermeneutics.
3

The Age of Marginalia: Theory and Method in Digital Spaces
A new textual hermeneutics must now respond to the revolution in the material,
social, and cultural foundation of interpretive and meta-textual activity of all kinds
brought about by the advent of digital communication and network computing
technology. Much has been made of the importance of digital media in creating
possibilities for new forms of democratized media production, distribution, and
reception, usually through a narrative in which digital media play the role of valorized
“other” to the center-periphery/top-down mass media (Best & Kellner, 2001; Castells,
2009, 2007; Kahn & Kellner, 2005; Meikle, 2002; Negroponte, 1995; Nightingale &
Ross, 2003; de Sola Poole, 1983; Jenkins 2006; ad infinitum). While the
democratization of media production is no doubt an epochal shift, more important is the
expansion and growing importance of meta-textual activity, which is to say those
activities such as interpretation that refer to texts or textuality. The revolution in meta-
textual activity online results from technological, social, and cultural changes that have
given these activities both greater durability and distribution. Historically speaking,
most meta-textual activity was verbal or at least relatively ephemeral
2
and had an
extremely limited potential audience. Digital technology gives these activities lasting
and (virtually) portable form, and thus has expanded the potential audience to a
theoretically infinite horizon of time and space. One need only look at a single YouTube
video or post on a popular blog to see how a reef of meta-textual comments and links
forms around the original mote (to say nothing of how those videos and posts are often
highly meta-textual themselves). Or consider how websites such as Tumblr, Pinterest,

2
Ranging from notes taken in the margin of a book to the organization of a personal library or CDs or DVDs or the
lending of a book or pamphlet to a friend.
4

and even Facebook create opportunities for individuals to curate texts of various sorts
into personal collections, to mark links between these texts and indicate groups they
belong to, to share them with added comment. The very concept of hyptertext is as pure
an expression of meta-textual activity as could be imagined. As a result of new access to
these means of communication, self-constituting and organizing forms of meta-textual
activity permeate everyday life. Texts are used in an open (but not equal) self-reflexive
process of continual interventions and counter-interventions by diverse agents
employing a variety of different practices situated in diverse contexts. Drawing on
Ranciere’s concept of politics (1998) one could argue that the recording of these meta-
textual activities in durable form represents a truly political shift in who is allowed to be
counted and to engage in discourse. In a sense, the age of democratic media is really a
footnote to this age of durable meta-textual activity—the age of marginalia. Of course, if
we live in the age of marginalia then perhaps being a footnote is preferable.
3

At this time no realistic attempt could be made to account for every theoretical
and methodological innovation that takes digital media for its object or employs the
affordances of digital technology. The field is new and fecund, and in its initial ferment
it is difficult to pre-determine which growths will prosper, which will wither, and which
will fuse into novel hybrid forms. As will be argued throughout these pages, textual
hermeneutics must be a critical part of the study of digital media as it has been for
previous communicative forms because any questions of text and interpretation are
forever intertwined. At this time no textual hermeneutic theory—whether it be
specifically “digital” or general—has achieved a dominate position. In fact, specifically

3
I think so.
5

interpretive concerns seem troublingly under-represented, even in those areas where
interpretation would seem most relevant and most beneficial. Two emerging theoretical
and methodological fields seem immediately important to the task of studying textual
interpretation in digital spaces, whether they endure in their present form or not: the
so-called digital humanities and the “big data” movement. Neither the digital
humanities nor “big data” are organized enough to be called schools or traditions or
even clear unitary theoretical systems; both are closer to network clouds formed from
varying degrees of communication and affiliation between components. Of the two, “big
data” is the more coherent thanks to its organization around a common set of
methodological (and related theoretical commitments), but even those affinities are easy
to overstate. Both the digital humanities and “big data” movements have much to offer
any new textual hermeneutics, and a hermeneutics has much to offer them in turn.
Like cultural studies before it, no activity seems to typify work in the digital
humanities so much as trying to define or resist definition of the concept of digital
humanities. The website whatisdigitalhumanities.com, created by Jason Heppler,
provides a randomly selected definition of the digital humanities from a database of
definitions given by participants at the “Day of DH” conference between 2009 and 2012.
The underlying database currently contains 510 different definitions. Generally
speaking, however, the term digital humanities describes work focused on the
integration of digital technologies and computational models and methods with
humanities disciplines such as literary and artistic study, anthropology, philosophy, and
history. The digital humanities grew out of earlier uses of computing technology in data-
intensive humanistic fields such as archaeology, classics, art history, etc., and continues
6

to spread and evolve as considerations of the theoretical and methodological impact of
computing deepened (Unsworth 2002; Hockey 2008). Work in the digital humanities
typically emphasizes both the objects and methods of research, but also pedagogy,
archiving and cataloging, and creation of computational tools and texts (Burdick et al.
2012; Schreibman, Siemens, & Unsworth 2008). The digital humanities movement has
also demonstrated a focus on text and narrative that has escaped the study of digital
media in other disciplines, even novel “digital age” re-inventions of those disciplines.
Finally, digital humanities projects also include a number of initiatives, groups, and
journals focused on broadening the definition of scholarly publishing to include
multimedia objects such as visual essays, interfaces, interactive texts, and data driven
cataloguing and curation projects such as the Text-Encoding Initiative.
While the digital humanities are without question a diverse field and new
computational methods permit new objects of study (Masser 2012; cf. Newman et al.
2006), a unifying interest in the study of texts pervades the digital movement even from
its earliest moments. Father Roberto Busa’s (1980) appeal to IBM for help in building a
concordance for the works of St. Augustine and related authors is often cited as the
inaugural moment of the relationship between computational methods and humanistic
inquiry, and further text-centric computationally empowered projects such as
concordances and indexes followed (Hockey 2008). Considering the importance of text
to the pre-digital or non-digital humanities this continuity makes perfect sense, but text
is also in some ways particularly well suited to computational study. Matthew
Kirschenbaum (2010), in an attempt to account for the importance of English
departments to the emergence of the digital humanities, observes that “after numerical
7

input, text is the most traceable type of data for computers to manipulate” (p. 8).
Computer programs now exist that are capable of some forms of textual analysis such as
co-word analysis (Marres 2012). Texts are decidedly not new objects of study in the
abstract, but computational methods objectify texts in new ways. If texts are both a
unifying interest and key area of innovation in the digital humanities, then textual
hermeneutic theory must be one of its foundational projects. Without the ability to
theorize the relationship between interpreter and text the study of texts becomes either
inert or solipsistic, and all the more dangerous for appearing to be neither.
Even as the need for hermeneutic theories of digital media forms grows ever
more pressing, counter-movements against what might be seen as overly abstract
epistemological theorizing in favor of computer-aided empirical methods have emerged,
movements often arrayed around the term “big data.” “Big data” refers rather benignly
to data sets so enormous that they overwhelm traditional methods of data storage,
analysis, and representation (Manyinka et al. 2011) and the connectivity afforded by the
universe of digital devices has been one major source for the accumulation of enormous
stores of data (Raine & Wellman, 2012). Despite that rather dry definition, empirical
and statistical methodologies based on the big data model have developed a broad and
sometimes even millenarian following both inside and outside academia. Chris
Anderson (2008), journalist, editor, popularizer, and serial prophet of the digital took
up the banner of “big data” in characteristically epochal terms, arguing that massive
databases and statistical analysis have rendered the concept of theory obsolete: “[f]orget
taxonomy, ontology, and psychology….[w]ith enough data, the numbers speak for
themselves.” The idea that the numbers can speak for themselves once they reach
8

sufficient scale, that as Anderson puts it “correlation is enough,” is a radical form of
several more nuanced arguments about the power of big data (Williamson 2014). Big
data analysis presents a challenge to various forms of theory because the scales and
complexities of the computational processes that lead to big data’s statistical models are
sometimes so vast that they cannot be understood by human intellect (Mayer-
Schönberger & Cukier 2013). The stakes for developing tools to successfully employ such
data are understood to be enormous—for corporations looking to maximize profit or
efficiency, for government agencies tracking social change, and even for scholars in the
physical and social sciences. Google has perhaps become the most well-known data
accumulator through its tracking of web traffic and consumer behavior, its algorithms
for tracking link structures on web pages, its maps of the physical world, its attempts to
index and scan vast amounts of formerly analog data in books and journals, and not so
much its social network Google+, but they are hardly alone. Academic interest in big
data is also booming (Snijders, Matzat, & Reips 2012) in the social sciences (cf. Lazer et
al. 2009; Massar 2012) and in the humanities (Parry 2010; Manovich 2012). Does this
advance mean theory is in retreat?
No. Theory is far from obsolescence because theory is inevitable, and “big data”
and theory are not playing a zero-sum game. “big data” analyses, as any serious
proponent of the approach would point out, are built on rich theoretical traditions, at
the very least those that support the epistemological and ontological foundation of
empirical inquiry and statistical analysis. Even Anderson isn’t really dismissing theory
at large but the value of modeling causal relationships as opposed to simply accepting
the conclusions of statistical analysis as (stubborn) facts. Yet a certain attraction to the
9

idea of an empirical approach that avoids epistemological complications remains, an
attraction at least as old as the hope to replace the super-human unity of the episto-
ontological eye of God with the non-human neutrality of the machine senses of
photography, phonography, and film. It is rooted in the desire for raw access to the
world as it is unmediated by the contingency of perspective. But data cannot replace
ontology; as the eponymous collection of essays collectively point out, “raw data” is an
oxymoron and data itself is predicated on onto-epistemological assumptions rooted in
theory (Gitelman 2013). No matter how seductive the promise that a-theoretical
mathematical analysis can give one access to the same strength of external validity
claims (as well as the social and cultural power) of the hard sciences (cf. Newman et al.
2006), the promise is empty.
The cold comfort of machine methods is doubly inappropriate for hermeneutics,
the study of the interpretation of texts. Even the strongest advocate of textual
determinism would not maintain that text and interpretation can be assumed to be in
every case identical, or that any possible interpretation can be entirely extrapolated
from textual traits or affordances.
4
Furthermore, while the study of the text is not
necessarily the study of interpretation, the study of the text requires the practice of
interpretation. When these inevitable interpretive activities are made implicit in the
treatment of text(s), as data sets the assumptions of a particular interpretive regime will
be naturalized from useful hypotheses and heuristics to accepted premises to veritable
axioms. One cannot mathematize away the contingency of individual circumstance
when that contingency is part of what one wishes to understand. One might respond

4
Although this may lead to rather heated discussion of the proper definition of interpretation, a problem
addressed in chapter 3.
10

that in the social sciences at least the very idea of generalizability is based on an effort to
define tendencies and collective behavior rather than account for any possible response,
but if complexity theory as well as the simple experience of everyday life has taught us
anything, it is this: that small variations can make huge difference. In truth, the focus on
general responses or average results in the study of complex human systems are a sort of
methodological shorthand for a host of confounding, mediating, and moderating
variables that neither method nor theory could account for. To make any knowledge,
however imperfect, possible, some limitation has to be accepted, but one should not
mistake the present limitations of one’s understanding for the horizon of the universe.
Just as the advent of digital media technology necessitates new hermeneutic
theory, so too does the methodological revolutions taking place in around the concepts
of the digital humanities and big data. While no amount of computationally aided
analysis of texts alone can fully account for interpretation of that text, computational
methods are not therefore somehow disqualified from the study of interpretation. The
issue is not that computational methods are not useful or important or even potentially
revolutionary for the study of texts—in fact these methods will be more useful,
important and revolutionary than many of their advocates suspect—but that that
potential can only be realized with adequate textual hermeneutic theory. A new theory
of textual hermeneutics could offer that foundation to the digital humanities, to
computational methods in the humanities and social sciences including those under the
sign of “big data,” and to all fields concerned with or dealing in texts and interpretation.
To do so, it must provide a way to articulate the relationships between diverse
articulations of object, diverse methods, and multiple theoretical orientations within a
11

common space. Fortunately, creating a theoretically and methodologically ecumenical
theory of textual hermeneutics is another step on the same road as creating a general
textual hermeneutic theory capable of accounting for diverse historical media
landscapes: hermeneutics must turn toward the social.
The Social Turn in Hermeneutics
Accounting for textual interpretation requires attention to interpretation as a set
of socially situated practices and performances, and while past textual hermeneutic
theories do address this issue, they so do through assumptions the landscape of digital
media have revealed to be contingent on a particular historical context. As that context
has changed, those assumptions have become increasingly unsound. Chapter 2 provides
a broad review of the history of textual hermeneutics, and in doing so suggests three
equally broad theoretical concepts endemic to the study of the interpretation of texts:
textual realism, the text/interpreter interaction, and the text/interpreter power binary.
These are longstanding if sometimes implicit aspects of hermeneutic theory, so while
the theoretical and methodological problems that attend them are not unique to digital
media, chapter 3 explores how digital media have pushed them to the point of crisis. The
affordances of digital texts and interfaces as well as the political economy of textual
production, dissemination, reception, and interpretation online require revised
hermeneutic theory to reframe the study of textual interpretation within a new, wider
shot. Renewed attention to the social aspect of textual interpretation, a social turn in
hermeneutics, allows just that. Reconceptualizing the social aspects of interpretation in
a more general and broadly applicable form no longer dependent on the assumptions of
printing press or broadcast media is the only viable way forward.
12

Chapter 4 explicates the concept and theoretical basis of network hermeneutics, a
theoretical system capable of accomplishing the necessary social turn. Network
hermeneutics is built on the premise that textual interpretation is a social fact: a
widespread, varied, continuing, and dynamic activity seen manifest in various modes of
practice and performance. Interpretations themselves are characterized both by degrees
of uniformity and variation, both systematic and seemingly entirely idiosyncratic. Thus
far network hermeneutics remains, but for some shifts of emphasis, well in line with
previous approaches to the study of textual interpretation. These subtle shifts, however,
ultimately cascade into major theoretical revisions beginning with basic issues of
epistemology. Network hermeneutics is built on the “intra-active” epistemology of
Karen Barad’s (2007) concept of agential realism. According to Barad’s theory the
phenomena of the world are not objects, but relationships. Much like how a scientist
might diffract a beam of light through a prism to study it, the observable world is made
known to us through the “diffraction” of a hypothetical object or force through the
medium of some mode of perception. Interpretation, the medium of diffraction for
knowledge of texts, is a learned social practice that is enunciated, tested, and learned
through various forms of interpretive performance, both of which are collected under
the term “interpretive activity.”
As both social practice and performance
5
interpretive activity is always already
implicated in various social systems both as a shared process of sense-making and as a
motivated social activity with social ends. Texts, after all, are not just spaces for
cognitive problem solving but tools for use in social life. A text can offer symbolic

5
Practice and performance are used here in an encompassing sense that includes the material aspects of both and
the discursive structures that enable them.
13

resources for later communication, a tool for the assertion of individual or group
identity, a means for situating others within the imagined social world, and much more.
These activities are themselves are one type of all possible social practices and
performances that refer to text or textuality, referred to as “meta-textual activities.”
6
The
adjective “interpretive” is employed here to describe those practices and performances
that allow an interpreter to make a text both knowable and known—knowable in that it
is a potential object of knowledge and known in that knowledge of the text cannot be
independent of the means through which knowledge is produced. “Meta-textual,” on the
other hand, designates those texts, discourses, sites, practices, artifacts, and ideas that
in whole or in part are about or refer to other texts or textuality itself.
7
While
interpretive activity will remain the focus of this study, it is inevitably entangled with
other meta-textual activities such as those of judgment, group and individual identity
and general social mapping, categorization, and affinity.
8
Spaces afforded by digital
media technology render the relationship between the interpretive and the meta-textual
as well as between the social and the textual particularly salient, but ever more complex.

6
Neither interpretive nor meta-textual is intended as a taxonomic category, as –etic terms useful to designate
shared properties in a variety of different phenomena and their relationship to texts
7
From this perspective asserting that a given text is “meta-textual” is trivial. All texts refer in some way to other
texts, and if at any time there was a primordial moment where a single text referred to no other textual space that
moment is long past and likely irrecoverable. The meta-textual problem is not “if,” but “how,” “where,” and “why.”
8
Judgment activities refer to those concerned with assigning value or quality to a text or texts. Identity activities
are those in which texts are used to assert individual or group identity, while social mapping describes the use of
texts to designate understood relationships between social groups (e.g., that’s “their” music). Categorization refers
to the establishment of relationships between texts, whether through the articulation of a television genre or the
Library of Congress Classification system. Affinity activities are those in which an individual invests personal
meaning and relevance to a text or texts, and as such might range from divination practices to modern fan
activities. These meta-textual activities therefore provide the infrastructure for what constitutes a text, for why a
text matters and to whom, what texts can do, and how one puts texts to use.
14

The relationship between interpretation and meta-textual activities highlights
the two basic senses in which interpretation is fundamentally social. First, interpretative
activities are based on both generative rules and bodies of discursive knowledge that are
learned, and that learning takes place within a particular social, historical, and cultural
context. Second, interpretive activities are undertaken for social purposes, and that
these purposes influence interpretive activity in ways both visible and invisible to the
interpreter. Understanding interpretation as a process of sense-making therefore
requires understanding how interpretation relates to the interpreter’s social world, the
repertoire of practices and performances available to them, and their sense of what role
texts can play in social life. That social world, in turn, exists in relation to both
subjective and inter-subjective understandings of the world of the textual. By accounting
for the social lives of texts
9
, network hermeneutics provides a meso-scale account for
how interpretation operates that connects both macro-scale accounts of hegemony or
culture and micro-scale instances of individual or group textual interpretation and use.
As a result network hermeneutics offers a new general hermeneutic theory that does not
rely on the three problematic assumptions of previous hermeneutic theory.
For textual hermeneutics of any kind to proceed, one must be able to define the
concept of “text.” Since network hermeneutics replaces the idea of the objective,
independent existence of empirical text or textuality with a situated, contingent account
of how interpretive practices intra-act with texts, offering a foundational definition of
text is obviously hazardous but ultimately necessary. Chapter 4 navigates this problem
by attempting to isolate the absolute minimum premises that the concept of text would

9
I do not wish to disqualify entirely biological explanations for aspects of interpretation, merely to suggest that the
search for biological uniformities in a set of phenomena as complex as hermeneutics could not proceed without a
proper account of the social.
15

require for any interpreter. The “absolute minimum premise” approach is an analytical,
deductive form of network hermeneutic inquiry that takes an interpretation or group of
interpretations and attempts to cut through the inevitable contingency of the instance to
identify what concepts or relationships the interpretation(s) under study absolutely
require. In this case, the concept of text cannot be alienated from its double existence:
text refers inevitably beyond itself both through its use of a borrowed symbolic grammar
and through the work of representation that those symbols perform. A text is always
part virtual, but the potential text is actually encountered not in its virtual form but as a
material object in the world, a part of reality in its own right. This boundary is
particularly important for the study of digital media due to the myriad ways in which
digital texts might articulate their relationship to reality, and how interpreters might
themselves understand that boundary. Of course, the “absolute minimum premise”
approach is only one imperfect, partial way to address any problem, but in this case it
affords us a theory that can be applied in empirical media effects research on the nature
of “realism.” Chapter 4 concludes by outlining an explication and operationalization of
the text/reality boundary, and describing how it might be useful for future experimental
research.
Chapter 5 expands on the boundary between text and reality by engaging with the
tradition of documentary film and television theory to examine the axiology of
representing reality as a practice. The liminal space between textual and non-textual
real has always been a core question for hermeneutics, but the advent of computer,
internet, and mobile technologies that permit close integration of practices of audio-
visual and lexical production with everyday life demand increasingly sophisticated
16

models to account for that boundary. Photographs posted on Flickr or Facebook, live
recordings, even entirely lexical Tweets have sophisticated understood relationships
with the real. While the questions raised for mass media forms still apply, they are
complicated by a very different technological and socio-economic context. When one
video creator has nearly the same access to technology and dissemination as another,
the responsibilities of the one who documents to those he or she represents or is
representing to must no doubt change to reflect new power relationships. The allegedly
participatory affordances of digital media technology require revision of both
interpretive and hermeneutic methods to make them sensitive to more nearly
horizontal, localized power relationships.
Accounting for small differentials in the power between subject, documentarian,
and audience becomes increasingly important when one focuses on the intersection
between power, privacy, and control of communicative resources. Chapter 5 explores
these problems through the study of both documentary media and the technologies that
permit various forms of documenting. The video-hosting site YouTube has been
described as one of the key sites for participatory media production (cf. Burgess &
Green, 2009). Focusing first on the example of a YouTube documentary video designed
as an intervention against homophobia online, this chapter explores the implications of
the relationship between the political economy of participatory media production and
horizontal power in the context of privacy and horizontal surveillance. Horizontal
surveillance poses different ethical issues than more traditional top-down surveillance
models. To address this problem Chapter 5 also explores what network hermeneutics
17

can offer the design of technological interventions by critiquing a proposed counter-
surveillance technology that trades one form of surveillance for another.
These ethical and practical problems allow chapter 5 to address a second
foundational issue in network hermeneutics: the role of conceptions of power as an
interpretive tool. Hegemonic conceptions of power provide one of the more stable
grounds for generalizing hermeneutic practices across a given population since they
provide an account for how potentially diverse responses to texts converge into
dominant readings. To the extent that this power model no longer holds it becomes a
weaker source of validity for attempts to generalizable an interpretation of a text to
other interpreters. Digital technologies diffuse power, but what might be characterized
as “resistance” in relation to a particular conception of hegemony is itself a form of
power and not merely a sort of friction against centralized power structures. Such
power, even in its limited way, has its own distinct disciplinary influence. One should
not abandon the concept of hegemony; to the contrary it remains the best way to
conceptualize how discipline in accordance with dominant ideology can be enforced
through those otherwise disempowered in the system that ideology supports. Just as
one must account for the importance of horizontal surveillance so too must one attempt
to reckon with more nuanced networks of shifting power relationships. Hegemony
remains a major network hermeneutic concern, but the interpretive heuristics that the
top-down model provided cannot be sustained.
Even if the theoretical justifications of textual realism or top-down conceptions of
disciplinary power no longer provide justification for generalizing textual interpretation
as a method of inquiry, textual interpretive methods remain absolutely critical to
18

network hermeneutics because textual interpretation is inevitable. Network
hermeneutics holds that no one can study interpretation from the outside because all
are interpreters of texts. Chapter 6 explores how two kinds of interpretive methods—
textual analysis and social interpretive methods
10
—can be made compatible with an
intra-active network hermeneutic approach though the study of interpretive and meta-
textual activities and artifacts on the hugely popular website Newgrounds.com.
Newgrounds.com is an open-access platform on which users can share Flash animation
and games, visual art, and music through a crowd-sourced editorial system. Thanks to
this system, as well as a variety of more conventional affordances for meta-textual
activity such as written user review, Newgrounds offers a wealth of opportunities to
study interpretive and meta-textual activity in durable, virtual forms. This chapter
provides concrete examples of the relationship between interpretation and other meta-
textual activities through the study of performances of interpretive prowess, affect,
establishment of cultural capital, and the assertion and maintenance of personal and
group identity. The use of texts for diverse social ends is hardly unique to digital media
(cf. Conquergood, 2002, 2007; Denzin, 2003; Pollock, 2006; Sullivan, 1986), but the
technological affordances and social context of online interfaces invites new questions
about both the shape and the relative importance of meta-textual activities. An
examination of texts and meta-textual materials on Newgrounds suggests that

10
See Willis (2007) and Sherrat (2006) offer extensive reviews of the hermeneutic tradition in social scientific
research. Dilthey’s (1991) concept of the “human sciences,” Max Weber’s (1949, cf. Ringer 1997) interpretive
methods, Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy (2008) and the application of psychoanalytic methods to
anthropological and sociological questions (e.g., Freud 1994) are key foundational moments for the social
hermeneutic tradition in the social sciences (not to be confused with the social turn in hermeneutics, advocated
here). Familiar exemplars of that tradition include sociologists such as Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer (2000),
philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur (1976) or Hans-Georg Gadamer (2004), anthropologists like Victor Turner’s
(1988, 1995) and Clifford Geertz’s (1973) studies of ritual and performance, cultural historian’s such as Robert
Darnton (1984), and many others too numerous to list.
19

interpretation is felt as much in its presence as in its absence, and that the instability of
the loss of interpretive community and context is being played out in meta-textual
practice.
******************************
This study contends that textual interpretation is always already a social activity.
The nature of the text and the relationship between text and interpreter conceptualized
thus far in textual hermeneutic theory is not sufficiently flexible to account for
interpretation’s social character in the novel ecology of digital and online media. A new
model cannot be built anywhere except upon the shoulders of the old, so the first step
must be to return to the history and pre-history of the field of hermeneutics.

20

Chapter 2
Hermeneutics, Textual Interpretation, and the Problem of Other
Minds
Textual hermeneutics is a diverse field held together by a set of well-established
questions and recognized approaches, and this connective tissue contains theoretical
premises that pervade the study of the interpretation of texts. This chapter isolates
several of the most critical premises of textual hermeneutic theory so that they can be
tested as tools for studying the interpretation of digital media in the chapters that
follow. The process of isolating these foundational ideas begins with a brief survey of the
origin of the modern field of hermeneutics and the pursuit of a “general” hermeneutic
theory. While hermeneutic philosophy shifted to more onto-epistemological concerns
with the work of Martin Heidegger, methods of textual analysis supported by textual
hermeneutic theories persist as an important trans-disciplinary practice. Thanks in
particular to the wide-spread influence of the hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricoeur 1970)
and its application in literary, cultural and critical theory, textual hermeneutic theory in
various forms now provides external validity and a degree of cautious generalizability to
textual interpretative methods as a means for understanding the interpretations of
others in a variety of disciplines. Across this proliferation three key hermeneutic
premises persist: the interactive relationship between text and interpreter, the text-
interpreter power dialectic, and the epistemology of textual realism. These common
theoretical concepts provide the foundation for textual hermeneutics’ methodological
validity. Unfortunately, as will be demonstrated in chapter 3, these three commonalities
21

are precisely what prevent textual hermeneutic theory from accounting fully for digital
media texts and the interpretive and meta-textual practices in and through which they
are articulated.
Defining Interpretation and Hermeneutics
“To interpret” is a promiscuous infinitive of ancient pedigree. A reader interprets a
novel. A musician interprets music. A mystic interprets revelation. An anthropologist
interprets the significance of a social ritual. Martial epics, halls full of painting and
sculpture, macramé, folk songs, the strength of a handshake, or the dilation of another
person’s eye all might be said to require interpretation, as might the distribution of
chicken bones thrown from a bag or the results of a national political poll. Interpretation
in a myriad of forms predates the information revolution, the industrial revolution, the
scientific revolution, the printing press, at least two agricultural revolutions, the practice
of written history, and perhaps even our species. The word “interpretation” itself comes
from the Latin interpretatio, explanation, which is in turn derived from interpres, an
agent between two parties such as a translator or negotiator. It retains much of this
meaning in contemporary English, generally being used to describe the act of explaining
or elucidating, or to set forth the meaning of something. As the examples above make
clear the variety of objects susceptible to interpretation and the contexts in which
interpretation takes place are staggering. While interpretation can refer to a number of
distinct practices, for the purposes of this project I will use the term “interpretation” in a
more limited sense to refer to the process through which a text becomes both knowable
and known—knowable in that the text becomes a potential object of knowledge and
22

known in that knowledge of the text cannot exist independent of the concept of
interpretation itself.
11

Textual hermeneutics, in turn, is the art or science of textual interpretation,
sometimes also referred to as the theory of interpretation, and like interpretation its
roots sink deep into classical philosophy. The word hermeneutics comes from the Greek
words hermēneuein, to interpret, and hermēneia, interpretation, with their clear
reference to the messenger god Hermes (Palmer 1969, 12). While interpretation might
refer to any number of practices, specifically textual interpretation was a significant
philosophical concern in antiquity. Socrates (Plato, n.d.) discusses interpretation in Ion
and Protagoras,
12
among other dialogues. Plato famously critiques the value of such
meaning and by extension the means through which one comes to it in The Republic
(2007). Aristotle (2014) addresses hermeneutic issues in his study of the relationship
between language and logic, De Interpretatione. Increasingly sophisticated elaborations
of hermeneutic theory and practice drawing from these Hellenistic roots can be found
throughout the work of Christian theologians from the Patristic period to the Middle
Ages: the exegetic work of Philo of Alexandria (2013),
13
Origen Adamantius,
14
and St.

11
A point more fully elaborated in chapter 3.
12
See Baultussen (2004) for an analysis of Protagoras from an exegetical point of view.
13
One can also find the complete text of Yonge’s translation of Philo online at
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/. Philo regarded the Torah as the source of all truth, not just
religious truth, so exegetical concerns can be found throughout his work, but of particular importance is his
allegorical work in Legum Allegoriæ. I particularly recommend the section Yonge entitled “De Mutatione
Nominum,” or “On the Changes of Names,” as an example of Philo’s concern with the specificities of a text and his
rigorous attention to detail (and his interesting justification of that interest in light of his treatment of language as
a human construct). See also Borgen (1997) for Philo’s exegetical work placed within an historical and intellectual
context, particularly that of 1
st
century Hellenistic Jewish culture. Runia (1993) reviews Philo’s influence on early
Christian theology.
14
Origen Adamantius is most commonly discussed in relation to his contribution to Neo-Platonist philosophy,
particularly through his On First Principles (1966), but he also made several important contributions to Biblical
hermeneutics. Unfortunately much of Origen’s exegetical and hermeneutic work has been lost, in particular his
Hexapla, an important comparative study of Biblical translations that ultimately proved influential in the formation
23

Augustine
15
to name only a few.
16
Yet despite its ancient pedigree the word hermeneutics
only appears in the English language at the beginning of the eighteenth century (OED)
not long before the articulation of hermeneutics as a distinct field of knowledge in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
Considering how long the study of textual interpretation had been an ongoing field of
intellectual inquiry, why did hermeneutics as a distinct field coalesce at so late a date?
As will be discussed in detail later in the chapter, many of the innovators in the field of
hermeneutics thought of themselves as engaged with already established traditions of
exegesis and philological inquiry. Despite this continuity, a number of very real
theoretical innovations differentiate earlier interpretive theory from what was to
become the modern field of hermeneutics, most importantly several radical shifts in
what objects and problems textual interpretive methods were understood to apply to.
Still, whether hermeneutics existed as an implicit field the question remains how and
why hermeneutics was articulated as a new, or at least a reformed, discursive object in
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe. Understanding the founding

of the modern Biblical canon, of which only fragments survive (Fenlon 1910; cf. Silva 1987, 58-62). Origen also
produced extensive commentaries, some of which survive, a number of translations of which are available (cf.
Origen 1996; Coxe & Menzies, 1897).
15
St. Augustine of Hippo’s interpretive works continue to exert a strong influence on textual hermeneutic theory.
Augustine (1982), like Philo, argued for and articulated an allegorical approach to the Bible. In his four-part work
De Doctrina Christiana (1958; cf. Woo 2013) Augustine not only set forth methods for interpreting the Bible but
articulated the importance of teaching and protecting correct interpretation. Augustine played a major part in
Dilthey’s narrative of the philosophy of history (cf. 1991, 147-149; Heidegger 2004, 118-126). His Confessions and
other works play a major part in Heidegger’s study of The phenomenology of Religious Life (2004). Augustine’s
articulation of hermeneutic universality and the relationship between thought and language has been a major
influence on Gadamer’s hermeneutics (cf .Gadamer 2004, 421; Arthos 2009; Grondin 1994) although the nature of
that influence is ambiguous (Cary, 2011; Vessey, 2011).
16
See in particular Baltussen (2007) on the development of exegesis and its relationship with the genre of
“commentary” in Greco-Roman antiquity, and Struck (2004) on the genealogy of the concept of the symbol in the
allegorical tradition.
24

narrative of hermeneutic theory is as essential a step in identifying hermeneutics’
unifying theoretical commitments as tracing their pre-history and later evolution.
The Pre-History of Hermeneutics
The roots of modern hermeneutics sink into the European Renaissance, the
Protestant Reformation, and the social and cultural revolutions of the eighteenth and
nineteenth century which in turn tap into older, Classical sources. In many ways it is
this connective tissue between classical, medieval, and Renaissance Europe that feeds
the sprout of modern hermeneutics—particularly in the fields of biblical exegesis and
classical philology. Both fields attempt to recover from loss. Biblical exegesis sought to
reveal and preserve authentic revelation, the link to the prelapsarian utopia. Philologists
sought to recover connection with the human past, although that past may take on
mythological dimensions. In Homeric scholarship, for example, the tradition of textual
philology stretches over millennia in the form of both independent works and scholia,
17

and many of these works strayed into the exegetical or allegorical.
18
During the course of
the Renaissance interest in allegorical works and attempts to reconnect with the antique
Greek and Roman past returned hermeneutics to secular texts such as the works of
Virgil and Ovid.
19
However, biblical exegesis and classical philological inquiry also cross-

17
The term scholia refers to explanatory or critical commentary placed in the margins of texts.
18
Allegorical approaches to Homer have been sometimes marginalized in Homeric scholarship—often they are
excluded from collections of scholia. For example, Erbse’s monumental collection of Illiad scholia, Scholia Graeca in
Homeri Iliadem, excludes allegorical works. These were later included in Van Thiel’s edition of the D-scholia
(Nünlist 2011). Yet the tradition of allegorical interpretation of Homer is nearly as ancient as the study of Homer
itself (Struck 2011). Heraclitus’s (2005) Homeric Problems and Porphyry’s allegorical essays (Lamberton 1989, 108-
133) and scholia influence by Porphyry exemplify the allegorical tradition.
19
The relationship between Renaissance humanism and the philological study of Greek and Roman literature is
well established (Mann 2004). Wilson-Okamura (2010) provides a sweeping history of the study of Virgil during the
European Renaissance. Stok (1994) details Renaissance scholars’ pursuit of the historical Virgil in the face of the
mythology that developed around him. The online resource “Ovid Illustrated: The Reception of Ovid’s
25

fertilized, at least as early as the comparative scriptural translations contained in
Origen’s Hexapla, St. Thomas Aquinas’s studies of Aristotle,
20
and in creation and
revision of the Biblical canon.
21

The importance of the Bible in medieval and Renaissance Europe guaranteed the
continued relevance of hermeneutics as an issue (and source) of both temporal and
spiritual power.
22
Hermeneutic authority was a powerful resource, carefully
husbanded.
23
The Catholic Church held that scripture and the authority of the

Metamorphoses in Image and Text” provides a wealth of examples of Renaissance meta-textual activities around
the Metamorphoses including philological scholarship.
20
St. Thomas Aquinas wrote twelve commentaries on Aristotle works, including his commentary on The Book of
Causes (1996) in which he argued that the work should not be attributed to Aristotle. Aquinas’s philosophy and
theology in general show considerable Aristotelian influence (Yarchin 2004, 93), although the similarity between
the two is sometimes overstated (Owen 1993). Of course, Aquinas has had considerable influence on Biblical
exegesis and hermeneutics in general in his own right—most notably his two senses of scriptural meaning and
conceptualization of metaphor famously articulated in question one, articles nine and ten of his Summa Theologica
(2010), and in his many commentaries. Although not directly concerned with textual interpretation Heidegger
dedicated an entire chapter of his Introduction to Phenomenological Research (2005, 120-147) to Aquinas.
21
Cf. Volumes 1 and 2 of The Cambridge History of the Bible detail this process through the reformation.
22
Heresy, after all, is essentially a hermeneutic problem (Arnold 2001). The close alliance between Biblical
exegetical and temporal authority in the history of the Catholic Church in Europe begins at least as early as the
establishment of Christianity as the state church of the Roman Empire under Emperor Theodosius (Boyd 1905).
While his predecessor Constantine the Great ended Roman persecution of Christians and supported the First
Council of Nicaea, he did not involve himself directly in theological affairs and Christianity remained a
heterogeneous social and religious movement (Freeman, 2009). Theodosius did, transforming tolerance of
Christianity into the abolition of state support for non-Christian religion and the establishment of a single Christian
orthodoxy based on the Nicaean model as the single acceptable form of Christianity (Bury 1923; Williams & Friell
2005), mating the secular power of the Roman state with the spiritual authority of the emerging Christian Church.
As the Western Roman Empire declined, the Catholic Church became the new center of both spiritual and
temporal authority, and again these two missions were mated in both persecution of non-Catholic Christian sects
and missionary efforts in pagan countries (Jeffrey 1980). As the Catholic Church became both a unifying political
and cultural institution across much of Europe, Efforts to protect this dual authority against heresy, internal
schism, various proto-nationalist, political, and social movements such as the Hussites (Kaminsky 1967), and the
threat of other major religions such as Islam are too numerous to list here, although the Protestant Reformation
and the conflict between Henry VIII and Rome that led to the emergence of the Anglican Church are seminal
examples. Such power relations were not always in favor of the Pope of course, but the moral authority of the
Papacy had profound temporal influence. As Bertrand Russell put it, “[a]s politicians, men might rail against the
Pope, but only heretics questioned the power of the keys” (2004, 43).
23
A resource that also could be used strategically, and not only by the Church. Championing orthodox belief was a
tool secular rulers could employ as part of their sometimes wrought relationship with the Papacy—McGinn (2004,
195) discusses the example of King Philip the Fair of France potentially using his support of the prosecution of
Marguerite Porete for heresy as a tool for smoothing over relationships with the Vatican (cf. Lerner 1972, 71-81).
26

episcopacy together allowed for authentic interpretation of divine revelation,
24
and that
both were to be regarded equally as infallible sources. As such it was the Church’s duty
as part of its educational mission or magisterium to confirm the authentic biblical text
and its correct interpretation—to render the text an object of knowledge. The Bible
didn’t have an independent existence as a neutral something to be consulted on its own
authority; it was situated in a permanent and necessary relationship with the tradition
and institution of the Church.
25
Access to the text for the initiated was therefore not only
undesirable, it was really impossible—without the ministry of the Catholic Church the
text was not truly “complete.”
26
The power of the Church, and to an extent the order of
civilization in Catholic Europe, rested in part on the validity of particular hermeneutic
theories and methods.
As a result, when this order came to its point of crisis, hermeneutics played a key
role. While the great social-political upheaval of the Protestant Reformation was about a
great deal more than scriptural authority the fight over who controls the text and
meaning of scripture was a crucial battlefield. While Martin Luther did not articulate a
clear and fully enunciated hermeneutic system explicitly (Grondin 1994, 40-41) much
can be extrapolated from his own interpretive work and exegetical comments. Despite
that, Luther articulated certain interpretive principles quite plainly—key among them

24
Consider paragraph 100 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “The task of interpreting the Word of God
authentically has been entrusted solely to the Magisterium of the Church, that is, to the Pope and to the bishops in
communion with him.”
25
Cf. part 82 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “the Church, to whom the transmission and interpretation of
Revelation is entrusted, does not derive her certainty about all revealed truths from the holy Scriptures alone.
Both Scripture and Tradition must be accepted and honoured [sic] with equal sentiments of devotion and
reverence.”
26
I wish to avoid the traditional Protestant narrative of vernacular Bibles as resistance to centralized Church
tyranny. While the Church’s fight against vernacular translation of the Bible was certainly a calculated move to
retain power over the sacred text, it was also validated by a particular hermeneutic and theological perspective.
See Walsham (2003) for a more even-handed study of the complex politics of translation and Catholic authority in
the post-Reformation period.
27

the doctrine that Scripture alone was sufficient for salvation or sola scriptura. Where
the Catholic Church insisted that the biblical text was essentially incomplete and
inherently dispersed, Luther asserted its status as an object with discernible properties
independent of any particular institutional context. Luther did not invent the concept of
an objective text: the concept was a cornerstone of philological and biblical inquiry,
27

but Luther’s enunciation of it in connection with his critique of the Church gave it
extraordinary political import. However, commitment to an objective text does not
equate to absolute freedom of interpretation, quite the contrary. Luther’s assertion of
the primacy of scripture did not reject the pedagogical role of churches or the
priesthood
28
nor did it eliminate the need for exegetic and explanatory work, but it did
place all of these under the ultimate authority of scripture. With an infallible text and
potentially fallible interpreters, the discovery and application of proper interpretive
practice gained enormous social, political, and metaphysical importance.
The importance of “correct” interpretation and the power of an objective text with
discernible stable traits grew stronger still in Enlightenment political theory. Luther
demanded that secular and religious power be responsible to the text, not only
responsible for it. A similar logic can be found in theories of constitutionalism and the
resurrection of the Aristotelian (2000, 139-140) concept of the “rule of law” in legal,
political, and social theories such as those of Samuel Rutherford (1843), John Locke
(1980), and Montesquieu (1997). The idea of laws that govern in lieu of some human

27
Consider for example Aristarchus of Samothrace’s injunction to explain “Homer from Homer” (Struck 2004, 76).
Jean Grondin (1994, 40) also points out that early Christian writers frequently engaged with scripture as
comprehensible in itself—see for example Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana.
28
Although to an extent the actual act of translating the Bible was problematic for the doctrine of sola scriptura as
it highlighted the importance of human intermediary agency in the transmission of Scriptural truth (Sheehan 2005,
4; Pelikan 1985; 332).
28

agency (who might rule “by law” but is not ruled by them in turn) requires significant
faith in the ability of language to successfully communicate meaning across a variety of
social and historical contexts. It is probably not coincidental that Locke’s preferred
metaphor for social order fundamentally textual—the social contract, a metaphorical (or
literal) document of reciprocal rights and responsibilities. Like the doctrine of sola
scriptura, constitutionalism required stable knowable texts that exist independent of
the interpreter—objective texts. The concept of laws as a relatively stable textual object
capable of governing society also required a systematic theory of the interpretation of
texts that could be accepted as practical, durable, and, most importantly, legitimate.
Theories and practices of interpretation ranging from practical legal concerns to the
grandest metaphysical issues had need of a new kind of legitimacy—legitimacy based on
the ability to interpret the text correctly and convincingly, rather than a responsibility
for authorizing correct interpretation. Defending a theory of interpretation as correct in
terms of its relationship to the objective reality of the text alone required a new set of
standards, objective standards.
The Emergence of Hermeneutic Theory
The first stirrings of what would become modern field of objective, “scientific”
hermeneutic inquiry can be found in Benedict de Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise
(1883, originally published in 1670).
29
Drawing on both the theological and philological
hermeneutic traditions, Spinoza approached the Bible as an historical document and his

29
Spinoza was a practicing scientists in his own right, working in mathematics, physics, optics, and chemistry, and
his empirical modes of thinking significantly his more theoretical, philosophical work (Savan 1986; Curley 1973).
Savan even goes so far as to argue that the Theologico-Political Treatise extends the methods of the natural
sciences into biblical study, making it a, if not the, founding work of scientific hermeneutics (97; cf. Rudavsky
2001).
29

hermeneutics focused on the extraction of meaning rather than Truth. Spinoza argued
that the interpretation of the Bible was essentially an inferential process similar to the
interpretation of nature. The authors, in turn, were situated within a particular social-
historical context, so understanding their message require knowledge of that context.
One should seek evidence for one’s inferences from Scripture itself, bearing in mind the
historical environment in which it was created and originally meant to communicate as
well as the provenance of the text. Successful interpretation ultimately led one to
understand the intention of the original authors. This shift in objectives carried two
critical implications. First, if one sought meaning or intention rather than Truth it is
possible to engage with the text critically, to question not just a given interpretation but
also the text itself and its representations. Second, if even the Bible could be treated as
an historical text then perhaps interpretation itself could be generalized. The shift from
Truth to meaning suggests that one could have a general theory of hermeneutics rather
than separate theories for separate genres or forms of text.
While Spinoza’s hermeneutic approach to the Bible presaged the modern field of
hermeneutic theory that would emerge in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century, the most immediate influences on the nascent field came from more
traditionally philological scholars such as Friedrich August Wolf and Georg Anton
Friedrich Ast. Wolf,
30
one of the key figures in the emergence of modern philology,
figured hermeneutic inquiry as a form of communication with the author of the work, a
practice requiring empathy and openness. Ast, now most famous for his Grundlinien
der Grammatik, Hermeneutik und Kritik (1808) as well as his extensive work on the

30
Works on Wolf in English are relatively uncommon, but see Grafton (1981).
30

Platonic dialogues (1816), believed that philology should attempt to see past the outer
forms of literary sources to find inner meanings that can themselves be traced to the
spirit of the age.
31
History and knowledge of human internal life was therefore a
necessary adjunct to purely textual study. The text itself was not self-contained and
complete, or at least it could not be understood as such without the key of external
sources of knowledge. Like Spinoza both Wolf and Ast offered conceptions of
hermeneutics that focused on the power of textual interpretation to bridge historical
rather than meta-physical gaps.
32
Wolf and Ast’s theories of textual interpretation
remained limited in their scope to records of classical antiquity, but in a second parallel
to Spinoza they suggested the possibility of a larger, more encompassing hermeneutic
theory.
Spinoza, Wolf, and Ast pursued specialized forms of hermeneutics, designed for
certain types of texts and intended to overcome particular problems. In his cross-
disciplinary methods Spinoza had suggested a certain equivalency in texts—the Bible
was as much a historical text to be interpreted as a work by Plato or Aristotle. Wolf and
Ast argued that gaps in comprehensibility between the eighteenth-century central
Europe and ancient Greece or Rome could be crossed through interpretation, so why not
other gaps in comprehensibility between other historical periods, other cultures, or
ultimately even other individuals? Why have a theory of biblical exegesis or classical
exegesis if both pointed toward the need for a theory of textual interpretation in

31
See Palmer (1969, 76-83) for a fuller account of Ast and Wolf’s hermeneutic theories as well as their place in the
evolution of hermeneutic theory.
32
Although the idea that interpretation was inherently improving for the interpreter that was inherited from
textual hermeneutics close association with communication with divinity remained strong. Belief that
interpretation is a good act continues in various forms, often articulated in defense of the value of literary or
artistic study. See Gropnik 2013 for a number of examples of this kind of thinking.
31

general? Certain theologians had circled a similar point. For example August Ernesti’s
Principles of Biblical Interpretation (1832, but originally printed in 1761) argues that
the Bible be interpreted as one would interpret any other text, thus implying the
existence of a hermeneutics of any text, as well as for the importance of the historical
context of the text. While the idea of “general hermeneutics” as a concept can be traced
back at least as far as Johann Conrad Dannhauer’s The Idea of the Good Interpreter in
1630 (Grondin 1994, 48), the formation of a fully developed general hermeneutic theory,
and with it the true foundation of the modern field of hermeneutics, is generally
attributed to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s lectures and writing in the first decades of the
nineteenth century.
33

Schleiermacher believed that it was possible to construct a form of interpretive
inquiry that would be equally applicable to all types of texts regardless of genre,
historical epoch, or authorship. While Schleiermacher was primarily a theologian, he
was also aware of the more philological work of Ast and Wolf, as well as his
contemporary Johann Herder’s work on interpretation and the philosophy of language
(Herder 2002).
34
In fact his hermeneutic writings were often in direct response to their
work (Palmer 1969, 75). Schleiermacher argued for hermeneutics as a systematic
method for reaching understanding through “re-experiencing…the mental processes of

33
For more on Schleiermacher’s life, theology, and philosophy see Mariña (2005). For more concise review of
Schleiermacher’s place in the evolution of hermeneutic theory see Palmer (1969, 84-97).
34
In fact Michael Forster (2011) has made a compelling case for the importance of Johann Herder’s work in the
development of hermeneutics, and argued also that Schleiermacher’s status as the “father of modern
hermeneutics” may be undeserved (294). Since my present purpose is less to assign certain ideas to certain minds
than it is to survey these ideas over time, I will skip over this issue here.
32

the text’s author” (87).
35
Schleiermacher saw two forms of hermeneutic inquiry—one
“grammatical” or “objective” dealing with the ability to comprehend language and the
second “technical” or “psychological” where one reaches a state of understanding with
the text’s author. According to Schleiermacher the ultimate goal of hermeneutics was to
reconstruct and experience the subjectivity of another, even to the extent that the
interpreter could know the author better than the author knew him or herself (cf.
Schleiermacher 1998, 228). Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics requires that a text’s
meaning is neither ahistorical nor buried within the material form of the text itself, but
rather is dependent on the actual moment of interpretation.
For Schleiermacher hermeneutics remained an art, but Wilhelm Dilthey, heavily
inspired by Schleiermacher’s theories, sought to elevate the study of interpretation fully
to the level of science. Dilthey sought a method for gaining knowledge of human inner
life but was unwilling to accept either the empirical realism or idealism of his time.
Since one is unable to directly access the inner life of others or to safely equate one’s
own internal world with theirs, he argued that hermeneutics provided a means through
which to theorize that internal world based on outward, sensible signs, as one is unable
to directly access the inner life of others or to safely equate one’s own internal world

35
Schleiermacher described this process of experience and re-experience as being a synthesis of both a divinatory
process whereby one imaginatively transforms oneself into the other person and a comparative process through
which one understands the other through the common medium of the universal:

Both refer back to each other, for the [divinatory method] initially depends on the fact that every person,
besides being an individual themselves, has a receptivity for all other people. But this itself seems only to
rest on the fact that everyone carries a minimum of everyone else within themselves, and divination is
consequently excited by comparison with oneself. (Schleiermacher 1998, 93)

One could easily overstate Schleiermacher’s concept of understanding: see Bowie’s introduction to Schleiermacher
(1998, xiii) for a cautionary argument against taking Schleiermacher’s concept of understanding to describe a sort
of mystical, empathetic communion. Nonetheless, Schleiermacher’s focus on experience suggests the extent to
which he synthesized the sensibilities of both the Enlightenment and Romantic movement. See Crouter (2005) for
a full exploration of this tension, as well as for an excellent exploration of Schleiermacher in historical context.
33

with theirs.
36
Dilthey also believed that through its ability to connect the singular
experience of the individual with the universal horizon of human experience,
hermeneutics served as the critical method for understanding human history.
37
Having
given hermeneutics such enormous significance, Dilthey naturally placed hermeneutic
methods at the center of his concept of Geisteswissenschaften or the “human sciences”
such as history philosophy, philology, etc., almost all the humanities excluding the
arts.
38
Dilthey hoped to provide a theoretical justification for Geisteswissenschaften on
par with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and its philosophical defense of the natural
sciences (Makkreel 2012). Where the natural sciences sought to explain, the human
sciences would seek to understand, and through understanding make possible the study
of human experience despite the gaps between the self and others.
Dilthey, Heidegger, and the Ontological Turn
Schleiermacher had solidified the foundation of hermeneutics as a method for
engagement with texts as points of access to human experience, but Dilthey’s “human
sciences” re-asserted hermeneutics’ larger claims to the status of a distinct onto-
epistemological view of the world. For while both Dilthey and Schleiermacher saw in
hermeneutics a means to access the hidden minds and experiences of others, Dilthey
argued that hermeneutics also played a vital role for understanding the world itself.

36
“Expression seizes the stuff of reality in order to find it a medium for understanding; feeling manifests itself in
countenance and gesture, and it finds symbols in words and tones; the will attains fixed expression in precepts and
laws. The human spirit objectifies itself in these ways. Although these objectifications are outside it, they are its
creations” (Dilthey 2002, 349-350).
37
“Understanding is the rediscovery of the I in the Thou; spirit rediscovers itself at ever higher levels of
connectedness; this selfsameness of spirit in the I and the Thou…makes possible the cooperation of the various
functions of the human sciences. The knowing subject is, here, one with its object” (Dilthey 2002, 213). See also
Dilthey (1972).
38
Dilthey argued for the inclusion of sociology and psychological as human rather than natural sciences, leading to
the development of both interpretive and empirical traditions in both fields.
34

Dilthey not only situated the human sciences (centered on hermeneutic methods)
alongside the natural sciences, but made them the natural sciences’ necessary partner:
Because the data of our experience are incommensurable due to their various
sources, we can merely accept them as givens; their facticity is unfathomable for
us. All our knowledge is limited to the establishment of the succession of
uniformities of succession and simultaneity as they are related in our experience.
These are limits which are inherent in the very conditions of our experience,
limits which obtain at each stage of natural science—not external barriers
imposed on our knowledge by nature, but conditions immanent to experience
itself. (Dilthey 1991, 62)
Dilthey did not pioneer this point of view. Giambattisto Vico had in fact offered a similar
if in some ways more radical version of Dilthey’s argument for interpretive epistemology
in his Scienza nuova (1948,
39
originally published 1725). In Scienza nuova as well as in
his prior work,
40
Vico critiqued the then dominant Cartesian thinking of his time for its
failure to acknowledge the reality of that which cannot be demonstrated by deductive
proof or direct observation. Vico believed that such a limited view of what constituted
legitimate evidence prevented an adequate account of human experience and culture.
41

Vico argued that understanding human life required tracing language back to its origins
and the original, universal patterns of thought that later diversify through history (cf.
Vico 1948, 57, 66, 100). If language and attendant forms of thought vary through
history, it then becomes necessary to address human experience as historical and
dependent on the self.

39
Please note that the 1948 translation is from the third edition of Scienza nuova, not the 1725 edition.
40
See in particular Vico (1988) and his argument that one can only fully understand something through making.
41
“Because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance, man makes himself the
measure of all things” (Vico 1948, 54). See de Santillana (1950) for a brief and accessible account for Vico’s theory
of the relationship between knowledge and history as a response to Descartes. See Berlin (2013) for detailed
analysis of Vico as a “counter-Enlightenment” thinker.

35

The relationship between self and experience in hermeneutic theory intersected
with similar develops in phenomenological philosophy, the combination of which would
have profound consequences for hermeneutic philosophy in the twentieth-century. In
fact, Edmund Husserl developed the phenomenological perspective in part as a response
to Dilthey’s attempt to distinguish the human from natural sciences (Jalbert 1988), and
Dilthey’s understanding of language was influenced by Husserl’s Logical Investigations
(2001, originally published 1901).
42
Husserl’s phenomenological point of view holds that
experience is the only true form of knowledge, and that as a result all knowledge must
be studied as both situated by the self and existing in relation to the self (cf. Deetz 1973).
Consciousness, Husserl argued, was bounded by a sort of inter-subjective horizon of
given objects that constitute a shared foundation for experience—a “lifeworld” (1970).
One’s experience of that world occurs through “intentionality,” the directing of the mind
at an object in the world and the experience of that world through mental (rather than
physical) phenomena. Husserl’s ultimate interest was in how knowledge is constituted
in pure consciousness, a process he believed he could isolate by “bracketing”
43
the
status of the natural world to focus on pure consciousness, an approach to the study of
experience that came to be known as transcendental constitutive phenomenology
(2002; cf. Smith 2013). The process of “bracketing” begs the question of the nature and
role of interpretation in experience—a task undertaken by Martin Heidegger.

42
See Makkreel (2012) for more details of the influence of Husserl on Dilthey. See Dilthey (2002, 34 n. 16) for
Dilthey own acknowledgment of the influence of Logical Investigations.
43
Husserl’s employed the Greek term “epoché,” or suspension, to describe this method.
36

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (2008, originally published 1927)
44
was an, if
not the, epochal moment for twentieth-century hermeneutics. Heidegger rejected
Husserl’s search for transcendental experience, arguing that the experience of existing is
fundamentally the experience of existing in the world, of “being there” or Dasein. Rather
than attempting to bracket the world Heidegger argues for hermeneutics as the method
for understanding human experience as such—the elemental nature of all knowing and
being (36). Before one could theorize about the world, one had to experience it via
intentionality, and thus the theories one articulates are in essences theories of theories
(31).
45
Furthermore, Dasein was subject to the influence of tradition and language (42).
Only through hermeneutics—through interpretation—can one analyze the hidden
structures that govern experience and understanding itself (37; cf. Heidegger 1999;
Grondin 1997, 98; Gadamer 1976). Thus the process of understanding was not simply a
mental activity but a basic condition of Being, of existence. Thus Heidegger took
hermeneutics beyond the text and even beyond Dilthey’s “human sciences” to argue for
ontological hermeneutics.
Ironically, while Heidegger placed enormous significance on hermeneutics he did
not provide a full account of hermeneutic method, a task that his student Hans-Georg
Gadamer undertook, developing the methodology of “philosophical hermeneutics.”
46

Following Heidegger, Gadamer saw interpretation as a necessary component of existing
in the world and as an everyday practice of living and knowing. That process of

44
Heidegger’s work is notoriously sophisticated and, frankly, stylistically forbidding. Richard Polt (1999) provides a
useful introduction to Heidegger’s philosophy and explores Being and Time in detail.
45
Cf. Gadamer (2004, 266-269).
46
Gadamer described the onto-epistemological branch of hermeneutics descended from Heidegger as
“philosophical hermeneutics,” describing it as hermeneutics that deal with “our entire understanding of the world
and…all the various forms in which this understanding manifests” (1976, 18).
37

interpretation requires a certain tradition, a set of assumptions with which one can
engage with new phenomena (291).
47
As a result, the past is always present, even its
perceived distance from us is in a profound sense part of its character. Like Heidegger,
Gadamer also constructs an epistemology and ontology based on language: language
prefigures all experience and thus structures it. This does not mean, however, that
language simply perpetuates itself unchanged. Despite the fact that the phenomena of
the world are still aspects of consciousness, they still remain outside ourselves to an
extent, and if we have the capability to bring our understanding into line with that of
this perceived “other” we can achieve a “fusion of horizons.”
48
Through this fusion, we
are able to extend our own set of presuppositions or “horizon” to respond to this new
encounter. Hermeneutics is the process for achieving this end. Thus one does not seek
to exhaust a text or to reach beyond a text, but to engage in dialogue with it as
something authentically “other.” In so doing Gadamer re-integrated textual
hermeneutics to the ontological hermeneutic tradition.
The history of hermeneutic theory and interpretive practice suggests a tradition
in its own right, with its own prejudices and horizons. Hermeneutic theory has
undergone vast transformations in its methods and its objects—moving from a
technique for dealing with certain types of texts to a general theory of all textual
interpretation to the basis of the study of the human world to finally becoming the basis
of existence as such. Certain themes remain intact: interpretive questions work through
modes of engagement with different kinds of remoteness—the hidden, the occult, the

47
“Hermeneutics must start from the position that a person seeking to understand something has a bond to the
subject matter that comes into language through the traditionary [sic] texts and has, or acquires, a connection
from which the text speaks” (Gadamer 2004, 295).
48
“[U]nderstanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves” (Gadamer 2004,
305).
38

underneath, the alien, even the transparent. Interpretation is a method of connecting.
Hidden in the benign concept of connection are the seeds of three key foundational
assumptions of hermeneutic theory, assumptions that have served hermeneutics so
poorly in dealing with digital media.
The Hermeneutic Circle and Interaction
The most common metaphor for the interpretive process is the “hermeneutic
circle:” meaning is created through the movement between part and whole.
49
An
interpreter encounters a text only through sequential engagement with particular traits,
but those traits can only be made meaning in reference to the interpreter’s sense of the
text as a whole. The text as a whole, in turn, can only be encountered through the
particular. The hermeneutic circle actually contains two circular metaphors—the
interactive relationship between part and whole of the text and the interpreter’s iterative
relationship with the text wherein hypothetical relationships are tested and revised.
While the term “hermeneutic circle” actually comes from Heidegger, the circular image
is often used to describe the hermeneutic process envisioned by those who came before
him.
50
Heidegger took this thinking further, arguing that such a circular movement also
exists between any kind of “knower” and “known.” Reaching understanding requires

49
Schleiermacher is often credited with inaugurating the term “hermeneutic circle”, although I have been unable
to find the phrase in his writings. Schleiermacher clearly built his understanding of the actual process of
interpretation around a form of what has later been referred to as the hermeneutic circle: one understands a text
through its parts, and its parts through the whole (Schleiermacher 1998, 27). He does refer to the interpretive
process as a circular (cf. Schleiermacher 1998, 27). Also see Gadamer (2004, 266). Following the example of
Spinoza and Ast before him, Schleiermacher also saw a circular relationship between the text and its historical
and/or authorial context. As with the relationship between part and whole, the meaning of the text is not entirely
internal to the text but contained in its relationship with the world in which it was created or with the author who
created it.
50
For example, Wilhelm Schlegel (1996) argues that the proper process of interpretation of certain texts,
particularly ancient texts, is circular (Forester 2011, 298). Echoing the method of Spinoza before him, Schlegel
argued that meaning is not found in any given part of the text but in the relationship between part and whole.
39

that we find a way to connect our ability to understand and our self-understanding to
the unknown world, and then referring that back to ourselves. This version of the circle
was not a potential method for understanding certain phenomena; it was built into the
nature of human existence at its most elemental level. In all of these cases the
hermeneutic circle retains its basic spatial outline.
In the hermeneutic circle meaning or knowledge is created through interaction:
between part and whole, interpreter and interpreted, or being and world. These are
interactive relationships. Interaction describes a relationship between two discrete
objects that affect each other such as the collision of two billiard balls. Interaction is a
term of relatively recent mint. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term
interaction can be traced as far as the 1830s (“Interaction,” 1989) although the concept
of interacting is at least 100 years older. Many of these earlier references come from the
physical sciences, but interaction was also sometimes employed to describe the state of
discourse between communicating parties. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the term
“interaction” became one of the key words of the emerging fields of sociology,
psychology, and communication. The 1968 edition of the International Encyclopedia of
the Social Sciences includes an extensive discussion of the concept with sub-sections on
“social interaction,” “symbolic interaction,” “dramatism,” “social exchange,” “interaction
and personality,” and “interaction process analysis” (Parsons et al., 1968). Talcott
Parson’s opening sentence summarizes the term’s importance rather neatly: “[i]t is
almost pure tautology to say that human ‘social’ phenomena are cases of the interaction
between two or more human beings” (429). The fact that the term is not even included
40

in the most recent edition of the Encyclopedia suggests otherwise (Darity, 2008), and is
a historical shift worthy of investigation in its own right.
Of more immediate moment to the present project is how Parsons characterizes
the importance of social interaction. Starting with a critique of Descartes, Parsons
provides an extensive survey of the term’s importance in a variety of major intellectual
movements of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, but he returns
again and again to the basic thesis that interaction offered a way to conceptualize and
study the problem of other minds. The concept of interaction allows one to theorize the
relationship between the internal and external world as well as the doubly complex
relationship between one’s own interiority and the interiority of others experienced as
part of the external world. In a sense, interaction provided the paradigmatic link
between self and other without resulting to the authority of divine to explain the
objective existence of the non-self (as Descartes does). As such, interaction provided the
basis for an agnostic understanding of “minds” as existing not solely as solipsistic self-
directed entities floating in a sort of (potentially hallucinatory) ether. It also provided a
means for studying the problem of self and other by suggesting that interaction (rather
than the passing phenomenon of interacting) is an external phenomenon that can be
subject to study, and therefore offers some entrée into otherwise inaccessible mental
worlds.
Both hermeneutics and the social scientific concept of interaction develop in
response to parallel problems of rendering hidden objects and relationships observable
and comprehensible. So what does it mean to “interact” with a text? If the meaning of a
text is contained in the relationship between part and whole, then the interpreter’s task
41

is to find the ways in which those two aspects of the text interact. If one conceives of the
meaning of a text as a form of communication between author and interpreter, then one
might equate the text with interaction between two conversing parties. If interpretation
of a text is understood as an attempt at historical inquiry, then the text becomes the
externalized locus of the interaction between past and present, this culture and another,
here and there. Even in Heidegger one still finds interaction—the knower comes to know
through interaction between known and unknown centered in experience. Returning to
textual hermeneutics, each of these approaches depends on finding or creating a sort of
placeholder “other” in the form of the text. As an interaction between people might be
understood as an external sign of the action of minds to which the observer does not
have direct access, interactions in and with texts served a similar externalizing function
with hidden meaning. Both the attempt to understand the hidden minds of others and
the hidden mechanisms of the text are eventually combined as interest in the
interpretations of others became increasingly central to theories of the relationship
between knowledge and power.
The Hermeneutics of Suspicion, Text, and Power:
Through its history hermeneutics has been obsessed with the search for “occulted
meaning” (Kermode 1983). Finding hidden meaning requires purposeful effort.
According to Schleiermacher, for instance, understanding does not come naturally, but
must be consciously pursued to prevent misunderstanding (Forster 2011, 294; cf.
Schleiermacher 1998). The pursuit of proper hermeneutic methodology was based on
the belief that correct interpretation could not be taken for granted. Today that seems a
rather trivial premise, but that was not always the case. Consider the example of
42

European literary theory. In Aristotle’s Poetics (2008) one finds considerable attention
to the need for clarity of expression, but no reference to the value of hidden meaning or
the pursuit of it. Plato in The Republic (2007) acknowledges that literature conceals or
distorts, but it is precisely this property that places it in such ill repute. In Sir Philip
Sydney’s Defense of Poesie (1999) his entire argument is predicated on the idea that
poetry and drama are able to accomplish their pedagogical missions through clarity of
design. Neo-classical dramatic theory reacted strongly against obscurity or confusion.
51

Prior to the Romantic Movement and its emphasis on self-expression and personal
genius interpretation of texts was assumed to be well within the capabilities of a literate
interpreter. The effortful application of systematic interpretive practices did exist, but
primarily in the realm of sacred texts or historical philological inquiry, not poetry or
drama.
52
A secular text that required such exposition was a failed text, a failed
communication.
While hermeneutic theory problematized the act of interpretation, during the
nineteenth century a second conceptualization of the hidden aspects of texts was
emerging in the form of what Paul Ricoeur (1970) would famously dub the
“hermeneutics of suspicion,” found most famously in the work of Karl Marx, Friedrich
Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.
53
Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, albeit in very different

51
See, for example, Corneille’s (1960) discussion of the three unities in terms of clarity or the Abbé d’Aubignac’s
The Whole Art of the Stage (1684).
52
See M.H. Abrams’ (1971) seminal account of the shift from mimetic to expressive literary theories. On the
sacralization of secular literature see Schwartz (2008), Bourdieu (1993, 112-115), and Schaeffer’s discussion of
early Romanticism and Novalis (2000, 67-96).
53
Ricoeur argued that hermeneutics had two basic stances which correspond roughly to the hermeneutics of faith
and suspicion respectively: restoration and demystification. The approach of restoration attempts to discover a
message in the text addressed (in a general sense) to the interpreter. The approach of demystification attempts to
reveal in the text meanings disguised within the text. (cf. Ricoeur 1981, 6). See also Gadamer (1984) for the
hermeneutics of suspicion contextualized in the history of hermeneutic and phenomenological tradition of
43

ways, shared a focus on how everyday experience and thought potentially concealed
hidden meanings and were, therefore, worthy of hermeneutic analysis. Fortunately,
these suspect surfaces could be penetrable through proper understanding of the systems
they are concealed by and in service to: class interest for Marx, the unconscious for
Freud, antiquated morality for Nietzsche. In an echo of Dilthey’s Geisteswissenschaften,
the school of suspicion in hermeneutics was increasing applied to a diversity of human
action, but the text remained the master analogy (Ricoeur 1971). The influence of the
“hermeneutics of suspicion” in twentieth century thought can scarcely be overstated and
sprawls across diverse disciplines (cf. Farmer 2007; Felski 2011; Jameson 1983; Mumby
1993; Thiele 1991). As a result, a variety of intellectual traditions that might otherwise
have remained alien to the hermeneutic tradition developed a hermeneutic character.
The Neo-Marxist “Frankfurt School” mated hermeneutic methods with political
economics,
54
and that influence spread through critical theory and the later
developments of cultural studies.
55
Psychoanalysis found its way into literary theory,
anthropology, aesthetics, and far more. Nietzsche’s philosophy influenced Martin
Heidegger himself (Schrift 1990), as well as the deconstruction theory of Jacques
Derrida (Schrift 1990; Megill 1985) and post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault
(Thiel 1990; cf. Johnson 1991) and Gilles Deleuze. As the school of suspicion’s influence
spread, hermeneutic methods spread with it. While scholars inheriting the hermeneutics
of suspicion were generally well acquainted with debates within hermeneutics proper

Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Husserl. For a different take on the hermeneutics of suspicion and its relationship
with aesthetics and the study of authorial intention see Carroll (1993).
54
See, for example, Walter Benjamin’s work on auratic art and the aesthetics of fascism (1969; cf. Koepnick 1999)
or Adorno and Horkheimer (2000) on the effect of the economic structure of textual production on the content of
the resulting texts.
55
Although cultural studies tends to an ambivalent at best relationship with the Frankfurt school, the connections
are nonetheless profound (cf. Kellner 2002).
44

and indeed often cite or participate in these debates, they nonetheless begin to evolve in
novel directions and to employ a different set of theoretical assumptions.
56

The school of suspicion also gave textual hermeneutic inquiry new significance as
a potentially subversive act. Prior to the school of suspicion the great danger of bad
hermeneutic theory was misinterpretation, failure to find true meaning of a text. The
hermeneutics of suspicion treated the text as too easily interpretable, but only to a
degree for artificial that transparency concealed deeper ideological forces. Hermeneutics
was necessary as the means through which one uncovers the hidden action of ideology.
The danger of failed or incomplete hermeneutics was now that the text could enforce too
much uniformity of interpretation and through uniformity perpetuate dominant
ideology. The resulting battles over textual determinism—the relative power of the text
versus the power of the reader in establishing meaning—continue. At the core of this
debate is yet another interactive relationship, a power binary between interpreter and
object of interpretation. Some, particularly behaviorist psychologists and sociologists as
well as certain neo-Marxists such as those of the Frankfurt school, argued for “strong”
texts. Later efforts to champion “strong” interpreters within the cultural studies
movement and by uses and gratifications theory in media effects research all deal with
some version of this binary as well. However, this model of text/interpreter power was
based on certain assumptions about the structure of communication in modern
societies. More specifically, it responded to mass media systems where small groups
held access to the means of textual creation and the channels of textual dissemination.
As digital technologies have spread and brought with them broader access to the means

56
In part this may have been a result of the ontological turn in hermeneutics. While hermeneutics as such moved
away from its initial emphasis on texts toward onto-epistemological study interest in textual interpretation in
diverse disciplines remained strong.
45

of both creation and dissemination this model is becoming increasingly unstable. The
terms of the text/interpreter power binary can no longer be so easily identified with
particular material infrastructure and/or ideological context if producer and interpreter
are no longer such clearly differentiated identities and the difference becomes
production and interpretation of texts becomes fainter.
Textual Realism and the Problem of the Objective Text
Text, in the interactive hermeneutic circle and in the text/interpreter power binary,
is conceptualized as an object with properties that can be properly interpreted by correct
hermeneutic practice. Whether the result is access to the intention of an author, insight
into remote cultures, deeper understanding of textual structure, or the revelation of
ideological forces at work in the text the text itself remains an object of knowledge. The
objective text provides the source of stability that provides both the grounds and the
validity of hermeneutic study. This form of epistemological realism—textual realism—is
as elemental to hermeneutics as the hermeneutic circle and as wide spread (cf.
Oxenhandler 1960). Textual realism is an unfortunate but necessary term. First, realism
in this case refers to an epistemology rather than a mode of representation or a
particular material form. The issue is not that the text is contained within an object or
particular range of references, but that the text has an independent existence whatever
the range of textual or para-textual reference are contained with that corpus. Steven
Mailloux (1989) previously defined the term “textual realism” as the mode of
interpretation in which meaning is ultimately located beyond interpretation itself—in
the text, in authorial intent, in inter-text, etc. In contrast he defines those approaches
that situate meaning within interpretation as “readerly idealism.” In first case meaning
46

is “found,” in the second it is “made.” Textual realism as it is employed here departs
somewhat from this formulation, for rather than representing one pole of the familiar
text versus interpreter conflict, it refers to an even more fundamental epistemological
commitment—the idea of the text as an object with inherent objective traits that exist
independent of perception.
Textual realism in this mode is often less an explicit theoretical construct than an
implicit methodological component of textual analysis. While not every approach to the
relationship between interpreter and text requires a form of textual realism
57
its
assumptions are widespread. Both Friedrich Schleiermacher’s (1998) and Wilhelm
Dilthey’s (Dilthey et al., 1991) interest in hermeneutics as tool for interpreting textual
artifacts treat texts as material objectifications of authorial intent or human culture
(respectively) even if those objects have concealed properties that require interpretation
to reveal. Textual realism plays a role in almost any theory that attempts to reckon with
the potentially determining power of the text. Textual realism obviously fits quite neatly
with approaches that emphasize close study of the text such as New Criticism (cf. Elliot
1920; Richardson 1930; Ransom 1979) or certain forms of poetics. Theories of media
effects research that deals deal with the “effect” of an outside stimulus work from textual
realism, for even if the effect is modified or moderated by individual difference the trait
remains in the text. Of more immediate interest for this project, the study of the social

57
For example four-stage model of communication (1980) remains somewhat agnostic about the text’s status as
an object with definite traits, at least insofar as those traits relate to interpretation. However, his use of the
language of “encoding” and “decoding” seems to suggest that while there might be layers of perceptual apparatus
between object and interpreter the text is, ultimately, an object with objective de-codeable properties, although
this is hardly the only way to understand that relationship. The uses and gratifications (Blumler & Katz, 1974)
avoided textual realism, or at least did not require it, by eclipsing text with the interpreter’s understanding of the
text. Neither approach opposes or forbids a textual realist epistemology, but they do not require one to be
coherent.
47

power of technologies, hypertexuality, and textual openness also employ textual realism,
even when they champion the interpretive power of the reader/writer/user. For
example, many theorists of hypertextuality, electronic literature, and other forms of
database-like narratives identify textual openness in the vein of Umberto Eco (1984)
with certain technological affordances provided by digital media, and in conceiving of
these affordances, even implicitly, as given properties they follow a textual realist
agenda (Hayles, 2008; Manovich, 1999, 2002). Even for Roland Barthes (1974)
“readerly text” is “readerly” precisely because it is a certain type of text with certain
affordances. Derridean deconstruction’s (1998) attention to “cracks” and “fissures” in a
text that allow for multiple readings still focus methodologically on the text and how
certain properties of the text create these opportunities. Whatever theoretical conflicts
exist between the myriad of approaches the study of text, textual realism remains the
dominant epistemological foundation so long as the text is treated in objective terms,
even if those objective terms do not result in or enforce an objective interpretation.
Three Foundations of Textual Hermeneutics
The interactive hermeneutic circle, the text/interpreter binary, and textual
realism represent broad commonalities in hermeneutic theory and methods, even across
the wide diffusion of hermeneutic methods that has taken place since the founding of
hermeneutics as a distinct field. Unsurprisingly, all three are deeply compatible and in
fact mutually supporting. The hermeneutic relationship between text and interpreter is
interactive precisely because the text is understood in realist terms as an independent
objective entity. The power conflict over who “determines” interpretation is similarly
based on both the idea that two sides exist independently and that they are interacting
48

in a process of mutual influence, however unbalanced. Interactivity and conflict in turn
explain why a realist epistemology of texts can also account for highly varied
interpretations of those texts, even if it does not count all such interpretations as equally
valid. Together these three premises provide a coherent foundation for the study of
texts, and one that has been both enormously successfully and influential.
Unfortunately all three foundational premises of hermeneutic theory are also
deeply problematic for digital media, which would seem to suggest that the edifice of
hermeneutic theory and method built upon this foundation must be torn down as well.
Fortunately, the solution is nowhere near so dire. This theoretical impasse can be
overcome through a new approach to textual hermeneutics that does not require these
premises but still accommodates much of what was built upon them. This is possible
because textual realism, the interactive model, and the text/interpreter power binary
were not simply misguided errors but reasonable responses to particular historical
contexts and textual configurations that do not apply as readily outside of those
conditions. The social turn in hermeneutics provides less historically dependent
framework that situates existing hermeneutic theory within a more broadly applicable
general hermeneutic theory. The result is not a new world, but a larger and more
detailed map.

49

Chapter 3
Hermeneutics in Crisis

Contemporary hermeneutic theory is ill-equipped to deal with digital texts if our
goal is to comprehend how those texts are understood by others. The previous chapter
outlined three foundational premises of hermeneutic theory: the epistemology of textual
realism, the interactive model of textual engagement, and the text/interpreter power
binary. This chapter will demonstrate that all three premises require assumptions that
the study of the interpretation of digital media texts cannot sustain. Dynamic,
interactive texts with ambiguous borders and authorship can only be fitted to the
epistemology of textual realism with the utmost contortions. The interactive model that
underlies previous understandings of the hermeneutic process seems useful for
understanding interactive texts if only for reasons of parallelism. Unfortunately without
the foundation of textual realism, treating interpretation as an interaction becomes both
theoretically unsound and methodologically impossible. Even the text/interpreter power
binary, founded as it is on the historical conditions of a mass media ecology, fails to
account for the subtler graduations of power that accompany a digital media ecology
with more pervasive access to the means of production and distribution. The myriad
forms and degrees of communication and relationships that develop in online spaces
and evade concepts such as “community,” “institutional discourse,” and “tradition”
compound the problem further. Hermeneutic inquiry has reached a point of crisis, and
will remain in crisis until a new foundation can be found for hermeneutic theory that
does not require these three premises.
50

Textual Realism and the Digital Text
The textual realist epistemology of hermeneutics seeks to define the text as an
object susceptible to our knowing, a “something” in the world with discernible traits that
exists independent of us and our experience of it. Hermeneutics is the means by which
we come to know this object and how we come to engage with it in its otherness. Textual
realism is both pervasive and somewhat insidious, and the fact that the concepts of
“realism” and objective knowledge are held in such scorn in some quarters only
functions to further disguise it.
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The media effects researcher who exposes multiple
individuals to a text and then measures the effect of that exposure relies on a very strong
conception of textual realism to justify their method.
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One employs a textual realist
paradigm if one explicates the objective or inherent meaning of a text. From a
humanistic perspective these are familiar sins. However, one also employs a textual
realist perspective when one analyzes the form of a text, categorizes a text in a genre or
tradition based on its traits, explores a text’s “affordances,” deconstructs its “fissures,”
or searches out traces of authorial intent or persuasive purpose. For example, Barthes’
(1974) claim that texts are either “readerly” or “writerly” is predicated on a textual

58
The antagonism between realist and hermeneutic epistemology and methodology has endured at least since
Dilthey’s rejection of empirical realism as the foundation for the human sciences. One can certainly see traces of
this conflict in Vico as well (see Chapter 2). The feud continues to this day, playing out in conflicts such as that
between media effects and cultural studies researchers (cf. Fejes 1984) or Continental and Anglo-American social
science.
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The epistemology of textual realism is assumed in most media effects research, particularly those relying on
laboratory methodologies, to such an extent that it is never articulated. But consider, for example, studies of video
game violence that use exposure to a video game text as an experimental condition. If that text were somehow
not violent in some of the cases of exposure and violent in others (as many video games have the potential to be)
or if other textual factors sometimes interfere or any number of possible complications occur, such a study falls
apart. Put more generally, if the text is not an object with traits that remain constant then it becomes impossible
to expose subjects to those traits with any degree of certainty. This becomes doubly important when researchers
are required for reasons of practicality to attempt to create an experimental manipulation representative of one or
more games or to reproduce video game exposure in a different medium such as still images (cf. Dill, Brown &
Collins 2008 for one example among many).
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realist model as these attributes belong to the text. Umberto Eco’s (1989) “open work”
describes a field rather than a line of meaning, but that field remains an object subject to
limitation if not full description. Even Derrida’s (1977) assertion that texts have many
possible meanings and contain multiple points of entry places this expansive, if not
practically infinite, field of signifiers firmly within the text—the text has the attributes of
multiplicity and polysemy. In Wolfgang Iser’s (1980) reader-response theory the
implied reader is ultimately just an effect of the text. Any approach to textual
hermeneutics that relies on the existence of a text with relatively stable, definite traits
therefore operates from a realist epistemology as part and parcel of its hermeneutic
work.
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While textual realism requires an objective text, it can still accommodate the
existence of multiple interpretations of that text. Cultural studies, reception studies, and
fan studies often employ textual realist methods in that capacity. For example, when a
researcher attempts to qualitatively examine individual responses to a text
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to find
evidence of oppositional or negotiated readings, the researcher will commonly identify
such variation by contrasting it with a baseline, usually ideologically dominant meaning
attributed to the text. If that baseline meaning is identified by reference to the traits of

60
I can understand resistance to the idea that some if not most forms of post-modern, post-structural, and
deconstructive analysis depend on a realist epistemology, or that hermeneutics as it is commonly practiced often
employs realist assumptions in their methodology. Yet the basic idea is commonly articulated in discussions of
digital media. Consider, for example, the argument that hypertext and computer-mediated communication offer
an opportunity to put post-structural concepts to the test (Landow 199) or arguments made by in favor of treating
such texts as inherently post-modern or post-structural (cf. Turkle 1995; Reid 1991). In the former case one
obviously must assume that post-structural concepts can be materialized in textual form and detected as such. In
the latter theoretical perspectives are understood to be built into the texts in question. In analogue media the
textual realist paradigm is equally in evidence. After all, one would hardly surprise anyone by describing many of
Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories or Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) as post-structuralist, even hypertextual,
fiction, and such a declaration is founded on the purest textual realism. Thus, the instability that so fascinates post-
structural theory is predicated on the existence of an external, if only potential, object of knowledge: a text.
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To say nothing of the fact that those responses themselves are often texts such as diary entries, survey
responses, letters, conversations, etc.
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that text (or group of texts or type of text), then one employs a textual realist model. The
textual realist paradigm addresses multiplicity of interpretation in a number of ways: by
refuting all but the acceptable interpretation, by acknowledging or even valorizing the
text as inspiration for multiplicity, or by allowing the interpreter greater freedom in
“negotiating” a meaning with a text that still exerts an independent determining force.
In all of these instances the text remains an object independent of the interpreter—the
interpreter’s work of interpreting does not fundamentally change the text, only the
interpreter’s understanding of it. If, for example, these varied interpretations were
varied because they were responses to fundamentally dissimilar objects, then speaking
of them as variations of anything but experience itself becomes meaningless. Textual
hermeneutic methods rely on textual realism because the existence of an objective text—
however obscure, however widely and diversely addressed—justifies the comparison of
interpretations of the same or similar texts. The existence of a text with stable traits also
gives one’s own interpretive work a degree of validity analogous with the interpretations
of others, making it possible to articulate the existence of texts as objects of common
experience. Without at least the possibility for common experience of the text validated
by the text’s status as a definite “something,” diversity of interpretation becomes a circle
without a center and one’s own interpretations become hallucinations.
One immediate objection to the value of textual realism for the study of digital
media should already be self-evident: digital texts often change, sometimes through
interaction with the interpreter. If texts change for different interpreters, then one can
no longer speak of an objective anchor for common experience, so therefore dynamic
digital texts should be inherently incompatible with a textual realist epistemology. Yet
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textual realism is a hardy weed, and it can endure certain kinds of textual change. After
all, changes in texts over time are not solely the domain of digital media. Analogue texts
are, after all, fundamentally dynamic because analogue media are subject to age,
damage, loss, or modification.
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The philological and theological tradition from which
hermeneutics draws many of its fundamental problems, objectives, and approaches
often dealt with the problem of versions, fragments, authenticity, restoration, inter-
textual relationships, and the problems of the canonical and apocryphal. The text to be
interpreted was subject to change in all of these cases, sometimes radical change, but
these changes were directed toward the ultimate objective of finding an authoritative
text which one could then safely interpret, a master text. Texts that change or have
multiple forms resulted from the inevitable shortcomings of material media and
represented flaws to be repaired in pursuit of the master text unless they were built into
the master text itself. Textual realism has endured under these conditions because even
though the text is understood as external and durable, it is not finally material. The
master text is an entirely theoretical construct free from the corruptions of corporeal
media.
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In fact, no definite material instance of the master text need exist—multiple
instances can be seen as different points of access to a sort of immanent master text (cf.
McClain 2009).
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62
A digital text can change, but theoretically it need not, which is precisely why change in digital texts is
interesting.
63
For example, if one perfectly transcribed a master text and then added to it, one has not truly modified the
master text, only one (now flawed) incarnation of it.
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The realist prejudice is built deeply in the language of hermeneutics as well—the very concept of a “text”
suggests material form, and yet when one interprets, it is precisely the immaterial “behind,” “below,” “beyond,” or
“hidden within” that one seeks.
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A master text can be built on a number of foundations, and the justification of
one foundation as opposed to another becomes especially important when a text is
understood to be incomplete. How one brings a text from incompleteness to
completeness depends entirely on how one conceptualizes the master text. Writing on
the theoretical problems of the film archive, Steve Ricci (2008) observes that a film can
be seen as a “performance, experience, artifact, ruin, author’s work, historical
document, text, or palimpsest.” (p. 237). Each of these approaches to the text carries its
own theoretical and methodological obligations and directs one toward very different
conceptions of the rehabilitated “master” version of the text:
[a]n original performance is to be restaged, an experience is to be relived, an
artifact is to be rediscovered, a ruin is to be excavated and stabilized, and an
author’s work is either to be completed, updated, or revised. Documents have to
be correct….A palimpsest is uncovered, re-inscribed, and then re-read. (p. 237)
The concept of the master text allows for diverse materializations of the text that are
more or less related to its foundational standing, potentially more or less “complete” or
“authoritative.” In other cases a degree of bounded variation from the “master” suggests
a domain within which variations or departures become legitimate offspring,
particularly in the case of theater and music. The innumerable variations of Macbeth are
still understood to be attached to the immaterial “master text” of Macbeth, although the
standards for what counts as acceptable and unacceptable variation changes over time
in a manner similar to the range of acceptable variations in film or literary genre (cf.
McClain, 2010). However, as with genre, that does not mean that the “master text” is
understood as entirely mutable for once again it is its very solidity that makes variation
meaningful. Bounded variation allows the master text concept to accommodate the
general case of change in digital texts within a textual realist paradigm, but for
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interactive texts where change is understood as internal rather than external,
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ambiguity offers the most appropriate traditional parallel. Ambiguity, after all, is not
meaninglessness, but the creation of a space of possible meanings.
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Ambiguity
indicates areas in which multiplicity can be located, but if one correctly accounts for the
range of possible variations and their relationship one can encompass ambiguity in such
a way that one can still speak of an essential, stable master text: the master text remain
ambiguous about whether an element is S or Z, but in doing the text also makes clear
that it will never Q or 38 or C-flat a picture of a pipe. Variation within a range, or textual
affordances, allow for one to acknowledge highly divergent experiences of a single text
as well as highly divergent instantiations of a single text.
By coupling such an understanding of ambiguity with a grounding conception of
what should constitute the master text, one can interpret interactivity as a textual trait
within a textual realist worldview in a number of different ways. The nature of
interactivity and the idea of an interactive text remain hotly contested terms (cf. Quiring
2009; Cover 2006; Kiousis 2002; Downes & McMillan 2000, etc.), and in mentioning
some conceptions of interactive texts I do not wish to somehow disqualify others—
merely to provide notable instances of how textual realism has been sustained in textual
hermeneutic inquiry. For example, Murray (1997) is able to address an interactive
master text as a “work” by focusing on how structured variation creates a space for
authorship—the affordances for interaction become a part of the authorship of the work.
The example of Murray’s work should not be understood to imply that textual realism is

65
External change or variation in this case would refer to multiple instances of a text that refer back to a master
text but that multiplicity is not understood to be a trait of the master text itself. Internal change would describe
change that is understood to be operating within the master text itself.
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One might regard this space as a problem to be resolved, an attempt to embody multiplicity in stable form, or, in
the manner of Schrodinger’s Cat, as a space of possibility in which resolution is permanently suspended.
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reconciled with interaction only through theories of narrative. For those uninitiated in
the narratology versus ludology. debate in video game studies, Murray and others (cf.
Atkins 2003) who approach interactive texts from a narrative perspective have been
criticized for not fully accounting for how the experience of interaction itself makes
interactive texts qualitatively different from traditional narrative. Espen Aarseth’s
(1997) describes such texts as “ergodic literature,” or texts that require non-trivial effort
to interpret. Such effort changes the experience of interpreting, but it also means that
variation in quantity or quality of effort will result in different experiences of what is,
theoretically, the same text. The opposing “ludologist” approach treats games as
interactive formal systems, and in doing so obviously remains true to a fundamentally
textual realist paradigm (cf. Aarseth 2001). More recent, and theoretically sophisticated,
attempts to reconcile these points of view retain the realist perspective. Ian Bogost’s
(2008) theory of “unit operations” attempts to synthesize both perspectives. Bogost
offers an “object-oriented” approach to interactive texts arguing that they contain units
of meaning that can be isolated and analyzed—obviously a textual realist approach.
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Interactive texts have so far proven somewhat problematic for—but in no way
irreconcilable with—textual realist epistemology.
The flexibility afforded to textual realism by the figure of the “master text” settles
the potential disruptions of multiplicity in texts or interactive texts, but only at the cost
of our ability to study the interpretations of other minds. Even if one is willing to accept
that the text fully determines interpretation in the strongest terms, that determining
force still takes place in the context of experience. For a text such as a book where

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In so doing Bogost hopes to provide a theoretical foundation for understanding how such texts “inform, change,
or otherwise participate in human activity,” but his focus remains “primarily on the expressive capacity of
games…to seek to understand how videogames reveal what it means to be human” (2008, 53).
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relatively little effort is needed to at least expose oneself to the full text, the problem of
incomplete experience might be dismissed as idiosyncratic error or simply “incomplete”
readings that do not truly count as full interpretations.
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The same cannot be said of an
interactive text for, as Aarseth suggests, the experience of interactive texts depends on
non-trivial effort on the part of the interpreter. If non-trivial effort is required to
experience the text, then obviously varied levels of effort (to say nothing of quality of
effort, both in terms of capability and type of effort) will naturally modify the experience
of the text. One could play a video game one hundred times and come nowhere near
experiencing the game in its entirety.
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One could argue that even in the case of partial
experience the text’s procedural structure will remain intact, and that one need not
comprehend the text to understand it. However, the first case assumes the text is a
coherent whole—hardly a safe assumption in an age that valorizes the aesthetics of
disjuncture and contrast, and the second only begs the question. How comprehensive
does an interpretation have to be for it to count? How many affordances must one be
afforded? One could continue to bail out the cracking hull of textual realism after its
collision with interactivity, but it seems far wiser to seek firmer ground.

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Although this is already an enormous price to pay since it prevents one from studying error or apparent
idiosyncrasy or incompleteness! Imagine if one attempted to understand American Christianity but discounted the
interpretation of anyone who has not read at least the entire Bible. No textual hermeneutic theory that disqualifies
such sources of variation merits being called a general hermeneutics for the study of the interpretations of other
minds.
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The master text approach to defining an interpretable object has never fit well with the study of interpretations,
because contained within the idea of a master text is the idea that true exposure only comes from adequate
experience—a master experience. If one regards a painting as an artist’s work then seeing that painting after it had
been modified by another would obviously not count as a proper experience, but if one regarded it as a ruin such
an experience would be completely appropriate (more appropriate than seeing the version that has been repaired
to fit the original artist’s design). The problem is that since the master text transcends the object—even if the
object is a single, auratic instance like an original painting—the master text can never be truly experienced, only
extrapolated.
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Textual Realism and The Problem of Textual Boundaries
The textual realist approach struggles to accommodate interactivity, but breaks
down completely in the face of the ambiguous textual boundaries commonly found in
online media spaces. Textual realism requires a bounded text with limits set to the
interpretable space and a clear sense of the extent to which it can be considered a single
entity.
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Setting such boundaries might seem a rather straightforward proposition when
one is holding a single codex or a single photograph, although as the concept of master
text described above suggests, such textual limits are rarely so cleanly defined. Add to
that the further complications of whether one should include within the text various
inter-textual materials or para-text such as front matter, typography and formatting, or
cover art (Bennett 1982; Genette 1997) and one can see how setting textual boundaries
has always been a daunting project. Still, even disembodied the textual realist paradigm
has been able to account for them, again thanks to the justifications provided by a
conception of the master text. Perhaps an interpreter could include the cover art of one
version of a novel because the artist created it, but not of another that the artist wasn’t
involved with. Even treating texts as inter-textual—a tissue of a larger signifying
system—results in identifying a larger textual boundary and a larger set of interpretable
cues and relationships. Identifying an extant work, incorporating or accumulating
fragments, drawing boundaries between text and commentary or text and performance
are all long-established tools for studying texts and are wholly compatible with textual
realism.

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Thus textual realism can accommodate a palimpsest as a heterogeneous object whose parts may not be entirely
reconciled as a whole, but which is nonetheless at least an object with boundaries.
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In the case of digital media, however, textual boundaries become far more
difficult to identify (or construct) and justify in terms of a master text. First, many
digital texts exist in state of permanent incomplete-ness, so-called “perpetual beta,” that
undermines the importance of an authoritative version or even a primary experience of
the text (O’Reilly, 2005). Collaborative work, whether done in the spirit of the
“commons” (Benkler 2006) or used as a source of unpaid labor (Terranova, 2000) not
only lacks a single author but cannot even necessarily be attributed to a specific group
author (e.g., Fluxus), school, or tradition. As has often been observed, in online media it
is difficult to say where consumption ends and production begins (Burnett & Marshall,
2003). Add to this the massive inter-textual signifying system afforded by hypertext and
web architecture, and the end result is an environment in which identifying the
boundaries of a text for the purposes of establishing a definitive version to draw
conclusions from may not only be impossible but irrelevant.
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Without boundaries
textual realism cannot have an object, and without an object it loses any claim to being a
valid methodology foundation for studying the interpretations of others. If an
interpreter cannot establish a definitive text, she cannot validate it as a source of the
hypothetical experience of others based on her own experience. As a result, while the
textual realist epistemology can tell us a great deal about digital, even interactive, texts,
it can tell us only so much about the experience and interpretations of others.

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This issue will be developed in detail in Chapter 4. For now suffice to say that If our primary interest is in
interpretation of texts rather than texts themselves, which is to say how interpretation takes place and how and
why it varies or remains uniform, we need not necessarily concern ourselves with what the text absolutely is, but
rather what it is experienced as.
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Interaction and Interactivity in Hermeneutics
Interactive texts and ambiguous textual boundaries defy textual realism, and
without textual realism an interactive of the text/interpreter relationship becomes
unsustainable. The previous chapter outlined two metaphorical “circles” commonly
invoked in hermeneutic inquiry, both of which are based on an interactive
understanding of the relationship between text and interpreter. The first of these, the
“hermeneutic circle,” describes the process wherein the interpreter references the parts
of a text to understand the whole and the whole to understand the parts. This version of
the interpretive process has become the archetype of textual interpretation as a process
that occurs over time. The hermeneutic circle’s movement back and forth between part
and whole parallels the second “circle,” the temporal development of an interpretation
through the cyclical interaction of text and interpreter. An interpreter comes to the text
with a universe of expectations and pre-existing understandings of both text and reality.
These expectations structure the interpreter’s experience of the new information found
in the text, which in turn are reincorporated to modify existing expectations. The
interpreter’s experience modifies expectation while expectation structures and makes
sense of experience. The interpreter interacts with the text, and in doing so seeks to
understand how part interacts with whole. Together, these two circular, interactive
movements—between part and whole and between sensation and expectation—provide
the hypothetical general case of the process of textual interpretation.
Treating textual interpretation as an interactive process makes intuitive sense,
although it some ways interpretation is a poor species of interaction. An interaction
results from two objects or forces that come to act on one another. The two pool balls on
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their respective paths that collide and deflect on their Newtonian way. The vinegar and
baking soda that powers our nation’s science fair volcanoes. In textual hermeneutics,
when one studies the interpretations of others, one is attempting to discern a different
sort of mutual effect, one based on a perceptual and sense-making activity of a thinking
agent and the object of that activity. Using the idea of interaction in this way is well
within typical application of the term
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: the model of “interaction” has long served as a
method for overcoming the problem of other minds by providing observable external
phenomena of internal, opaque states. Since hermeneutics seeks to overcome such gaps,
treating interpretation as an interaction between text and interpreter makes perfect
sense. Unfortunately, the interpretation itself is not readily observable as it remains
internal to the interpreter unless externalized in some other way. In being externalized—
through enunciation of their interpretation in speech or writing, through observation of
behavior theorized to indirectly represent an interpretation, or through the study of
various social performances involving interpretation in situ—the interpretation becomes
alloyed with other communicative considerations such as identity and discourse (cf.
Walkerdine 1986). However, even if treating textual interpretation as interactive doesn’t
adequately externalize the processes through which it takes place it still might serve as a
reasonable description of textual interpretation.
Or perhaps it is precisely textual interpretation’s inability to produce observable
phenomena that has sustained the illusion that it can be addressed as interactive.
Imagine if we eliminated the problem—that we could isolate an individual’s
interpretation from whatever complications rendering it observable may have

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See Chapter 2.
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introduced. Even if we had a definite, purified interpretation we would still need to be
able to articulate how that particular interpretation resulted from the text’s contact with
the “other mind” to identify the relative contributions of the interacting factors.
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If the
researcher believes he can know
74
the impact that the specific properties of the
interpreter had on the text, then one could extrapolate a reasonable account of the text.
Unfortunately that is the unknown factor that we seek to identify. So instead one needs
to define the text prior to interaction to usefully employ an interactive model for
hermeneutics, and the researcher can only accomplish this through his own interpretive
work—which at best creates a new, more accessible interaction. Even in that case unless
he also had the ability to “zero out” his own interpretive inflections or had access to a
totally objective and comprehensive mode of analyzing the text he would still be unable
to understand the hidden interpretive activities in that original interaction. In both
cases he would need an objective description of an objectively existing text.
The interactive model is not methodologically valuable without textual realism
and some means of objective access to the object text. For example, consider the nature
of “non-linear” literature from a textual realist perspective. From the realist point of
view there are two types of “non-linear” texts one might identify: texts that are
inherently non-linear and texts that have affordances that permit interpretation as non-
linear. Certainly Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” or the I Ching seem to demand
to be interpreted as non-linear if any text does, but what texts could be said to have
affordances that permit a non-linear understanding? The practices of bibliomancy,

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Consider a physical parallel. If one knew that the trajectory of one of two balls after they interact, one’s ability to
extrapolate the original trajectories of the balls pre-contact would be limited. In this case since a non-interactive
text could hypothetically be said to be an immovable surface the more appropriate parallel might be not knowing
how features of the ball impacted its deflection.
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Or control for, in the case of media effects research.
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rhapsodomancy, or the various forms of sortes based on sacred or semi-sacred texts
(e.g., the works of Homer) make a compelling case that many written works can be
treated as non-linear, but whether that was due to traits of the text or the interpreter
remains uncertain. If one reintroduces the problem of how interpretation becomes
externalized, the scenario becomes even direr—is the interpreter expressing their
assessment of the text or are they knowingly re-appropriating the text for their own
purposes?
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If the researcher is able to objectively perceive the text and the text remains
functionally consistent between interpretive events, then he could successfully
differentiate between the text with non-linear affordances and re-appropriated text. To
understand the interpretations of others through the interaction between text and
interpreter, textual hermeneutics must be able to define attributes of the text through
correct interpretive practice and compare those to the presumably less correct
interpretations of others.
The Science and Scientism of Interpretation
Basing a textual hermeneutics on an interactive model requires an objective
method of textual observation, and such a method does not and cannot exist. An
interactive methodology requires a third party position—an observer capable of
differentiating and describing the objects
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observed and their various effects to
extrapolate the principles that govern their interaction without introducing some form

75
The author invites the reader to employ this work as a means of magical divination, thereby saving them the
work of re-appropriation. He would suggest that the proper method is to place one’s finger at random on a
randomly selected page. If the word under one’s finger is “hermeneutics” one should consider one’s query
answered in the affirmative; if it is another word the answer is negative. This should yield a roughly 50/50 chance
of either response.
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Both real like the text and virtual like the interpretation, but again this begs the question of how the
interpretation is made observable.
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of “noise” into the process of observation. However, even one studying the
interpretations of others one cannot escape one’s status as an interpreter who interprets
from a specific historical and cultural context. David Bordwell (1989) in his sprawling
critique of textual interpretation as a transdisciplinary methodology observes that no
matter who practices them, interpretive methods are “convention bound-activit[ies]”
with both constructivist and rhetorical elements (19). Bordwell argues that applications
of textual interpretation are not transparent or objective, but conventionalized forms of
routine problem solving similar to Thomas Kuhn’s concept of “everyday science.” While
contending theoretical schools make much of their dissimilarity, they still employ highly
similar interpretive conventions.
For film studies (and many other disciplines as well), Bordwell argues that New
Criticism became the paradigmatic model for “everyday” academic textual
interpretation and its conventions remain powerfully influential. According to the New
Critical model one studies a text or sets of texts and through a process of “close reading”
that attempts to identify and relate as many textual cues as possible to find “deeper”
meanings. Ultimately these meanings are not simply “found” in the text, but must be
constructed out of the text. To construct these meanings the interpreter will identify and
construct textual cues (rendered salient by his or her interpretive methodology) and
their relationship, eventually “mapping” these cues to extra-textual semantic fields (also
activated by the interpreter) through accepted interpretive heuristics. In practice, these
semantic fields usually provide the critical set of meaningful objects and relationships
and once successfully mapped on to a text, the interpreter’s job is nearly done. Thus a
Freudian interpreter who observes an oblong object interacting with a concave surface
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has the full weight and authority of an elaborate set of pre-existing schema when he
argues that the image of a woman eating a bowl of cereal is actually a dramatization of
penis envy. That’s not to say there is no real variation in the study of film. Film criticism
in general can be found in a number of “macro-insitutions”: journalistic, essayistic, and
academic criticism, each with its own preferred formats and formal and informal
institutions with varying levels of attachment to interpretation (Bordwell 1989, 20).
However, for academic film criticism emphasizing interpretive methods, the New
Critical paradigm remains in force.
The meanings an interpreter constructs, Bordwell notes, are what give the entire
enterprise of interpretation its significance, so there is a built-in incentive to find
sufficiently significant meanings to justify one’s investment in the text (23). Such
meanings take two forms. Implicit meanings are understood to occur when the text
“speaks indirectly” through symbolism, apparent contradiction, irony, etc. Symptomatic
meanings, on the other hand, are understood to be meanings that the text “divulges
‘involuntarily’… assumed to be at odds with the referential, explicit, or implicit
[meaning]” (9). Thus an interpreter searching for an implicit meaning in the 1987
Disney animated film The Brave Little Toaster might argue that the anthropomorphic
protagonist’s mock-heroic quest for his owner’s love declares in favor of the durability of
the authentically human in the face of dehumanizing technological and institutional
forces. Alternatively, an interpreter seeking a symptomatic meaning might respond that
the death of the protagonist and his eventual repair puts such optimistic readings to lie.
Emotional relationships are treated as yet another product to be used and discarded, a
mere stimulant whose planned obsolescence eliminates any sense of obligation. Without
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this obligation, so typical of pre-capitalist forms of economic exchange and anti-
hegemonic resistance movements, the individual is ultimately trapped within the
alienated self, unable to form bonds outside those created to sustain the existing socio-
economic order. The eponymous toaster isn’t redeemed by his sacrifice, he is merely
consumed. In this way, a few cues from The Brave Little Toaster can be mapped onto a
familiar (“lazy”) Marxist semantic field that allows one to spin an elaborate garment out
of a minute twist of thread. None of the interpretive moves that construct an
interpretation truly exist independent of the existing conventions of interpretation—in
fact an interpreter must be careful lest their attempts to innovate in any of these areas
render their interpretive project suspect
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.
All interpretation is convention bound, which places interactive textual
hermeneutics in an epistemological bind. To study the interpretations of others one
must account for the text in objective terms and the text can only be understood through
interpretation. Bordwell’s critique makes clear that textual analysis cannot ultimately be
purified of the would-be third party observer’s own interpretive horizons. Only an
utterly realist approach based on objective observation freed of presumption could
achieve that end—essentially a method of studying text that is non-interpretive. Some
non-interpretive methods attempt to remedy the problem, Bordwell’s “poetics” among
them,
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but often textual interpretive methods are redeemed from the contingency of the
observer’s interpretive work by reference to the authority of more objective theoretical
fields. Fields such as psychoanalysis or Marxist cultural theory provide schematic fields

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For example, even if one’s interpretive performance was otherwise rigorously conventional something as small
as the selection of an unexpected, non-canonical example to illustrate a point.
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Bordwell’s solution to the problem of the impossibility of neutral interpretation, poetics, is exactly that: a non-
interpretive form of textual analysis that aspires to objective definition of textual traits. This possibility will be
addressed in chapter 4.
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that can be applied to texts, and such fields’ claims to scientific status justifies the
validity of these interpretations as valid means of access to the interpretive activity of
others. All that was required was a method of mapping these theoretical concepts onto
textual traits through existing conventions of textual interpretation. For most of the
twentieth century, the key binary relationship of those maps has been variations on the
power binary between text and interpreter.
Text vs. Interpreter: Power as Hermeneutic Heuristic
The affordances of digital technology have created spaces where texts resist the
epistemology of textual realism and cannot be accounted for in interactive terms. At the
same time the increasingly broad dissemination of digital communication technology
undermines models of the relationship between text, interpretation, and social power
built on the paradigm of mass media. The stakes of hermeneutic inquiry shift over time,
perhaps most decisively with the advent of mass media and mass culture and the
problem of “bad” texts. The problem of texts with pernicious effects impressed itself on
social theorists ranging from the conservative (e.g., Matthew Arnold)
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to the radical
(e.g., Karl Marx) because these texts were not simply bad, but bad and powerful—
dangerous. Mass media texts distracted the impressionable audience from authentic
cultural values to crass, craven consumption, or reproduced modes of thought that
sustained exploitative economic relationships. That they did so invisibly made them all
the more pernicious. Concern over “dangerous” texts occupied a central place in what

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Although Arnold is often associated with his description of culture as “the best which has been thought and said”
his cultural criticism was more sophisticated than the phrase suggests. Arnold’s major concern in Culture and
Anarchy (1993) was the effect of cultural fragmentation along class lines on British society. He believed that proper
exposure to authentic culture could create individuals capable of seeing beyond narrow class interest. His concept
of authentic, good culture certainly places him firmly in the conservative camp, but he is at least an ambivalent
cultural elitist.
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came to be known as the hermeneutics of suspicion (and provided some of the initial
impetus for the study of the “effects” of media texts through social science methods).
The hermeneutics of suspicion, derived from Ricoeur’s “school of suspicion, is not a
unified movement; the Nietzschean, Marxist, and Freudian influences that root the
hermeneutics of suspicion spawned diverse theoretical progeny. However, as Bordwell
points out, the basic method of textual analysis remained intact, even as it was applied
in varied theoretical contexts. Power was now the hidden level of the text to be
interpretively unearthed.
The concept of dangerous, powerful texts furnished tools for the act of textual
interpretation itself, the most critical being the idea of a power relationship between text
and interpreter, the synthesis of which became the interpreter’s resulting interpretation.
While this relationship and its significance vary, the basic mode follows the textual
realist tradition by asserting the existence of a text with certain attributes, some of
which require interpretation to reveal. However, these attributes now also carry the
weight of ideological force, and thus even if not uncovered still work to enforce a
particular meaning of the text on the interpreter. The interpreter, in turn, might resist or
refuse such meanings, resulting in conflict over the final determination of the meaning
of the text. In the case of mass media texts these hidden traits were generally considered
guilty of supporting existing power relationships and of perpetuating the status quo.
Such texts required interpretation, in part to disarm their articulation of ideology by de-
naturalizing their representations of reality. Even if simple revelation was seen as
inadequate, adding the issue of social power to the familiar hermeneutic equations gave
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the interactive, textual realist interpretive process enormous social and political
significance as sites for diagnosing social pathologies.
From a hermeneutic point of view the inclusion of large numbers of texts under
the general category of “hegemonic” requires the articulation of an inter-textual
semantic space that could be applied and reapplied to numerous texts of that category.
Inherent to the articulation of that semantic space, of course, is the idea of its opposite,
of the texts that are non- or anti-hegemonic and exist outside the category of dangerous
text. Depending on the theoretical and political orientation of the hermeneutic
practitioner, any number of justifications could be provided to explain the difference
between “good” and “bad” texts. Redeeming a seemingly ideologically hegemonic text as
somehow secretly “progressive” became one way to justify interest in that text and the
hermeneutic enterprise of uncovering subversive strata, particularly in fields interested
in popular entertainment forms such as film studies where the mode of production
seemed inherently hostile to non-hegemonic expression (cf. Althusser, 1971; Comolli &
Narboni, 1971). Whether the justification came in the form of locating avant-garde,
alienating stylistic practices, subversively ambivalent narrative structures, or even just
authentic self-expression, a text could be freed from its status as part of the hegemonic
whole. Just as importantly, the field of non-hegemonic texts provided the necessary
structural opposite for the hegemonic text, reinforcing the validity of both fields and
allowing one to incorporate even more texts into the meta-field of hegemonic versus
non-hegemonic. For example, if the “hegemonic” film employed illusionistic realism, the
non-hegemonic field employed a presentational, alienating style. The meta-field of both
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good and bad texts whose identity depends on their relationship with the
text/interpreter power binary.
The pervasiveness of the project of relating texts to these fields is self-evident,
particularly in fields inflected by cultural studies and critical theory. That is not to say
that it is and was without its critics: they are legion. Different conceptions of the role of
media in social world such as the “uses and gratifications” tradition (Blumler & Katz
1975) vied with the mass society thesis on a number of fronts. Others critiqued the
relationships in the hegemonic/non-hegemonic discursive fields as well as the
legitimacy of the fields themselves. Deviance from the mainstream need not be
“politically progressive” (Staiger, 2000, p. 2; cf. Gallagher 1989, 44; Mayne 1993, 93).
Many scholars have already observed that the stylistic tools of the avant-garde were
often present in mainstream culture (Jenkins, 1992) and could in fact support the
economic structure of mass media industries (Mann, 1992; Caldwell, 1995). The story of
the cultural studies reaction to the mass culture thesis and the pessimism of the
Frankfurt School for their failure to account for diversity of interpretation is now so
well-worn it need not be further damaged here. Ironically, attempts to rehabilitate some
classes of dangerous text or more adequately account for interpreter power came to treat
the mass culture thesis itself as the “bad” pole of a binary between old, deterministic,
and pessimistic models and newer, more sophisticated models (even if those models
were in fact neither newer or more sophisticated). The most damaging blow to the mass
society thesis was simply historical change. As has been repeated ad naseum in the last
twenty years, the text/interpreter relationships appropriate to the mass media world of
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1890 or 1960 no longer fits quite so neatly with the more participatory digital media
landscape of 2014.
Whatever the fate of the mass society thesis, concern over the impact of texts
remains strong. The problem of both the effects and uses of texts introduced a new kind
of ambiguity into the field of hermeneutics—an ambiguity based on interpreter(s) rather
than text. Evaluating the quality of texts based on their social effect, based on what they
“do” rather than what they “are,” fits neatly with hermeneutics’ mandate as the study of
interpretation, but it complicated hermeneutics’ relationship with the method of textual
analysis based on the realist, interactive model. The problem for any approach
attempting to deal with that impact through the study of interpretation remained
accounting for both diversity and uniformity in interpretation. Studies such as Hobson’s
(1982) study of the soap opera Crossroads even suggest that audience’s construction of
texts vary to such an extent that individual viewers essentially watched their own
version of the show, although this may represent an extreme case. The so-called “Archie
Bunker” effect (Vidmar & Rokeach, 1974) provides a more moderate example: one sees
him as an ironic anti-hero who typifies the passing of a small-minded worldview;
another as a beleaguered champion of common sense. Both, however, will likely agree
that he has no great respect for his son-in-law and on much else about the text, and yet
they derive vastly different interpretations of it. The text/interpreter power binary
offered a way to systematically account for both the consistency and diversity of textual
interpretation. By assigning different levels of determining power to the two terms of
the binary, differences in interpretation could be explained. Furthermore, it provided
the key link to interpretive methods by providing such a clear analogy to the well-
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established text/interpreter interactive binary. By linking conflict in textual
interpretation to the mainstream/marginal semantic fields and the categorizations they
enabled while simultaneously providing the rationale for the continuation of a core
hermeneutic theoretical and methodological tenant, the concepts of power and textual
effect provided both a new rationale for interpretive work and continuity with existing
hermeneutic ideas and practices
The text/interpreter power conflict pervades contemporary approaches to the
text by providing the landscape over which they contend. Thus the mass society critique
might be situated as placing more power on the text. Fan studies (Jenkins 1992; Radway
1991) or reader-response and reception theory (Lewis 1961; Jauss & Bezinger 1970; Hall
1993; Staiger 1992) allow greater determining power to the interpreter. In some cases
the relationship between the mainstream/marginal and text/interpreter binaries were
inverted. The continued influence of the idea of the progressive or “good” text meant
that the right kind of text could have a positive social influence on interpreters who
were, presumably, more oriented toward the hegemonic ideology than the text
presented to them (or at least unaware of the legitimacy of their pre-existing anti-
hegemonic tendencies). In some cases the relationships between the terms might even
be ambivalent. The cracks and fissures in an otherwise conservative text that might lead
to a resistant reading for an interpreter committed to hegemonic values, or the
ambivalence in a text might lead to multiple possible readings with varied political
valances that are arguably in line with the text depending on the salience assigned to
cues and the master-text context in which it is located. One viewer of the film Starship
Troopers might read the film as a fairly straight-forward glorification of militarism, and
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negotiate away the occasional comic elements by arguing that they really only
demonstrate the true vapidity of liberal media discourse. Another might see those same
comic elements as well as the film’s numerous references to Nazi iconography as clear
indication of ironic intent, while perhaps acknowledging that the overall narrative
remains one of saving the world by killing things. One person’s fissure is another’s text.
Yet even in these hypothetical cases the basic issues of text/interpreter and
hegemony/resistance remains the default theoretical foundation. The fact that these
might be exceptional is precisely what made them non-trivial.
Exceptions can be dangerous. As Thomas Kuhn noted in his study of paradigm
shifts, exceptions can begin to have a corrosive effect on the existing paradigm that
strains to accommodate them and can prepare the way for paradigm shifts that re-orient
the landscape. Were such texts still truly exceptional, the threat to the status quo of
hermeneutic methods might be contained, but in the digital media world the exception
is already becoming the norm. The text/interpreter power model weakens when the
relative ideological orientations of text and interpreter are not so easily mapped, and
when the lines between creators of texts and interpreters of texts erode, and these are
precisely the phenomena that any hermeneutic approach to digital media spaces must
account for. Without the ability to map center/periphery or mainstream/marginalized
on the text/reader binary, textual hermeneutics loses the ability to validate its claims
about the nature of the relationship between social power and interpretive activity (as
well as the consistency/idiosyncrasy problem that plagues hermeneutics in every era).
The only reasons to continue trying to deform the familiar mass media model are inertia
and lack of a reasonable alternative. We can afford to accept neither. Not only does
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continued adherence to the status quo prevent us from attending to the specificities of
diverse media forms, it denies us the ability to account for the very real impact of
hegemony in spaces pervaded by subtler, more horizontal power relationships. Vertical
power relations remain relevant, as does the idea that these relationships will often be
characterized by the dissemination of ideological hegemonic texts from distinct groups
of producers and consumers. However, the work of hegemony through horizontal
relations, which is all the more insidious and likely more powerful, requires a different
approach to study in detail.
What is to be Done?
Textual hermeneutic theory has depended on textual realism and an interactive
model of the text/interpreter relationship to provide validity to attempts to relate one’s
own interpretive work to the interpretive work of others, and it cannot continue to do so.
The objectively defined text provides the constant in the equation of the text-interpreter
interaction that permits one to identify the processes of the interpreter’s mind through
an essentially subtractive process—interpretation minus the objective text equals the
idiosyncrasies of the individual interpretation. Treating that interaction between text
and interpreter as one of conflict over the final interpretation only re-enforces this
model both by giving the text a sort of agency and by keeping text and interpreter
theoretically separate. These three foundations provide the transdisciplinary premises of
textual hermeneutics as a means for studying other minds. Digital media defies all three
premises. Methodologically and epistemologically, textual realism simply makes too
many assumptions about the nature of texts and interpretation that cannot account for
interactive, participatory digital media. Without textual realism, the interactive model
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can no longer be resolved. Finally, changes in the political-economy communication
media have weakened the relationship between the text/interpreter and
mainstream/marginal, not only making it difficult to map consistently these binaries
onto each other but also bringing their status as binaries into question. Yet how is one to
continue studying texts and interpretation if one also disavows the legitimacy of
interpretation as a mode of understanding? We are, after all, interpreters ourselves.
A new epistemological and methodological model is required that can replace or
repair the three foundations now lost to us. To replace textual realism, this model must
account for the text without depending on it as solid ground from which to view the
world. This model must also provide the means to describe and study the
text/interpreter relationship by accounting for the text-interpreter, observer-
interpreter, and observer-text relationships, while accommodating the fact that the
observer is inevitably also an interpreter of texts in a manner similar to the interpreter.
Placing both interpreter and observer in the same field also helps to attenuate some of
the ethical dangers of the subject/object power divide by re-contextualizing the
relationship between professional and vernacular interpretive methods without
resorting to either proscriptive teleology or a bland relativism. Finally, a new model
must account for the operations of all kinds of power relationships, vertical and
horizontal, articulated through a textual landscape that defies simple binary
equivalencies. And finally it must do so without subscribing on old versus new, analogue
versus digital, or top-down versus participatory media binaries that are themselves
derived from the text/interpreter power binary. Only a general theory of textual
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hermeneutics can meet these criteria: one that addresses interpretation of texts at large.
The chapter that follows offers a possible solution.

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Chapter 4
Network Hermeneutics

To study the interpretation of digital media texts, textual hermeneutics must be
enlarged to account for new textual forms, text/interpreter relationships, and social
contexts in which interpretation takes place. This chapter offers a new textual
hermeneutics appropriate to digital media and centered on the problem of studying the
interpretative activity of other minds: a network hermeneutics. Drawing on Karen
Barad’s (2007) work on “agential realism,” network hermeneutics treats the
text/interpreter relationship as a mutually constituting “intra-active” relationship, and
thus avoids the demands of textual realism or the need for an interactive
text/interpreter model. For the purposes of this study an “intra-active” relationship is
one in which the means of perception and the object toward which perception is
oriented “intra-act” to mutually constitute the phenomena available to the observer.
While this new approach to textual interpretation responds most immediately to the
challenges posed by interpretation in digital media spaces, network hermeneutics is a
general hermeneutic theory that seeks to encompass existing approaches to textual
interpretation regardless of the type of text being interpreted. Network hermeneutics
achieves this by offering a common theoretical and methodological framework: a shared
protocol that cuts across theoretical and disciplinary boundaries and focuses on
accounting for textual interpretation as a socially situated set of practices and
performances through which texts are made knowable and known.
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Through interpretation, texts have social lives, lives that are lived within the
minds of their interpreters but also in the social and material realities of the world in
which those texts become meaningful. I define network hermeneutics, provisionally, as
the study of textual interpretation as a fundamentally social set of practices and
performances enmeshed in multiplex relationships with the interpreter’s social
psychological
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world. Network hermeneutics account for the social life of interpretation
on two levels. First, as practice, interpretation is structured both discursively and non-
discursively as a learned set of social activities based on certain generative principles
through which interpretation is made possible. Second, as performance, interpretations
are put to work in the social world as tools for communication, for constructing identity
and affinity, for accumulating social and cultural capital, and for mapping social
relationships. While these activities are informed by interpretation, they are not
necessarily of themselves interpretive: rather they are text-oriented or referencing
activities.
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Interpretive activity is one meta-textual activity among many, and while it
commonly makes other meta-textual activities possible, interpretation inter-penetrates
rather than precedes these other activities. Attention to the multiple senses in which
interpretation takes place in the social world and not in the opaque psychological space
of an inaccessible “other mind” allows network hermeneutics to articulate observable

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By the phrase “social psychological” I wish to invoke social psychological theory as an illustrative comparison but
not limit the range of relevant social and psychological factors to those typically associated with social psychology.
I also do not wish to limit network hermeneutics to the methods and knowledge claims of social psychology. The
value of the comparison is rather in social psychology’s attention to the relationship between the psychological
and the real and/or perceived world of other thinking beings, which neatly parallels how network hermeneutics
situates textual interpretation.
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Both “interpretive” and “meta-textual” are employed here as –etic terms and should not be understood as
genres of text or tied to particular genres of text held together by any force except one’s use of them. Almost all
utterance has some meta-textual dimensions, after all.
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phenomena that are both indications of those internal processes and interpretive
activities in their own right.
Network hermeneutics undertakes the study of the textual interpretation from
two premises. First, that the interpretation of text is an everyday activity, and while
particular communities might assert distinct interpretive codes, textual interpretation
itself is widely if not universally employed. Second, that any textual hermeneutic
theory must seek to account systematically for both uniformity and diversity in
interpretations and the activities through which interpretations are created and
articulated.
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The former of these premises I will return to justify at the end of this
chapter, but I believe that the latter is self-evident. The issue for network hermeneutics
is not proving the existence or justifying the validity of “resistant” or “oppositional”
readings, but accounting for them. Network hermeneutics addresses the problems of
diversity and uniformity with the hypothesis that interpretation is not the result of
ideology, the unconscious, personal choice, textual form, or any other unitary cause, but
an emergent process where the gentlest touch can propel interpretation not only in new
directions, but into entirely new forms. Since interpretive activity is socially situated,
influence on any given interpretive practice or performance might come from discursive
structures, the nature of communication channels, interpersonal and group
relationships and identities, or institutional and technological contexts. This multiplex
network of potential inputs spawns myriad and protean forms of interpretive activity.

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Which is to say that one must renounce using concepts like error or idiosyncrasy as pat explanations for
variation. Neither term is forbidden, but they must be employed systematically. An interpreter’s approach to a text
might be in error, but only insofar as the interpreter failed to successfully employ the approach they had
attempted—not error in an objective sense. Idiosyncrasy can certainly be employed as a means of designating a
residue of the unexplainable in interpretive activity, but doing so should be treated as a provocation to further
inquiry.
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A socially focused hermeneutic theory requires an account of interpretation and
meta-textual activity as both practice and performance. Social practice spreads, evolves,
and persists in communication, both through explicit teaching such as a literature class
or sermon and through observation of the practices and performances of others. For
relatively closely connected groups a community of practice approach is appropriate,
but Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus better explains how practice spreads through
more diffuse types of social relationships and groupings. Practice structures
interpretation, but so too does the performance of interpretation for, as Irving
Goffman’s work suggests, performance is a consensual process, in which various parties
play their respective roles. This chapter will then turn to social cognitive theory to
provide an account for the psychological processes through which modes of practice and
performance are learned and selected. Connecting interpretation as social practice and
performance with social cognitive theory situates network hermeneutics as a meso-scale
theory that provides connections between macro-scale social influences like hegemonic
discourse and micro-scale psychological factors and interpersonal performances.
Among these psychological factors, perceived textual ecology merits attention. Textual
ecology refers to the mental maps of relationships between texts and types of texts (such
as genre, era, author, etc.) and how those relationships are then mapped onto the social
world.
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This chapter concludes by addressing one likely objection to this model based
on the division between interpretation and simple comprehension. By the end of this
chapter a fully enunciated model of the basic structure of hermeneutics will be available,

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For example, the perceived audience for particular genres of films results from the link between an individual’s
understandings the world of texts and the social world.
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allowing the chapters that follow to expand and apply that structure to several
fundamental issues in the study of textual interpretation.
While interpretation is always already a social activity the text remains critical.
Network hermeneutics focuses on interpretation of texts rather than texts themselves,
but that does not mean that texts are to be bracketed in a manner following Husserl.
Texts are not hallucinations. They exist and have properties: there is, as opposed to
Stein’s Oakland, a “there there.” This no doubt sounds suspiciously like a return to
textual realism, but while the text does exist and have properties for network
hermeneutics, that does not mean that an interpreter can simply find and describe the
text in its inert “there-ness.” Textual realism and the interactive model of interpretation
function based on an interpreter’s ability to discern at least aspects of the text in an
objective sense. Rejecting this foundation places textual hermeneutics in a double-bind
where it must simultaneously account for the triangle of perceptual relationships
between interpreter, text, and the practitioner of textual hermeneutics. Without care, we
end up with the effect of a mirror looking in a mirror. To resolve this, we need a basic
methodological and epistemological mode assumption that applies equally to all of these
relationships.
Intra-active Hermeneutics
An intra-active, rather than interactive, hermeneutic theory could account for all
three perceptual relationships without a return to textual realism. An inter-active
hermeneutic model is made possible by and is a candidate to succeed the linguistic turn
in the humanities and social sciences. The linguistic turn in the humanities and social
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sciences has had ambivalent consequences for textual hermeneutics. Treating language
as the crucial point of access (and exemplary metaphor) for understanding human
collective life expands the importance of textual interpretation at the price of a
continued reliance on textual realist epistemology. Karen Barad (2003, 2007) argues
that, as a result of the linguistic turn in the humanities and social sciences, language has
been over-privileged in our understanding of the relationship between the material and
the discursive world. Why treat language as so much more “trustworthy," as if discursive
constructions were somehow transparent? From a hermeneutic point of view her
argument is self-evident—of course language isn’t transparent, that’s why one needs
hermeneutics. However, her critique cuts deeper. If symbolic discourse of all kinds, not
only the object of textual hermeneutics but also its means of articulation, cannot be
trusted to provide the means and materials for analysis then hermeneutics might no
longer be methodologically sound. One could even take Barad’s critique a step further to
point out that the various forms of symbolic utterance that provide the point of access to
language are themselves material or at least sensible, and should therefore be as suspect
as any other attempt at objective observation. Once again the problem comes from the
loss of the textual realist epistemology where texts were opaque but that surface opacity
was accessible and therefore, through proper method, penetrable.
Fortunately, Barad’s critique of the linguistic turn also provides a point of
departure for resolving the problem of a textual hermeneutics freed of textual realism.
Barad’s challenge to the linguistic turn is centered on the issue of “representationalism,”
or the belief that “beings exist as individuals with inherent attributes, anterior to their
representation.” Contained in this description is representationalism’s key “ontological
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gap:” that representations serve “a mediating function between independently existing
entities” and that those entities are themselves independent of the specific
representations and systems of representations used to represent them (46). From this
point of view it becomes difficult to move beyond normative questions of
representational accuracy or authenticity. While I’m sure Barad would agree that these
issues are important as a means to frame race, gender, and other social issues for public
discussion, debating representation in this way forces one into a continuing cycle of
charges and counter-charges that provide little opportunity for theoretical
development.
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Continued emphasis on the fight over “accurate,” “authentic,” or “good”
representation leaves little room to ask the more fundamental question of why
individuals require representations to understand external entities and yet those
representations themselves are considered to be comprehensible despite being external
in their own right. Representations are treated as both opaque and transparent. They
are opaque in that they serve a mediating function between entities that may or may not
be reflective of the presumed anterior reality of those entities, but they remain
“transparent” by never truly becoming exterior entities in and of themselves.
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Although being able to frame long-term social issues in terms of present-tense debates attached to popular
culture obviously carries the benefit of winning those spaces, time, and attention.
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Barad acknowledges that both performative and post-structuralist theories have pointed out similar short-
comings with the problem of representation although they have not come to the same conclusion. Performative
approaches challenge the existence of a reality anterior to and ontologically separate from representation.
Performance is not representation of reality, it is production of reality (cf. Austin 1977. For Barad, Judith Butler
serves as the exemplar of this approach, particularly Butler’s arguments that “gender is not an attribute of
individuals…gender is a doing” (57, cf. Butler 1990, 25). Barad also refers to Foucault’s post-structuralist effort to
cut through the “agency-structure dualism by rejecting the humanist premise that the individual pre-exists
discursive practices as well as fundamentally very similar Marxist notion of ‘the production of the subject via the
imposition of external systems of Power, Language, or Culture’” (63; cf. Foucault 2012). Unfortunately, Foucault’s
analysis of discourse ultimately remains agnostic about the relationship between “discursive and non-discursive
practices” (63). For Barad, that means that Foucault’s analysis remains critical incomplete, for his approach cannot
address “material constraints and conditions and the material dimensions of agency” (225).

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Barad’s critique of the linguistic turns’ obsession with representation serves her
ultimate goal of constructing an account of the material world outside of discourse that
still acknowledges the role of discourse in the creation of knowledge. To accomplish this
Barad draws on Judith Butler’s theory of “iterative citationality.” Iterative citationality
examines the gendered body as a “process of materialization” that produces the
apparently already given “boundary, fixity, and surface” of matter (Butler 1993, 9).
Barad extends this theory beyond the relationship between the human and the social to
the relationship between the human and non-human world. To that end Barad argues
for a new theoretical approach called “agential realism” to replace the linguistic turn.
The framework of agential realism:
provides an understanding of the role of human and non-human, material and
discursive, and natural and cultural factors….thereby moving such considerations
beyond the well-worn debates that pit constructivism against realism, agency
against structure, and idealism against materialism” (26).
Agential realism is based on Barad’s reading of Niels Bohr’s work on uncertainty in
quantum physics and his view of the relationship between reality and knowledge,
specifically his contention that the apparatus of perception and measurement must
always be accounted for in the study of quantum phenomenon.
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Bohr’s approach to
epistemology runs somewhat askew of popular understandings of quantum physics
which tend to be rooted in Heisenberg’s version of the uncertainty principle.
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According to popular wisdom, in quantum physics when one attempts to locate a
particle one can find its velocity or its location, but never both. A certain remainder of

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Barad provides an extensive narrative of the intellectual and historical background of this process, particularly
the debates between Bohr and Werner Heisenberg over the uncertainty principle that should be consulted
directly, but see also Bohr (1958, 170-173; 1949; 1948).
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The uncertainty principle is one of the most, and perhaps also one of the only, concepts in quantum physics that
has found traction in popular consciousness--thanks in no small part to the recent efforts of Dr. Walter White in
alpha-methylphenethylamine purification.
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the unknowable is inevitable; knowledge is always partial as a condition of its existence.
This is often taken to mean that objective observation is impossible, and that humans
inevitably exist in a sort of quasi-hallucinatory state responding to vague impressions of
an outside world available only through partial sensory mechanisms, both biological and
technological. Bohr offered a very different approach to the problem of quantum
indeterminacy by arguing that the issue is not that knowledge is partial by nature by
that it is partial because it is contingent on the conditions through which knowledge is
made (cf. Bohr 1958, 170-173). Objective knowledge remains possible, but only if the
apparatus of perception is considered part of that knowledge.
Following Bohr’s argument that the apparatus of perception be considered part of
phenomena, Barad argues that sensible universe is therefore composed of relationships
rather than objects.
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For example, one does not perceive a photograph as an inert
object in space that simply presents itself but rather through a set of relationships—
between the surface of the photograph and light, between light and our apparatus for
perceiving it. As a result the “knower” is not fully separate from the “known” because the
known is only knowable through the material configuration of both that enables the
creation of phenomena. Individual objects are never anterior to these intra-active
relationships but are produced by and productive of them—hence the term “intra-
action.” The world of the perceptible is founded on “entangled material agencies” rather
than independent mental models or objects (Barad 2007, 56). This approach to
phenomena cuts directly through the Cartesian division between object and observer

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“In my reading of Bohr, a pivotal point in his analysis is that the physical apparatus, embodying a particular
concept to the exclusion of others, marks the subject-object distinction: the physical and conceptual apparatuses
form a nondualistic whole marking the subject-object boundary. In other words, concepts obtain their meaning in
relation to a particular physical apparatus” (Barad 2007, 120).
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because the basic unit of knowable reality is the inter-twining of object and observer,
Barad’s entangled material agencies. As a result observation can be objective—insofar as
it is not dependent on a single person’s point of view—if it takes the mechanism of
perception into account.
Agential realism offers an alternative to textual realism without resort to
complete relativism or a hallucinatory relationship between interpreter and (imagined)
text. Barad’s theory allows for an account of “materiality [as] an agentive and productive
factor in its own right,” (225) without requiring a return to “‘thingness:’ what’s real may
not be an essence, an entity, or an independently existing object” (56). The material
world still exists in relation to the discursive world of method and discourse. Discourse
refers not only to language, but to the regime of what it is possible to articulate. When
knowledge is created discourse becomes part of the apparatus and therefore part of the
phenomena.
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When one seeks to engage with the “agentive” material world one
inevitably engages with the discourses with which they are entangled: theoretical
concepts such as position or velocity are not abstract properties but inseparable parts of
the intra-active phenomenon of the object and the means of observation. In the case of
textual interpretation, this means that the interpreter knows the text through the intra-
action of their senses, interpretive activities, and the text—the interpreter never has
direct access to the text itself but the text is not contingent on observation.
Interpretation occurs as the text is diffracted through interpretive practice like light
through a prism. While that diffraction is neither just the text nor just the interpreter, it

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“[M]easurement is a meeting of the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’” (Barad 2007, 225).
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is nonetheless an objective observation so long as it is understood as a diffraction, a
relationship, rather than an object.
Agential realism bears certain similarities with philosophical hermeneutics and
fits neatly with many hermeneutic theories, but ultimately Barad’s theory is built on a
distinct epistemological model. Since its inception hermeneutics of all kinds has been
focused on the relationship between method, knowledge, the knower, and the known,
but this is particularly true of Heideggerian hermeneutics. Heidegger shares Barad’s
concern for the relationship between self and the external world and similarly rejects the
notion that the external world is knowable only through discourse. Also, the concept of
intentionality certainly contains a whisper of intra-action. However, where Heidegger
makes allowances that one might ultimately be able to train the senses to find the world
un-interpreted, Barad makes no such allowance. In philosophical hermeneutics the
basic model remains that of a sensing individual who—for all their being in the world—
exists separate from the phenomena produced by objects. One can also find a certain
echo of the intra-active in Hans-George Gadamer’s (2004) concept of a “fusion of
horizons” through hermeneutics that bridged the world of the interpreted and the world
of the interpreter. Philosophical hermeneutics for Gadamer is a method of engaging
with the outside to expand the one’s “horizons” of knowledge and experience. In a sense,
the “fusion of horizons” could be considered a variety of Bohr’s account of phenomena,
but Gadamer’s hermeneutics still retains the observer/observed split that both Bohr and
Barad seek to revise. Fusing horizons in the Gadamerian sense suggests an overlap of
perspectives, moving the zero point of one episteme as close as possible to that of an
alien one, resulting in a moment of inter-subjective understanding. Agential realism
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acknowledges the inevitability of diverse perspectives, but places its faith in the ability of
perceivers to characterize their positioning as part of the phenomenon in question and
relative to other potential perceivers.
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Agential realism and the concept of intra-action provides an epistemological
basis for hermeneutics that does not rely on textual realism or an interactive
text/interpreter relationship. Unlike textual realist approaches, an intra-active approach
to texts does not require one to attribute objective properties to a text, nor does it rely
on such properties to justify its validity for multiple interpreters. Perhaps ironically,
intra-action responds neatly to the problems posed by interactive texts, thanks in part to
its willingness, indeed its insistence, on taking positions that are both objective and, in a
sense, provisional. It also allows for a large variety of understandings of what an
“interactive” text might be. If a digital text takes multiple forms while being engaged
with differently or if inter-activity refers to a certain practice of reference to previous
speech or even certain forms of sensory awareness and illusion than agential realism is
still applicable so long as we remember that the apparent “interaction” is based on
actual intra-action. Furthermore, while the interpreter’s experience of a text is intra-
active that does not mean that it is static. I would argue that one reason why the inter-
active model of the text/interpreter relationship (and the hermeneutic circle) has

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This makes text and interpretation very difficult to discuss. Our current language, or at least our current author, is
rather ill-suited to adequately describing intra-active phenomena. If we say a text “is” something we sound as if we
are returning to a realist paradigm, but if we say that the perceiver constructs the text as something we appear to be
coming down decisively on the opposite side of a question. Of course one could cheat and say that “the text is
constructed as” and through the use of Reagan-esque passive voice attempt to avoid the question altogether, but
sadly the unspoken subject of that phrase is the focus of our study. I have therefore attempted wherever possible to
be as precise in my use of language as possible, but also where possible to make the tension between language and
intent as clear as possible.

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enjoyed such wide-spread acceptance and enduring popularity is that it (at least
superficially) seems to account for the process of interpretation in a way that is close to
the lived experience of interpreting. Intra-action can also accommodate this time
element, but instead of imagining a tiny agent cycling back and forth in conceptual
space between text and interpreter or between known and to be known, one should
envision the dynamic articulation of phenomena.
An intra-active approach to texts might be seen as a serious threat to the practice
of textual interpretation itself as a valid methodology, but textual interpretation remains
necessary. While treating the text-interpreter relationship as intra-active does mean that
the interpreter does not simply find or completely define the text, the necessity of
accounting for the apparatus of perceptions permits an ecumenical approach to method.
Every approach is valuable provided it attends to its own contingency (lab experiments,
ethnography, textual interpretation, etc.). Diverse methods remain valid, although they
may be more or less valid for undertaking any particular form of study based on the
limitations provided by the “diffracting” method. Openness to a variety of approaches
does not excuse the interpreter, or practitioner of any other method, from rigor or
justifying one’s particular approach. Full accounting of method demands comparison
between instances of that method or between diverse methods, which in turn leads to
the need to adjucate divergent claims. Of course accounting for the contingency of one’s
own methods is easier said than done and it may ultimately be nearly impossible for
complex practices like textual interpretation. That is precisely what makes the
undertaking worthwhile. After all, accounting for method and the relationships between
methods is the core mission of textual hermeneutics! In the end an intra-active
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epistemology does not pathologize textual interpretation but allows one to address
interpretation as an inevitable and wide-spread activity by situating all forms of textual
interpretation within a common theoretical system. With that encompassing framework
in place, it becomes possible to discuss textual interpretive activity in all its myriad
forms.
Performances and Practices of Textual Interpretation
Agential realism and the concept of intra-action provide an epistemological basis
on which to construct a new general hermeneutic theory, a model for studying the
interpretation of text more capable of adapting to diverse media landscapes. Textual
interpretation is the means through which a text becomes both knowable and known to
oneself and to others. Following this thinking: interpretation therefore fulfills the role of
an apparatus of perception in an agential realist account. Interpretation makes a text
“knowable” by providing the means through which the text becomes an (apparent)
object of knowledge. Once knowledge of the text has been created, interpretation still
exists as the context in which that knowledge exists and is made sensible—interpretation
is how a text is known. This “known” is not identical with “meaning,” nor does the
operation of interpretation of necessity include all possible production of meaning.
Meaning is much broader term referring to a text’s significance. That significance
includes the universe of possible significations understood to be within, attached, or
attendant to the text but also to the text’s relation to social identities and relationships,
non-interpretive questions of quality or affect, applications to which knowledge of the
text can be put, and practices that the text is seen as articulating or participating in.
Textual interpretation participates in the creation of meaning, but meaning as a whole
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can only be found in the full panoply of meta-textual activities. Textual interpretation
produces knowledge of a text, and while that knowledge is never truly separate from
meaning it can be usefully separated for analytical purposes. To understand how texts
come to be known or how texts come to be meaningful requires an account of
interpretation.
Textual hermeneutic theory must be able to account for textual interpretation,
and returning to the premises of this study that means accounting systematically for
both the uniformity and diversity of interpretations of texts. Simply living in the world
one encounters enormous variety in interpretation, either in one’s communication with
other interpreters or simply as one’s interpretive work on a text continues over time and
creates new and modified interpretations. Accounting for these differences is no easy
task. However, without textual realism, accounting for the uniformity of interpretation
becomes just as problematic, but ultimately they are susceptible to the same solution.
Eco (2004) argues that seemingly “aberrant decodings” of texts occur as a result of the
conflict of differing systems of significations. Aberration is not merely idiosyncratic but
evidence of alternative, systematic causes. Identifying these hidden causes will be
difficult enough, but to make matters worse the effects of those causes are also obscure.
The interpretative work of others makes a poor phenomenon for observation, contained
as it is within the minds of other thinking beings to which we do not have access.
Instead one encounters various articulations of interpretations as well as behaviors and
material artifacts that might be seen as articulations of interpretations or symptomatic
of interpretations but never the unalloyed act of interpreting.
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These articulations or symptoms of interpretation are not simply end products of
a linear process that ends once interpretation is complete. They also influence other
interpretations, most critically the evolving interpretations of the articulating or
symptomatic individual. Imagine, for example, a student explicating a poem. Her
explication serves as an interpretive tool for her listeners, both an example of
interpretation to be emulated or rejected as well as a possible interpretation of a given
text. The interpreter, in turn, judges the success or failure of her performance and the
practice that informed and articulated it (based on factors to be discussed later) and
applies this feedback to her own knowledge of the text. If she detects subtle hints that
her analysis of an image in that poem is unacceptable she might revise her
understanding, believing her previous interpretation to be wrong. Of course, in
explicating the poem the student may or may not be revealing her actual understanding
of the work—she may be simply repeating what she thinks the professor wants to hear—
but her performance of her interpretation remains a meaningful act in its own right.
After all, it requires a fair amount of skill to convince a literature professor of your
ability to interpret a text while simultaneously accounting for that professor’s
preferences to increase your standing in the class. One should then asks how and to
what extent that performance influences the interpretive work of others or feeds back
into the interpretations of the original interpreter, despite her somewhat cynical
intentions. The uses to which she puts her textual knowledge influence her, influence
others, and are therefore valuable instances of interpretive activity even if do not afford
direct access to her mental process of interpretation.
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Interpretation helps one to make sense of texts, but it also helps one to make use
of them and these two properties are difficult to separate. These social qualities of
textual interpretation are of secondary concern to the traditional textual realist because
interpretation is constructed as the agent’s sense-making response to a problematic
object, with the uses that are implicated by interpretation coming into play only after
interpretation has taken place. Network hermeneutics still treats interpretation as
sense-making, but motivated, goal-oriented sense-making. Returning to the example
above: the explicator might regard her performance as a means to a desirable grade or
simply local acclaim and therefore the result of her interpreting may go partially
unvoiced. Our perhaps something else motivates her. Perhaps she regards literature as
mentally and morally edifying and thus interprets in search of improving messages or
insights—a personal hermeneutics of faith. Perhaps her sense of self-esteem won’t allow
her to fail to interpret it to her standard and thus she must find a way to interpret the
poem such that she feels she comprehends it completely. Perhaps she believes the
cultural currency that one accrues through literary study will be valuable to her later in
life and therefore interprets with an eye toward minting that currency as efficiently as
possible by hewing to accepted practice and knowledge. In all cases the text is
interpreted not simply because it exists but for a reason, and that motive in turn is part
of the apparatus of perception that makes interpretation possible. Heidegger has snuck
back into this discussion—a text is interpreted not simply according to what it is, but
what it does or can do.

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The act of interpreting a text or the various means through which an
interpretation are externalized into forms observable by others result in a complex
confluence of motives and means. This complexity could easily explain why
interpretations are so often varied for they are undertaken in response to varied
motivations and social contexts. Yet if this is the case, why are interpretations also
commonly uniform, or at the very least clearly related and mutually comprehensible?
One could answer that question through resort to the properties of the text, but that
would necessitate either a return to a textual realist epistemology or so many caveats
and qualifications as to rob it of its explanatory power. If the text cannot be relied upon
as the stable foundation from which uniformity springs then interpretive activity, the
apparatus through which text is diffracted, must afford some points of contact between
interpreters and interpretations that result in systematic uniformity and variation.
Textual interpretive activity must be to some degree a social activity rather than entirely
formal or psychologically internal, and the social element of textual interpretation takes
two forms: as practice and as performance. Network hermeneutics treats textual
interpretation as practice because it is a shared way of doing things. Network
hermeneutics treats textual interpretation as performance in two senses. First, that for a
text to be “used” interpretation must have ways to translate to action. Second, that that
action is undertaken in ways influenced by or directly in response to the observation of
other thinking beings. Together interpretive practice and performance describe the
myriad of potential social influences on interpretive activity as a whole.

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Textual Interpretation as Social Practice
Interpretation is a learned activity, both through explicit education such as a
literature class and through extrapolation from observed models, both good and bad—it
is a species of social practice. Treating textual interpretation as social practice is hardly
novel, and a great deal of work undertaken through social-semiotics (Halliday, 1978;
Hodge & Kress 1988), reception theory, history of criticism and the ethnography of
historical spectatorship (deCordova 1990; Culler 2002; Jauss 1982; Mayne 1993; Stacey
1993; Staiger 2005; Taylor 1989), and reader-response theories (Iser, 1980, 1978; Fish
1980) have all dealt with textual interpretation in terms of social practice. Nor is the
idea that interpretation is dependent in part on the perceived or real uses of a text
particularly novel. Beyond the obvious Heideggerian connection the relationship
between interpretation and identity construction is a well-trod road. Many reception
studies, Morley’s (1980) The Nationwide Audience for example, have examined how
interpretation varies between groups, and how the reception of texts itself is practiced in
real terms. Such studies have also extended into how that interpretation fits into even
more specific social contexts. Morley (1986) extended his earlier research by looking at
viewing practices within the domestic sphere, and viewing relations within the context
of the patriarchal social relationships of the family. He focuses on how television is used
within the family, not merely how it is interpreted. Both Anne Gray (1987) and Valerie
Walkerdine (1986) studied the gendered power relationships that existed around the use
of the VCR in the home. Perhaps most famously Janice Radway (1986) explored how
readers of romance novels attach meaning not only to the texts they read but to the
practice of reading them. Typically accounts of interpretive practice are tied to some
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concept of community, with Fish’s (1980) work on interpretive communities or fan
studies (Jenkins 1992a) providing seminal examples. These studies deal with
interpretation as social practice in a specific context—a family, an institution such as the
university, or a community who share interests.
The general concept of “communities of practice” is widely used, and for that
reason also lacks a settled meaning (Cox 2005). Brown and Duguid (1991), for example,
focus on communities of practice as an alternative to top-down, formal accounts of how
work processes are accomplished, arguing that such communities emerge from the
needs of workers trying to adapt the demands of management to local conditions. Lave
and Wenger (1991) treat the community of practice as a site for situated learning with
both formal and informal elements where practices are transmitted to new members of
the community through informal channels—apprenticeship in trades being a classic
example. Still, Lave and Wenger’s primary interest is in situated learning, and they do
not provide a coherent account of what constitutes a community of practice. Wenger
(1998) later returned to the issue and provided an extensive explication of the concept of
community of practice, including a lengthy list of probable traits while retaining a focus
on mutual engagement. Wenger’s attempt to define the community of practice retains a
number of similarities with Lave and Wenger’s original formulation such as the focus on
the importance of identity, of initiation into the community, and trajectories of
participation (Cox 2005). The key difference is that in Wenger’s later account of the
community of practice itself is not how the community is articulated. Instead Wenger
identifies a number of dialectics such as participation/reification and local/global, the
negotiation of which he believes better accounts for the form, continuity, and dynamism
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of communities of practice. Thus the everyday life of a community of practice is informal
and evolving, and therefore not homogeneous. Works remains the central fact of the
community, although Cox observes that Wenger’s description of communities of
practice actually deals little with how “a community of practice [is] structured by the
work itself and a management-created context” (532). Furthermore, while Wenger’s
concept of communities of practice centers on pedagogy and the formation of social
identities, it remains silent on the role of such communities in structuring thought or
individual agency.
The concept of a community of practice seems well suited to the study of
interpretation primarily because it provides useful accounts of how interpretation as a
practice might be learned outside of formal channels or explicit teaching. Ultimately the
communities of practice approach cannot serve the needs of the study of interpretive
practice for a number of reasons. First, accounting for interpretive practice requires a
model of how practice operates socially in groups that are not centered on the practice
in question. While some groups are no doubt centered on interpretation in whole or in
part—some versions of a book club, for example—most groups employ interpretation as
only part of their activities and may give it little explicit attention. While Wenger (1998)
does provide a version of the community of practice that is not defined by the practice
itself, Wenger’s account retains a central focus on work and working groups directed at
shared goals. Again, while interpretation might be or serve the goal of a group
interpretation is not necessarily goal oriented in Wenger’s sense of the term.

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Second, while the community of practice approach defines social groups in a
more inclusive sense that reaches beyond the stronger sense of “community” often
employed in fan studies, it still remains focused on groups. That focus make it difficult
to usefully generalize the community of practice beyond the group setting to large,
imagined communities or more ambiguous networks of relationships. Binding the
concept of practice to a definite group also makes accounting for how interpretative
practices might transcend group membership or how an interpretation might take place
in the context of an individual’s conflicted group affiliations. In digital media the
practice of interpretation takes place in spaces outside of academia or family setting,
beyond any single institution, culture, community, or tradition. The problem of
ambiguous social context is not native to digital media. A general theory of
hermeneutics that attempts to account for practice must be able to deal with influence
outside of coherent communities or institutions, but particularly in the case of socially
disembedded media ecologies such as those found in network computing. Some have
attempted to find a way around that problem by positing various less strict definitions of
community (cf. Burgess & Green 2009), but as ethnographic approaches proposed for
fan communities stray from the community context they quickly lose their explanatory
power. After all, in previous studies of interpretive communities such as those typical of
fan studies the characteristic interpretive and meaning making practices of the
community as opposed to the theorized mainstream is precisely the object of interest.
The study of such marginality suggests a different set of questions than the attempt to
study interpretative practice at large.
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The list of requirements for a concept of social practice that can accommodate
textual interpretation has already grown quite lengthy. To apply a theory of practice to
interpretation that theory must be able to deal with diverse kinds of social groups
ranging from tight knit fan communities, to academic institutions, to more dispersed
groups such as members of a guild or profession or even a complete stranger. A theory
of interpretive practice must also be able to deal with more, sometimes ambiguous
social relationships across social networks, across cultures and sub-cultures, between
audience and professional media, between groups, or within individuals negotiating
diverse group affiliations. This theory must be able to explain how interpretations or
interpretive practice spreads and is employed. Interpretation is practiced in everyday
life, and for that reason everyday life is the field of possible connections which a useful
theory of interpretive practice must be able to embrace. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977)
concept of practice as an instrumental part of collective human life offers a step toward
such a theory.
Bourdieu and Habitus
Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) deals with practice not as a sort of learned group activity
but as an instrumental part of human culture and psychology. Bourdieu’s analysis of
practice bears certain similarities to both Lave and Wenger and Brown and Duguid’s
analysis of communities of practice insofar as all of them reject the centrality given to
formal rules and structures in structuralist sociological thought. Bourdieu however is
willing to deal with the problem of how communities structure both individual and
collective thought by mating the study of practice with the study of power and ideology.
In Bourdieu’s account practices are rooted in a community’s “habitus:” the set of
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acquired beliefs, attitudes, systems of representations, practices, and shared social
rituals through which social structure becomes naturalized into an individual’s
subjective experience (72). Social order functions only to the extent that it is able to
conceal its arbitrariness. Tradition within the group is not based in explicit sets of rules.
Were these rules made explicit, they would cease to be naturalized: “what is essential
goes without saying because it comes without saying: the tradition is silent, not last
about itself as a tradition” (167). Since the habitus is defined in part by its implicitness,
Bourdieu challenges ethnomethodology’s belief that the ethnographer should work to
produce “accounts of accounts” because doing so already envelopes the “account” in a
new and alien habitus. Such accounts are not meaningless, of course, but that they are
not successful representations or privileged glances into “native experience.”
The “habitus” takes shape in a society through “generative schemes” which allow
for the creation of a multitude of different concepts, classifications, and practices rather
than rote reproduction of learned models: “[habitus is] the product of a small batch of
schemes of enabling agents to generate an infinity of practices adapted to endlessly
changing situations, without those schemes ever having been considered as explicit
principles” (16). These schemes are the “semi-learned grammars of practice—sayings,
proverbs, gnomic poems, spontaneous ‘theories’ which accompany even the most
‘automatic’ practices” (20). Generative schemes, and the habitus itself, are only
rendered explicit on occasions when they have already faltered. This means that if one is
asked to codify one’s own practices one is already becoming alienated from them. The
habitus is not all encompassing, individual agency still exists but is articulated through
the habitus. The same is true of individual judgment: “it is because each agent has the
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means of acting as a judge of others and of himself that custom has a hold on him” (17).
Still, practice and cognition are tightly intertwined in Bourdieu’s account, particularly in
the form of classification. Classifications emerge as a part of practice which, in turn,
informs future practice, but it remains essentially instrumental. While members of the
community may come to identify with their practice and/or have their practice shape
their worldview practice remains something that they “do” to achieve some goal, itself
based in the habitus rather than simply desire. Both classification and practice emerge
from the generative principles of the habitus and are therefore inherently intertwined
and mutually constitutive, and since agency itself is articulated within the habitus it to is
closely inter-connected with both.
For that reason Bourdieu’s model of practice, despite his insistence to the
contrary, is actually extremely deterministic. Michel de Certeau (1984) argues that
Bourdieu’s method does not truly account for agency because the relationship between
habitus and practice remains determined and therefore structure is continually being
reproduced. De Certeau argues that in Bourdieu’s account practices are nothing more
than an “exteriorization of achievements” that demonstrate one’s internalization of
social structures (57). This characterization may not be entirely fair, as Bourdieu ties
practice not only to habitus but also to “by the material conditions of existence…as
treated in practice by agents endowed with schemes of perception of a determinate sort,
which are determined, negatively at least, by the material conditions of existence” (116).
Practices are not simply the habitus reproducing itself in a vacuum; material conditions
underlie it and changes in them changes the habitus. The same is true of agency, it exists
in determining relationships with both habitus and material conditions, but it is not
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itself fully determined. Whether or not Bourdieu’s method achieves the necessary
balance of agency and structure or a full appreciation of the relationship between social
and cultural forms and their everyday, tactical appropriation, de Certeau is right to
emphasize the degree to which Bourdieu treats practice as simply an externalization of
habitus. Bourdieu views emphasis on the “execution” of practice as misguided,
“objectivist” social science that treat “practices are no more than ‘executions,’ stage
parts, performances of scores, implementation of plans” (96). Bourdieu theory requires
revision to provide for the role of practice, for not only are the actual acts of practice an
important part of its relationship with the material world, they are also a point of entry
into the habitus itself.
Practice cannot exist or persist without “execution,” for not only is execution
part of practice—practice is doing, after all, not simply thinking—but only through
various species of execution can practices be observed and generative principles
extrapolated. For those same reasons the term “execution” is also unsatisfactorily
reductive, because execution is more than actualization of intent structured by habitus it
is also a performance, a social performance. Practice and performance interpenetrate.
Practice can afford the means through which performance takes place. For example one
performing one’s identity through appropriate technical practice to re-affirm
membership in a community of practice (Cox 2006). Or, following Irving Goffman’s
(1982, 1990) dramaturgical theories of inter-action, practice provides a shared
repertoire for interpersonal performance, even performance with strangers. A fan
attempting to take part in a group of like-minded enthusiasts might be expected to
perform appropriate declarations of affective attachment to justify full membership
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(Jenkins 1992a; Radway 1986). Practices can also be performances in the sense that
performances are themselves productive and constitutive: the individual does not pre-
exist the performance or merely expresses him or herself during the performance, but
rather is made in the performance (Butler 1993). While Bourdieu’s concept of habitus
does provide an account of more socially disembedded social practice it must be
supplemented with an account of performance and its relationship with practice.
Performance and Practice in Interpretation
The anthropologist Victor Turner, who is often credited as the founder of the
study of performance,
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championed performance as a key site for understanding
culture, as one of the primary constituents of human life. In his The Anthropology of
Performance (1988) he argued that everyday life involved continual performance
employing not only speech but dress, physical appearance, architecture, food—basically
any human activity can be performative and any conceivable object can become a prop
in that performance. Ultimately Turner placed particular emphasis on the public
performances or “social dramas” where the social world of the group is quite literally
acted out. In such performances, which can occur at any level of society (e.g., nation,
tribe, family, etc.) social structure and shared understanding is performed and social
change comes to be understood and “crisis, which, if not sealed off, may split the
community into contending factions” is stabilized (“Dramatic ritual” 1979, p. 83). For
that reason such social rituals are themselves contained through restrictions such as
ceremonial spaces or times, or the concentration of legitimate disruption in the person

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See Babcock & Macloon (1987) & St. John (2008) for reviews of the significance and influence of Turner’s
research. For more on Turner’s contribution to the study of religion and ritual see Deflem (1991).
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of an “edgeman” such as a shaman who is given the ability to violate social protocol. By
marking these performances as exceptional, they are able to articulate the social order
while still maintaining its authenticity and necessity; a certain degree of distance and
reflexivity can be accommodated provided it remains liminal. However, crises of this
order are by nature attached to extraordinary circumstances, and the explicit
examination of social assumptions is the exception rather than the rule.
A different kind of social drama can be located in more quotidian performances
of personal identity and group affiliation of the kind described by Erving Goffman.
Goffman (1982; 1990) focuses on the sort of everyday performance where individuals
attempt to sway others by successfully performing a preferred identity—for example, the
competent sales clerk or the diligent student. However, no one can inhabit the same role
in every context, and therefore one must constantly chose from a repertoire of potential
roles while simultaneously analyzing the roles of others as part of the task of defining
different social contexts. Through this interaction participants not only attempt to
understand the definition of the situation, but also help constitute it. This highlights a
second problem with Bourdieu’s approach to practice. Individuals occupy diverse roles
and most articulate multiple identities and relationships, including ones that involve
straddling what amount to different social worlds. Even if all these roles might fit within
the overall structure of a broader social habitus treating them as such seems to ignore
the very real and sometimes quite profound stresses individuals feel trying to perform
sometimes contradictory identities or to navigate liminal areas. Furthermore, as part of
the process of performing the correct identity a certain degree of reflexivity is necessary.
Both attempting to identify and penetrate insincere performances, deal with contextual
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boundaries, and the process of saving and giving face, all key aspects of the sort of social
drama Goffman describes, requires attention to the fact of performance—a potentially
de-naturalizing habit of mind even if the roles being occupied are otherwise felt to be
sincere.
Goffman’s concept of performance differs from Turner’s in a number of
instructive ways. First and foremost, Goffman’s focus is on the everyday and the
individual while Turner focuses on crisis and the group. Individuals certainly play a role
in social drama, and some individuals become quite individualized in the process of
social drama (e.g., Turner’s “edgemen”), but ultimately social drama remains a sort of
collective immune response to change. However, even if Turner’s emphasis is clearly on
the collective it still implicates the individual. The individual usually has a role to play in
the social drama, sometimes in a traditional sense as a participant in the performance
and sometimes in their capacity as a member of the group as a whole who plays both
chorus and audience to the occasion. These performances are a major element of
Goffman’s work: the repertoire of roles and performances that an individual takes and
their ability to mesh those roles with the roles of others. These moments of performance
require a shared understanding of how such a performance is achieved, what is and is
not done, meant, or expected. In short, it requires shared practice of various forms of
social performance, a practice that is somehow being learned and shared. Turner’s
account deals with an already constituted community, and within this community it is
relatively easy to envision potential mechanisms through which members are educated
in this way, but in Goffman’s examples the mechanism by which such standards are
spread is more nebulous and contexts and relationships are finalized in real time. Some
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standards may cut across an entire profession without all members of that profession
coming into contact or sharing an explicit doctrine.
Performance is a social activity and it requires some elements of shared practice
to make it so. If practice is a social activity, it seems quite reasonable that it will
inevitably be performed both in the sense that it is done for an audience and in the sense
that is constituted itself in the act. Goffman’s treatment of performance as an everyday
activity that is tied to one’s sense of self, desire to manipulate the impressions of others,
and transforms, sometimes radically, in diverse circumstances requires that these
performers have a repertoire of potential roles and the tools to enunciate those roles in
mutually comprehensible ways. As such, it can be considered practice based. The
communities of practice approach deals explicitly with performance through its
emphasis on social learning. For Bourdieu, although he objects to what he views as the
overly instrumental subtext of the term performance, practice is also clearly
performance in both senses. The habitus provides the generative rules for performance,
and the performance materializes and reproduces those rules. Since judgment of the
behavior of others is also implicated in practice and acceptance of custom, then a
reciprocal a desire to manipulate said judgment in others through use of one’s
understanding of the possible within the context of the habitus is quite natural. Shared
practice makes performance possible, just as performance makes is the medium through
which practice spreads and persists.
Textual interpretation should be addressed as always both practical and
performative. Even if the interpretative practice in question takes place entirely within
the mind of the reader that interpretation is already implicated with performance both
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as one key medium through which generative principles were learned and extrapolated
and as implicit material for performative activity. In the former case, one interprets with
an eye toward performance because one has learned interpretation through both
observation and doing—in school, in private conversation, in sermons, in journalistic
criticism, etc. In the latter case the demands of a future performance need not be
consciously acknowledged, although they certainly can be. The influence of performance
is built into the fiber of interpretation through interpretation’s relationship with the
interpreter’s social and psychological world and the myriad non-interpretive meta-
textual activities that the text may be employed for or implicated in. Practice and
performance are not identical, but they overlap in meaningful ways and interpenetrate.
Social Cognition and Interpretive Activity
The relationship between interpretive and meta-textual activity suggests that
these practices and performance spread through multiple social and psychological
contexts, some structured such as formal education and others more diffuse such as
everyday observation. Such practices are not reproduced by rote, so how and why an
individual adopts particular practices and performances in particular circumstances also
requires explanation. Albert Bandura’s (2002) social cognitive theory fills that gap,
offering both a broadly applicable model for how interpretive and meta-textual activities
are spread and sustained through practice and performance as well as providing a way
to conceptualize how models of practice that might seem merely instrumental come to
have a powerful influence on behavior and cognition. Social cognitive theory constructs
human beings “as active, self-motivating, and evaluating agents who respond to their
environment primarily through their own cognitive processes” (265). Agency in this
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account is bounded by a number of external factors, particularly those of “social origins”
(267), but even with these limitations the mind is nonetheless capable of “generative
symbolization, forethought, evaluative self-regulation, reflective self-consciousness, and
symbolic communication” (266). So far social cognitive theory seems in line with many
accounts that attempt to balance the social and psychological, but Bandura goes a step
further to argue that cognition is in part socially constituted, that thought has “social
origins” (267). Humans tend to be gregarious creatures, and communication and the
formation of groups requires a shared “symbolic environment” (271). Cognitive
processes are required to engage in communication, and communication in turn acts to
enlarge the human mind—a net evolutionary benefit. Thought is not an entirely internal
process, but always already social thanks to the importance of shared mental constructs.
Two cognitive processes underlie the process of social learning necessary to
participate in such collective mental activity: observational modeling of behavior and
abstracted learning of generative rules for behavior. In the observational mode of social
learning, individuals attend to and remember behavioral models that they view as
relevant and important. When sufficiently motivated, particularly by the need for self or
social approval, these behaviors are reproduced. Since an individual will often feel a
number of different motivations that may point to differing courses of action, learned
behavior cannot simply be reproduced by rote. Instead, the individual consciously or
unconsciously determines on a course of action based on the dynamic between
motivation(s) and their existing models of behavior. Were behavioral modeling the only
available form of learning a great deal of variation might exist between various types of
behavior, but change in the various types of behavior would be impossible. To account
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for change Bandura also argue that individuals are able to extrapolate the generative
rules that underlie behaviors that they observe. Using these rules they are able to modify
existing models to apply them to novel situations or different sets of motivations.
Bandura’s models are lean and portable, and that is both a virtue and a vice. On
the one hand they can be applied to a diverse set of phenomena in varied circumstances,
but on the other they lack specific explanatory power. Nonetheless they do provide a
general theory of the social-psychological relationships that underlie practice without
recourse to any particular construction of community or habitus. Furthermore, while
social cognitive theory is essentially a theory of media effects it accounts for group, and
inter-personal influence by postulating two potential paths of learning: a direct path
from media sources to individuals and an indirect path through socially mediated
pathways (285; Katz & Lazarsfeld 2006). One might argue that this model still
ultimately puts the real source of influence only in the media, and denies the importance
of authentic local or simply non-mediated impacts, but in light of the role of
interpersonal relationships in digital media one requires the ability to account for all
kinds of communication in a mediated context. In either case, the presumption that
influence starts with media is not essential to the aspects of social cognitive theory
valuable to hermeneutics.
Bandura’s theory suffers from other weaknesses as well. Social cognitive theory is
designed to account for processes that “work.” As such a failed attempt to model
behavior (e.g., inability to fully recreate a behavior or improper application of generative
principles) might be mis-identified as a success, leading the researcher to attribute
undue significance to idiosyncratic or accidental features as grounds for understanding
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models and motivation. Second, while social cognitive theory acknowledges conflicting
motives working in relation to a highly variable set of potential behaviors it provides
relatively little insight into the reciprocal role of the available repertoire of behaviors
and principles in creating motives. Fortunately these shortcomings do not disqualify
social cognition as a model for how interpretive and meta-textual practice might be
learned, but they do place considerable limits on its explanatory power. Social cognition
may not be perfectly suited to network hermeneutics, but it offers an useful place to
begin.
A Meso-scale Account of Hermeneutics
A general model of social learning as an initial hypothesis makes it possible to
turn to the issue of the relationship between individual interpretation and larger social
structures. Relating the social world writ large to the moment to moment process of
textual interpretation remains an unresolved and rankling problem for hermeneutics. In
the study of textual interpretation the social element is often conceptualized in broad
categories such as ideology or langue or culture or even zeitgeist. These macro-scale
constructions are obviously useful, but relating them to the micro-scale of individuals
interpreting particular texts can only be undertaken with considerable caveats. Some
kind of connective tissue is necessary, and often times the lack of that connective tissue
is overcome through the justifications of textual realism or particular conceptions of the
master text. Take, for example, the concept of zeitgeist, or the “spirit of the age,”
commonly associated with Hegel’s (1807; 1984) dialectic philosophy of history. Hegel
believed that an evolving historical spirit, which in broad terms can be defined as
human culture, both creates and responds to history and that the manifestations of
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human culture all bear its imprint to varying degrees. Zeitgeist can be mobilized for
textual interpretation in two keys ways. First, zeitgeist can be treated as a special case of
the author function with the direct author of the book acting as a sort of mediating
factor between zeitgeist-as-author and text. Alternatively, zeitgeist can also be mobilized
as a semantic field that can render an unfamiliar text comprehensible through
translation into more familiar terms. In this mode it acts as the mediator between text
and interpreter, refiguring the former for the comprehension of the latter. In both cases
zeitgeist ultimately serves the needs of the textual interpretive method, and in so doing
through serves a sleight of hand mediating function between marco-scale social forces
and micro-scale interpretative activity.
Network hermeneutics—the study of the interpretations of others—can fill out the
missing meso-scale level. Interpretive and meta-textual practice are both directed at a
variety of ends, most of which are centered on various ways of using texts as forms,
models, and objects of communication. Social cognitive theory mated with concepts of
social practice and performance suggests that achieving these goals so requires
employing practices that others can share and regard as legitimate. Thus while a
“successful” interpretation may or may not have a true objective standard, a sense of
successful practice is necessary both for the individual to believe that they have
understood a text properly and can use that understanding for other meta-textual
practices and performances. Of course, that feeling of understanding does not equal
appreciation or understanding to anyone else’s satisfaction, in fact it might not even
require direct access to the text itself. Believing based on para-texts that Remembrance
of Things Past is basically just the story a guy who smells a cookie and needs seven
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volumes to cope with that harrowing experience and therefore deciding not to invest the
considerable time and energy necessary to actually read it is a form of understanding a
text even if such an understanding is not likely to satisfy a Proust scholar. Anticipated
usefulness probably also plays a role. One is likely to be satisfied with a rather facile
understanding of Proust if one isn’t expecting it to ever be relevant to one’s life. In this
interpretation is bound up with one’s sense of self, and the likely trajectory of
hypothetical future selves.
In providing the space to make connections between social institutions or
discursive formations and individual interpretive and meta-textual activity,
hermeneutics could provide the missing meso-scale link in our understanding of the
relationship between macro- and micro-scale forces in textual creation, interpretation,
and use. A meso-scale account is important because relationships are neither universal
nor isolated particulars, but by definition occupy, constitute, and or construct social
activity in general. However, actually identifying the relevant social groups and the
spaces in which practice and performance are observed and articulated is far more
difficult, particularly for digital media where relevant groups are not so easily identified
and identity is articulated in dynamic ways. As was the case for Bourdieu’s habitus, the
lack of a ready-made social context makes hermeneutic work much more difficult, but
not impossible. Rather than seeking a bounded group or a set tradition one should
anticipate dealing with overlapping networks—a relational system of practices,
performances, identities, relationships, and knowledge. As a result meta-textual practice
in digital spaces will be heterogeneous and emergent, but not impenetrable to
hermeneutic study. Understanding relational networks requires the exploration of two
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parallel meta-textual ecologies—the ecology of meta-textual influence and interpreters’
mental ecologies of texts and meta-texts.
Two Meta-textual Ecologies
The ability to employ proper meta-textual practice and performance and the ends
to which they can be employ must be learned, and textual hermeneutics must work to
build an account of the channels through which this learning takes place. These
communicative channels are the conduits through which meta-textual practices and
performances are communicated, observed, and learned. Now that hypothetical models
of practice and performance are in place along with a potential explanatory mechanism
for how and why these activities are learned and modified it becomes possible to begin
to construct such an account of these channels. In dealing with more unitary systems
like “interpretive communities” such channels are relatively easy to trace—relationship
between student and teacher, the prestige of different academic journals, etc.
Unfortunately as discussed above that will only take one so far when dealing with the
digital world. Diverse individuals have diverse relationships with potential channels,
both in terms of access to them (for both communicating and receiving) as well as power
over other’s access. If individuals are motivated to maintain or modify their meta-
textual practice and performance in the digital world they have numerous options for
finding exemplars, testing potential practice, or even receiving education in meta-
textual principles. The relationship between practice and performance suggests that
even if communication is in whole or in part unintentional social learning can still take
place through modeling and extrapolation. Even if the individual is not consciously
seeking out meta-textual models they are nonetheless exposed to constant examples of
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practice through the channels in which they seek entertainment, information, and social
interaction. Instead of a unitary community of practice or a top-down relationship
between center and periphery this results in a field of potential relationships with
varying degrees of power akin to that media systems dependency theory (Ball-Rokeach
1976).
While originally designed for a mass media media ecology media systems
dependency theory’s focus on control over access to information that others need also
have the ability to decide how such discourse is carried out (cf. Ball-Rokeach and Loges
1996). Employing a media systems dependency inspired ecological perspective one
could conceive of a system whereby individuals desire to have access to shared norms of
interpretive practice to help them in their own communicative activity as well as
“expert” norms of interpretation to help them frame unfamiliar texts. Digital media adds
a second kind of potential access that can be leveraged as power—access to spaces of
participation and/or interaction. Like spaces where information can be collected, spaces
of participation are also channels whereby individuals seek to derive benefit, and as a
result more valuable channels will have greater power over the sort of discourse that
takes place in them, although as we will discuss in chapter 6 the nature of surveillance
regimes in digital media is likely based more on nearly horizontal group norms rather
than top-down power. The study of channels through which interpretive and/or meta-
textual practice and performance are learned and articulated could be studied from both
an individual point of view as well as a network level point of view (Rogers 2003;
Valente 1996). The relative importance of different social relationships and institutions
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is already part of cultural studies work on reception, but adding an ecological
perspective would be incredibly valuable to the long-term project of hermeneutics.
Hermeneutics also requires that we account for a second ecology, this time a
mental ecology of texts and their audiences: a textual ecology. Thus far I have focused
primarily on the role of centripetal forces, forces that create degrees of homogeneity, but
of course these same forces also create heterogeneity insofar as a step toward one might
be a step away from another. Still, I do not wish to over-emphasize the pull of
homogeneity, especially at a surface level. One might object that some people take great
delight in arguing for minority opinions of a text’s meaning, but the precise fact that
they feel it necessary to argue suggests the critical importance of earning legitimacy for
a point of view. Furthermore, such debates are often based on differing views of largely
shared generative principles, not truly and utterly disparate worldviews clashing. The
fact that interpretation is a social activity with a certain tendency toward homogeneity
does not result in identical viewpoints but bounded variations. Large disconnects
between systems of hermeneutic practice can be socially costly as they mark one as an
outsider or an incompetent (not that that line is always clear in human thinking) and
can lead to mutual misunderstanding or conflict. Someone who reads one film critic and
disregards another feels some discomfort when “their” critic’s interpretation or
judgment is critiqued or the others is championed. In part this is simply a matter of
trying to earn and maintain cultural capital, and nothing devalues one’s cultural capital
faster than having the wrong relationships with media channels, but also a sense of ego-
involvement and identity. As we have already established interpretive and meta-textual
norms are not simply instrumental, they are tightly bound up with social identity of
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various kinds, both those of the interpreter and those of that interpreter’s sense of the
world in which his interpretation takes place.
Consider for example the rather common belief that film students “hate” movies.
Perhaps the interpretive and meta-textual practices and performances of film students
read differently to those whose practice is based on the opposition between enthused
engagement and critical distaste. The training that film students receive and the
performances they are encouraged to produce are often built on extensive analysis of a
filmic text, whether for purposes of critical study or qualitative post-mortem as models
for production. To someone whose practice and/or performance is based around
expression of either enthusiasm or distaste such a distanced attitude might read as
dislike.
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Yet while the non-major misunderstands, they nonetheless find the film
major’s apparent opinions comprehensible. Another’s interpretation of a text need not
be the same as one’s own or even based on familiar generative principles to be
comprehensible if it fits within one’s understanding of the practice and performance of
the referent group. Just as practice and performance speak to the need to establish and
maintain contact with those “inside” the system, so too do they provide the significance
of the borders of that system.
This suggests the need for network hermeneutics to provide ways to account for the
perceived social ecology of texts and their relationship with interpretation. The influence
of who one views a text’s audience to be can have considerable impact on one’s sense of
that text’s meaning—in fact a great deal of very intelligent literary theory is based on
precisely that perspective. Along with imagined audiences imagined texts exist in this

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Of course this is only a hypothesis and thought experiment. Film students hate movies because they are hollow,
soul-less creatures.
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ecology as well. After all, most individuals are aware of a sizeable corpus of written
works, the majority of which they have never read, and they often have a sense for the
kind of person who does read them. Thus one’s imagined version of the Koran is tied to
one’s imagined Muslims, which might in turn have a very real impact on one’s reading of
the news, a film set in the Middle East, or even the Bible. The extensive literature on the
third person effect also suggests the importance of the relationship between perceived
audience and how one understands a text. The third-person effect is largely derived
from essay on the tendency to “overestimate the influence that mass communications
have on the attitudes and behaviors of others” (Davison 1983, p. 3). Since then, the third
person effect has been extensively studied and received considerable empirical support
(Perloff 2002, p. 490), although some suggest that it might more properly be studied as
the “influence of perceived influence” (Gunther & Story 2003).
The issue of the ecology of imagined audiences and texts also suggests the problem
of failed hermeneutic practice. Inevitably, hermeneutic practices fail, and they do in a
number of ways. Ironically, I suspect that true inability to interpret is not a common
failing, but rather a very special case requiring that one accept certain interpretive
criteria that make the incomprehensible a viable conclusion. It is possible, after all, to
interpret something as meaningless or as so muddled as to be unworthy of further
consideration and therefore, for all intents and purposes, as interpreted as it need be. In
fact, as mentioned above, this can pre-date or preclude any direct contact with the text
in question. However, the belief that the hermeneutic practices of others fail is rather
commonplace, and could be considered a variation of the third-person effect. Aside from
the traditional theory that censorship comes simply from a patronizing attitude or more
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interesting theories that it is a response to threat or a mode of exerting social power, the
insufficiency of individuals to properly understand a given text is a rationale for why
“we” can engage with it safely and “they” cannot. Interestingly, this also seems to be tied
to the question of distance, as “they” usually lack it, but I suspect that this is concept
specific to certain sets of meta-textual norms that happens to resonate with a more
commonplace sense of the insufficiency of others.
Ars Explicandi and Ars Intelligendi
Network hermeneutics as the study of the interpretive practices and performances of
others has been defined, but before concluding I wish to return to one outstanding
issue: the problem of types of interpretation. In the previous chapter I outlined
Bordwell’s (1991) critique of the role of interpretation and “big theory” in film studies,
but delayed discussing his proposed solution. Bordwell’s argument focuses on
interpretation as part of the institution of film criticism and theory, and his approach to
the rhetoric of interpretation is naturally based within the context of this field.
Bordwell’s concern as a film scholar is primarily with how textual interpretation can be
relatively easily subverted to support any number of theoretical positions. As such, he
believes that the solution to the problem can only be found in a recommitment to an
intensely empirical study of texts shorn of the insidious interpretive element—a return
to the surface of works in the form of an historical poetics of cinema (263-264). The idea
of studying texts without interpretation likely seems quite counter-intuitive, especially
in light of how I have thus far characterized interpretive methods as the means through
which texts are known. Bordwell, however, is using “interpretation” in a different sense.
The definition of interpretation Bordwell employs is based on E.D. Hirsch’s (1976) re-
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division of interpretation into two functions: the ars intelligendi, the art of
understanding, and ars explicandi, the art of explaining.
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Bordwell uses these terms in
a fairly specific manner that fits neatly with his overall project, but doesn’t necessarily
mesh entirely with Hirsch’s usage: ars intelligendi refers to mere comprehension of the
text, while the search for hidden meaning in a text is part of the ars explicandi. Bordwell
believes one can comprehend without engaging in the explication of hidden meaning. In
the present study I have thus far treating these two ars under the term “interpretation,”
an extremely unpopular point of view.
The existence of two forms of “interpretation” makes intuitive sense. The basic
understanding of a text that we might associate with basic literacy seems a more or less
transparent process—when one reads a newspaper article or a shopping list or a street
sign the process of interpretation is not conscious even if the result is. Coming from a
phenomenological perspective, Don Ihde’s describes writing as an ancient technology
that, by virtue of its denotative properties, refers to reality indirectly (hermeneutically)
yet is experienced as transparent: ‘hermeneutic transparency, not perceptual
transparency’ (Ihde 1990, 82). As Heidegger observed of his famous exit sign, we see it
as an exit sign first and perhaps can eventually see it in a more primitive form as a
certain configuration of color or an amalgam of metal and plastic. The process of
interpretation takes place transparently, but it seems unreasonable to therefore consign
the stop sign to the category of non-sign objects and events, if only for eponymous
reasons.

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Other means of sub-dividing interpretation exist. Dillon (1978) employs a tripartite division of reading into
perception, comprehension, and interpretation. Staiger (1992, 18-24) provides a valuable account of objections
against this position.
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One might argue that the interpretation of an object such as a street sign can no
longer claim the status of interpretation because it has been so thoroughly pre-
interpreted that interpretation no longer truly takes place. Of course, the same cannot
be said of a shopping list or other object that contains information that is new or
unknown to the interpreter so the point would be unworthy of mention did it not refer
to the more interesting interpretive problem of texts that defy textual expectation.
Imagine, for example, that one added the words “hammer time” to a stop sign as some
errant wits have been known to do. In this case interpretation still proceeds mostly
transparently, but may require a hiccup of uncertainty to parse out the new message. In
this case what should by rights be mere transparent understanding becomes briefly
visible and effortful. And herein lays the rub. For a moment what should have been
immediately comprehensible became “hidden.” Or consider how flower symbolism in a
novel might be lost on one person, understood to exist by another but requiring
explication, and immediately and perfectly comprehended by a third. Person one
doesn’t understand nor does he realize he is missing something, and therefore remains
at a comprehending level even as he fails to comprehend. The second person finds that
they must exert effort to understand. The final person understands but requires no real
effort because the information is not “hidden” from them in any way. The line between
comprehension and interpretation as Bordwell establishes it is actually a line between
relative levels of effort based on relative levels of knowledge, ability, and intent. Or, put
another way, at what point does signification become adequately hidden?

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An answer to that question without reference to the interpreter is impossible. I
would argue that comprehension and interpretation are not necessarily separate
activities, but different species of interpretive practice. If one is exposed to a text that
one finds difficult to interpret even at the merest level of comprehension and if one
nonetheless endeavors to comprehend one is searching for the “hidden,” or at least
trying to glimpse through the seemingly opaque, and yet one is not of necessity
performing what Bordwell would describe as “interpretation.” I would argue that what
Bordwell describes as interpretation is in fact a subspecies of interpretive practice in
general that asserts the importance of a particular kind of effort and that embraces
hermeneutic activity as a good on its own. The emergence of hermeneutics as a
systematized field of inquiry and the rise of criticism’s pursuit of hidden meanings is not
coincidental—interpreters trained in the philologically and theologically based norms of
hermeneutics are taught to study and solve the problem of distance. If bridging distance
is the reward of interpretation, then it is not difficult to imagine how texts that create
distance will come to be understood as more rewarding. The value of the work of
translation also speaks to the same set of values—translation is effortful work to contact
remote or hidden meaning. When one considers how many interpreters were trained in
theology, classical philology and how many were taught the practices of translation and
exegesis the valorization of “effortful” interpretation as the more valued mode seems
inevitable.
The search for occult meaning in texts and the value of effortful interpretation is not
historically specific to nineteenth through 21st century western interpretive theory. One
can find “hard” texts in a variety of historical and cultural contexts. Consider for
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example the Buddhist koen which is designed to reward intense interpretive effort, or
the value ascribed to ellipsis and understatement in literary traditions such as Japanese
wa and haiku poetry. Mastery of the search for hidden meaning is attendant to mastery
of social graces such as understatement, deflection, face saving, and double-entendre.
When seen as a work it becomes a virtuoso performance of socio-linguistic prowess as
well as cultural and social capital: an exemplar of the relationship between the practice
and performance of interpretation. Complex texts, alienating texts, or texts that seem to
“demand” effortful interpretation gain meaning thanks to systems of interpretive
practice that valued certain methods and understandings of interpretation over others.
For this reason rather than treat the search for hidden meaning as essentially
separate from comprehension, I propose a more useful set of categories to describe two
different kinds of interpretive practice drawn from Shelly Chaken’s (Chaken & Eagly
1989) heuristic-systematic model of information processing: heuristic vs. systematic
interpretation. Heuristic interpretation seems transparent because it deals with text that
present no problem to our existing hermeneutic practice: the interpretive tools we apply
seem to fit so seamlessly that their application occurs without conscious notice.
Systematic interpretation is interpretation that rises to the level of consciousness and
thus requires conscious application and/or revision of existing hermeneutic practice. In
a sense then systematic interpretation is predicated on failure, but that would ignore the
social value attached to “effort” in interpretation. Effortful interpretation is just as likely
to begin as a result of personal investment, likely meta-textual application, or simply as
an aspect of one’s sense of one’s interpretive practice.
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For that reason both heuristic and systematic interpretive practice could be both
both –etic and –emic terms. In an –etic sense one can use the terms to describe
interpretive practice as more or less effortful, more or less explicit. For example, one
might discuss how a certain interpreter constructed a text through heuristic practice
while another seemingly similar interpreter approached the object it systematically, and
attempt to understand why. Heuristic interpretive practices are likely not inherently no
less elaborated or dense than systematic practices, but the existence of variable degrees
of conscious effort seems reasonable. These terms can also be applied from an –emic
perspective: to describe interpretation that is undertaken as if more or less effortful, and
examine the respective meanings and values of interpretive activities in an historical
context. In Pre-Romantic English literary criticism one sees traces of interpretive
practices where overly systematic approaches to the problem of extracting meaning
from secular texts are not valued except as tools for pedagogy. In interpretive practices
more informed by a Romantic or Modernist perspective the opposite is true—much is
made of the elaboration of “hidden” meaning and the process through which this
meaning is constructed is often elaborately laid out. In interpretive practices that place
great value on extensive systematic work one would expect that the interpreter would
“perform” their interpretation in a way that focuses on the presentation of that effort—
even if that effort is being somewhat minimized as a matter of producing the appearance
of virtuosity. Alternatively, that same interpreter addressing a different sort (or more
likely differently value text) might not only see no need to demonstrate the interpretive
process but may even go so far as to conceal it. Knowing what to reveal and what to
conceal is a core meta-textual skill.
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Conclusion: Network Hermeneutics’ Foundational Problems
In this chapter I sought to justify the need for network hermeneutics, but have yet to
explicate precisely what makes this theory network hermeneutics. There are three
reasons why this new approach to textual hermeneutics is designated “network”
hermeneutics:
1. Historical: The hermeneutic model I have argued for in this chapter is
designed to be generally applicable to the study of interpretive and meta-
textual practice regardless of context, a general hermeneutic theory. In
particular, I sought to provide a hermeneutics that could shed the out-moded
assumptions of the nineteenth and twentieth century media landscape.
Network hermeneutics is therefore intended as a gesture toward the historical
media landscape in which this revision takes place, allowing therefore the
possibility of it being replaced by future paradigm shifts.
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2. Relational: Hermeneutics for a digital landscape requires ways of accounting
for new kinds of texts and more diverse and disembodied sets of social
relationships found online. To do so required giving up the realist
epistemology of the text as well as heretofore traditional views of the
relationship between text and interpreter and their power relationship. The
result is a hermeneutics of flatlands—of spaces where points of orientation
multiply and contend. Analyzing relationships in the “flatlands” requires a
relational hermeneutics based not on zero points or centers and peripheries

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Although, in the words of a great man, that ain’t exactly plan A.
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but on the multiple and multiplex relationships, subtle power differentials,
and emergent phenomena found in network models.
3. Protocol: Finally, network hermeneutics seeks to position interpretive and
meta-textual activities of all kinds within a single field. As a result it not only
justifies methodological ecumenicalism but requires it. Network hermeneutics
is designed to provide a common theoretical foundation and set of
terminology for these currently disparate fields and their methods, a sort of
shared general protocol like TCP/IP. Network hermeneutics seeks validity in
the relationships between multiple methods as they are situated within the
larger theoretical whole.
The chapters that follow apply the network hermeneutic theory outlined in this
chapter to a series of basic problems in textual hermeneutics by combining network
hermeneutics with a series of different theoretical approaches. This approach two
primary purposes. First, any potential general hermeneutic theory must be able to deal
with questions problems of text and textuality, power and critique, and social
hermeneutic inquiry into meta-textual activity. The following chapters do not exhaust
these topics, but they explicate necessary first steps by providing case studies of
significant texts, practices, and performances relevant to contemporary digital media.
These chapters demonstrate the sort of questions network hermeneutic approaches
must ask, and how they might differ from more traditional hermeneutic theory. They
also offer examples of what network hermeneutic theory is capable of, of what network
hermeneutic theory can do for the study of textual interpretation that has until now
been problematic or impossible. Finally, by engaging with multiple theoretical and
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methodological traditions these chapters demonstrate how network hermeneutics
functions as a meta-theoretical “protocol” by capable of engaging with multiple
disciplinary traditions. This chapter established network hermeneutics, and the three
chapters that follow provide theoretical elaboration sufficient to make network
hermeneutics a fully viable theoretical perspective.

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Chapter 5
Realism and Reality: Conceptualizing the Digital Text in Network
Hermeneutics

“Reality [is] one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes.” –Vladimir
Nabakov

Traditionally the critical boundary in hermeneutics has been the gap between text
and interpreter, but the line between text and non-text is equally important and will be
the focus of this chapter. To understand interpretive activity one must understand how
interpretive and meta-textual practices and performances provides the means through
which a text is identified and its boundaries set and understood. Definitions of text and
processes for its identification are without question enormously varied—and even if
further research ultimately identifies a comprehensive core one must allow for such
variability at the outset. However to study this variability one must also be able to
articulate a field in which that variation takes place. Without some unifying definitional
factor it becomes impossible to separate variation of a type from entirely separate
species. Furthermore, the project of network hermeneutics itself is built on theoretical
definitions that treat text as a potential object,
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and while that object might be varied
some definition is necessary to make network hermeneutics coherent. Network
hermeneutics requires a definition of text, and the need to avoid prescriptiveness
requires that that definition be the absolute minimum necessary qualification for what
constitutes text-ness or textuality.

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For example, interpretive activities are the means through which a text is made knowable and known.
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While it may be impossible to pre-theorize every possible understanding of text
vs. non-text one can still seek to isolate the minimum hypothetical criteria that any
designation of textuality requires. This chapter identifies that criteria through a
theoretical explication and thought experiments, finally establishing that texts must
always at least be phenomena that contain a virtual, referential space that is understood
to exist at least in part outside of material reality. Establishing the minimum criterion of
textuality is also immediately useful as a solution to certain problems in media effects
research on media realism, an explication of which concludes this chapter. Network
hermeneutics is methodologically ecumenical, and that ecumenicalism must take the
form of studies that can be transliterated across disciplinary boundaries and make
connections between formerly disparate theoretical concepts. This chapter provides one
example of how such transliterations might take place and prove valuable by moving
from a largely deductive, theoretical, and in many ways highly humanistic process to
empirical theory and research design. Drawing on the film criticism of Andre Bazin, this
chapter argues that before one can study individuals’ responses to a text’s
representation of or similarity to reality one must first deal with how the text itself is
understood to exist in relation to reality. The relationship of a text to reality can be
captured by a hypothetical bivariate model that allows one to separate interpreter’s
understanding of the “realistic” versus the “real.”
The first question to address is whether a definition of text is warranted at all.
Network hermeneutics is skeptical about formal definitions because such strictures sit
uneasily with the more pragmatic and relational bent of network hermeneutics. It could
be held that asserting any definition of text and textuality creates a normative pressure
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to confine variation to the bounds of that definition. Establishing a definition of text
may disqualify interesting liminal instances that deserve consideration as interpretive or
meta-textual activity, or it may simply proscribe away important variations. Finally, one
might object that such a definition revives the bias built into the very concept of “general
textual hermeneutics” that the field of interpretable objects is ultimately a unified whole.
Such objections are built on subtle mischaracterizations of network hermeneutics and
the intra-active model. Any term used in network hermeneutics must satisfy two basic
criteria. First, insofar as possible a term’s definition and usage must be accompanied by
explicit articulation of the nature of the mechanisms of perception and knowledge
creation that intra-act to create the phenomena studied. Limitations and assumptions
do not disqualify a term’s use because they are inevitable, and attempting to strip away
the implicit baggage of terminology to find a truly “neutral” language, even if
undertaken in the spirit of the most cosmopolitan relativism, is ultimately simply an
attempt to claw one’s way back to a Cartesian zero-point. Second, network hermeneutics
requires one to acknowledge one’s status as an interpreter among interpreters—there is
no special methodological tree house from which to survey the vernacular, ideologically
interpolated, or non-scientific world below. As participants in the ecology of interpreters
placing our own definitions in contact, and potential conflict, with those of others is
both necessary and inevitable. Seeking and articulating the rationale of an absolute
minimum definition permits an interpreter among other interpreters to acknowledge
the inevitable limitations of method in pursuit of the broadest possible shared meaning.
Definition is not employed by fiat, but as the part of the continuing process of
explication that makes method of any kind possible. Only through the broadest possible
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meaningful definition of text—the minimum qualification for inclusion in the class—can
such a process become possible.
The Minimum of Textuality
Thus far network hermeneutics has defined interpretation in terms of its role as
the means through which a text is made knowable and known, but this definition begs
the question of the definition of the term “text” itself. The essential nature of text-ness
has never been universally agreed upon. Indeed, the variety of what is regarded as text
across time and culture testifies to creative variation. Turning to this universe of
possible objects that might or have been defined as text reveals such a plethora of
textual forms that attempting to derive a single set of principles through which texts are
identified seems quixotic, particularly if one tries to account for the veritable onslaught
of new, transformed, and/or newly hybridized textual forms that have emerged as a
result of the advent of digital and networked communication technology. Even if one
could find a broadly acceptable principle based on this panoply there is never a shortage
of examples that defy it. The advent of digital media has made such sabotage all the
easier. Hypertext, interactive text, multimedia text—new textual forms multiply in
digital spaces and older forms combine into novel hybrids.
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This process seems unlikely
to abate, and most likely to accelerate.

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Examples of the textual change in and to an extent as a result of digital media abound. The process of
remediating non-digital media forms into digital media offers one obvious example of how medium and genre
hybridize in digital spaces (Bolter 1991; Bolter & Grusin 2000). Aarseth (2004), Apperley (2006) and others have
written on the difficulties of establishing the relationship between novel digital textual forms such as video games
and pre-existing analogue precedents. Jenkin’s (2006) concept of convergence culture suggests the extent to
which social practices online create hybridized forms. Manovich (2001) deals with new textual forms and their
relationship with the technological affordances of digital media. Perhaps nothing demonstrates the sense of “new-
ness” digital textual forms inspire then the drive to develop and teach new concepts of literacy (cf. Mills 2010).
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Hermeneutics already has a lengthy history of hungrily accommodating new
textual forms. Gadamer observes that in its earliest forms “the task of hermeneutics was
originally and chiefly the understanding of texts,” with text referring decisively to
written discourse (2004, 353). Although one might object that hermeneutics of a sort
pre-existed writing in the form of divination or spiritual communication, the importance
of the tradition of rabbinical and Christian hermeneutics to the later work of
Schleiermacher and Dilthey, which in turn proved so instrumental in establishing
hermeneutics as an independent field, suggests that written texts should nonetheless
enjoy a sort of foundational status for the modern field of hermeneutics.
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As
hermeneutics post-Dilthey began to claim a much larger field of potential objects
written texts remained the master analogy through which these new objects were
understood (Ricoeur 1971). Ricoeur is correct that the legacy of the written text still
haunts hermeneutic inquiry, but nonetheless the variety of objects now understood to be
susceptible to interpretation as texts are staggering. A short story or poem can be
interpreted, but so can a photograph, a performance, some kinds of kinesics, a splash of
color on a sidewalk, institutional discourses, and professional wrestling — little can
escape the reach of the skilled interpreter. Digital media and the multi-media practices
commonly associated with it have intensified the rabid assimilation of new objects as
texts while further undermining the importance of text that takes a purely lexical form.
Since network hermeneutics focuses on how interpretation takes place in the
world and in “other minds” a normative standard of textuality is neither required nor
possible, but a broadly descriptive working definition remains necessary. Network

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Furthermore, I suspect one could chase the origins of interpretation as religious or magical practice to at least
the origins of homo sapiens, if not earlier. The idea of the “world” as a text predates Dilthey and is by no means
restricted to the hermeneutic tradition as such (cf. Ong 1988; Curtius 1953).
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hermeneutic theory focuses on how interpreters through their varying forms of
interpretive and meta-textual activity identify and delimit texts and make sense of
textuality. This focus requires a high degree of pragmatic open-mindedness about
matters of definition. The variety of textual forms alone suggests the diverse means
through which texts and textuality might be conceived. One cannot hope to pre-theorize
every possible variation in these processes, and considerable detailed empirical study
remains to be done before one could begin to map trends at anything but the broadest
level. However, if a complete account at this point is impossible, it remains possible to
deduce some minimal theoretical limitations within which variation occurs. In fact such
work is a necessary prerequisite to empirical study, for making reasonable comparisons
and deriving general principles requires at least a provisional sense of the field in which
these protean phenomena can exist.
To do this would be to attempt to determine the absolute minimum requirement
for textuality—what property no matter how trivial seems so inalienable from text-ness
that it cannot be absent from text of any form. Another way to look at the problem
would be to ask if there is a rudimentary limit that any individual interpreter must
satisfy to designate a phenomenon as textual or potentially textual. What, in short, is the
absolute primitive term of textuality that any phenomena must satisfy for it to be
considered as a potential text? Possible definitions of text do not want for variety. The
Oxford English Dictionary alone offers over a dozen definitions, and the advent of SMS
messaging has given the word new currency as both noun and verb. The word text
originates from the Latin texere, to weave or to construct. In English “text” commonly
retains a connection to both aspects of texere for a text is often described as a weaving
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together of symbolic elements with some kind of communicative intent. This working
definition might tell one relatively little about how any given interpreter identifies a text
or give meaning to textuality, but it does suggest two potential requirements of
textuality: that a text is or contains signs, and that it is intentionally constructed.
Texts of Symbols and Intent
Larry Gross’s (1985) study of visual narratives offers a solid starting point for
understanding how symbol and intent might be recognized in the phenomena of
potential texts. Drawing on Fritz Heider’s (1958) attribution theory and his previous
work on symbolic strategies with Sol Worth (1974), Gross identifies two classes of
perceived objects: “those objects and events that do, and those that do not, evoke the use
of any strategy to determine their meaning” (2). The former category he describes as
non-sign events, or those that we “code ‘transparently’” through a process he describes
as “tacit interpretation” (2). Gross defines the second category as “sign events,” or those
objects which one responds to as being in need of interpretation; objects are not
inherently sign or non-sign but are responded to in those terms. Gross further sub-
divides the category of sign events into “natural” and “symbolic.” Natural events are
those that one interprets based on one’s belief about their cause—these are events that
“derive precisely from existential conditions.” They are events that warrant
interpretation, but they are not understood as having been created with the intent to
communicate. Symbolic sign events, on the other hand, are interpreted with the
assumption that there was intent to communicate, and that the object in question has
been created through “semiotic conventions” (2). Recognizing the symbolic, and by
extension the text, requires identification of intent.
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Gross employs intent in this discussion in a unique and provocative manner that
deserves explication. When Gross speaks of intention he is not invoking the Romantic
tradition of attempting to commune with the mind of the genius creator or of the sort of
biographical criticism built on what Wimsatt & Beardsley (1954) famously call the
“intentional fallacy.” Gross is also not arguing that intention defines a text or that
understanding requires identifying intention, but that identifying something as a
symbolic sign-event pre-supposes that it is in some way intentionally communicative.
Gross’s definitions do, however, account for all of these theories, and many more
besides—a valuable capability when one considers the variability in the meaning and
relative importance given to authorship across human history and cultures (cf. Becker
1974; Goldschmidt, 1943). Gross’s model also leads to some counter-intuitive
conclusions. Gross defines a sign-event as “communicative…only if it is taken as having
been formed (to an important degree) with the intention of telling something to the
observer” (3). For example, he argues that for one participating in a conversation the
conversation is a symbolic sign event, but for an eavesdropper the event is natural
because it “was not intended to tell the observer anything, so it can only be seen as
informative about the speaker’s stable and/or transient characteristics as revealed in
that situation” (3). This seems an oddly restrictive definition, especially since the
observer is presumably employing all of the mental processes that the participants in the
conversation are to make sense of it. Gross’s decision to divide sign events into natural
and symbolic does not seem like a theoretically useful division for understanding an
interpretive process that underlies both, but shorn of the issue of the direction of intent
communicative intent alone might hypothetically serve as one primitive term of
textuality.
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“Dear Reader, You are Reading:” The Text without an Author
Although the potential variability in how that intent is recognized, constructed,
and understood could be considerable communicative intent itself nonetheless seems a
likely candidate for a minimum qualification of textuality, and one can test this
possibility with a simple and intuitive thought experiment. If intent is the minimum
qualification for textuality then interpreters should never identify something as textual
or potentially textual if they already believe it contains absolutely no communicative
intent. In other words, is it possible for something to be a text with a cause rather than
an author? In a sense this is a variation of John Searle’s (1980) “Chinese Room” thought
experiment that he employed against the notion that a computer program can create
consciousness equivalent to a human mind. In Searle’s experiment an individual who
does not speak Chinese is locked in a room with a set of instructions that allow him or
her to take a question posed in Chinese and correlate it with an appropriate Chinese
language answer. Anyone asking questions of this individual in Chinese will, based on
their ability to produce cogent answers, believe that the person in the room speaks
Chinese, when in reality they are simply executing a set of (presumably extensive)
instructions and have no notion of what is being communicated. Strictly speaking the
individual in the room may have no idea that communication as such is taking place—
they are merely processing marks or sounds into other marks and sounds.
One can construct a similar experiment to test if a text must be understood to
have some quality of intent before it can be given textual status. Imagine a computer
program that randomly excerpts a few sequential words from a vast collection of textual
samples regardless of sense and context and reproduces them as new texts. An
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interpreter who basically understands the nature of this mechanism encounters the
output of this program, do they regard it as meaningless fragments that superficially
resemble text or as texts to be interpreted in their own right? Fortunately this example is
not hypothetical: consider the strange case of the Twitter feed known as
“Horse_ebooks” (@Horse_ebooks). Horse_ebooks is a spam Twitter account that posts
links to affiliate websites. To aid in this task, a bot culls ebooks for sentence fragments
and tweets them, creating enough of an illusion of human agency to sneak past a spam
filter (Chen 2012). The process is entirely automatic and only occasionally manages to
capture an entire comprehensible statement.
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The ability of a computer program to
produce something approximating free verse poetry is familiar to anyone who has
ventured into their spam e-mail folder. Unlike a spam folder, however, Horse_ebooks
has an audience, a big one. The Horse_ebooks Twitter feed has, as of this writing, over
200,000 followers, a tumblr dedicated to annotating it
(http://annotatedhorse.tumblr.com/) , a web comic illustrating choice examples
(http://horseecomics.tumblr.com/), assorted unofficial merchandise, and has been
named on numerous best of Twitter lists (Townsend 2012; Thor 2011). While there is
still some debate about whether or not there is some human agent nudging the bot to
produce more amusing or bizarre statements, the evidence seems to suggest that the

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As an interpreter myself I have to admit that at its best Horse_ebooks achieves a certain terse genius that makes
one doubt its automation. “Everything happens so much,” horse_ebooks muses. “We speak and breathe
everything.” “Avoid situations,” it councils. “Why putting on clothes ‘to get laid’ is counterproductive and stupid,”
it wryly notes. “I have completely eliminated your meal,” it confesses. “Unfortunately, as you probably already
know, people,” it mourns. Yet Horse_ebooks has no author, no intent. The superficial appearance of
communicative intent that comes with these seemingly well-crafted epigrams is the source of much of the
entertainment value of Horse_ebooks—along with the wonder of serendipity in all its forms. One might find
similar entertainment value in finding shapes in clouds or in a gust of wind lofting a cap so perfectly onto a dog
that it appears to be wearing the hat by choice.
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feed is exactly what it appears: a bot humming away indifferent to the occasional
sensible statements it produces (Chen 2012).
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The fact that horse_ebooks is a computer program producing text fragments
matters less to the study of textual interpretation than what interpreters understand its
intentional status to be. Although there remains continued interest in confirming that
Horse_ebooks isn’t secretly subject to direct human control the understanding that the
tweets it produces are in fact free of human agency remains common among its
followers (Chen 2012). In any case Horse_ebooks seems to satisfy one criteria for
identification as a text—interpreters are interpreting it, annotating it, and transliterating
it into other forms. A text, whatever else it is, is that which is interpreted. So if
interpreters are employing what appear to be interpretive and meta-textual practices
and performances in regards to Horse_ebooks the elemental importance of intent
becomes at least somewhat suspect. If one spills the contents of a Scrabble game on the
floor one is unlikely to view the result as a text and interpret it. Yet when one replaces
the tiles with context-less excerpts and the floor with Twitter, one finds thousands
interpreting the “works” of Horse_ebooks. The level of intent is essentially equal in both
cases, as is the degree of “authorship.” Perhaps Horse_ebooks is the exception that
proves the rule—by removing intentionality but retaining its appearance one creates a
burlesque of text and its abuse of the line between text and non-text only serves to
solidify it. Or perhaps it is the farthest edge of avant-gardism; in many ways
Horse_ebooks is the perfect “readerly” text. Ultimately, Horse_ebooks claim to

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One could argue that from the perspective of procedural authorship that horse_ebooks itself is the text, created
by its author as a set of procedures that produces the tweets as individual instances. Such argument is entirely
appropriate to the question of whether Horse_ebooks is a text or not, but not whether it is viewed as such. More
importantly, it is precisely because one could conceptualize the both program behind horse_ebooks and its
individual tweets as texts that we must be careful in employing any overly prescriptive definition of textuality.
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textuality must be resolved by the interpreters, which is precisely the point. Whatever its
status interpreters are treating Horse_ebooks as if it contains meaningful
communication and not just noisy data intended to deceive other virtual agents. The bot
behind Horse_ebooks, indifferent to this fact, has no impact on whether or not
interpreter’s read the results as textual—it is the interpreters who transform it into text.
One could equally transform spilled Scrabble pieces into a text simply by treating them
as such, and giving them status as if they are communicative. The problem is that
interpretation isn’t a passive sensory activity, but an active undertaking that involves
elements of choice. One has the ability to interpret as if, and thus random data can
become a text even if one knows that it actually was created without intent or hidden
meaning.
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Interpreting As If and the Potential Text
Evidence of intention has thus far been employed to describe a property of the
text, but an attribution of agency is the work of the interpreter. One might object that
interpreting as if or knowingly treating a non-textual object as textual (i.e.,
“textualizing” the object) is still an edge case, but if it is it is a common one. When an
artist takes a found object and places it in a particular context to give it symbolic
meaning few would refuse it the status of text and part of that status comes from her
intention. She textualized the objects. However, how interpreters of her work later
understand the intention behind her work might have no bearing on anything like her
personal intent, and in fact they may actively disregard her persona intent. In truth the

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If, on the other hand, one regarded the output of horse_ebooks as containing some kind of arcane wisdom or
hidden messages from the spiritual world then one would be interpreting, not interpreting as if.
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term “intention” is too loaded to account for all the modes of authoring that an
interpreter might assign to a text. Instead one might employ the term “authorial agency”
to describe the merest form of authorship built into the text simply because it shows
evidence of being an artifact of some agent that attempted to give it a certain trajectory
of meaning (even if that trajectory is not necessarily manifest). The concept of authorial
agency does not refer to any specific variety of authorial imprint that a certain form or
quality of authorship might give to the text, nor does it refer in any specific way to a
particular concept of how intention is manifest, communicated, or identified. It doesn’t
even assume that the authoring agency is a single entity. Our reading of a text as the
expression of the genius-author’s greatness of spirit deals no more or less with authorial
agency than our reading of the author as purely an effect of the text or the text as a
tissue of inter-textual reference. In all cases the text remains an artifact of a
communicative act, an utterance, even if the interpreter does not attempt to pursue the
author’s intended meaning.
The fact that horse_ebooks can be and is interpreted as if it had authorial agency
suggests that authorial agency is assigned after phenomena are already viewed as at
least potential texts. For one to identify authorial agency one must treat it as an artifact
of a communicative act—not just any object touched by some creating or modify agent
will do. Identification of authorial agency therefore requires identification of
phenomena capable of bearing that agency. A similar problem applies to Gross’s
approach to intent to communicate and the third-party observer—the observer cannot
be sure that a communicative attempt is directed at her without first viewing it as
potentially communicative. The second party in a conversation begins as a third party
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observer. If authorial intent cannot be assigned to a phenomenon until after it is defined
as potentially textual, then some other criteria precedes intent as the minimum
qualification of textuality. Authorial agency may well be a requirement for textuality in
the second instant, but the example of Horse_ebooks and similar textualization activity
makes agency’s claim to universality and precedence problematic enough to make it
questionable as a minimal standard of textuality in the first instant. One can only endow
horse_ebooks with (fictive) authorial agency after one has established it as a potential
text.
Symbolic Form and Intent
Locating authorial intent requires a phenomenon be given at least potential
textual status, so the fundamental test of text-ness could potentially be found in an
interpreter’s familiarity with the outward embodiment of symbolic communicative
forms and their understood relationship with authorial agency. The shape of letters, the
organization of a page in a codex, or the conventions of mapmaking all speak of
intention even if they do not guarantee it, so recognizing such traits in a phenomenon
might serve provide the necessary initial cue of potential textuality. In this way simply
identifying traits associated with symbolic materials would suffice to identify a
hypothetical text even if it remains indecipherable—I can recognize musical notation,
flags semaphore, or Morse code as textual but they remain all but indecipherable to me.
Of course, intent does not depend purely on material textual form. If one found a tangle
of knotted string beside the road one might see in that evidence of some knot-producing
agent (the American Boy Scout being one of the most common terrestrial sources) but
fail to recognize it as a quipo, an Incan tool for record keeping. However, if one received
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such an object in response to a tax audit one would most likely recognize that there is
intent to communicate even if the symbolic system itself is unintelligible. In both cases
the text is the same and the intent and authoring agent is the same, but other outward
signs help demonstrate the quipo’s communicative intent. Ultimately it seems most
likely, and most in keeping with the hermeneutic mania for circles, that neither
authorial agency nor the material signs of symbolic artifice of necessity take precedence
in the identification of authorial intent—one can enter the circle at any point.
Horse_ebooks has the outward signs of intent since it reproduces familiar
symbolic forms, so perhaps the hypothetical connection to authorial agency that these
forms suggest provides the necessary grounds to textualize Horse_ebooks’ tweets
despite the recognition that they lack an author or communicative intent. However, that
possibility still does not justify treating authorial agency as the minimal qualification of
textuality. Horse_ebooks bears outward signs of symbolic artifice, but that artifice is
potentially textual because it is understood to be symbolic. Phenomena can be given
textual status by an interpreter with the interpreter’s knowledge that no authoring
agency exists and then add that an imagined account of that agency later,
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but in all of
these cases the recognition of potential symbolic materials precedes it. Stones left beside
a trail by another person might be understood as symptom of their passage, but a cairn
has communicative intent because it is understood as referring beyond itself. Scrabble
tiles spilled on the floor bear all the outward signs of artifice and are in fact artificial but
their particular configuration on the carpet is unlikely to be attributed to an authoring

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Or in the case of horse_ebooks bask in the uncanny simulacrum of agency that non-agency can produce.
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agency unless some referential quality exists in that configuration.
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Still, authorial
intent might be a minimum requirement for textuality under certain circumstances. For
example, if one was practicing divination with one’s Scrabble tiles one would search for
meaning on the basis that some ordering force placed them in a communicative
configuration, but even then the search for the symbolic would be part of the premise of
authorial agency. The case for authorial agency or even attributed agency as the absolute
minimum requirement of textuality remains unclear and seems weak without extensive
empirical work to suggest otherwise.
Textual Boundaries and the Virtual
The concept of text can better be defined by reference to its boundaries rather
than a direct approach to its inherent textuality. A text has at two primary types of
borders, one with other texts, and one with the non-textual. Allusions, citations and
quotations, influence, pastiche, parody, revision and re-telling, even plagiarism—all
represent ways in which a text can be said to extend beyond itself. In some cases the
“text” to be interpreted is understood as a sort of super-text such as the works of a given
author or a particular genre. Thanks in part to the influence of Saussarian linguistics,
deconstruction, poststructuralism, and even the continued influence of Neo-marxism
and psychoanalysis setting the boundaries of a text has never been more wrought.
Poststructuralist critics such as Roland Barthes (1977; 1974) and Julia Kristeva (1980)
diffuse the text widely, rooting its meaning in broader linguistic and cultural systems
brought to bear by the interpreter. The post-structural influence in literary and art

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If, for example, one spills Scrabble tiles out of their bag and they spell “Get out or die” or “Help I am trapped in
a Scrabble factory” a brisk search for authorial agency is likely to result.
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theory, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology can scarcely be over-stated. In
rhetorical criticism, Michael McGee (1990) and Michael Leff and Andrew Sachs (1990)
famously sparred over the status of the rhetorical text. Leff and Sachs argue for the
continued importance of close readings of individual texts, justifying the unitary text in
terms of its status as a “locally stable,” functional phenomenon tied to a rhetorical
performance. (255). McGee, on the other hand, argues that cultural fragmentation has
reached the point where “primary task of audiences, readers, and critics” is constructing
the text to be interpreted itself (274), and that to understand a rhetorical text one must
be prepared to chase it’s ideographs across numerous texts and contexts.
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However
these considerations are primarily focused on one of a text’s borders—its relationship to
other texts or signifying systems in general—failing to account for the potentially more
productive relationship with the non-textual world.
What defines the boundary between texts and the non-textual world? If one can
define what must be determined to separate text from non-text then one should also
have found the inherent quality that serves as the minimal requirement for all textuality.
So what isn’t text? Texts live a double life as both material and virtual entities, for while
we encounter them as part of our “real” world they are understood to refer beyond
themselves to something absent. One might conceive of this absence in a number of
ways—as a reference to an absent author, as the absence of the fictional world, as the
absence of historical remove, as the absence of the signified from signifier, or even as
the absence of any signified. Textual hermeneutics attempts to remedy this absence by
bridging the gap between presence and absence whether it is in an attempt to establish

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Both share “a central concern for rhetorical performance and its materiality,” for situating the rhetorical text in
an historical moment (Cox 1990, 317). Thus a rhetorical text can be staked to its performance.

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contact with historically remote cultures or to find the whisper of a seemingly silent
deity. This is what a text isn’t—a text is understood to both presuppose and point
toward to some external space beyond the text. In its reference to the external a text also
makes clear the separation between its self and its reference—the absence that famously
exists in the symbolic is also the absence in reference.
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A text’s relationship with that
external, referred to sphere is requisite for text-ness, and might be the minimal attribute
that makes the hypothesis of textuality possible. After all, whatever else a text may do, it
refers and in that reference contains a virtual dimension and a symbolic pointer.
Now another hypothesis can be put to the test, namely that whatever material
forms
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a text may take and whatever relationship with authorial agency might be
understood to apply a text’s most primitive textuality can be tied to the relationship
between absence and reference that it is understood to articulate. So it is possible to
conceive of a text that does not include this tension between absence and presence? No.
All texts have both a material and a referential dimension. This does not mean that one
cannot experience a text in purely experiential terms that remain very much in the here
and now. One encounters a book both as a text and as a physical object with certain
properties of weight, size, and texture. A blast of horns in an opera is experienced in real
time, and for an audience member this blast is very much a part of the text of the
performance. However for the technician shocked awake from his nap on a catwalk by

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The difference between reference and symbolic being that the symbolic requires either the fact of or an
understanding of communicative intent while reference alone does not, based as it is entirely on the interpreter’s
understanding of the phenomenon as pointing beyond itself. An interpreter can understand a text as both
referential AND symbolic, but these are separate, compatible concepts. Reference is also not equivalent to
symptomatic since symptomatic describes a “trace”-type of relationship discussed later in this chapter.
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Material in this case being used in a sense more in line with Barad account of the material world. Material here
should not be taken to mean analogue: lights shining from a screen ordered is as material as pigment on a page for
this purpose.
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that same blast of horns they have no such textual quality. The stage that the audience
member might experience as a space of presence and presence—of events that both are
and aren’t happening—is experienced by the now plummeting technician in more
concrete terms and again without this sense of absence. At some point soon after one
imagines that the descent of the technician and the shocked reaction of the actors
becomes non-textual for the audience member to see it as entirely present and real,
although the length of that delay will probably depend much on the conventions of the
play being performed and the context of its performance. From the example of the
falling theater technician one can derive two lessons. First, the boundary between text
and non-text can be deadly, and should not be taken lightly. Second, a text or aspect of a
text for one person might be non-text for another, and a text for me today might be non-
text tomorrow if its material status overwhelms the required virtual reference.
The boundary between textuality and non-text is the quality of virtual reference,
but virtual reference is not an attribute of text alone. The quality of reference belongs to
the intra-action between text and interpretive activity, and the phenomenon of the text
itself is experienced through this entanglement. Interpretive activity does not “put”
absence in the text any more than the text appears with absence built in. Without the
mechanism of perception that interpretive activity affords a text’s virtual dimensions
remains inert and without text interpretation cannot occur. By treating text as an intra-
active phenomena a definition of text based on the absolute minimal criteria becomes
possible: a text is a phenomenon wherein the material world is diffracted through
interpretive activity in such a way that some or all of the phenomena experienced are
understood to refer beyond themselves to virtual space. An attribution of authorial
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agency seems likely to be an essential second step since the quality of virtual reference
seems to imply symbolic forms but that claim is more vulnerable to potential empirical
counter-example while virtual reference is by definition necessary. Since attribution of
authorial agency follows finding virtual reference in the potential text there is at least a
theoretical sliver of possibility for reference without attribution. No such possibility can
be found for the concept of virtual reference, so virtual reference alone serves as the
minimal qualification of textuality.
Text, Reality, and Realism
Defining textuality in terms of virtual reference suggests a number of
immediately obvious research questions regarding texts, only one of which I will
attempt to address here: if all texts are defined by the relationship between their
presence and a referential, virtual space of absence then one should be able to derive a
theoretically valid set of general categories that describe the potential range of these
“border” relationships. What can the boundaries between textual and non-textual mean
to an interpreter? Understanding these boundaries requires a number of
“presence/absence” relationships be specified. First, the relationship between the
presence of the text as an object or event and its absent referent (even if, in postmodern
style, that referent is ultimately only more reference) must be defined. Second, the
nature of the boundary between text as liminal entity and the larger reality needs to be
taken into account. This problem of location is made immensely more complicated by
media such as audio recording and film that create the impression of non-mediation.
The illusory, perhaps even hallucinatory, power of audio-visual recording media and the
potential for non-mediated records of reality occupied a great deal of humanistic, social,
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and even physical scientific through the nineteenth and twentieth century, and those
issues are all the more relevant today with cheaper, more ubiquitous digital recording
devices.
So what then are the possible relationships between textual, virtual, and
material? Gross’s (1985) discussion of visual narratives again offers an excellent starting
point for an inquiry into the nature of the text/reality boundary: “when we witness
events through the mediate of film, then, the interpretive strategy we adopt will depend
upon whether we think the events occurred ‘naturally’ in front of the camera or were
made to happen by the ‘author’ who wanted to tell us a story” (4). Following on from his
division between natural and symbolic signs, Gross notes that directly observed events
can be either intentionally communicative or not, leading to either “inferences about
intended meaning” or “attributions about the ‘actors’” on the part of the interpreter.
However when such events are mediated through film these divisions become more
complex. He defines “invisible mediation” as a work that is understood to present real
events (thus encouraging attribution) but since it is still known to be mediated one
infers intentional communication in certain aspects of the film (e.g., editing, non-
diegetic sound, etc.). In this case invisibility of style does not refer to the relationship
between film and audience (as it often does in film theory) but rather to the fact that the
actors filmed are believed to have been unaware of the fact that they are being recorded.
“Unobtrusive mediation,” on the other hand, still purports to show natural events but
the actors are understood to know they are being filmed. “Media events” are events that
are created for the camera, but are still understood to be “real,” while “scripted fiction”
is fictional entirely. In the case of recording media such as film this kind of mediation
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can be seen as transparent because one experiences the referenced reality in a manner
that does not suggest human interference through both textual and para-textual
information. This “transparency” does not necessarily require the experience of invisible
or realist style. Continuity editing in classical Hollywood cinema (Bordwell, Staiger, &
Thompson 1985) is famously designed to be invisible to the audience, an unobtrusive
film style supporting a particular conception of realism in film. With some training one
can note techniques that create this invisible mediation, and one can see how little they
have to do the sensory experience of everyday life.
The problem of the relationship between textuality and reality is not only a
concern for textual analysis or even the humanities in general. The problem of the
border between text and real has also long been a major concern of media effects
research where it is described as the problem of “realism.” The application of the term
“realism” which one would assume would be virtually defined by its self-evidence,
requires a great deal of circumspection. Unfortunately, despite an extensive literature in
media effects research dedicated to questions of how media users perceive the “reality”
of media, the term remains ambiguous in application. And with reason, for realism is a
slippery term. A great many of the studies of realism that attempt fail to enunciate a
clear definition of what constitutes the “real” beyond broad attention to genre (news is
real, sit-coms are not), media accuracy, or even simply treating “the real” as a given
property (Potter 1988; Atkins 1983). Matters are further complicated by the fact that
most studies of the perception of mediated reality that focus directly on the question of
ontological status are based on the study of children (Pouliot & Cowen, 2007; Huston et
al., 1997; Potter, 1992; Wright et al., 1994; Flavell et al., 1990; Ostman and Jeffers 1980;
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Hawkins 1977; Greenberg & Reeves, 1976). Such studies offer tantalizing forays into the
question, but as they are developmental in orientation they could, at best, be used as
tools for understanding abnormal psychology in adults.
Fortunately, Hawkins (1977), Wright et al. (1994), and Potter (1988) have all
taken subtle approaches in their analysis of the multiple dimensions of perceived reality
that operate in media that provide a foundation on which to build. All three also come to
broadly similar conclusions. Hawkins (1977) challenged the traditional, unitary
conception of realism by studying the extent to which children view television along two
core dimensions: the understanding of its status as life vs. drama (the “Magic Window”
question) and whether or not they meet their social expectations for how people
function in reality. Wright et al. (1994) similarly focused on children’s ability to
comprehend a television program’s relationship to reality along dimensions of factuality
(fiction vs. non-fiction; are the events or objects portrayed “real”) and a slightly different
construction of social realism (are the events or objects portrayed similar to reality).
Potter offers three such dimensions: instruction, identity, and the “magic window.”
Instruction focuses primarily on the viewer’s opinion of the object as a potential
educational aid. Identity, on the other hand, might be more appropriately identified
with “realism” rather than “reality” as it deals with the similarity between televised and
actual situations as well as para-social relations with depicted persons.
The concept of the magic window largely follows Hawkins as it is directly
“concerned with the degree to which a viewer believes television content is an unaltered,
accurate representation of actual life” (Potter 1988, 26). However, the apparent
similarity between measures is complicated by differences in operationalization.
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Hawkins, for his part, bases his “magic window” questions largely on whether or not
children understood that the events on television did not “continue” into reality—that
the criminals being pursued in the fiction were not sitting in fact sitting in a jail
somewhere after the show is over. Wright et al. (1994) largely followed suit, although
they employed both more overt measures, such as asking if a program was reality or just
television. Potter (1988), even though he defines the magic window as a question of
immediate representation of reality, he later dissects the concept in terms of
plausibility—perhaps because his primary interest is in broadcast television rather than
audio-visual communication in general (Potter 1988, 27).
These terms remain unsatisfactory, both because of their continued ambiguity
and their questionable validity. Take, for example, the traditional television evening
news program. Any given evening news program combines footage that is understood to
be documentary, news readers performing characters within a highly stylized
environment who describe an external reality, and entirely artificial objects such as
graphics and the weatherman’s map. Even a fictional drama is complicated by the
traditional dramatic tension between a “factual” actor and fictional character and
between the fiction of the show with the reality of “putting it on,” all lines that are often
quite blurry. The key conclusion one can take from comparing these elements is that
“realism” is not a simple additive equation where a mediated object because more
“realist” as it advances up a list of requirements. A mediated object can be both realistic
and unrealistic, and it can do so in profoundly different ways. Cartoons, for example,
often rely heavily on psychologically feasible characters that exist in a world largely
indifferent to conventions of realism as representational style or even realistic physical
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plausibility. The matter is further complicated by the fact that even the best of our own
interpretive activity cannot be assumed to equate to the interpretive activity of any given
interpreter. The history of the theater is full of stories of audience members unable (or
perhaps unwilling, a sort of de-textualization perhaps) to differentiate actor from
character. Even the term realism is wrought. Realism might refer to a particular artistic
tradition with distinct codes and canons. It might refer simply to the plausibility of a
plot or character. It might refer to the quality of an illusion or special effect. Some critics
simply use it as an equivalent of “good.” Realism, like reality, is a mess.
The Symbol and the Trace
Before one can understand realism, one must understand the relationship
between a text’s virtual and material dimensions, its relationship with reality. Taking
the example of an evening news broadcast, one can identify two distinct types of
text/reality relationship at work. On the one hand, we have the “ontological”
relationship of the events seen “in” the text—their status as real or fake, true or false. On
the other, we have the relationship between the media object and the events or objects
to which it refers. The film critic Andre Bazin (2004) offers such an interpretation of
realism based on his discussion of the supposed ability of the motion picture, and the
photograph before it, to “capture” rather than portray reality. Through the neutral
function of the machine, he argues, one can capture the truth claim of “the inalienable
realism of that which is shown” (2004, 108). He compares this form of realism to a
death mask—an impression taken of a real object rather than an attempt to re-create it.
One might be tempted to consign such a viewpoint to a worldview rendered obsolete by
decades of photographic and cinematographic deception, but this may be premature as
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increased media exposure does not seem to reduce the tendency to take mediated
messages as direct impressions of reality—in fact the opposite may be the case
(Donohue & Donohue 1977; Slater & Elliot 1980; Greenberg et al. 1982; Messaris &
Kerr, 1984). In either case, the basic question of the relationship between the text and
material reality—the “process” boundary—remains relevant.
Para-Authentic and Artificial Boundaries of Textuality
Each of the two text/reality borders will be understood as one of two discrete
states: para-authentic or artificial. A text that is regarded as ontologically para-authentic
contains events, objects, and people which are understood to be a part of reality, while
an ontologically artificial text’s contents are understood to be fictions. Thus a CSPAN
broadcast of a congressional debate would likely be viewed as ontologically para-
authentic, while an episode of The West Wing would be seen as artificial. A Para-
authentic process boundary refers to the concept of the “trace”—the sense of a
relationship between reality and the object as being clear (although not necessarily
transparent) to the extent that the existence of the text can be seen as an artifact of that
reality. An artificial process boundary, on the other hand, deals with active mediation:
the text’s relationship to reality is obscured either by intervening agents or other factors.
For example, a security camera would likely be seen as possessing a para-authentic
process boundary because it seems to simply show what it “saw”—despite the fact that it
is obviously mediated the relationship between the text and the referent reality is
understood to be clear. If on the other hand one has reason to believe the tape has been
modified then one would like consider it to have a process artificial boundary. In both
cases access to reality is mediated, but in the first case since there appears to be no
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interference or noise between referent and representation it can be seen as essentially
“transparent.” In both cases the interpreter draws on a wide variety of textual and
contextual cues to identify the nature of these boundaries. The table below illustrates
the different possible states and provides examples of the sort of text an interpreter
might see in those terms.
Content Para-Authentic Content Artificial
Process Para-Authentic An amateur
photographer’s snapshots
of an event at which she
was accidentally present.
Events are seen as real,
process is seen as
relatively free of
interference.
This is an amateur
photographer’s
impromptu snapshots of
a play. Event is fictional,
but the process is seen as
relatively free of
interference.
Process Artificial This is a professional
news photographer’s
depiction of the real
event for a news
magazine. Events are
real, but the process is
not seen as transparent.
This is an art work
prepared by a
photography student.
The events contained
were staged for the
purposes of the
photograph, and the
process was likely subject
to manipulation.

Neither the ontological nor the process boundary of the text is truly a property of
the text itself—in fact, the same text could easily be seen as any of these categories by
different interpreters or under different circumstances. Unlike previous conceptions of
realism in media effects research, this division is founded on the hermeneutic practice of
interpreters who must answer these questions to identify, delimit, and situate a text.
This does not mean, however, that these terms are necessarily an explicit part of
interpreters’ vernacular theorizing or that they can be automatically tied to particular
textual forms. In pursuit the relationship between reality and text realism we cannot
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rely on viewers’ concepts of realism or documentary in a generic or narrative sense
(Shapiro & Chock 2003; Hall 2003; Nichols 1991), but must instead attempt to plumb
their understanding of media objects as artifacts. Furthermore, as in the case of the
news broadcast mentioned above, there can be multiple types of text/reality boundaries
in play at any given time between different aspects of a text. Furthermore, not every
object or relationship that falls under this rubric is necessarily a text. A fire alarm that
goes off could be seen as possessing ontological and process para-authentic boundaries,
but it is not of necessity a text because only the interpreter’s practice in intra-action with
it could make it so. Once again, the key issue is that these are borders that hermeneutic
practice allows an interpreter to construct for a text.
The textual borders identified by one interpreter will not necessarily correspond
with those of another. Returning to the news broadcast, one interpreter might
experience the whole of it as ontologically para-authentic and process artificial, while
another might parse out different borders for the weather map, the chat between the
anchors, the display of found footage, etc. In short, these borders can be nested, and as a
result these texts can be seen as nested as well. In fact, something seen as non-textual
might be nested within a text. If a news viewer sees the found footage displayed as
entirely process para-authentic and onotologically para-authentic they might not
consider it a text at all, but simply a “trace” of reality. On the other hand, they might see
identify the same borders, but still view it as both a trace and textual. These borders do
not exist without the interpreter and interpretive practice. The borders do not only apply
to audio-visual footage or other media possessed of a high degree of illusionism or
transparency. One can easily imagine how a novel, for example, can be seen as
ontologically para-authentic or artificial, but it is unlikely to be seen as process para-
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authentic. However, if one imagined finding a angrily scrawled note one might consider
it process para-authentic by virtue of it having been created in a sort of state of furious
transport and therefore of possessing “trace” status. A sculpture could be understood to
depict a real or fictional subject, but if viewed as an instance of an artist’s work one
could see it in process para-authentic terms—a variety of biographical criticism. In fact,
the same interpreter might approach the same borders in different ways under different
circumstances. When one watches a play one might expect to experience it as
ontologically and process artificial, but when one watches an actor or treats the play as
part of his oeuvre one might stray to process para-authentic.
Conclusion: Defining Text
Network hermeneutics requires a definition of text to be theoretically coherent. A
single instance of text or text-interpreter intra-action cannot be objectively pre-defined,
but one can identify the minimum qualifications for inclusion in the category of text. Put
in a manner more compatible with network hermeneutics: what must be true about a
phenomenon for it to be treated as a text or potential text in any sense. Two hypotheses
were initially put forth—that texts were defined by communicative intent or that they
were defined by their employment of pre-existing material symbolic forms such as
letters or numbers or particular configurations of sound. Part of the problem is that
interpreters have the ability to textualize phenomena, to treat what they acknowledge as
non-textual as if it were textual or to endow the previously non-textual with textuality.
As a result even after opening the concept of intent up to a broad definition of authorial
agency one can still easily find instances where an authorless non-text such as a
horse_ebooks tweet are textualized, therefore intent is likely not absolutely necessary.
Since the concept of the symbolic is based on intent, then the usage of symbolic forms is
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ultimately a placeholder for intent and is therefore also disqualified. Yet the fact that
text requires interpretation seems to suggest that something like the symbolic must be
necessary.
Turning to the border between text and non-text reveals a solution, a text is
defined not by evidence of intent but by the perception that the phenomena in question
are capable of reference, of pointing to a virtual space. Reference here need not include
an agent who gave the textualized phenomenon its referential quality although the
assignment of some form of authorial agency seems a likely step in most interpretive
activity. Nor is reference inherent in the object itself: my quipo is your knotted string,
but once aspects of that string are understood as referential they become textual cues,
permitting interpretation. All texts exist in two sense—both as objects in the world to be
encountered and as references to virtual objects and relationships. With these minimal
qualifications in mind one can theorize the potential states of the understood
relationship between the textual and the non-textual. By understanding how an
interpreter defines the nature of the relationship between the real and virtual aspects of
a text one can learn a great deal about the interpreter’s understanding of that text and
even textuality in general. This understanding could even be studied empirically. Careful
measurement and manipulation checks would allow a researcher to ascertain the nature
of the understood boundaries of a text. If a subject in an experiment is experiencing a
stimulus that the experimenter wishes to be read as a mediated representation of the
real (i.e., a ontologically para-authentic and process artificial boundary), the
experimenter must be sure that they are experiencing in those terms. More importantly
it will also allow the research to ascertain if the interpreter considers the object in
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question a text at all, or what aspects of a nested text are potential understood as
textual. Finally, this explication of textuality will help clarify the currently confused
results and terminology in empirical studies of the concept of realism.
These problems are especially important for digital media forms, where
navigating the relationship between artificial and para-authentic can be difficult for the
most skilled interpreter. Can a webcam diary be seen as ontological and process para-
authentic after lonelygirl15? What is the boundary between real and fictive behavior in
an MMORPG or trans-media alternate reality game? How does one understand cell-
phone footage of some disaster or atrocity? Even the problem of collective authorship
requires attention to the line between the telling of the story and the story told. Part of
the fallout of the advent and spread of digital technologies has been the collapse of
context for texts as well as social relationships, and the power of who represents whom
or tells what story is all the more complicated. The examination of this power and its
relationship to interpretive and meta-textual activity occupies the next chapter.

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Chapter 6

The Hermeneutics of Power and the Power of Hermeneutics
in Digital Documentary

Since at least the advent of the “school of suspicion” the role of social power in
the creation and interpretation of texts has been of critical importance to textual
hermeneutics. Power infuses interpretation at every step, but the analysis of power also
serves as an interpretive tool. Concepts of the relationship between text, interpretation,
and social power have serve as heuristic device for textual interpretive methodologies,
most critically in the enormously influential model of the text/interpreter power binary
discussed in chapters 2 and 3. For example, cultural and critical studies inflected textual
analysis has long relied on such heuristic tools, with results ranging from the relatively
dire pronouncements of the Frankfurt School to the more nuanced studies of modes of
reception such as that of Stuart Hall (1993) to the relative optimism of early digital
media studies. However, the text/interpreter power binary has strained to
accommodate the new power dynamics between interpreter, text, and the producers of
texts that have emerged since the advent of digital media. Digital media has so far
increased access to means of textual production and channels of dissemination, and in
doing complicates the relationship between producers and audiences, thereby
undermining the political economic basis of the text/interpreter binary.
The previous chapter dealt with how network hermeneutic inquiry can be
integrated with media effects research and experimental methods around the issue of
textuality and textual boundaries. Now focus shifts from the line between text and
reality to the representation of reality. This chapter offers a new analysis of the
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relationship between the political economic context of more participatory, democratized
modes of textual production and meta-textual activity, focusing in particular on the
ethics of representing or documenting the “real.” Network hermeneutics requires
methods for accounting for the relationship between power and textual production just
as it accounts for the relationship between power and interpretive and meta-textual
activity.
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With the advent of digital media the relationship between social power and
text has changed. Vertical, hierarchical models of the relationship between text
producers, texts, and audiences that associate the production of texts with dominant
ideologies remain relevant, but a more horizontal, network oriented power model is also
required to study the use of texts and interpretation between near-peers. The tradition
of documentary ethics offers a particularly salient opportunity for such a study, because
it represents a long tradition of meta-textual activity based on clearly articulated models
of the power relationships in textual production and reception.
Network hermeneutics studies interpretive and meta-textual activity such as
debates over ethical text production, but it is also itself a species of meta-textual activity
among others. A network hermeneutic perspective properly treats the use of interpretive
heuristics based on the analysis of social power in –emic terms it cannot avoid engaging
with existing meta-textual discourses such as the ethics of media production because it
inevitably informs those discourses (and is informed by them in turn). The
text/interpreter binary itself is, after all, a hermeneutic concept that in turn was re-
appropriated as a textual interpretive schema, so models of analysis derived from
network hermeneutic insights are themselves open to ethical discourse. This chapter’s

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What is the making of a text, after all, if not the exemplary case of meta-textual activity?
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study of the use of power as a hermeneutic and interpretive tool therefore also engages
with questions of the ethics of participatory media production, focusing in particular on
two cases studies. The first is a YouTube video intended to shame homophobic video
game players by documenting their online communication. From the perspective of the
older top-down power model such a video intervention is clearly a socially progressive
act, but from a more horizontal perspective its value becomes more ambivalent. The
second case study in this chapter is an attempt to counter the power of state surveillance
through specialized wearable cameras intended to create a subversive practice of
counter surveillance. Once again, from the perspective of a top-down power model
empowering the disempowered seems absolutely ethical, but taking a more systematic
perspective the likely results are far more insidious. These case studies represent only
two applications of a power analysis founded on network hermeneutic models, and
while they are important cases they only inaugurate the project of such analyses and
criticism. Documentary ethics in particular requires both renewal and application to
participatory media forms as the power to represent the real, so treacherous in its
invisibility, is becoming increasingly commonplace and complex.
Documentary Ethics
Pet videos, prank videos, gameplay videos, online vacation photos, even games
and social networks that employ geo-location are not often granted the title of
documentaries in the traditional sense they all make the claim to represent reality
similar to those made by documentary film and television. Documentarians and
theorists (cf. Grierson 1976; Nichols 1991; Ginsberg 1999; Ruby 2000; Winston 2000 to
name only a few key examples) have examined the ethics of documentary, the proper
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way to use the enormous power to represent what “is,” for decades, and these questions
remain critical for anyone hoping to engage critically with digital media culture or to
develop new, more pro-social norms for media production. The issue need not be as
enormous as documenting war crimes or government crackdowns on dissent, simply
purporting to represent how others think, feel, and behave places one in a position of
enormous power. How does one make an ethical YouTube video of one’s friend jumping
off a roof into a pool? At first glance such an issue may seem trivial, but it becomes far
less trivial when she runs for Congress. Non-professionally produced digital videos’ role
is now commonly subsumed into traditional media narratives as a sort of materialized
eye-witness account (Gordon 2007),
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a process unlikely to slow with the explosive
diffusion of mobile recording technologies such as smartphones (DeGusta 2012,
PewResearch Internet Project 2013). According to one version of digital mythology,
networked computing and digital production technologies not only afford those
formerly consigned to the role of audience access to the tools of media producers, they
also provide less mediated, more authentic access to the world (Litterson 2003). Every
web cam, every eye witness video, every tweeted photograph gives greater access to the
real, and their use is spreading at a nearly unprecedented rate. The power of mediated
communication to document reality has never been so discursively central or so widely
employed.
How does the diffusion of these new technologies affect the ethical issues of how
to employ the claim to represent the real, and what are text creator’s responsibilities to
those he or she represents when they are able to represent back? Traditionally,

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The concept of “eye witness account” in this case making an especially strong claim to reality, being a claim to
both process and content para-authenticity even as they might be incorporated in more artificial news discourses.
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considerations of documentary film and television ethics have focused on two critical
points—the moment of production wherein the relationship between documentarian
and subject is constructed and the documentary text itself and its address to its assumed
audience. Ultimately, both issues become questions of communicative power—who can
construct knowledge, who can represent whom, and how is that knowledge constructed
as a normative process. As Brian Winston observes, the foundation of contemporary
ethical debate in documentary has been that “[f]ilm-makers are more powerful than
their audiences and, normally, more powerful than those who participate in their
documentaries” (Winston, 2000, 86). For Winston, however, placing too much
emphasis on the documentarian’s “responsibilities” to his or her audience is corrosive to
the documentary enterprise. Instead, he argues, the documentarian must have the
freedom to act expressively and not suffer under the unnecessary ballast of journalistic
responsibility for “truth-telling defined as a species of impossibly mechanistic, strict
observation” (155). The key ethical claim on the documentarian is not that of the
audience, but that of the subject represented: for “the real difficulties of ethical
documentary production…rest far more on the relationship between documentarist and
participant than between documentarist and audience” (1). The question, then, of the
subject’s role in his or her own representation, is key. However, this relationship can be
constructed differently. Bill Nichols, in his seminal book on the documentary, argues
instead for an “axiographic” approach to documentary ethics based on the documentary
gaze and its construction of time and space. While the audience is to some extent
interpolated into this gaze, the primary ethical relationship he or she constructs remains
between filmmaker and subject. However, the focus of ethical inquiry is on the
documentary text where this gaze is articulated. In such places he argues, one finds “the
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stamp of one person’s vision across the face of the world [that] calls for a hermeneutics
of ethical interpretation.” Only then can one investigate “the implantation of values in
the configuration of space, in the constitution of the gaze, and in the relation of observer
to observed” (Nichols 1991, 78).
Garnet Butchart (2006, 428) observes that ethical discourse in documentary can
be reduced to three fundamental problems: the problem of participant consent, the
problem of the journalistic concept of the “‘right to know’ whether a text is
representative” and the problem of objectivity and efforts. Nichols and Jay Ruby (2000)
focused on the latter problems and developed methods for destabilizing the
documentary’s patina of neutrality and objective representation. This, Butchart argued,
leads to “an impasse concerning individual rights….ethics become[s] a question in the
enterprise of documentary only when the expression rights of the filmmaker intersect
with someone’s privacy, right to information, [etc.]” (Butchart, 2006, 428). As such, he
defined two possible positions—assuming a core of verifiable truth (a view Butchart
believes to be incommensurate with civil rights and free speech) and assuming that
everything is relative and therefore purely a matter of “opinion,” the latter of which he
proposes as the currently orthodox approach. However, the tension between rights and
truth introduces dangerous elements into the equation, for when one finds oneself
speaking of documentary ethics in terms of inherent, universal rights, one begins
reasoning in terms that encourage rather static and undue adherence to conventional
moral schema. Ethical arguments based on inherent rights and conventionalized
morality lead to an inevitable impasse when faced with authentic difference. By focusing
debate on the concept of respecting the assumed inherent rights of the “other,” these
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approaches collapse into moral imperatives based on rights and constructions of
legitimate difference that results in theoretical deadlock and further justifies Western
hegemony.
These ethical approaches to the problem of representing the reality all share a
similar implicit assumption—that the means to represent are restricted to those who are
already socially empowered. This assumption, in turn, implicitly informs their
hermeneutic approach to the documentary as a text, providing a sort of hermeneutic
tool for understanding a documentary in relation to the real world and how such
relationships should be constructed. The foundation of this hermeneutic approach to
power—the power imbalance between documentarian and subject—exists parallel to a
second similar imbalance between producers of media and audiences. This latter
asymmetry of access to the means of textual production provided the central ground for
critical studies of media in the twentieth century.
The Ghost of Mass Media
Considerations of documentary ethics have focused on reckoning with the
inherent power imbalance between those who represent and those who are represented,
with a reasonably clear division between the two groups. Such a power binary makes
sense for the world of mass media, where production technologies and distribution
systems are expensive and restricted. The twentieth century was not easy on mass
media, at least discursively (Bennett 1989), and the theory behind the mass society
thesis that tied mass media to a wide range of social ills was widely influential (Bell
1960). Scholars influenced by Marxism or the Frankfurt tradition saw mass media as
complicitous in preserving and advancing social hierarchies fueled by the steady
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drumbeat of Capitalist ideology (cf. Marcuse 1964; Althusser 1971; Hall 2009). Others
were troubled by its historic association with propaganda and totalitarianisms of the
Right and Left. A broad range of the political spectrum was troubled by its corrupting
entertainment of sordid appetites and its supposed vapidity (Arnold 2006; MacDonald
1997). Even Newton Minnow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission,
famously dubbed broadcast television a “vast wasteland” in a 1961 address to the
National Association of Broadcasters. The problem with broadcast media was that it was
narrow—not narrow in reach, but narrow in scope.
As discussed in chapter 2, while usually not included in the official “hermeneutic”
tradition cultural studies and critical theory both rely heavily on textual interpretive
methods. For early members of the Frankfurt School such as Herbert Marcuse, Theodor
Adorno (1991), and Max Horkheimer (1972) the binary was weighted heavily in favor of
the media and the powerful, treating both the technology and the culture it fosters as
forces of social control. Mass culture, they argued, taught individuals patterns of
conformity and naturalized inauthentic forms of social relations. These observations
were based on both political economic and textual analysis—in fact their work the
culture industry is centered on the ability to make connections between the two. The
interests and ideology of those in power thus became a hermeneutic tool, a set of objects
and schema presumed to be in the text that provided a template for understanding how
to make sense of a text. Consider, for example, this passage from The Culture Industries
(Adorno & Horkheimer 2000):

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Continuing and continuing to join in are given as justification for the blind
persistence of the system and even for its immutability. What repeats itself
is healthy, like the natural or industrial cycle. The same babies grin
eternally out of the magazines; the jazz machine will pound away
forever….It draws on the life cycle, on the well-founded amazement that
mothers, in spite of everything, still go on bearing children and that the
wheels still do not grind to a halt This serves to confirm the immutability
of circumstances. The ears of corn blowing in the wind at the end of
Chaplin’s The Great Dictator give the lie to the anti-Fascist plea for
freedom. They are like the blond hair of the German girl whose camp life is
photographed by the Nazi film company in the summer breeze. Nature is
viewed by the mechanism of social domination as a healthy contrast to
society, and is therefore denatured. Pictures showing green trees, a blue
sky, and moving clouds make these aspects of nature into so many
cryptograms for factory chimneys and service stations (18).
Adorno and Horkheimer do not explicitly set out to explicate a text nor do they
engage in lengthy analysis of individual texts. Nevertheless, their invocation of example
after example performs interpretive work. The results of this interpretive activity one
discovers in the traces of a unifying hermeneutic schema behind the critique. The
political economy of media production is the schematic field through which texts are
made to make sense, and how texts are understood to make sense for others, as well.
Power also informs the critical theorists’ sense of the extent of their text(s) chosen for
interrogation. Dashing through example after example to make points about larger
issues wouldn’t make sense if the authors didn’t have a hermeneutic model that allowed
them to treat diverse texts as parts of a larger whole, incarnations of a sort of ur-text, or
at least deeply similar iterations of some authoring agency. The relative stability of their
hermeneutic schema is what allows them to dash through so many examples so
rapidly—the schema affords ready categories to which textual traits can be ascribed, and
since those categories are already densely intertwined in the schema itself one need not
worry over much about variations in relationships within any given text. The schema
wins over the local, in part by shocking the reader with the range of texts found to
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exhibit complicity with dominant ideology. Interpretation creates the movement from
specific textual cues to pessimistic schematic categories that set the horizon of potential
interpretive discover. Social theory sets the standard for power critique. Returning to
the question of documentary ethics, one discovers direct parallels with the power
dialectic between documentarian and subject with that between media producer and
consumer. The empowered half of the binary has the ability to represent, while the un-
empowered half has the ability only to be represented and represented to.
While that mode of using power as a hermeneutic tool remains influential and
widespread, the revisions associated with the cultural studies movement have to some
degree eclipsed them—particularly in the realm of digital media. Cultural studies
shifted
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the focus of media scholarship from the media object itself to the moment of
its interpretation and its incorporation into its audiences’ lives. “Participation” here was
conceptualized not in terms of the process of media creation per se, that remained the
reserve of professionals situated in vast institutions. Rather, participation was re-read as
the ability of members of the mass audience to participate individually with varied
interpretive and meta-textual activities. Fortunately, such polysemic seizures and the
resulting redemption of the text was discovered to resist hegemonic discourses (Hall,
1993). Stuart Hall’s modes of spectatorship provided the now almost archetypical model
that informed this hermeneutic approach to power. Hall argued that the lack of
equivalence between producer and receiver meant that, despite the considerable power

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This is not intended to suggest that cultural studies scholars were the first to attempt this project! Even within the
immediate social circle of the core Frankfurt school members Scholarly attempts to redeem mass media, mass or
otherwise, did not wait for the modem. Walter Benjamin (1936) famously argued that the new media culture could
serve to de-mystify high culture, and return culture to the people. Politically engaged avant-gardists like Berthold
Brecht, who sometimes collaborated with Benjamin, worked in the mass media, even in heart of darkest Hollywood.

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imbalance, there would inevitably be differences between how a message is intended
and how it is interpreted, allowing for dominant, negotiated, and resistant readings. The
search for the resistant reading became, much like the gaps and fissures of
deconstruction discussed in chapter 2, the means through which a text could be
redeemed as a “good” object, and one of the most commonplace activities of the sort of
everyday criticism of cultural studies inspired media studies. With the advent of digital
media the concept of resistance underwent a change, shifting from fugitive acts of
resistance to opportunity for more affirmative forms of power.
Participation and Digital Media
Digital media seemed to confirm and fulfill the importance of “participation” in a
much larger sense, especially in the heady early years of the advent of Internet
technologies into everyday life. A great many of hopes and expectations ride on the
word” participation,” no less among media scholars than venture capitalists, with the
Internet serving as the medium of choice for technologically facilitated liberation.
Websites like Youtube and Twitter or mobile apps like Vine allow those formerly
consigned to the “audience” to enter into the process of creation, and dissemination, of
media texts (Stengrim, 2005; Ross & Nightingale, 2003). This variety of participation
has underwritten a great deal of the popular and scholarly utopianism surrounding
network computing technologies. Even those who resist the temptation to wholesale
digital evangelism argue that expansion of the media creating public has the ability to
similarly expand public discourse beyond the limitations of the mass media (cf. Best and
Kellner, 2001; Castells, 2007; Kahn and Kellner, 2005; Meikle, 2002, etc.). Others have
focused on the power of such computer interfaces to allow for the radical reconstruction
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of the self (Turkle, 1995). One need not go far to find evidence predictions have been
accurate: social movements use digital technology for coordination and network
building (Juris, 2005; Wolfson, 2012), counter-publics are created online (Milioni
2009), mobile technology has disrupted official news discourse (Allan, Sonwalker, and
Carter 2007; Keane & Donald 2002; ad infinitum). The parade continues today, now
incorporating social networks and mobile technologies. Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman
(2012) describe this confluence as “triple revolution” posed to remake what it means to
be an individual.
The ability to document—in audio recording, still image, digital video, or any
number of other media—as a means of communication and expression in online spaces
should benefit from the disruptive, democratizing power of digital and internet
technology. As a result, it might argued that there is reason to believe that contemporary
advances in digital imaging and communication have rendered much of the ethical
debate around documentary and the hermeneutics approaches to power that inform it
obsolete. As digital recording technologies and methods for the distribution of digital
content, the ability to record and represent the real before a potentially broad audience
has deepened and widened its social penetration. The ability to participate in
production, to speak in forms both durable and distributed, suggests the old binaries
need not trouble us. Participation undermines the power imbalance that informed these
hermeneutic approaches by displacing the “official” top-down discourse and its
attendant system of knowledge. One could even argue that such a system would displace
the need for destabilizing meaning within the text (a la Nichols and Ruby in
documentary, or deconstruction in general) by providing a sort of permanent inter-
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textual instability of discourse. If the “professional/amateur,” “inside/outside,”
“mainstream/marginal” binaries are finally collapsing into synthesis, perhaps one only
needs patience, not debates over the moot issue of documentary power. Have digital
media changed the power calculus of documentary production to the point where power
no longer requires explication provided the text in question is adequately participatory?
Halogayboy and Participatory Documentary Intervention
In 2006 Time magazine famously selected “you” as their Person of the Year in
honor of the extraordinary impact of popular participation on the World Wide Web,
using the image of a YouTube video player surrounding a reflective surface on the cover
(Grossman 2006). Considering the extraordinary growth and importance of YouTube as
an accessible platform for the distribution of video (Burgess & Green 2009) the image
portraying the site as the a deuteragonist in the growth of participatory culture (Jenkins
2006) was somewhat prophetic, although the importance of other interfaces offering
distribution capabilities such as social network sites such no doubt deserve equal
attention. Use of digital video technology for self-expression and exploration of identity
(Banet-Weiser 2011) and/or as part of political activism (Askanius 2014) is a now a
familiar part of contemporary media ecology and a commonly cited justification for
claims of network computing’s democratizing effect. A documentary posted to YouTube
that represents the behavior of others is more problematic, particularly when that
behavior is being held up for scorn. The construction and ethics of power in
participatory media environments depend in part on more macro-scale issues such as
representation and hegemony, but also the smaller power differentials that exist at a
local, even interpersonal level.
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In the case of a video documentary made by a YouTube user named “halogayboy”
interpersonal power relationships, surveillance, privacy, and critique create a complex
and problematic example of the application of power through media production. On
November 23, 2007, “halogayboy” posted video to YouTube entitled “Halo 3:
Homophobia Evolved.” It contained the results of a bit of amateur video ethnography.
Using the non de guerre xxx GayBoy xxx on the Microsoft Xbox Live online video
gaming network, halogayboy recorded microphone chatter and gameplay in games of
Halo 3
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in which he participated. In response to what halogayboy refers to as his
“proud and unambiguous gamer tag,” he is subjected to repeated homophobic insults by
other players ranging from “hey gayboy are you a faggot or what?” to “I hope gay
marriage never gets passed—have fun being single.” Other players employed colorful
combinations of the standard homophobic language with anti-African American racial
slurs, which were apparently intended to intensify the degree of insult (although
halogayboy made no reference to his race). Nor did it end at verbal abuse; halogayboy
notes in his comments on the video that he did not include “the betrayals (people on my
team killing me), players asking me NOT to party up, or all leaving mid-game so that I'm
all alone.”
Any player of first person shooter games—whether on a PC via the internet or on
a dedicated video game console—will be familiar with the level of aggressiveness in the
game’s chat functions as well as the nearly hysterical levels of various forms of
masculine symbolic posturing and violence. Consider, for example, the practice of “tea-

109
Halo 3 is a 2007 first person shooter video game available on the Xbox 360 console, the third installment in
Bungi Studios’ enormously successful Halo franchise. For the uninitiated, the series details the exploits of a
scientifically enhanced super soldier in a vast interstellar war. The multiplayer version of the game allows players
to compete and cooperate in player vs. player games on the “Xbox’s Live” network.
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bagging” a defeated opponent by having one’s avatar kneel and stand up repeatedly over
their body to simulate the act of applying one’s genitals to their face. Players will also
engage in sometimes elaborate games of escalating insults similar to verbal games such
as “The Dozens” (Jordan 1983) or “flyting” (Parks 1986). As a player of such games I
have to admit that there is a joy in the virtuoso performance of such rituals. Declaring
one’s homosexuality or other kinds of non-normative identity that would otherwise be
the basis of insults in such an environment is a daring move. In challenging this
environment halogayboy is certainly asserting his existence against hegemonic hetero-
normativity, but he is not doing so from a position of absolute submission—he can resist
and sustain his resistance with a durable (virtual) text. However, he is not resisting a
centralized power source, per se, but the diffusion of hegemonic power among relative
equals—in fact, many of those who torment him may very well be constructed as
normatively inferior to him in different contexts (e.g., class, race, nationality, etc). Also,
halogayboy had the ability, no doubt as a result of a certain degree of financial security
and education, to employ his digital literacy to seek a form of redress. After all, while his
fellow Halo 3 players may have had the opportunity to abuse him on in-game chat, it
was halogayboy who posted a video of them to YouTube that has since received over
900,000 views and over 9,000 comments—the majority of which appear to be
supportive.
Accounting for the diffusion of power in these more participatory technologies
requires a subtle, encompassing model that can account for more “horizontal” power
relationships. Yes, power is diffuse, but not in the traditional sense of a “resistant”
spectator (Hall 1993) who is able to make a radical step against or away from dominant
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ideology or marginalized media practices able to speak against it. One need not, and
should not, simply renounce any concept of hegemony or dominant power structures,
we do need to account for the fact that power can be asserted across a broad, shifting
network of power relations, and not merely as a sort of friction against centralized
power structures. The “Halo 3: Homophobia Evolved” video exemplifies the triple-bind
of democratized digital media. On the one hand, a site like YouTube allows someone to
post a video such as this we could serve to raise awareness and to some extent shame
those who participated in bashing halogayboy. On the other hand, similar freedom
powered by a different technological interface also allows other players to torment him
for his non-normative sexuality, and that torment demonstrates the closely policed
limits on behavior and identity enforced by other Xbox Live users. Halogayboy’s record
of his experience demonstrates that while digital media enables the dream of the digital
agora, it also allows the rapid formation of the digital lynch mob. It’s worth noting that
Microsoft explicitly bans such behavior in their terms of service (2008), and yet it is
they who control this interface and is in a position to introduce technological curbs or
closer moderation (which is largely non-existent). Even if Microsoft must assume the
guilt of an enabling Pontius Pilot, they do so in complete harmony with more optimistic
view of the potential of open, peer-to-peer technologies: the view that more
communication, especially more unfettered communication, is always good (cf. Hafner
2001, 33-34).

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The Ethics of Digital Documentary
How does one evaluate the ethics of “Halo 3: Homophobia Evolved?” Ironically,
traditional documentary ethics would urge us to remain wary of halogayboy’s power as
documentarian that arises from his ability to represent others. Typically in documentary
ethics secretly recording individuals to expose them to public ridicule would be seen as
an abuse of the documentarian’s power. However, halogayboy’ is also an outsider, a
homosexual representing his experience in an intensely homophobic virtual space.
Hypothetically as a member of a disempowered group turning his camera toward
mainstream prejudice the protective requirements of documentary ethics might not
apply in the same way they would to an anthropologist documenting another culture.
Furthermore, if communicative resources in digital online spaces are no longer as scarce
as those in mass media ecology then ethical issues of “who gets to represent whom”
might no longer be relevant. If one documentarian represents reality in one way another
has easy access to the means to correct or challenge that representation through both
widely available meta-textual spaces such as comment sections or by creating their
documentary representations.
In a digital communicative ecology with relative abundance of access
documentary ethics need concern itself with situating the documentary in an inter-
textual space where communicative power can be sought but only in contest with other
voices. In such an environment it could be argued that widening participation and
including as many voices as possible is valuable in itself (Bucy and Gregson 2001).
However, “inclusion” alone seems to be a fairly limp justification for any possible
communicative behavior, and such justification carries with it considerable dangers. The
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sheer volume of online communication in all its forms demonstrates that simply being
“included” in the digital world does not guarantee being heard or even acknowledged.
Nor does it eliminate the problem of power differentials in representation; in fact the
more inclusive the digital world is understood to be the more dangerous exclusion
becomes. Silence becomes absence when all voices are believed to be heard. This is
problem hazardous of accounts of the democratizing forces of digital media that employ
an evolutionist view to differentiate the digital present from the “pre-digital” past
(Ginsberg 2006). Not only does the idea of a single uniform “digital” space conceal
difference and context, it also creates a new class of disempowered other in relation to
the digital “us.” In Gramscian terms the result is a form of political domination through
naturalized ideological hegemony in which those who aren’t heard not only don’t have a
voice, they don’t exist. Silence becomes absence.
If expanded participation alone cannot be treated as an inherent good, then
perhaps one could treat the type of communication that a more participatory ecology
produces as opposed to the texts produced by a more restrictive one. The ability to
interact through comment sections or technical rating systems doesn’t exist in broadcast
television or radio, nor can one respond to a news program by broadcasting one’s own.
Since the means of producing and distributing content in a mass media system depends
on access to considerable material capital, it might stand to reason that eliminating that
requirement would permit critique of established power relationships. Application of
power as a hermeneutic tool in the traditional mode would suggest as much. However,
neither interaction nor participation necessarily create “resistance” or anti-hegemonic
communication. Andrejevic (2007) wisely points out that one should differentiate
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between simple interactivity, which is often touted as an inherently liberating force
bringing a sort of inevitable end to the era of broadcast centralization, and true
participation—for a great deal of what passes for participation in digital media today is
actually simple submission to monitoring. Gramsci’s (2005) concept of hegemony,
based as it is on the creation of consent and legitimacy rather than enforced ideological
values, suggests that even participation can be fully interpolated within hegemonic
norms. Real world examples abound. In fact, a degree of controlled participation is
absolutely vital to maintaining the legitimacy of the status quo (Bucy and Gregson 2001)
and often become forums in which orthodoxy dominates anyway (Wolfson, 2012). Even
in situations where popular media production and horizontal communication seems
most at odds with the objectives of more traditional media outlets such participation
can, and often is, sublimated into a sort of “supplement” to the official (Gordon 2007;
Yu 2004). “Halo 3: Homophobia Evolved” can’t be defended as the result of the
inherently good process of widening participation or even given the benefit of a doubt
due to participation’s benevolent effect on content.
Perhaps “Halo 3: Homophobia Evolved” can be defended from a more ecological
perspective, as an attempt to correct a general imbalance. For example, halogayboy’s
intervention could be viewed as an attempt to produce an inter-textual version of what
Faye Ginsburg’s (1999) describes as the “parallax effect.” Ginsberg argues that in
anthropological documentaries one should juxtapose the anthropologist’s view of an
indigenous culture with the culture’s own cinematic self-representation. In doing so
“one can create a kind of parallax effect; if harnessed analytically, these ‘slightly
different angles of vision’ can offer a fuller comprehension of the complexities…of the
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social phenomenon we call culture” (158). The focus, then, is on the relationship
between an official, anthropological discourse and an indigenous discourse, much as in
the aforementioned examples of participatory documentary and sub-cultural production
the focus is on introducing outside voices into the mainstream without dissolving them
therein. The ethical issue for halogayboy’s intervention then is not his responsibility to
those he represents or those to whom he represents as it would be in traditional
documentary ethics, but rather how his intervention speaks in relation to (but not
necessarily against) the relative homogeneity of mainstream discourse. This justification
however does not quite apply. Halogayboy’s video differs from the anthropological
scenario Ginsberg describes in that it is not in response to a single clearly articulated
voice or institution, but to a more diffuse set of behaviors believed to be tied to a share
ideology. His document does not exist parallel to another document but to observed
online behavior that he recorded. To truly achieve such a parallax effect though one
would need some articulation of the presumed dominant discourse in its own terms.
Halogayboy cannot truly provide that through his representation of other players’
response to his declared homosexuality.
“Halo 3: Homophobia Evolved” remains problematic. Traditional documentary
ethics would object to halogayboy’s representation of others. Halogayboy’s marginal
status as a homosexual might grant him a certain degree of reprieve from that challenge,
but his marginality is complicated by the fact that he has the power to represent others
and to do so before a large audience. The value of participation alone does not
automatically validate the ethics of any given act of textual creation, nor can one truly
say that he has succeeded in creating a “parallax effect” in contrasting his representation
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with another. This line of thinking merely returns us to the problem of Halogayboy’s
right and ability to represent that other discourse ethically, both in terms of a potential
obligation to his subjects and to his audience. That obligation, however, needs to be
conceptualized in terms relevant to digital media. While issues such as representation
and large scale differences in communicative power remain relevant, the smaller power
differentials that exist between individuals who are peers or nearly peers need to be
accounted for as well. While this horizontal power relationships obviously have a micro-
scale, interpersonal ethical dimension, taken collectively these relationships also have
unique macro-scale effects that require ethical consideration on their own terms.
Perhaps most important among these is the concept of privacy and its perceived loss.
The Cloud Panopticon: Horizontal Surveillance and
Sousveillance
Along with the chat room sexual predator and the identity thief, the 1984 inspired
image of the totalitarian government and its all-seeing eyes casts a long dark shadow in
the digital imaginary. While more traditional means of surveillance equivalent to the
wire tape or security camera persist, continuing revelations of the monitoring of
telephone and data traffic by governments and private industry worldwide and their
accumulation into vast databases offers a new, digitally native threat, a dark side to the
concept of “Big data.” These stores of information also allow for the surreptitious
accumulation of data that, while individually harmless, become more invasive in
combination, destabilizing concepts of privacy (boyd 2010). Thanks to “big data”
archives such as the National Security Agency’s PRISM top-down surveillance power
has become a major political and social issue once again. Big data surveillance is just as
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if not more important for its discursive weight then its practical capabilities. Vast
accumulations of data seem to betoken the potential, or the hidden reality, of an
omnipresent surveillance state. That such programs are claimed not to affect most
people in any way is basically irrelevant. The concept of panopticism teaches us that the
idea that one is “probably” not under surveillance at any given time is a far more
effective form of social control then the certainty that one is under surveillance at
particular times. However even in light the advent of new forms of top-down
surveillance it is important not to lose sight of an even more important, and more
pervasive disciplinary force: horizontal surveillance between near peers.
While Mark Andrejevic’s (2007, 212) studies of surveillance focus primarily on
the increased surveillance capabilities of more traditional centers of power (e.g.,
government, large corporations), he notes that simultaneously the technologically-
enabled ability of individuals to monitor others and the perceived necessity of engaging
in such monitoring has increased as a result of network technology and computer
mediated communication. He terms this form of surveillance lateral or peer-to-peer
surveillance. Both the power of digital media to “disembed” individuals from the array
of social cues we use to evaluate others in our interactions with them and a pervading
sense of post-modern cynicism that distrusts any knowledge and experience not
obtained in the first person combine in contemporary society to create a “culture of
mutual detection characterized by general suspicion” (219). Lateral surveillance is a
two-way street—on the one hand, one has the ability to monitor others, and yet
simultaneously one must be constantly aware of the “non-enforcing character of peer
monitoring as a means of screening for deviance” (234). Not only that, one must be
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careful how one conducts one’s surveillance, for having one’s failure to detect deception
recognized means being seen as a denizen of the vilest depths of the post-modern
imaginary: the dupe. Andrejevic asserts that this results in “a nation of watchers
performing their verification practices with an eye to the gaze of an imagined other, in
order to avoid being seen as a dupe” (240). Andrejevic further breaks down lateral
surveillance into three categories, each based on the object of interest: romantic
interest, family, and friends or acquaintances (223). However, a cursory glance at
Andrejevic’s choice in verbs indicates that the surveillance he is attempting to
conceptualize is a very active form of surveillance, perhaps best typified by what he calls
“search-engine surveillance” (225). This sort of surveillance can include both “open-
ended information fishing expeditions, and more directed searches for specific types of
information,” but remains very much query based (229).
The norm-enforcing quality of the gaze of others doesn’t quite fit this model since
very often its disciplinary power is passive rather than active—the power of potential
surveillance embodied in Bentham’s panopticon. One might borrow a term form
computer science and refer to it as “event-driven” monitoring. Active surveillance can to
an extent be anticipated and by virtue of the fact that it requires time and effort limits
can be imagined to its scope. If nothing else, belief in one’s own insignificance provides
a sturdy defense against fear of active surveillance. Passive, event-driven surveillance on
the other hand is ubiquitous, and only coalesces into active disciplinary action when
deviance (the “event) is detected. Unlike Foucault’s prisoner one living in this “cloud
panopticon” lives with the certainty that someone is always watching, the only question
is what they might be watching for and why. Cloud panopticism is a far more insidious
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form of monitoring than more active horizontal surveillance techniques. The ease with
which it takes place robs one of the comfort of obscurity—a potential observer need care
very little to note and respond to one’s behaviors, and every channel of information one
has about others acts as a reminder of that. Worse yet this form of surveillance enjoys
the aura of legitimacy, if not historical inevitability, that surrounds the “democratizing”
technologies that enable peer surveillance and event-driven monitoring thanks to the
counter-hegemonic ideals associated with democratized use of communication
technology. (Active surveillance, on the other hand, seems like the far less valorized
practice of stalking.) As digital technology becomes even more ubiquitous and the
practices associated with it less novel the hegemonic gaze of peers will not only seem
legitimate, it will become naturalized. The current fascination with top-down power
must not be allowed to conceal this process
Cyberglogger: Textual Power and “Sousveillance”
One can see the danger of the continued over-emphasis on top-down power even
in well intentioned, well-reasoned, and highly original interventions into the practice of
documenting reality through audio-visual means. Take, for example, the concept of
“sousveillance” (Mann, Fung & Lo 2006; Mann, Nolan &Wellman 2003). The goal of
sousveillance is to create “equivallance” between “surveillance” and those typically being
surveilled (Mann, Fung & Lo 2006, 1). Traditional surveillance relies on what could be
described as the “‘archicentric’ omniscient ‘eye-in-the-sky’ (God’s eye or authoritarian
view)” of surveillance methods such as CCTV cameras that subject public and
commercial spaces to a “one-sided panoptic gaze” (1). Sousveillance, on the other hand,
is designed around the concept of ubiquitous personal surveillance by those being
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surveilled—mostly likely in the form of wearable cameras and computers. Mann and his
coauthors even offer a mechanism to achieve this end: the Cyborglogger system that
would allow users to record continuously via a camera phone hung from the neck,
allowing constant, overt capture of first person perspective. By placing the monitoring
function within a phone, one creates a counter-panopticon, for not only are the watchers
being watched (and recorded), but they in turn can never be sure when or if they are
being recorded. In their discussion of the ethical issues of Cyborglogger, the developers
observe that one must consider what to do about those who would attempt to obstruct
the program and thereby possibly violate the users’ “information rights.” Also, they
express concern over the possibility of “tampering with the evidence” by requiring
Cyborglogger-enabled recording devices be turned off in certain situations—thereby
privileging one discourse over another (Mann, Fung & Lo 3-4). Strangely, they do not
consider the rights of all those being photographed by the system—to say nothing of the
rather obvious use such photos, published online and indexed, would be to those
conducting more traditional forms of surveillance. In essence, the Cyborglogger system
would create a new format for cloud panopticism where any given individual is
constantly under secret “sous”-veillance, and the uses to which this technology might be
put, or the responsibilities of the de facto documentarians, remain unknown.
This latter point, the issue of not knowing how, when, or where records of one’s
activities might be used, is critical. While the language of the “right to privacy” might
reasonably be critiqued on a number of levels (Butchart 2006; Gotlieb 1996), the social
effects of pervasive monitoring in a digital environment characterized by the
“disembedding” of social cues renders the issue of privacy, or perhaps one might better
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say of personal information, deeply problematic. Privacy is always complex and
situational, although it tends to be discussed in terms of creating a safe space of
withdrawal from the panoptic eye of “Big Brother,” however conceived. Privacy is a
dynamic process of boundary management based on cultural expectations and personal
experience (Palen and Dourish 2003; Grudin 2001). As such, privacy is not an issue of
degree (ranging from none to perfect security) but rather of understanding the situation
and audience, managing other’s knowledge of the self, and combining these two
objectives successfully. Without knowledge of the context in which information is likely
to be used, one has no control over one’s privacy because one has no way to make the
reflexive judgments to determine what course of behavior or degree of exposure is
desirable. The result is “context collapse,” or the loss of control over the boundaries that
one typically employs in face-to-face communication that allows one to act
appropriately in different circumstances and to control who has access to what aspects
of your identity or actions (boyd 2008; Marwich & boyd 2011). As those who have
become unemployed or suffered embarrassment as a result of a Facebook photo or a
wayward Tweet reaching the wrong person, making such contextual judgments is
intensely important.
The proponents of sousveillance did at one time attempt a sort of ethnography of
what “co-veillance” might mean to those being monitored (Mann, Nolan & Wellman
2003), but they did so in the form of a sort of public art installation. Also, despite their
assertion that no one being “co-veilled” objected, it’s not entirely clearly how they would
have or whether the researchers undertook to ascertain how those being monitored felt
at all. However, in this case the “co-veilled” had a reasonably good idea how and why
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information on them was being used. Systems that conceal their monitoring, such as the
classic panopticon or “Cyborglogger,” make such an understanding of one’s actions in
context impossible, and one might reasonably assume that should such a system ever be
established a sort of social “chilling effect” from context collapse might accompany it as
individuals would be well-advised to assume the utmost, and least kind, level of
observation at all times. As such, we might not be surprised to find that those who
occupy positions of relative sub-ordinance are least comfortable with the idea of being
constantly surveyed by anyone. Friedman et al. (2006), for example, found that women
were far more concerned about video monitoring in public places than men, even if they
were themselves the “watcher” (Friedman et al. 2006). Thus the socially safest courses
of behaviors will be continually reinforced, and the communication ideas that could be
censured by anyone important will be discouraged. The only form of pre-digital social
control that doesn’t pale in comparison with cloud panopiticism is the culture of mutual
distrust that authoritarian states such as Nazi (and later East) Germany inspired
through the encouragement of informing, but even that systems seems almost
amateurish by comparison.
Horizontal Power, Interpretation, and Documentary Ethics
Both the examples of halogayboy and cyberglogger point out the need to
reconsider documentary ethics and the power analysis of texts to better account for
horizontal power relations. The concept of participatory digital documentary production
through new media technologies does not slice through the documentary form’s ethical
questions—instead, it transforms them and injects them into a far larger and
qualitatively different sphere. Network hermeneutics raises the questions of horizontal
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power relationships, which places issues of interpretation at the heart of ethical
evaluation. For mass media the relationship between the empowered textual creator and
the subject or audience of a text were the key loci for power analysis. One cannot
continue to represent these points of contact, what one might call the primal scene of
the mass media criticism, in such binary terms. The questions remains relevant but are
not sufficient for a media landscape where the roles of subject, producer, and audience
of documentary media are permanently blurred and texts are being created, re-created,
challenged, and acclaimed at previously unthinkable speed. This requires a shift in focus
from the isolated act of filmmaking and/or its result to the understanding of
documentary production as well as their associated interpretive and meta-textual
activities as wide-reaching social practices.
Network hermeneutics takes horizontal power seriously because the role of
textual power in a digital media landscape requires both vertical and lateral power
analyses and a more ecological orientation toward questions of textual impact. From an
–etic perspective revised analysis of power relations inevitably impacts the study of
meta-textual activity of all kinds. From an –emic perspective, analysis of power is also
an important meta-textual activity to be studied in its own right. The producer/non-
producer power binary inspired elite meta-textual discourse on documentary ethics,
which in turn informed various forms of documentary production. The production of
new texts always carries a meta-textual component, and the construction and
application of ethical discourse as modes of judgment, affiliation, or categorization
(good vs. bad documentary are generic as well as qualitative traits) are prime candidates
for network hermeneutic study and active engagement. As the hermeneutic scholar is an
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interpreter him or herself, the study of such discourses necessitates honest engagement
with them. If one is serious about encouraging the best in textual production,
documentary or otherwise, one cannot afford to remain aloof from such meta-textual
activity anyway.
This makes locating potential exemplars of good practice important, and “Halo 3:
Homophobia Evolved,” because of rather than despite its ethical complexities, deserves
consideration for that status. Halogayboy documents passive peer surveillance in his
video—other Halo 3 players were not actively seeking out homosexuals to abuse, but if
once one became salient they will reacted against him. Such horizontal, diffuse, and
ubiquitous peer-policing as was directed at halogayboy on needs to be documented, and
it needs to be documented with attention to the ethical dimensions of the how the act of
documenting. Unlike those who attack him Halogayboy’s video, on the other hand, was
a more active form of surveillance and discipline. Using his screen name as bait he
actively undertook to find and record in-game behavior and then to represent it in a
documentary idiom to other audiences who would find it objectionable. In doing so his
target was not to hold particular players accountable, but to challenge the status quo as
a whole. Rather than allow the players who abused him to be subject, in turn, to abuse
by sympathetic others who viewed his video, he effaced their names to protect them—
feeling that those few didn’t deserve to be pilloried for the sins of many. While it might
lack the elaborate reflexive or epistemological complexities of documentaries produced
by others halogayboy’s decision speaks to the reflective ethical consideration that must
be championed.
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To develop a new ethical discourse the tendency to construct ideological
landscape in terms of official, mainstream discourses and popular or non-professional
resistance, counter-discourse, or appropriation must be overthrown. As a result, the
validity that the schemas associated with a construction of the media and ideological
landscape in terms of “official” or professional discourses and popular or non-
professional resistance, counter-discourse, or appropriation must also be called into
question. A text can no longer be read against the schema of either a dominant or a
resistant type. To retain textual analysis as a valid tool for understanding the
interpretations of others or the range of interpretations available to them one might
attempt to refit the existing schema by replacing the political economic context of
production with greater attention the Gramscian “relations of force” that sustain certain
discourses in inter-textual space, but the risk of inadvertently continuing to pour old
wine into digital media bottles remains. For practitioners of interpretive methods
finding those new tools may take some time, or perhaps the binary construction of
power will simply cease to be such a commonly employed interpretive schema. Instead
of a contest between text and interpreter or dominant and subordinate a new, less
fundamentally structuralist and more multi-polar model could be created. Multiple
forms of communicative power need to be addressed. For understanding mass media
forms the question of who represents or creates knowledge about whom one must add
attention to who defines who can converse with whom and through what channels as
well as who sets the boundaries of legitimate communication, argument, representation,
and conclusion. How these interpretive and meta-textual practices will change as new
power models are introduced remains to be seen. In the next chapter, we will turn our
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attention to some significant changes in interpretive and meta-textual practice that are
already well underway in digital media spaces.

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Chapter 7
Textual Ecology and Textual Analysis: Art Games and Reunion

We cannot escape our status as interpreters. Network hermeneutics advocates for
non-interpretive methods to study interpretive and meta-textual activities, but that does
not mean that interpretive or textual analytic methods must, or even can, be abandoned.
While it may not be the only show in town, as Stanley Fish would have it, the practice of
interpretation as a method of inquiry remains critical if for no other reason than to keep
the analysis of the interpretive activities of others in perspective. Network hermeneutics
champions the value of textual analysis performed as fellow practitioners and not as
experts evangelizing for the true path or from behind the white coats of scientistic
objectivity. All interpreters interpret, and everyone exists among and as interpreters.
One cannot exhaustively define the practices and performances of others in abstract
terms, but one can situate in those activities in relation to one’s own definitions,
practices, and performances. The tools used to study the interpretive activities of others
must apply equally to one’s self. Thus far this study has examined and revised the
underlying principles of textual hermeneutic theory in an effort to create a new general
hermeneutic theory capable of accounting for the interpretation and use of texts in
digital spaces, but the study has yet to address how the actual practice of interpreting
texts might change, and how textual analysis might be connected to network
hermeneutic concepts such as meta-textual practice and performance and textual
ecology.
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This chapter completes that process by examining the interpretive and meta-
textual practices of users of popular Newgrounds.com through textual analytic (and to
some extent ethnographic) methods. Following the examples laid out in the previous
two chapters, this chapter applies the theoretical problem of the role of textual analysis
in network hermeneutics to the concrete case of the “art games” collection of Flash
video games from Newgrounds as well as to some of the interpretive and meta-textual
performances and traces of practice that surround them. The key question for textual
analysis will be one of claims: what can the evidence yielded by analysis of texts be used
to prove by itself, and what can be it used to prove in connection with other methods
through the network hermeneutic framework. Applying this latter approach to the “art
games” collection suggests the existence of a broad tendency in the meta-textual activity
of Newgrounds users: a drive toward “meta-textual reunion,” or the desire to shared
engagement with texts and inter-texts to re-create authentic community or
understanding within fragmented digital and social space. In a twist this drive to
“reunion” serves to marginalize the practice of interpretation in favor of other meta-
textual activities such as declarations of textual affinity and the use of texts as tools to
leverage controlled acts of personal revelation. Interpretation, it seems, is not the only
show in town.
Interpretive Methods and Textual Ecology
Network hermeneutics studies interpretation, but does not to prescribe it. That is
a different task. Network hermeneutics is a general hermeneutic theory in the sense that
it can be used to study interpretation as a human activity, not that it offers ideal
interpretive tools. As a result the use of textual interpretation as a method is
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complicated by network hermeneutics’ inability to provide an objectively valid
interpretive paradigm. Yet the foundation of network hermeneutic theory is that textual
interpretation is more than a necessary methodology, it is inevitable and for that reason
network hermeneutics seeks less to construct interpretive methodology then to make it
as self-aware as possible and through that awareness to situate self relative to other. If
one already detects a whiff of the Gadamerian fusion of horizons in this idea one’s nose
has not been deceived, but Gadamer holds the interpreter to a much higher standard.
Network hermeneutics does not seek a merger of horizons of understanding, but the
articulation of ecology. The interpretive activity of self does not merge with or attempt to
emulate that of the other, but to understand their relative positioning in relational
terms. This means that the textual analytical tools employed in any one study cannot be
said to provide a permanent model for all future applications, only one more landmark
in the ecological field. The Morris Zapps of the world will have to be ultimately
disappointed—one can never conclusively analyze a text.
This chapter focuses on two major approaches to the application of interpretative
methodology: textual interpretation as a means to understand a work and textual
interpretation to understand the text as an artifact. Network hermeneutics’ theoretical
injunction to treat all interpretive activity in relational terms anticipates tremendous
variety in the application of interpretive methods in network hermeneutic theory, but
the master textual paradigms of “work” and “artifact” are so archetypical in hermeneutic
that they merit first consideration. First, textual interpretation will serve in one of its
most traditional modes as a means to describe an object conceived through the master
text paradigm of a “work” of an artist, although it will do so within the restrictions
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placed upon its possible claims by intra-active epistemology. This tradition of
interpretation isolates and identifies the salient cues in a text and relates those cues both
to other cues within the text and to extra-textual schema and contexts including but not
limited to those supplied by the semantic and syntactic systems supplied by the concept
of an artistic “work.” The master text
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of the “work” generally treats the text as an
object susceptible to description and ultimately comprehension, although particularly
valorized texts might be understood to prolong the process of comprehension toward a
functionally infinite horizon. Network hermeneutics cannot use interpretive methods in
quite this way. Studying intra-active phenomena requires that description become
“description”
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based on the specificities of a particular entanglement of a mode of
perception—in this case a particular species of textual analysis—and text.
Textual interpretive methods will also be employed to interpret the meta-textual
performances of Newgrounds’ users as “artifacts” of their meta-textual practice.
Interpretation has long served as a method for comprehending and interrogating the
communicative acts of others, both in terms of identifying their probable intended
meaning as well as locating any evidence of un-intentional cues that appear to be
symptomatic of unarticulated ideas, implied relationships, and both unconscious and
tactical manipulations, of course. Through social hermeneutic theory the range of
potential texts expanded. For example, a cockfight or other ritual can be textualized and
rendered subject to interpretation. The master text in this interpretive mode is not the

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As discussed previously master-texts serve as the hypothetical complete form of a text that the specific instance
of a text might only approximate or incompletely embody. Thus when the master-text of “work” is applied to a
text certain elements are presumed to be present and if they are not present then they must be supplied through
interpretation and/or the addition of other texts (e.g., para-texts, inter-textual concepts such as canon).
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“Description” does not make the current reading of these texts any more or less objective or contingent than
any other reading, the quotation marks merely acknowledge the terms’ inevitable contingency.
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“work” but the closely aligned concept of the “artifact” of hidden processes, with both
texts and traces serving as the cues to be interpreted. The “artifact” approach often
treats texts as symptoms of some concealed social or psychological machinery.The
artifact exists in the form it does because of collective practice or culture writ large (but
instanced small). The basic set of moves is again those of cues and semantic fields that
Bordwell outlines, but semantic fields tied to culture, nationality, group practice or other
collectivity are more salient then those of individual genius.
By denying the existence of an objective or scientific mode of textual analysis
beyond that afforded by the acknowledgment of intra-action network hermeneutic
theory challenges and extends social hermeneutic methods. Reconciling the two does
require one to reconsider the relationship between the visible and invisible of a text, the
surface and the interpreted “below.” Texts are susceptible to textual analysis because
they are themselves already meta-textual, no text exists without precedent, and if one
ever did it probably bears more on the question of what it is to be an animal capable of
interpretation than it does on the nature of texts today or even two thousand years ago.
As such texts are created and interpreted within textual ecologies—the perceived world
of all textual objects, the means through which those objects can be legitimately engaged
with or applied, the possible relationship between texts and reality, and the
relationships between the social world and texts. Textual ecology is the evolving sense of
the world of the textual and its relationship with the world of the non-textual, a sort of
inter-textual imaginary in all its complexity of any given individual, although one can
certainly speak of group similarities or discursive uniformity. It can manifest in an
individual’s cognitions, but also in any number of canon-making, categorizing,
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axiological, or sense-making activities ranging from a list of the ten greatest novels to
the categories on a website to the Dewey decimal system. Individual or group senses of
textual ecology are the medium of possibilities through which meta-textual activity
including interpretative activity is made possible.
The concept of textual ecology provides the necessary hook on which to hang the
enterprise of network hermeneutic inquiry through textual analysis of “artifacts.”
Insofar as texts have interpretive or meta-textual qualities they also serve as both the
material and tools for further interpretive and meta-textual inquiry that will pass
through the hands of many diverse practitioners. While they are not finished products,
they are moments in which generative processes of practice and performance becomes
crystalized in instance rather than type. Interpretation enters the process when one
takes the additional step of attempting to identity the principles through which the text
came to exist and its relationship to individual or group textual ecology. Each text is in
some way a meta-textual intervention into the existing ecology, and as such it contains
its own distinct history and position as well as its own authoring agency (as both
function of the text and as an historical entity). But we are already interpreters, with our
own textual ecologies. While a multiplicity of methods might be employed to study
textual ecology one cannot do so without comprehending the relationship between one’s
own ecology and that of the ecology under study. This requires textual interpretation. It
also requires attention to the interpretive and meta-textual activities of others, whether
it is in the form of textual exegesis, a rating on a 1 to 10 scale, the construction of an
interface for viewing a document or generic categorizations on a website. Since all of
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these performances and artifacts emerge from a particular concept of textual ecology
they have two faces, one facing texts and one facing the social world.
Newgrounds.com: Everything, by Everyone.
Newgrounds.com is a media website that hosts crowd-sourced (and partially
crowd-curated) Flash animations and games as well as music and visual art. The
interface and interaction that takes place on Newgrounds.com offers an exemplary
opportunity to study the relationship between the textual and the social. The website
Newgrounds.com has a long, by the standards of web media, and happily sordid history.
Tom Fulp, creator and current owner of Newgrounds as well as one of its best known
contributors, created the site as a fan page for the Neo Geo video game system. Fulp’s
interest in web design led him to work with Macromedia’s Flash multimedia design
platform (now owned by Adobe) and he, along with many others, began to employ Flash
as a medium for creating animations and simple games.
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Fulp received a burst of
mainstream media attention when he posted a series of “Assassin” games that allowed
players to comically murder their favorite celebrities. As Newgrounds transformed into
a showcase for his work and as his work gained visibility, other Flash designers began
asking Fulp to include their work on his site. He did, and submissions exploded. Unable
to keep up with the increasing volume of submissions, Fulp created a crowd-sourced
editorial process called “The Portal” which allowed users to vote on whether other users’
submissions would be included permanently on the site—a system that continues today
with a newer “Portal” for audio files and a non-voting Portal for visual art (Fulp, 2011).
The Portal system is in turn tied to a user reputation system that rewards users for

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This process is by no means limited to Flash—see for example Mackenzie’s (2006) discussion of Java Script
programming.
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voting on submissions, both new and old, with increasing voting along with other perks
including various marks of distinction for one’s user profile page. The profile page acts
as a sort of clearing house for all of one’s activities on the site, tying together one’s own
submissions to the site across media as well as providing space for blog-style personal
announcements, lists of favorite Newgrounds content personal information and graphic
avatars, assorted awards earned for one’s reviews and submissions, and statistics on
one’s level of participation. Not only does the interface allow interpretation, it rewards it
and many of the affordances for creating identity and prestige on the site require it.
Some of the material on Newgrounds is organized into “collections,” essentially
coded generic categories, based on a wide range of potential generic criteria such as
“robots,” “video game parody,” or “Game Developer Platforms” (Collections, n.d.).
Within Newgrounds.com, the collection “Art Games” offers a particularly fecund
opportunity to explore the construction of interpretive and meta-textual activities in
such a participatory, digital space. The designation of a specific collection for “Art”
Games is both descriptively and normatively loaded. On the one hand, these games
might be described as “art” because they employ certain aesthetic strategies associated
with the more traditional art forms valorized by the creators and curators of the
collection. On the other, they might be designated art for purely evaluative reasons,
because games in this collection are somehow are better than “non-art” games, or at
least better in some specific, “art” way. In both cases, one would expect that in a space
specially designated for “art” games would contain explicit discussions of norms of
interpretation and evaluation, most likely more than other collections without similarly
semantically loaded titles. If nothing else one should anticipate this because, for most of
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the last 100 years, art in quotation marks has had to define itself in relation to formal
avant-gardism—even if that meant marking out its territory as being against or
indifferent to it—and formal avant-gardism by its nature operates by defining and
defying interpretive and aesthetic norms. While it may be that this site of popular
criticism does not follow traditions more commonly found in the discourses of
academics, artists, curators, and critics, it can serve nonetheless as a reasonable starting
hypothesis and potentially interesting point of comparison.
The Newgrounds website describes the “Art Games” collection quite explicitly:
“Some games are made and exhibited as art. The intent isn’t necessarily to provide the
player with a challenging or addictive mechanic, but rather to convey a message, elicit
an emotion or create a memorable experience” (Art Games, n.d.). The “Art Games”
collection contains nearly 90 games as of this writing.
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As with all collections on
Newgrounds, individual submissions are suggested for inclusion in pre-existing
categories by registered users via a link on each submission’s webpage. Site
administrators define new collections and ultimately decide whether a given submission
is included in one based on user nominations. One cannot therefore analyze the
contents of the “art games” collection as an expression of some pre-existing –emic
category in the textual ecology of some or all of Newgrounds.com users. Users’
relationship to that category is necessarily ambiguous, although an ethnographic study
of the process through which collections are created and curated would be quite
interesting, and would allow one to speak meaningfully of how genre is constituted in a
particular community (or at least in a particular social and technical network).

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This information current as of March 7, 2014.
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Newgrounds users at large cannot safely be discussed in such unified terms. One would
be hard pressed to demonstrate that there is a single community here to probe, as use of
a shared interface is hardly a guarantee of “community” (Cox 2008; Kling & Courtright
2003) or even a single network of practice (Brown & Duguid 2001). Even if one could
isolate particular sub-communities or networks the hyperlinked structure of the
Newgrounds and the World Wide Web at large militates against any attempt to isolate a
single investigative space, rendering the idea of a stable community within a virtual
“space” problematic to begin with (Warnick 2007). Treating it as a genre that has special
meaning for and relationship to its audience in a way that can be extrapolated from the
text or generic designation is impossible.
Newgrounds’ collections such as “Art Games” should be regarded as digital
interpretive and meta-textual structures whose relationship with the texts it contains
and excludes as well as its meaning and salient for several different if potentially
overlapping groups (site administrators, content creators, and site users) are
ambiguous. For that reason it seems best to avoid treating the concept of “collection” or
any given collection as meaningful cultural categories with some kind of “special
relationship with a cultural origin or ‘absolute subject’” (Clifford 1988, 40) or an attempt
to see through discourse to “deeper” patterns in a manner reminiscent of Herbert
Blumer or (the later) Clifford Geertz. Both of these approaches risk sacrificing insight to
one’s own projections. At the same time one cannot ignore the category or employ it as a
sort of heuristic limit to the scope of study because it exists as both an element of the
interface and discourse of Newgrounds. Whether or not the category has particular
meaning for a given user, the fact that the category exists within in the interface itself
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renders it significant in –etic terms. Consider a parallel example within the Newgrounds
interface. For each submission one finds multiple groups of clearly related texts—the
animation, music or game and the meta-textual activities that take place quite literally
around it within the affordances provided by the Newgrounds website. This
differentiation, coded into the interface, serves as both discursive and non-discursive
forms of meta-textual activity. For games in a Newgrounds collection a second non-
discursive meta-textual element designates these games as members of a related set. As
a collection “Art Games” structures access to Newgrounds’s material both in terms of
how the site responds to users’ searches or browsing as well as determining some of the
hyperlinks found on a member submission’s page. “Art Games” as a category exists as a
definite aspect of interface, and as a result one can justify the attempt to describe the
games it contains in terms of their formal properties, to draw comparisons between
them, and to ascertain where and if meaningful relationships exist within this category
even if we can’t define it as a “genre” in a traditional sense. As such, studying the
contents of the non-discursive, material category “Art Games” makes sense, even if its
discursive salience of users is uncertain.
A field of potential textual objects has been established and the potential for
meaning of the extension and intension of that field brought into question, so now more
extensive forms of textual analysis can be brought to bear. These analyses are “more
extensive” because the work of textual analysis is already well underway—textual
aspects of the interface have been interpreted, para-textual elements described and
given meaning in relation to textual elements (and vice versa). So far these analytical
efforts have followed familiar forms and have focused on a primarily heuristic level—
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which is to say that they have dealt with signification as a fairly transparent
phenomenon. The next set of textual analytic moves takes a slightly more sophisticated
form. To illustrate the contingency of these moves, the passages that follow employ an
extremely overt form of attention to “mode of perception,” far more so than would likely
be required in typical application of textual analysis. For lack of more appropriate lexical
affordances I would like to place the next step in my analysis in quotation marks even as
I articulate it. I hope the reader will understand these quotation marks are born out of
necessity and not out of undue self-regard:
“While there is a great deal of diversity even within the relatively small number of
games included in the “Art Games” category they clearly share certain stylistic
influences. Three distinct trends seem especially salient; trends which I will refer to here
as meta-gaming, retro-gaming, and political advocacy. None of these categories should
be understood as exclusive, and many games occupy all three (with most occupying at
least two). The category of meta-gaming is fairly self-explanatory: games in the “art
games” collection often tend to explicitly emphasize the mechanics of gameplay,
whether that be the interface, the structure of the games affordances, or the available
narrative arcs one can form from these affordances. One common variety of meta-
gaming employs extremely limited and/or very structured interaction to high-light the
impermeability of the interface and communicate powerlessness. For example, Good
Fortune
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allows the player to perform one of two actions: pray for wealth and check the
door to see if wealth shows up. It doesn’t. The move here can obviously be equated to
Modernist strategies of ‘baring the device’ that seek to highlight the moment of

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mediation. I Wish I were the Moon
115
provides a more sophisticated example. In this
game the player is, without title screen or explanation show a rather pathetic (in the old
sense of the word) scene of a woman in a rowboat gazing up at an apparently indifferent
man sitting on the moon. A heart floats above the man’s head—he is content.
Occasionally a bird flies by. If the player does nothing than nothing changes—the system
stays in stasis. However, some experimentation reveals that the player can move the two
principles, the bird, the stars, and the moon itself in the form of what appear to be
Polaroid snapshots. Generically, the game doesn’t seem to fit with any traditional
categories of gaming, particularly not the majority of those found on Newgrounds.”
The interpretive moves in this passage are quite familiar. While disclaiming the
existence of a definite generic origin around which the texts in “Art Games” coalesce the
concept of “style” is invoked to ground comparison within the group. Unlike genre
which often has a certain generative connotation style suggests something more akin to
simple comparison without speculation as to origin, although it does contain a whisper
of the idea of a shared practice of text making (although that whisper is not
acknowledged). Even speaking about these matters must seem tedious, and that is
precisely the point—most likely readers of this passage are fully vested practitioners of
very similar interpretive practices and veterans producers of such interpretive
performances. From the point of view of performance the description of “I Wish I were
the Moon” deserves attention for the stylistic shift employed in the description of the
game. The only point of variation takes place when the affordances of the game Good
Fortune are invoked as textual traits in the spirit of “procedural authorship,” but both

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the location and the choice are themselves familiar within existing interpretive schema
for video games (see Chapter 2 for relevant examples). This style of interpretation will
continue, albeit with only implied quotation marks:
Returning to meta-gaming, these games also tend to employ multi-endings.
Strictly speaking, virtually all video games contain the potential for multiple endings:
the binary win/lose state. However, in these situations, and in many other games that
employ more sophisticated multiple ending structures, the “lose” ending is in fact
merely a way-station to the true “win” ending that finally erases the false “lose” endings
and forms the final coherent narrative. In many meta-games multiple endings are
instead used to represent an ambiguous field of potential actions: the endings coexist
and inform rather than replace each other. Returning to I Wish I were the Moon, if you
move the man to the boat the moon floats away, and he looks depressed (to emphasize
this fact the player is told they won the “lost love” ending). One can move beyond this
ending by moving the moon to the man’s position, at which point he happily embraces it
and ignores his female counter-part. If one drops one or both parties in the ocean one
receives the “tragedy” ending. Switching their positions results in the original scenario
with the parties changed (the “I am your moon” ending). There is no ending in which
the implicit “love story” is resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, nor is there an ending that
is indicated as otherwise more complete. Instead, the game suggests the variation on the
stasis within the original scenario. I wish I were the Moon is a true dilemma: there are a
small set of actions one can take but there are no solutions. In fact, since the choices one
makes only really serves to highlight aspects of the original scenario, there is in fact
virtually no real change.
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The trend of retro-gaming
116
tends to take shape at the level of visual and
auditory style. Games characterized by this retro-gaming style tend to employ
purposefully primitive graphics and sound, especially 8-bit graphics that harken to the
computer and console games of the 1980s, as well as simple and/or obsolete forms of
interface. Retro-gaming and meta-gaming are usually closely allied, as we can see in the
unassumingly titled Don’t Shit your Pants.
117
Here, retro-gaming style serves to further
emphasize the game’s “gameness” and in so doing resonates neatly with its meta-
gaming structure. The game Don’t Shit your Pants seems like an odd inclusion in a
category called “Art Games,” or at the very least an unexpectedly Rabelaisian one.
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Its
title is fairly self-explanatory—you are in control of a man who needs your assistance in
successfully relieving his bowels. Visually, the game is very much of the retro-gaming
style. The graphics are 8-bit, and the interface requires one to type in actions at the
bottom of the screen in a DOS-like environment reminiscent of pre-graphic user
interface games such as Zork. In typical meta-gaming style, the primary obstacle to this
project is the typing interface itself. One is allowed to take nothing for granted. If one
attempts to enter the bathroom, the door doesn’t respond until one specifies “pulling”
rather than pushing the door. One must also clarify entering the bathroom, removing
one’s pants (in the correct order of course), and finally the titular act itself. Like many

116
This should not be confused with the hobby of retro-gaming which involves the pursuit, playing, and
connoisseurship of older games and gaming systems.
117
Although most games that employ a retro-gaming style in the “art games” collection clearly also employ a meta-
gaming structure, it is quite possible to have one without the other. The commercial games Smash TV or Grand Theft
Auto 2 both employ meta-gaming elements but do so without invoking older visual or aural styles—although
interestingly Smash TV accomplish this by remediating the form of the television game show. On the other hand,
games such as the recently released Mega Man10 employ retro-gaming style without meta-gaming structure. Still,
the two trends are often closely related as a favored means for video games to “bear the device.”
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games in the “art games” category, Don’t Shit your Pants has multiple endings and
finding each ending gives the player a new award
Games such as Looming
119
employ a more atmospheric use of retro-gaming
aesthetics, using a black, while, and grey color scheme to evoke the spare, seemingly
abandoned world of “Looming.” Here the use of primitive graphics serves a more
visceral purpose. Rather than harkening back to a different age of gaming, it suggests
the unknowable, the uncanny, and the content of emptiness. This attention to negative
space resonates with the mysterious artifacts that litter Loomings grey world which
point to, but do not define, previous ages lost to memory. This is an autumnal world,
verging on winter—as the player’s character’s name “September” suggests. September’s
journey through Looming are framed by letters to his (or her) unknown other—
January—in what can only be described as a sledge-hammer blow of over-determined
metaphor. In case further reinforcement for this point were needed, attention to the
shadings of many of the pixels indicate an (unseen) light source situated to somewhere
at the bottom left of the field. Accepting the map convention that up is North suggests
that this source is none other than sunset. Yet for all its sparseness Looming also
possesses a strange sort of pan-psychism. While most of its pixels sit in still, ordered
fields or coalesce into the occasional structure or cloud, some scamper away from one’s
passage or flit about like insects. Something lives here, but perhaps not something
human.

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Finally, certain games explicitly advocate a stance on a political issue through the
medium of satire. If meta-gaming and retro-gaming operate primarily at the levels of
structure and audio-visual style respectively, then advocacy games can similarly be said
to operate primarily at the level of their explicit content. Despite the fact that many
games in the “art games” collection employ a very earnest tone, all of the games that
take political positions operate exclusively in the register of irony and camp. Sweatshop
Boy
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typifies all three of these stylistic trends. In it the player plays the role of a young
boy working at a sewing machine in a sweatshop. Pressing the keys “F” and “J”
constitute the entirety of the player’s interaction with the game, and the objective is to
balance the boy’s energy level with his need to produce a certain amount of goods,
particularly when the factory foreman walks by. Failure to manage the boy’s energy
results in his collapse, and failure to produce enough materials results in his
apprehension by officials. One or the other is inevitable, but following such failure you
are instantly provided with a new, identical boy. The goal, such as there is one, is to
make the most amount of money before perishing. Visually and aurally the game
invokes the 8-bit graphics and digital music of 1980s video games and its meaningless
high score system revives the days of arcade cabinets. The limited and ultimately futile
interaction the player is afforded high-lights the game’s mechanics in typical meta-
gaming style, and this powerlessness resonates with the game’s rather straight-forward
message (presumably, sweat shops are bad). Sweatshop Boy offers a clear cut example
of each of the three-trends in their most common forms: retro-gaming style and meta-
gaming structure mated with politically active content.

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Before any conclusions from these trends can be drawn due attention to the
contingency of my interpretive practice and performance requires that the potential
validity of any conclusion based on this analysis can only be as strong as the limits
placed upon its claims.. The interpretations were written so as to be as overtly “intra-
active” as possible. Interpretive choices were explicitly stated, as were the places where
choices could be made. The result is not a particularly sophisticated form of textual
analysis, but a fully workable one. Conclusions about how the identified trends might
constitute the intension of the “Art Games” collection as a potentially –emic category
requires that one attend to the potential divergences between the interpretive practice
above and the variety of interpretations Newgrounds users are likely to construct. While
one cannot hope to truly exhaust the full spectrum of possible meanings for the category
to take, certain issues seem likely to be relevant for many, if not all, users. The extent to
which my interpretive practice overlaps with that of other Newgrounds users remains an
open question, but in a move similar to that employed in the discussion of realism and
reality in chapter 4 potential boundaries could be set in the range of potential meanings.
First, we might hypothesize that if the title “Art Games” has any –emic meaning it
would hypothetically almost inevitably include the fact that its contents are “games” and
ask what constitutes them as such. The concept of games rewards description and vexes
definition, but one common avenue for seeking the “gameness” of games lies in studies
of play, particularly that of Roger Caillois. Expanding on Johann Huizinga’s (1950) work
on the concept of “play,” Caillois (2001) has attempted to provide a theoretical structure
for categorizing different kinds of play and games.
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Caillois argues that games and play

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activities can be divided between a small set of fundamental categories: Agon
(competition), Alea (chance), Mimicry, and Illinx (sensory instability or vertigo) (23).
These categories, in turn, contain activities that range along a spectrum between pchaos
(Paida) and order (Ludus) (27). For example, random childish rough-housing might be
categorized as Agon (with probable twists of Mimicry and Illinx) at the Paida pole while
a chess game would be an Agon activity at the Ludus pole. Assuming that one can pry at
least some insight from the concept of play (one plays games after all), we can use
Caillois’ categories to help describe the objects at hand.
The games contained in the category “Art Games” do not fit any of the four
fundamental categories of play very neatly. Most of them have little or no overt
competitive element (at least with a definite opponent or real “winning” outcome), or
meaningful use of chance. One sees some employment of Illinx, although these are very
mild and nothing compared to games that seem to trade on destabilization such as Four
Second Frenzy
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where the player is forced to rapidly adapt to incredibly brief, visually
over-stimulating mini-games. Some do seem to employ a sort of playful mimicry in the
act of taking on the role of, say, an amoral and acquisitive fast food CEO but even here
the case is tenuous and while such make-believe certainly constitutes play its
questionable whether it meets the more structured sense of a “game.” Moreover, these
instances of mimicry are not truly imaginative. In the submission McDonald’s
Videogame the player takes on the role of the head of the titular company and, if
successful, makes impressive progress toward the destruction of civilization. Here one
could be said to mimic the amoral CEO by entering into an interaction with a system of

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affordances that allows one to be that character and little else, but to what extent one
truly imaginatively personifies said CEO (internally or externally) is an open question.
On the Paida-Ludus spectrum one can situate all of these games fairly safely at the
Ludus end: most are highly structured and often have limited affordances for
interactivity. Still, that offers only a tangential attachment to Caillois’ categories. These
may be games, but it’s difficult to see how one “plays” them. Deduction from social
theory, it appears, ends in a cul-de-sac.
If the term game does not seem to afford potential boundaries on interpretation
then perhaps the term “art” might. Again, the issue is not that some kind of inherent
structure that generates the category “Art Games” exists, but that the use of the term
might have some –emic resonance. The use of “ar”t as a normative category seems like
the most likely employment here given the games taken collectively do seem (through
textual analysis) to share many salient traits. If this is the case then perhaps the term
encourages one to classify these games as special objects that transcend their otherwise
mean gameness to become elevated art objects worthy of special contemplation.
However, considering the number of methods for expressing and displaying aesthetic
judgments on the site, it seems unlikely that the “art games” collections can be treated
as simply as a category of elevated quality—especially since most of the games and
animations most lionized elsewhere on the site are not present in the art games
collection. It also seems questionable that a group of submissions including a game
called Don’t Shit your Pants can safely be considered a space of rarified contemplation
and ambitious creation.
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Alternatively, we might take art to refer to games that are explicitly formally
experimental. This seems more satisfying, especially in light of the wide-spread use of
meta-gaming techniques that foster impenetrability, strangeness, and a sense of the
uncanny. It appears that most of these games are “art” games in the sense reminiscent of
many high art discourses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—they seek to
alienate, to critique, to counter expectation. Indeed, many of the author’s statements
express the games’ experimental nature, sometimes in the mode of apology. Others beg
for players’ patience, knowing that their games will defy expectations. However,
virtually none explicitly invoke traditional high art discourses, with the possible
exception of I wish I were the Moon wherein the author explicitly recognizes the
inspiration of Italio Calvino. Still, the majority of these games seem to define an
experimental space (although a number of the advocacy games seem far less
experimental, particularly McDonald’s Videogame and The Free Culture Game
123
).
However, this space does not seem defined by an express attachment to any aesthetic
manifesto or canon. On these matters the games and their creators are largely silent.
Thus, even after examining submissions included in the category and attempting to
deduce potential limits imposed by the term “art games,” the –emic properties of the
collection remain elusive. From a network hermeneutic point of view one would not
expect otherwise, for a great deal of interpretive and meta-textual activity in the form of
users’ reviews remains to be addressed.

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The Politics and Poetics of Meta-Textual Activity
The “Art games” collection and its accompanying interfaces invite both
interpretative and meta-textual engagement, and that engagement occurs within the
context of subjective and intersubjective textual ecology. Turning from the game’s
themselves users’ reviews one is immediately struck by the enormity of the response. All
games in the “Art Games” collection have hundreds of written reviews (to say nothing of
the thousands of numerical votes and tens—sometimes hundreds—of thousands of
views) with several such as McDonald’s Videogame breaking a thousand reviews.
Clearly this is a vibrant space for the exploration of meta-textual activity! One is also
struck by the visual importance the design of the Newgrounds site assigns to reviews.
They are placed immediately below the author’s comments, and while only a few of the
most recent are displayed they are all archived. The mere fact of their being recorded
and archived in written language speaks to an important shift in the circulation of meta-
textual discourse, perhaps even an epochal one. The great difficulty of studying historic
responses to media of all forms lies in the fact that so little of it was recorded. With the
exception of valorized scholarly discourses, the relatively narrow channels of mass
media, marginalia, and the occasional diary, most meta-texts produced by most viewers
of media were oral and transitory. The move from the sphere of the oral to the sphere of
the written marks a radical shift, and the volume of resulting meta-textual artifacts is
staggering. Nor is this phenomenon limited to Newgrounds. Communication online that
takes place in what are essentially forms of annotation—be it in the form of written
commentary, numerical reviews, or link structures—is so pervasive as to be probably
immeasurable.
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This shift in the durability of meta-textual activity represents, in the words of
Jacques Ranciere, a moment of politics—albeit a politics of poetics. For Ranciere, the
essential division in societies operates at the level of the counted and the uncounted.
The counted are those who are understood to the ability to speak and can therefore
participate in public life. The uncounted, on the other hand, are only capable of voice—a
sort of animalistic vocalization that “indicates” rather than “expresses” (1999, 2).
Ranciere refers to this order as the “partition of the perceptible”—the implicit order that
governs and categorizes the social world (57). As a result the majority of what is
traditionally referred to as politics is, in Ranciere’s thinking, better described as various
modifications of the “police” order of society which modifies the relationships between
the various terms but leaves the basic schema itself intact. One example of this can be
found in Ranciere’s discussion of the Scythian slave rebellion where the slaves, while
rebellious, remained nonetheless within the partition of the perceptible that identified
them as slaves. As such when the Scythians attempted to fight them as they would fight
fellow warriors they were defeated, but when they returned with whips to punish them
as rebellious slaves they quickly overcame their adversaries. Politics only truly occurs on
those extraordinarily rare occasions when something disrupts the partition of the
perceptible, introducing what amounts to an unrecognizable impossibility that exposes
the non-object status of the existing order. By way of an example of this order and how it
can be disrupted, we can turn to Ranciere’s discussion of the Roman plebeians on the
Aventine Hill and their secession from the Roman partition of the perceptible (23-27).
From the position of the patricians attempting to deal with this outbreak, the plebeians
are among the uncounted who have no speech (only voice). To their shock, the plebeians
establish for themselves a separate order which, while imitating the forms of the
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patrician order, demands by its very existence acknowledgment of those within it as
equals. Thus when some among the patricians go to speak to the plebeians they have, in
essence, already given up the battle: they have admitted the contingency of the previous
order and responded to the plebeians as fellow speaking subjects.
By entering into the medium of the written word, reviews like those on
Newgrounds.com represent a variation on the moment of politics. The uncounted and
uncountable multitude of audience members have suddenly claimed the position of
speech largely denied them under the mass media paradigm. In traditional mass media
partition of the perceptible the audience was conceived of in what might be called the
voice of the box office. They spoke with their dollars and attention, and like animal cries
of pain or pleasure these were seen as indications of their preference. However, this is
not the world of the Roman patrician-plebeian conflict: the mass audience was a
counted part of the existing order although it existed as a grand reduction of
dissimilarity into a singularity. We see this most in the use of individual members of the
audience as representatives of the singularity in marketing research—they are not
individuals with their own distinct ethos and virtue, but rather isolated instances of the
larger system in the manner of a blood sample. For, unlike the Romans, modernity has
penetrated the opacity of voice through the operations of experts who can translate the
cries of the audience into meaningful speech. Whether it be in the context of a senate
hearing, market research, or a journalist getting the “man on the street’s” opinion, those
incapable of speech can be diagnosed, much like that blood sample, by the relevant
authorities. Examples were sought not for their idiosyncrasy or individual interest, but
for their representativeness. Thus the audience members were not themselves
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uncounted, per se, but were rather counted as non-individual parts of a sort of super-
entity.
The potentially political import of durable meta-textual performances such as
written reviews on Newgrounds comes from the fact that they represent not simply the
voice of preference or second-hand speech curated by experts but rather the meaningful
speech of individual subjects. However, the content of this speech introduces an
unexpected problem. As mentioned above, one would expect reviews within the
collection “art games” to be more focused on dealing with issues of interpretation and
aesthetics that might otherwise remain implicit in reviews that fit more comfortably into
pre-existing categories. At least, one would think that the primary method of textual
criticism—exegesis—would be in evidence. However, the vast majority of the reviews
offered by site users’ focus entirely on their personal reaction to the game—usually
expressions of either like or dislike.
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One rarely sees what might be described as
exegesis, the work of constructing canons or authorial identities, or attempts to
formulate aesthetic standards. For example, user Zoe1990 responded to the game I wish
I were the Moon by saying that it gave her goosebumps.
125
Most are less explicit,
employing simple statements of pleasure or displeasure, like or dislike. Jackill076
simply states: “Kind of cheesy but I like it. Good job!” Those reviewers that do not
explicitly express personal response still tend to do so implicitly. Deprofoundis observed
that the game was an “interesting experimental game though I am not sure if the
endings made any sense to me or the actions I had to perform.” Throughout user

124
Note also that textual analysis has returned, once again in the relatively transparent form of reproducing
signification and noting simple similarities.
125
Unfortunately Newgrounds does not provide stable links to individual user reviews, and since the organization of
the reviews changes as new reviews are added there is no reliable way to reference them. As such, the best method
for returning to them is to go through the individual game pages and search.
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reviews self-expression serves the primary meta-textual mode, with exegesis playing
little or no role.
The game Air Pressure provides a number of interesting examples of the tension
between exegesis and self-expression, if only because the meta-texts surrounding it are
rather exceptional. Many of the reviewers note that the game—which seems to deal with
a unhealthy relationship—is actually an allegory for drug abuse. For example, the user
GreenGames provides an extensive exegesis of the game, noting that he observes that he
thinks the “girl represents heroine,” providing a number of points of support including
the observation that the game’s protagonist states that she “wrapped herself around my
arm.” Hixomdido comes to a different conclusion based on the same textual cue by
noting that the protagonist referred specifically to his left arm and since most people are
right handed than she probably represents self-cutting. Many other users express their
satisfaction with the game, but note that they don’t feel that they understand it and wish
someone would interpret it for them. However, many user responses are still more in
line with user Nishikido’s comment: “Wow, just got /that/ ending... wow... This was
beautiful. Actually... it made me look forward to more of this kind of thing from you. I
hope to see it. Wow... Wow. It was really great.” In the case of Air Pressure it’s
interesting to note that while the users are attempting to unwrap the puzzle of the game,
their project tends to end there. The game, the reviewers seem to agree, is a sort of
riddle with a solution, and the objective of their meta-textual intervention is either to
request help in finding that solution or to provide their argument in favor of a preferred
theory. This is at best a very limited sort of exegesis, closer to share video game tips than
an attempt to engage extensively with the text. Which leads one to the fundamental
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problem with engaging with these meta-texts: they seem to simply represent bad
criticism. The use of simple “I like/I don’t like” statements or similar self-expressions
are of the sort that high school English teachers spend countless gallons of red ink trying
to purge from their mid-terms. Such self-expression is proper exegesis’ dark other, for
the decorum of proper meta-textual activity requires that one employ an argumentative
form that seeks to purge, or at least minimize, pure individual idiosyncrasy.
These meta-textual performances take place in a sort of virtual public space,
albeit one heavily structured by technological affordance. These reviews are part of a
loosely structured but nonetheless coherent sphere of textual criticism. The relationship
between technology and emerging discourses on Newgrounds bears an informative sort
of inverse relationship with Michael Warner’s (1990) characterization of the creation of
public life in the American colonies. He argues that the increasing tendency toward
anonymity among authors and the technological affordances of print discourse were not
merely coincidental with the foundation of the American public sphere but constitutive
of it. Prior to this period, he argues, public life was understood in terms of the continuity
and solidity of shared traditions as well as the individual interactions of members of
society. This new print discourse created a new space for written communication where
it was possible for colonists to “exchange not as a relation between themselves as men,
but rather as their own mediation by a potentially limitless discourse” (40). As a result
public speech was no longer a species of interpersonal communication with a specific
material context but an “exchange can be read and participated in by any number of
unknown and in principle unknowable others” (40). By effacing the self it became
possible to speak both as and to the public, occupying an abstract shared space that is, at
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least theoretically, available to all. By occupying this space and effacing the self one also
invokes the authority of one’s personal disinterest in public affairs.
So if self-expression is the valorized form of discourse for users’ meta-texts in the
art games collection, than one might similarly ask what sort of “sphere” of textual
criticism they are creating. The most obvious answers are all deeply pessimistic. On the
one hand, one can return to Ranciere and observe that while the users of Newgrounds
have entered into an apparently new relationship with texts thanks to their ability to
comment on them in an enduring form to a large audience, the actual result of this
practice is only the proliferation of indication, not speech. The problem isn’t simply that
self-expression in this mode seems closer to the aforementioned animal cries of pleasure
and displeasure, but that despite the relative endurance of user’s contributions to the
site they very rarely refer to each other in any sustained way. In this the discussion
around Air Pressure is again unique in that it actually approaches the status of a
discussion. Without interaction, with contact between statements made across time, one
cannot reasonably say that there is truly any discourse here except that inherited from
other sites. The lack of discussion of interpretive norms, of shared aesthetic principles,
or of canons similarly suggests that user reviews on Newgrounds don’t represent a new
sphere of meta-text but rather are evidence of the complete evacuation of the possibility
of meaningful shared discussion of texts. Individual users do not invoke shared norms
or concepts because they don’t believe there are any.
This pessimism is, thankfully, premature. Rather than treat the reviews of
Newgrounds users as, by and large, simply untutored or bad criticism one should treat
them, like the patricians facing the rebels on the Aventine Hill, as potential objects of
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another order. Fortunately, this possible order is not without precedent. David Randall
(2008) argues that an important part of the shift that underlay the emergence of the
literary public sphere “derived particularly from transformations in the concepts of
ethos and auctoritas” (222). In short, Randall attempts to demonstrate that the textual
authority of authors shifted historically from an emphasis on the author as a speaking
individual (where their ethos was of critical importance) to the author writing as truthful
witness to the characters within his narratives thoughts and actions. The author, already
channeled towards greater anonymity by print and commercial culture (as Warner
noted above), slowly surrendered the authority of the text to its characters. When the
author was that character, however, a very different sort of witnessing took place.
Authors like Montaigne still claimed a sort of ethos by invoking their sincerity and
openness—making ethos “a function of the truthfully expressed self” (235). Much like
authors of literary fiction were increasingly acting to provide reliable access to the
external and internal worlds of their characters; other authors were attempting to
provide similar access to their selves. This may seem superficially incompatible with
Warner’s view of the American political public sphere, but Randall argues that one can
find in these shifts in the literary public sphere the stirrings of the political public
sphere’s conception of the individual and its parsing of private and public. They are very
different but ultimately allied operations—one dealing in the public and the other
dealing in the private—that together form the necessary context for expression both
public and political and literary and private.

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If this is the case, then one might reasonably assert that the reviews on
Newgrounds represent a reconfiguration of public vs. private utterance. Whereas
traditionally valorized practices of producing meta-texts on art objects have emphasized
the need to efface “merely” personal reaction, these reviews re-assert the importance of
individual response and its meaningfulness as a public form of expression. And this may
be partially true, but these reviews seem like very limited forms of sincerity. While
Montaigne might have promised full and unfettered access to the sheltered places of his
private self (whether he provided them or not), these reviews largely take the form not
of full revelation but controlled performances. One must ask what the purpose of these
reviews could be. Of course, in an online social setting, social visibility is finite, and
therefore only a limited number of participants will be able to truly speak publicly to the
group as a whole, so as a result one might reasonably question whether they are truly
“public” utterances simply by virtue of being potentially public (Butler 2001). Still, in
one sense they serve, like many Q&A and advice giving contexts, as mediums for group
formation whether or not any individual utterances is truly directed to the group
(Mackenzie 2006). In fact, the mere act of producing reviews could serve as a valuable
tool for construction of the self in the manner of Spigel’s (2005) concept of “conspicuous
production,” a possibility supported by the amount of information provided to users on
other users activities.
All of these issues, then, center on the question of constructing the self within a
shared social space, and review writing is in fact only one small part of the large number
for affordances provided by Newgrounds.com to create an online persona. Henry
Jenkins (2006) argues that one can conceptualize the relationship between use and
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interface by conceptualizing them as dialectic between the strictures of the coded
interface and the relatively open-ended practices of participation. This approach,
however, risks understating the importance of the interface in providing not just
restrictions on participation by affordances for its articulation (although Jenkins himself
urges against this view). Lessig (2006), on the other hand, focuses on how interface
create spaces for the realization of use, and following this angle of attack one is
staggered by the number of avenue available to Newgrounds users for the construction
and expression of their online selves. As mentioned above, each Newgrounds user has
an individual page for their profile which contains a considerable amount of information
on their activities on the sight as well as spaces for more controlled self-expression such
as autobiographical sketches, graphic avatars, and personal posts. The user also has the
opportunity to express their critical point of view in rather simple terms by adopting a
color-coded “alignment” for the graphic representing their voting power ranging from
generous to critical.
Reviews provide another occasion for creating their online selves, but a very
challenging one. Much like in Warner’s discussion of the creation of the American public
sphere’s public, these reviewers face the problem of attempting to deal with the
multitude of potential future audiences and contexts. To some extent reviewers attempt
to control his problem by attempting to construct their own audience and context—
particularly in terms of whether their review should be characterized as, à la Goffman
(1959), a front- or back-stage utterance. For example, in the discussions of the
allegorical content of Air Pressure mentioned above, the reviewers are clearly
articulating their audience as being their fellow users. User Zanguche, on the other
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hand, addressed his comment directly to the author, stating that “This game was SO like
my relationship with my girl. I hate you.” Both are public utterances, but in the latter
case other readers are constructed as over-hearing an exchange between Zanguche and
the creator rather than as the sole audience of that communication. In his or her review
of the submission The Man who Sold the World,
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user Evillemon2 provides a lengthy
critique of the game in which the wide-spread use of the second person indicates that it
was clearly written directly to the game’s creator with little or no sense of a potential
wider audience. In fact, it reads like a rather harsh rejection letter:
I couldn't even finish the game it is so bad. This is a harsh rating only because I
felt that it had potential. First off, your music does not suit at all….Maybe you
made the music yourself. Maybe your friend made it for you. It does not mean
that you should use it. If you try to pull off a game like this (one with a message
instead of actual game-play) then you need to have all of the important
components….I understand that you tried to put emphasis on him being of a
different nature, but that is foolish….Also, collecting things in the level without
knowing what they are is a waste of an idea. Explain more. We are saving
humanity. Okay. How...? Did you ever ask yourself that? I look forward to future
games from you and I hope that you found this review helpful. Good luck to you.

Reviewers also employ language to construct the context of their review. Many
reviewers of Air Pressure, and again the game is somewhat unique in the number of
such reviews, provide rather formal responses. Ocere, for example, provides a lengthy
response:

126
http://www.newgrounds.com/collection/artgames
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Assuredly deep though in a way that I cannot identify with. I think one of the core
concepts of these "choose your action" novels is to allow the reader to choose
what he would do in any given situation and then color not only the story, but the
main character, to fit the reader instead of the other way around and not just
convey a point like a regular movie or novel. Instead I feel as though I am playing
through this stranger who has made slightly different choices, but hasn't really
changed at all despite those choices. Like a single unchanging individual who has
simply fallen into different circumstances […] Its not bad by any means, but at
the same time I can't say I enjoyed myself either. I too am part of the crowd am I
not?
Other users employ more clearly back-stage utterances employing informality
and short-hand. SpazMoticMonkey addresses her fellow users with “im sorry but will
someone explane [sic] to me what just happened.” Familyguygirl asks “Its Cute! But why
was he in the hospital? Did he do ‘IT,’” leaving the question of what “it” she’s referring to
unanswered. In all of these case, whether intentionally or not, the reviewers are
attempting to provide an implicit context for their future readers that the Newgrounds
interface itself does not provide them. The question of how realistic these strategies are
is another matter. Obviously despite their best efforts to contextualize their own
reviews, reviewers still must rely on the willingness of their future interpreters to accept
this contextualization. The fact remains that they face the dilemma of addressing
themselves to vast unknowable assembly of possible future re-situations of their
reviews, and must reckon with the problems of both a multitude of multitudes and a
void.

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Meta-Textual Reunion: Expression from Self to Other
This made my eyes cry, hard, beautiful concept, beautiful music, sad story... I was
depressed, I feel like the man... He made me happy to know, even though Earth was
gone, it's Spirit, Love, Daring, and Wisdom will remain in the galaxy, the universe... And
humanity may never exist, but something out there in the world will pick it up and learn
our ways, and become a new Earth, withpirit, Love, Daring and Wisdom, they will haev
there own. Ours. X") BEAUTIFUL I <3 YOU!!!”
—User CMS200 on The Man Who Sold the World
This issue of the void of unknowable multitudes of others acts as a critical motive
force for both reviews and games in the “art games” collection—a sort of strange
attractor toward which all of this complexity and variety trends. If the lack of exegesis, of
canon building, and of explication of specific aesthetic programs suggests a lack of a
shared context for interpretation, there seems to be an at least implicit strain against
this difficulty—a sort of anti-postmodern move against fragmentation. They share the
project of creating an “us,” an interpretive regime created in situ that restores meaning
to communication and identity to communicators. Returning to the three stylistic trends
mentioned above, we can see that each trend invokes a specific imagined community.
Meta-gaming invokes a community of gamers, a group joined by their affinity for video
games (or at least games). By thwarting the expectations that a shared sense of games
has provided for this group, it serves to re-enforce those expectations and emphasize
their “sharedness.” Retro-gaming performs a similar action at the level of generation
and, to a slightly lesser extent, social class—invoking a shared nostalgia for the material
culture of the past. Advocacy games, in turn, speak to a community of affect based on
shared beliefs. The attitude of irony shared by these games does not seek to convince,
but to invoke a shared sense of dissatisfaction and, one suspects, disempowerment.
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If the games attempt to call this group into existence, the expressivism of the
reviews acts as a sort of declaration of inclusion within that group. Much like Ranciere’s
partition of the perceptible, whether one comes down in favor or against an individual
submissions one still votes within the confines of the understood shared space. Appeal
to the implicit authority of personal response replaces explicit interpretive exegesis,
even if that response is not necessarily unmediated access to the secret self in the
manner of Montaigne’s sincerity. Sometimes even hermeneutic practice is subsumed
into the expressive mode. For example, the reviewer Arawanach, writing on the game
Apples in the Tree, said that the game “feels deep, but I don’t really get it. The apples.
She just throws them into the water. And the tree seems to get sick as the apples go
down….” Arawanach employs traditional hermeneutic moves—isolating textual cues ten
translating them into critical language—but the results is not explication; instead, it
evokes Arawanach’s own experience of the game’s “deepness.” In these situations, the
appeal to self acts as a moment of mutual recognition, a gesture of shared personhood
where the self offers the last inalienable grounding for a “naturalized” sense of the real.
Thus meta-theoretical language, as such, would be instantly suspect for it would de-
naturalize the presumed authority of individual response. If post-modern aesthetics
glorified the fragment, then on Newgrounds we find an aesthetic of reunion.
For example, in the intensely psychological Looming, the invocation of the
primitive interface can be seen as an invocation of generational “lack,” a return to the
simplicity and uncanny excitement of a childhood defined by similar texts. The
autumnal atmosphere is that of nostalgia, and the undirected through the star field of
the past—translated here into two dimensions—to re-examine incomprehensible
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artifacts suggest that nostalgia’s counterpart is not merely exhaustion, but otherness.
The past is lost, the apparent continuity of the self illusory. This loss is not forgetting.
Forgetting at least leaves lacunae that mark the absences it creates, but here one is an
alien in the world of memory and even the gaps are not your own. Looming is first and
foremost a lonely world, a fact only highlighted by the alien life that seems to move
some of its pixels, by the absent January, and by the relics of a lost past, and in this
inherent in this loneliness is the yearning for a comprehensible other: an other like
oneself. Looming offers a radical plea for the re-structuring of the past into meaningful
memory, but suggests that the creation of such memory is impossible without others.
Within the three stylistic trends we can also isolate a number of binaries that this
aesthetic of reunion attempts to navigate. First, and we find this primarily within the
meta-gaming trend, is the issue of comprehensibility vs. strangeness. While a certain
degree of strangeness is definitely embraced by Newgrounds users, the example of Air
Pressure mentioned above suggests that there is a definite limit. A work can be strange,
but it must still be comprehensible. Hence the treatment of Air Pressure as a sort of
riddle: while many users declared that they just didn’t get “it,” they did not renounce the
existence of an “it” to get. Even a cursory survey of reviews of other games reveals a
similar set of response: games are praised for being complex and interesting but
condemned for being unapproachable (sometimes coded as “pretentious”). The critical
danger of this binary lies in the possibility of the alienating power of art to unravel an
already tenuous sense of shared context.

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Nostalgia operates on a similar register in retro-games, revealing a tension
between a personal and a collective past. While many site users no doubt were not
children during the 1980s when games of this style were current, they none the less
seem to accept them as part of “their” history. Here the danger lies in the potential for
the assumed group to unravel through the denaturalization of this consumer good based
history. Nostalgia itself exists in tension with the possibility of exhaustion—the point at
which the repeated reproduction of the imagined historical moment ceases to carry its
charge due to its increasing present-ness. In this the aesthetic of reunion moves
radically away from the postmodern. These retro styles are not reproduced as surfaces
to be manipulated, but as signifiers of a shared personal reality that carries an affective
charge. At this point there does not seem to be a coherent move toward expressing
exhaustion, but its potential haunts the retro-game style nonetheless.
Within political advocacy games we find a similarly empty space opposing irony
and satire: where is commitment and directness? Considering that so much else seems
rooted in a form of sincerity it might seem extremely odd that commitment is not the
primary register of political advocacy games, but that would be begging the issue. These
games are operating in a space where sincere commitment to a political program is
already suspect because the lack of a shared context of meaning is so powerfully felt.
Instead, commitment shifts in register to the sincere expression of cynicism as a
sentiment, a move that neatly requires no move beyond the expression of shared state.
While we again do not wish to place too much emphasis on the importance of what is or
isn’t included in the category from a generic point of view, it’s worth noting that these
games are in the distinct minority. This may be so because they push the implicit
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question of the aesthetics of the reunion—who is us?—to an uncomfortably explicit level
by creating grounds for fissure.
Ultimately the aesthetic of reunion suggests a sort of utopian yearning for the
anti-postmodern and non-Modern world of authentically “popular” culture, perhaps
even “folk” culture. However, unlike folk culture authenticity here is still primarily
underwritten by consumption rather than production (it matters that we all liked it, not
that we didn’t make it). One might be tempted to treat this as a resurgence of a
Romantic worldview, but this too seems only partially accurate. The Romantics
valorized the individual where the aesthetic of reunion assumes the individual and
attempts to reintegrate it into the whole. The communal life of the online world serves
as the space for authenticity and regeneration, replacing the Romantic obsession with
nature. Sentiment is now an end in itself, and commitment is ham-strung by irony. If
anything, this may represent the first fully anti-Romantic aesthetic movement, if it can
be considered a movement at all. The aesthetic of reunion does support a clearer
conclusion—that meta-textual practice and performance are informed by the social as
much as the textual. Since these games provide opportunities for this process of meta-
textual convergence it stands to reason that interpretive practice, while less explicitly
performed, is also subject to this social influence. If one wishes to employ texts to create
community or to inform shared communication one must interpret them in a manner
comprehensible to others. Effacing the process of interpretation helps to conceal the
contingency of that interpretive work—that it could be other than it is and that the
fragile and hoped for moment of reunion could spiral out into Babel.
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Could this desire to find authentic community and shared identity through meta-
textual performance be found throughout online spaces? Perhaps. At the very least the
caution with which one must employ the “Art Games” category suggests that it would be
erroneous to assume that meta-textual reunion is limited to it. Besides, even casual
consideration can quickly enumerate other sites that seem to resonate with this point of
view. Consider, for example, the current vogue for zombie apocalypse survival literature.
In these tales individuals are radically ejected from everyday social reality in a visceral
nightmare of moment to moment survival. Hardly the stuff of escapist reading, at least
until one considers that these works are in fact utopian. The world they portray is a
world fully returned to the real, and to the real as comprehensible at the scale of the
individual. Actions matter, the formation of groups and alliances are authentic, irony is
displaced by pressing need, and despite the zombie fiction tendency to trade in shades of
moral gray the fact remains that at least one definite enemy Other is always in evidence.
These stories represent a desire to return to a truly human world, albeit through the
medium of extinguishing it. So too does the aesthetic of reunion found on Newgrounds
speak of an urge for the overthrow of postmodern fragmentation and Modern
alienation, a return to the self, and to each other.
Conclusion: The Meta-textual and the Interpretive
For network hermeneutics textual interpretive methods provide a critical method
through which to relate one’s own meta-textual activity to that of others. In the study
above textual interpretation took two forms—explication of “works” and social
hermeneutic inquiry into the relationship between symbolic phenomena and hidden
social and psychological structures. Both are typical applications of textual analysis,
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modified to fit with a new intra-active epistemology. Applied in this way interpretations
can offer evidence with provisional generalizability to the interpretations of other
minds, but the more importantly they provide the means to relate one’s own practice to
that of others. Such conclusions still must remain attached to the fundamental principle
of intra-action. Other methods and other times and places could produce different,
equally valid results, but attention contingency allows them to relate meaningfully. It
remains possible to have meaningful debate about the outcomes of textual interpretive
methods as objective facts, even if we can’t discuss texts or their inherent meaning in
similarly objective terms.
The outcome of this chapter’s analysis confirms that very fact: by employing
textual analysis and meta-textual performances of explication the interpretative method
of this chapter diverged widely from the more affective, identity oriented meta-textual
performances of Newgrounds users. Newgrounds users tend to assume interpretation
and comprehensibility between interpreters, rarely if ever engaging in the sort of
extended exegetical performance found in this chapter. This chapter, in turn, avoids
affect except in occasional footnotes
127
and deals with matters of group and identity
implicitly through application of academic practice. While the potential audience for
both performances are ambiguous, Newgrounds users employed language to designate
their understanding of their audience far more extensively than this chapter which
tended to avoid the both the first and second person in favor of the questionable
neutrality of the third. These meta-textual practices differ, but remain mutually
comprehensible and can be compared in similar terms even with their vastly different

127
Although not this one.
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approach to interpretative activity. Meta-textual horizons do not fully converge, but in
sharing a space relationship, if not identity, becomes possible.

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Chapter 8: Conclusion

Textual hermeneutics is the study of textual interpretation, and interpretation is
the activity through which texts are made potential and actual objects of knowledge.
This means that interpretation both renders the text as phenomenon susceptible to
knowing and provides at least part of the system in which that knowledge is
comprehensible. Textual hermeneutics is the study of textual interpretation, although it
is oftentimes treated primarily as the theory behind the proper application of
interpretive practice. This is both a natural and necessary part of hermeneutics, but
application of normative interpretive standards alone does not adequately fulfill the
larger mandate to study interpretation. Textual interpretation is every day and
everywhere: a wilderness run riot while we have tended our garden. In fact,
interpretation is so ubiquitous that it verges on invisibility, which perhaps explains why
systematized hermeneutic theory as such only emerged in seventeenth and eighteenth
century Europe after millennia of interpretive theory and practice and out of a profound
series of religious, social, economic, and political crises. The search for systematic
accounts of interpretation evolved, most famously with the work of Friedrich
Schleiermacher, into the search for a general hermeneutic theory—a single theory that
could account for all forms of interpretation regardless of textual genre or historical
context. While hermeneutic theory as a whole would eventually shift to more general
epistemological and ontological questions through the work of Edmund Husserl and
Martin Heidegger, the use of textual interpretation as a methodology ensured strictly
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textual hermeneutics’ continued relevance in virtually every division of the humanities
and social sciences.
The theory of interpretation that informs the continued application of textual
interpretation and the study of interpretation as such largely rests on three foundational
concepts. First, the view that texts are objects with an independent existence and
definable, durable traits, a concept I call textual realism. This viewpoint is surprisingly
wide-spread: even those theories that champion the power of interpreters against the
text commonly resort to the idea of objective textual traits. Those traits in the form of
“cracks and fissures” or “readerly” texts are often the source of the interpreter’s freedom
to interpret. Second, that interpreter’s and readers have a fundamentally interactive
relationship as two distinct entities influencing one another in specific ways, with degree
of relative influence a key source of theoretical contention. With the advent of the
“school of suspicion” and greater concern over the power of texts—particularly mass
media texts—to enforce certain interpretations the text/interpreter relationship was tied
to a text/interpreter power binary. In this model the text and interpreter are to varying
degrees in conflict, fighting over power to define the final interpretation. Together these
three theories have allowed textual hermeneutics and interpretive methods to evolve
and proliferate.
Unfortunately, textual realism, the interactive model, and the power binary are
only partially adequate to studying texts within a digital media ecology. The idea of an
objective text with definite traits becomes problematic with interactive texts that change
in response to interpreter actions, and thereby make the material text’s form directly
dependent on the interpreter. To rescue the textual realist epistemology and the practice
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of interpretation and hermeneutics it supports numerous theories have emerged to
account interactive texts through categories of ambiguity, incompleteness, multiplicity,
and textual change. These rescue efforts, and textual realism as a whole, share a similar
commitment to asserting the relevance of various conceptions of a “master text” (such as
that of an author’s “work” or an historical “document”) that can encompass interactive
variability within a still “objective” whole. While one might scruple with the need to
enforce definitions of “master text” on a text to render it interpretable, it permits one to
keeps textual realism intact. The problem of textual boundaries is more critical. Thanks
to the emergence of forms of continually evolving texts, hyperlinking structures,
permanent beta, and multiple authorship textual realism’s need to fix a master text for
interpretation becomes more and more a liability. Furthermore, as David Bordwell’s
critique of film theory demonstrates, even the most aggressively textually intensive
approach to textual interpretation is ultimately a convention bound practice that may or
may not reflect the textual interpretations or even the basic experience of the text, if one
wished to differentiate them, of an interpreter operating within a different interpretive
regime. Textual realism depends on a certain degree of objective validity to justify
asserting analogues between particular interpretations and interpretation of said text at
large. If texts do not have objectively definite traits and boundaries and cannot be
observed in non-conventional ways that validity rapidly deteriorates.
The text/interpreter interactive relationship also fails to account for the
specificity of digital media textual interpretation. The model of “interaction” requires
two distinct entities influencing one another. In the case of interactive texts textual form
is dependent on interpreter choices which, in turn, are in part dependent on textual
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form. This interdependence undermines the interactive model’s value as a means for
resolving the problem of “other minds”—the inaccessibility of others’ mental processes
of interpretation. If one can articulate a text as a definable object that is somehow
changed in interaction with the unknown other process of the interpretive activity of
another mind, one can derive information about that process based on the changes that
take place between text and interpretation. However, if text and interpreter are
interdependent rather than interactive then it becomes impossible to attribute any
modifications of the original object to the “other mind” alone based on variation from
the “baseline” interpretation because no baseline can truly exist. For example, one might
regard a particular poem as a relatively linear text, but when a potential interpreter uses
it for rhapsodomancy by selecting a random passage and interpreting its meaning in
relation to their current situation they are treating it in decidedly non-linear terms.
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Neither of these approaches can claim to be the baseline. This might not be a problem in
and of itself were it not for the fact that seeking to account for interpretive activity as
such, which is to say all interpretive activity, is precisely the interest of any general
hermeneutics. To study interpretation one cannot afford to set aside any interpretive
activity as simply idiosyncratic or incorrect interpretation that need not be explained
except as inevitable aberration. For that reason, the interactive model cannot suffice.
The text-interpreter power binary is based on mass media ecology, a historically
specific social, political, and economic configuration of the power to create and access
texts. The mass media model generally asserts that while means of access to texts, at
least some texts, are vastly democratized the production and distribution of texts is

128
The obvious comparison here being to the I Ching, in many ways the exemplar non-linear text.
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highly restricted. Behind this model lurks the fear of the influence of “bad” texts,
variously understood as degenerate from “good” culture, as hegemonic and repressive,
or simply as psychologically or socially dangerous. For the practice of interpreting texts
the mass media relationship between text and interpreter provides numerous potential
structurally binary semantic fields (e.g., good vs. bad, literary vs. non-literary,
hegemonic vs. resistant or oppositional, popular vs. folk, etc.) that in turn allowed for
interpretation of texts as part of a larger semiotic system of mass media. The particular
configuration of mass media, in turn, provided an empirical basis substantiating the
validity of arguments about the traits and effects of these texts. The resulting theoretical
system was dynamic and totalizing, accommodating even those texts that seem outside
of the mass media system as that system’s inevitable binary opposite. These binaries, in
turn, offered highly adaptable interpretive heuristics. For example, a text might be
analyzed as asserting the importance of authentic relationships with one’s work, which
in turn is tied to the non-hegemonic pole of a Neo-Marxist semantic field that is in turn
justified by a particular analysis of the material historical conditions of society. Various
theories might grant more power to interpreters or more power to texts, but the binary
provides the shared context for discussion. However, digital media has changed the
material conditions of the mass media ecology out of which this binary emerged. The
line between receivers and creators of texts is blurred. The material limits on the
distribution and durability of texts created outside of mass media systems are
undermined by internet communication technology. As a result the mass media model
of textual power can no longer serve as an adequate interpretive heuristic, which
undermines the generalizability of textual interpretation and requires a new, more
subtle form of power analysis.
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To address these problems I have argued for a new kind of hermeneutics, a
network hermeneutics. Network hermeneutics argues that the social practices of textual
interpretation and meta-textual activity create the uniformity and diversity that one
observes in textual interpretation as it exists in the world. In this I differentiate
interpretive activity from more general meta-textual activity, or the set of practices and
performances that are in whole or in part about texts. Interpretive activity is a species of
meta-textual activity, alongside other activities through which texts are put to use (e.g.,
as cognitive tools) or made to have meaning (e.g., as sources of identity). These
activities involve both practices and performances—both socially learned processes.
Interpretive and meta-textual activities are observed and learned, and generative
principles are derived that allow for otne’s own application of them through social
cognition. As a result, interpretive activity is always already a social activity, and the
importance of social factors is only increased by other meta-textual activity that
encourages one to use texts for social and psychological ends.
Network hermeneutics operates from a new epistemological foundation based on
Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism. Rather than treat the text as an entirely
external object interpreted through an inter-active process, network hermeneutics based
on agential realism defines the relationship between text and interpreters as “intra-
active” or mutually constituting. According to Barad, the basic unit of the sensible
universe is phenomena, and these phenomena are themselves not objects but
relationships such as the diffraction of light through a prism. Thus the text is diffracted
through the interpreter’s interpretive and meta-textual practice. Objective knowledge of
textual interpretation is possible provided it accounts for the apparatus of perception
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that served as the “diffracting” medium. Since the apparatus of perception in this case is
socially founded, this means that texts are fundamentally experienced on a social level
both through the learning of interpretive practices and one’s understanding of the uses
of texts. These influences encourage a certain degree of uniformity in interpretation, but
also provide the grounds for a great deal of variation. Different interpretive and meta-
textual regimes, the differing salience of different practices and goals, or the simple fact
that practices and performances are generative rather than rote explains variation. It
also allows one to do so without depending on either a textual realist or interactive
paradigm, and yet still to make verifiable claims about the interpretive activity of others.
The model of hermeneutics advocated in this study is called “network”
hermeneutics for three reasons. First, network hermeneutics is designed specifically in
response to a digital, networked media landscape. Which leads to the second reason:
network hermeneutics is a relational rather than relativistic or absolute model for
hermeneutics. Network hermeneutics seeks to establish a general theory of
hermeneutics by accounting for interpretive activity both within and without definite
communities and institutions, in diverse social contexts, and as articulated through
subtle power relations. By providing a meso-scale account of the relationship between
macro-scale social institutions and micro-scale instances of interpretive and meta-
textual activity, it not only better accounts for digital media ecologies but also for
interpretation as a social activity in other potential ecologies as well. Finally, network
hermeneutics is itself an attempt at creating a sort of network. The “intra-active”
epistemological paradigm permits and even demands methodological ecumenicalism.
Any method can be potentially valid insofar as it can defend its claims to validity and
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account for itself—no mean project but a far cry from the sort of bland ecumenical
relativism that sometimes passes of inter-disciplinary cooperation. Furthermore, it
allows a way to account for the double bind of hermeneutic inquiry—that interpretation
is an inevitable activity and thus any attempt at hermeneutic study must in turn be able
to account for the interpretive activity it employs. By treating interpretive activity as an
apparatus of perception among others, it becomes possible to avoid having to posit a
fundamental separation between “our” correct interpretive activity and the activity of
others. As a result network hermeneutics provides a shared protocol through in which
diverse methodological and theoretical traditions can participate on equivalent terms—a
sort of TCP/IP for inquiry into textual interpretation.
Network hermeneutics is a form of textual hermeneutics, and as such it is
fundamentally concerned with developing a pragmatic account of how texts are
interpreted as symbolic systems and how the concept of text is given meaning within a
particular confluence of meta-textual performance and practices. Since the means of
identifying texts, understanding textuality, and establishing textual boundaries are
potentially as variable as the myriad forms of texts themselves one cannot pre-establish
all potential variations that such processes might take. That will require enormous
amounts of empirical research, ranging from ethnography to lab experiments. Before
such study can take place though a degree of coherence must be given to the field of
possible objects by ascertaining at least hypothetical limits to the forms in which the
identification and boundary setting of texts take place. To do this I undertook to
theoretically isolate what, if anything, could be considered the absolute minimal
requirement of text-ness, the primitive term of textuality. This problem was further
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complicated by the fact that interpreters are able to knowingly “textualize” a
phenomenon they previously regarded as non-textual, effectively creating text even if
the interpreter doesn’t regard him or herself as the authoring agent. While evidence of
authorial agency recognized through context or familiar material forms employed in
symbolic communication is almost certainly a key criteria for textual identification and
textuality they are better regarded as important variables then the absolute minimum.
The fact is that before a text can be viewed as intentional or communicative, it must first
be viewed as having the possibility of being such.
That possibility is created by one’s experience of the phenomenon of the potential
text invoking a symbolic relationship between the material reality of the text and an
virtual field of reference. All texts are liminal entities, existing at the boundary between
material and virtual, and these relationships can take on a number of forms. These
relationships are of particular importance to media effects researchers attempting to
understand the effect of “realism” on human cognition and behavior, although
considerable theoretical conflict remains over how to define and measure this
problematic variable. The text/reality relationship can be measured along two axes: the
ontological and the process. The ontological axis refers to the understood reality claim of
the virtual referent of the text—whether the fight on the TV screen is part of a sitcom or
part of a news broadcast. The process axis describes the understood relationship
between the text as a material object and the material reality it portrays—whether the
news program is showing found footage with a clear relationship to the event it portrays
or the connection is muddied by the uncertainty of various forms of interference. Each
of these variables can exist in one of two states, either para-authentic or artificial. A
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para-authentic ontological boundary refers to the depiction of events understood to be
real, while an artificial process boundary shows events understood to be fictional (even
if the fiction portrayed references real events). A para-authentic process boundary refers
to the understanding that the text is actually a trace of an actual event, and that while it
is textual the mediation between record and event is transparent and relatively un-
interfered with, with a process boundary referring to the opposite. These relationships
are relevant not only to television broadcasts and films. In fact they are significantly
more important for understanding the subtle relationship between text and real that
might be understood to exist in cellphone pictures, webcams, amateur recordings of all
kinds found in digital media as well as the complicated relationship between reality and
fiction found in group gameplay or collective story telling.
The concept of power as articulated in the text/interpreter binary belongs to the
age of mass media where texts could be more safely associated with institutions invested
in the maintenance of the status quo. While such power was never total or even non-
contradictory, the relative ease of access to communicative resources offered by digital
technology undermines it to the point that it can no longer be taken as a sort of baseline
for comparing text and interpretation to macro-scale social forces. Decentering the mass
media paradigm has two critical impacts on hermeneutics. First, it makes the now
traditional binary structures between mainstream and periphery or text and interpreter
that have provided key heuristic devices for justifying textual interpretation as a method
for comprehending the interpretations of others. Second, it requires the development of
new understandings of the relationship between power and interpretation and power
and meta-textual activity, theories that can account for familiar issues such as
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representation but also the more novel impacts of participatory culture as articulated
through digital and Internet technology and new media ethics that reflect those theories.
The problems of privacy and context collapse are typically discussed in terms of
self-defense, public policy, and interface analysis and design, but they are also issues of
power. When texts are understood to represent or to be a trace of reality that power
because textual power as well, which raises axiological questions about the ethics of
textual creation and of how texts are employed. Such documentary film and video in
myriad forms permeate online spaces such as YouTube, and if scholars are serious about
engaging with everyday interpretive and meta-textual activity as participants rather
than sequestered observers they should engage with ethical discourse around these
texts. Taken individually one can debate the relatively ethical claims that subject and
audience place on a given documentary or documentarian. Taken collectively one must
engage with the overall result of a particular textual ecology, much like how the
historical context of mass media justified the hermeneutic heuristic of the
text/interpreter binary. An interpretive tool of similar breadth and explanatory power
has yet to emerge for the ecology of online and digital media.
Network hermeneutics urges diversity of methods, and interpretive or textual
analytic methods remain a valid tool for understanding how texts are understood and
used. In fact, textual analysis is absolutely necessary to network hermeneutics as an
essential component of the process of understanding one’s apparatus of perception and
its role as part of the phenomena one studies. Due both to the challenge of the recursive
reflexivity that arises from the use of interpretation to study the use of interpretation as
well as the impossibility of prescribing an objectively superior interpretive method
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through a theoretical position that regards them as ultimately equal, the actual
application of interpretive methods informed by network hermeneutics is no mean
accomplishment. One can apply interpretive methods in a given instance and evaluate
them in terms of a network hermeneutic paradigm, but that application does not
provide any kind of definitive precedent. It cannot. The validity of textual analysis in
network hermeneutics rests on the relationships forged between interpretations,
relationships made meaningful through their mutual attention to the modes of
perception (e.g., interpretive practice, meta-textual practice) that made them possible.
Analysis of the games and meta-textual performances found in the “Art Games”
collection on Newgrounds employ textual and social hermeneutic inquiry through
textual analysis. Based on this analysis of both texts and user reviews a discernible trend
toward self-expression and the apparent urge to create a sort of authentic community
through meta-textual activity. While the value of this drive is never overtly discussed,
the result is a system of aesthetic standards in both textual and meta-textual work, an
aesthetics of reunion. The aesthetics of reunion demonstrates the importance of both
the social and the textual in meta-textual and interpretive activity. The drive toward
reunion and authenticity encouraged expressive styles of meta-textual performance and
discouraged explicit interpretation. While debate over meaning was possible and did
take place it was contained within specific generic forms. The act of self-expression
contains an inherent control on its disruptive potential simply by merit of it performed
as response rather than demonstration of fact. The variety of personal responses and
their potential for authentic connection depends upon the shared experience of the text.
A pressure toward comprehensibility, if not uniformity, in turn influences interpretation
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of texts, placing certain choices above others. While it is not clear that this necessary
means that heuristic rather than systematic interpretive practices are also encouraged,
the question warrants future inquiry.
Major Research Areas and Implications
This study serves as a prologue and provocation to network hermeneutics, not its
conclusion and scarcely its beginning. The on-going project of network hermeneutics
centers on the core traditional questions of textual hermeneutics: How do texts mean?
How are they understood? Why are they understood one way and not another? What
does the understanding of a text mean? Network hermeneutics also suggests its own
distinct set of research questions, all of which can be addressed with a variety of
methodologies. This list is not exhaustive, merely suggestive of the research questions
important to network hermeneutics.
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1) General Theoretical Questions
a. How do interpretive and meta-textual practice and performance relate in
general, and in the context of particular discourses, groups, individuals,
historical periods, etc?
b. What are alternate causes for uniformity and diversity of interpretation
such as biological attributes or psychological universals, and how do they
relate to hermeneutics as a social practice?

129
This list also avoids self-evident projects such as ethnographic or archival study of particular meta-textual or
interpretive practices and performances or individual textual criticism and the practice and performance of meta-
textual activities of all kinds.
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c. What is the relationship between textual interpretation and interpretation
in general, particularly from the point of view of onto-epistemological
hermeneutic philosophy?
d. How does textual interpretation relate to other forms of sensation or
cognition?
e. What is the relationship between text and technology?
f. What is the relationship between affordance, structure, and interpretation
in text and technology?
2) Questions of Text and Textuality
a. How are texts identified and how are their boundaries set in specific
contexts? How are para-texts, meta-texts, and inter-texts conceptualized
and mapped in those contexts?
b. What does textuality itself signify in the context of specific meta-textual
practices and performances?
c. What is the relationship between text and the non-textual real? How do
conceptions of the relationship between the text’s manifestation as a real
object and its quality of virtual reference relate to other meta-textual
activities?
d. How do conceptions of authorial agency vary and relate to meta-textual
activity? Are their empirical instances of texts understood as truly author-
less?
3) Hermeneutics and Power
a. How do power relationships relate to meta-textual activities in specific
contexts of textual production, dissemination and deception?
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b. How should such analyses be used to inform normative standards for the
production, dissemination and reception of texts?
c. Do textual effects exist without interpretation, and if so what are they and
in what contexts do they occur?
d. How does interpretation mediate and moderate media effects?
e. What does avant-gardism means in a participatory media ecology, and
how does avant-gardism relate to meta-textual activities? One can ask
similar questions about oppositional or counter-cultural texts.
4) Interpretive Methodologies
a. How does one map interpretive, poetic, and rhetorical analyses of texts
and their relationship to the analyses of other interpreters?
b. How are texts categorized in the context of specific meta-textual activities?
What do these categorizations mean? How do categorizations relate to
particular –emic modes of textual mapping?
c. What is the status of the literary for network hermeneutics? Does the
practice of interpretation itself have a positive or negative valence?
5) Meta-textual and Interpretive Activity in Situ
a. What are the relevant meta-textual practices and performances for
interpreters’ engagement with texts?
b. Do different general modes of textual interpretation exist, and if so what
are they and what cues them?
c. What are the precise configurations of the relationship between meta-
textual activities in general and interpretive activities specifically?
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d. What are the networks of influence or diffusion that cause meta-textual
activity to spread, change, or be sustained over time?
e. How does one relate the –etic textual mapping of the interpreting self to
the –emic textual mapping of others?
As discussed in the introduction, a new hermeneutic approach has significant
ramifications for the digital humanities, particularly those approaches to the digital
humanities based around “big data” methodologies. Network hermeneutics suggests the
need for caution in projects that attempt to use natural language analyses of large data
sets when those analyses do not acknowledge the role of meta-textual activity in sense-
making and the unstable relationships between different meta-textual approaches.
Literalism, formalism, and the mathematization of language are valid tools, but they
have limited value for understanding the interpretations of others. When these methods
seem to produce valid results for the interpretations of others they do so because the
meta-textual activities of researcher and subject are relatively closely aligned. Even in
that case such methods reveal little of the process of interpretation, which undermines
both predictive and descriptive power. Understanding interpretation requires a
hermeneutic perspective.
The New Hermeneutics
The goal of this study was not to create a new general hermeneutics so much as to
predict the necessary response to the problem digital media and the texts, performances
and practices found therein pose to traditional hermeneutic study. The loss of so many
of the touchstones of the age of the codex or the age of the television required a general
246

hermeneutics, or at least a step toward a more general hermeneutics, that could survive
without certain assumptions. Future technological, social, and cultural changes will no
doubt reveal other assumptions, now invisible, that must be forgone. For now, network
hermeneutics offers a way forward. Network hermeneutics accounts for the existence of
dense webs of relationships between phenomena, for connections between narrative,
knowledge, and desire in all its forms. It cuts the Gordian knot of the strong vs. weak
textual determinist debate. It allows one to re-conceptualize the interpreter-text
relationship in a way that provides greater nuance, allowing for interpreters who are
also producers and who exist in densely multiplex confluences of meta-textual activities.
It allows one to address problems of power and interpretation in subtler terms, to deal
with textual production in between relative equals as well as across larger power
differentials without sacrificing a critical perspective. Finally, network hermeneutics
allows one to conceptualize one’s own interpretive activity in its inevitable relationship
to the interpretive activity of others, and helps avoid the danger of treating one’s own
interpretations as simply “correct.” In doing so it provides the hermeneutic theory
necessary to account for digital media, and resolves many of textual hermeneutics most
stubborn dilemmas. But network hermeneutics’ value does not come from the problems
it solves, but the fact that in resolving these impasses it offers vast new fields for inquiry.
Network hermeneutics occupies two distinct middle grounds. First, network
hermeneutics operates as a meso-scale theory occupying the conceptual space between
macro-social factors such as political economic context or ideological hegemony and
micro-scale factors such as individual psychology or interpersonal relationships.
Second, and more importantly, network hermeneutics offers a theoretical medium in
247

which diverse disciplines can interact in more meaningful terms, a truly trans-
disciplinary theory. From its basic epistemology network hermeneutics demands both
methodological and theoretical ecumenicalism, but it also provides the means for
achieving a deeper degree of inter-disciplinary contact by providing a shared language
in which similar problems can be shared and concepts more completely transliterated
between disciplines. Chapter 4 sought to provide one example of how what might be
considered a deeply humanist and qualitative approach to the issue of realism can,
through a network hermeneutic episteme, offer theoretical refinement for quantitative
media effects research, but this is only one point of potential contact. Network
hermeneutics begins this work of transliteration, but creating a truly trans-disciplinary
space for the study of texts will require extensive theoretical and methodological
innovation. Even fairly common theoretical and methodological alliances like that
between ethnography and textual interpretation will require considerable revision, a
problem explored in chapter 6. Chapter 5 suggested, in cursory form, how these
concepts can, in turn, inform the production and design future texts, interfaces,
persuasive communicative programs, tools, social spaces, laws, and much more.
In his essay “Tradition and the individual talent” Elliot (1920) challenges the idea
the older writers were irrelevant or had been superseded by modern works by pointing
out that as the present we know more than the past, but that the past is what we know.
This observation is also true of the text itself. No matter how far human intellectual
inquiry ranges from the study of the text, the text remains what we know. Thus while
hermeneutics might sometimes anesthetize even a hardy spirit, the importance of the
study of the interpretation of texts could hardly be over-stated. A new approach to texts
248

naturally provides a new approach to the study of literature, film, television, painting,
sculpture, rhetoric, linguistics, law, and of course theology—all the disciplines that deal
with texts. A new hermeneutics also has significant repercussions for those fields that
employ texts methods as a standard part of their methodology such as history or many
forms of ethnographic research. It must also echo in disciplines that study
communication through texts in all this forms or attempt to apply texts to achieve a
desired end such as public health, computer science, neuroscience, sociology,
psychology, science studies. Nothing puts the lie to the idea that the humanities are in
some crisis of relevance, at least at a theoretical level, more than the problem of the text.
Texts are critical to human life, to human culture, to the human mind, to human
endeavor of all kinds. No matter how obscure the theoretical corner in which it
quickens, ultimately it will resound.
************************************************
I would like to end with a sort of provocation, a coda of what I believe but cannot
prove. Unfortunately, it takes the form of the sort of generalized, vaguely zeitgeist-y
spirit of ages argument that network hermeneutics attempts to refine the study of the
interpretation of texts away from. The emergence of the scientific study of textual
interpretation so closely on the heels of the scientific revolution seems to me to have a
double significance. The idea that the world of science displaced (or more likely
subsumed) the world of magic is a familiar one. As the fairy was replaced with the
electron our experience of the world began to change, to become more inert. What is the
world of magic if not the world of the super-abundance of signification, where every
breeze or throw of dice or nocturnal noise doubles as a whisper of another order
249

speaking? It would be hugely coincidental if just as the world of meaning began to fade
the search for meaning in texts should take a more general form, ultimately extending to
the social world and the experience of the world itself. I do not wish to overstate the
importance of this turning, but I think the many exceptions that one can tender to this
observation ultimately fall in its favor. What is theology or philology if not an attempt to
hear a whisper in silence or cacophony? The advent of a general hermeneutics as a
valuable theoretical objective and the desire to find obscure rather than overt meaning
in everyday texts, everyday social life, everyday experience mirrors this transition too
conveniently to be ignored. Whatever the fate of network hermeneutics or any other new
theory of interpretation the very real changes in the technological and communicative
context of everyday meta-textual practice and performance need attention, for they
likely represent another such turning. Mark Twain is supposed to have said that while
history does not repeat, it does rhyme. The study of the interpretation of texts, of
communication and the creation of meaning, may foreshadow the next verse.

250

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Creator McClain, William Thomas (author)

Core Title Network hermeneutics: interpretation of texts as social practice and performance in the age of digital media

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 08/20/2014

Defense Date 08/19/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

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