Gavin Miller has a written a fascinating article,"The Apathetic Fallacy," in the April 2010 issue of Philosophy and Literature. Following up on the arguments made by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in "Against Theory," Miller argues that the humanities are plagued by a wide-ranging -- and harmful -- taboo against speaking about intentionality and subjective epistemology. Our main mistake, he contends, is that we mistake objective ontology with objective epistemology. Because we aspire to be scientific, we dismiss arguments that rely on introspection and fear the consequences of accepting "first-person warranted claims" (a fear first expressed by advocates of behaviorist psychology). This leads to absurd readings of texts, such as Fredric Jameson's famous Lacan-inspired misreading of Bob Perelman's "China," which allegedly exemplifies the schizophrenic breakdown of signifying chains under conditions of late capitalism.
Let me share my favorite paragraph of Miller's essay, an example meant to illustrate the limitations of Lacanian psychoanalysis:
The ethics of the Lacanian “unconscious” are, I believe, less than benign. The interpretative practice that Fink describes seems indistinguishable from the hermeneutics of abuse directed at Barack Obama for his 2008 campaign comment that “you can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig.” This remark was meant as a metaphor for Republican policy, but was interpreted by the Republicans as a reference to Sarah Palin’s candidature for Vice-President. The “pig” in the metaphor, they insisted, was Palin, who had earlier joked—with implicit reference to herself—that the difference between “a hockey mom and a pit bull [terrier]” was “lipstick.” Had only the Republicans been more Lacanian, they could have added that Obama’s repudiation of this interpretation indicated his pre-analytic investment in a specular image of wholeness and self-identity.
This example neatly expresses the crux of Miller's argument, revealing both its strengths and the questions it leaves unanswered. 
Miller is in essence asking, what kind of loon would blame Obama for calling Sarah Palin a lipstick-wearing pig? George Saunders might say this kind:
So, when Barack Obama says he will put some lipstick on my pig, I am, like, Are you calling me a pig? If so, thanks! Pigs are the most non-Élite of all barnyard animals. And also, if you put lipstick on my pig, do you know what the difference will be between that pig and a pit bull? I’ll tell you: a pit bull can easily kill a pig. And, as the pig dies, guess what the Hockey Mom is doing? Going to her car, putting on more lipstick, so that, upon returning, finding that pig dead, she once again looks identical to that pit bull, which, staying on mission, the two of them step over the dead pig, looking exactly like twins, except the pit bull is scratching his lower ass with one frantic leg, whereas the Hockey Mom is carrying an extra hockey stick in case Todd breaks his again. But both are going, like, Ha ha, where’s that dumb pig now? Dead, that’s who, and also: not a smidge of lipstick.
A lose-lose for the pig.
As the political blogger Adam Serwer has recently argued, the American right has increasingly taken up the mantle of identity politics -- "an identity politics which perceives persecution, and possible extinction, for a culturally constructed usually white, conservative, 'real American'" -- embracing the politically correct tendencies formerly associated with liberalism. More and more, I would add, it is the left (more so even than liberalism) that is opposing identity politics, trying to make connections, to disrupt the absurdist malfunction of reasoning that Saunders represents in the form of his narrator's damaged discourse. Which is not to say that Saunders doesn't also reinforce some hoary culture war stereotypes -- his satire was, after all, published in the New Yorker, and seems to complain that supporters of Palin aren't merely wrong, but stupid. My minimal point, though, is that the apathetic fallacy Miller discusses is a bipartisan affair on the American political scene.
But is there no defense we might mount of Saunders's narrator's misinterpretation of Obama or Jameson's misreading of Perelman? I am certainly a fan of referring to intentionality in critical arguments I make. I've spent a considerable about of time in archives this summer and during previous summers looking for evidence to justify my various critical claims, on the assumption that authorial intention matters. But isn't the common confusion of intended-meaning with what we might call significance, well, significant?
And, if we are to speak of the ethical dimensions of how we use language, to what degree should we hold someone responsible for the significance of the words they use? To what degree is it valid to judge the success of art in terms of its effect on its consumer? It seems hard to maintain that intention should always trump significance. Aesthetic responses are, to different degrees, grounded upon our appreciation of the nonsemantic qualities of speech, as Amy Hungerford points out on her recent study, Postmodern Belief. We frequently treat the nonsemantic -- the aesthetic, cultural, social, historical -- as though it were a kind of meaning or had the force of meaning. Whole artistic movements have been built around such conflations. Should we simply banish or ignore these movements? Judge them as failures because they get their theory wrong?
This sort of confusion is at the heart of Philip Roth's The Human Stain, a novel that revolves around the "politically correct" misapprehension of intention. Coleman Silk, a classics professor at Athena College, is punished as racist for using the word "spook" in reference to two absent black students, despite the fact that he meant the expression to have no racist meaning. He was merely referring to the ghost-like absence of his students, he explains. And yet Roth is too cagy to simply come out on the side of intention, against significance, though his sympathies pretty clearly lie with Silk. After all, Roth might have constructed his parable of political correctness run amok without also making Silk someone who is passing for white and as a Jew. This plot development exposes some of the limits of grounding critical analysis in the investigation of intentionality. Can Silk "intend" himself white? Clearly, Silk doesn't think so. He believes that his blackness is a function of who he is, not what he means or what he does. Otherwise, there would be no such practice as "passing." As Walter Benn Michaels has pointed out, without a sense of racial essentialism, a "passing" Coleman Silk would simply be white because he is taken as white.
But if blackness isn't what Silk does, but rather who he is, then he shouldn't be able to submit his blackness as evidence that he is not racist, at least not if he believes that it is only his intentions that ought to count in judging his language. His blackness is, because he understands himself to be passing, definitionally not a function of his intentions and meanings. So, paradoxically, Silk is submitting his blackness (who he is) as evidence that he could not be making a racist statement (what he means), despite the fact that being who he is by definition has no meaning if intention is what really matters. It only has significance. Ergo, Silk must be saying something like, "As a black man, I am alive to the significance of racist words and phrases. It is therefore reasonable for you to assume that I would not use words with a pejorative significance. From this set of facts, you can reverse-engineer my intention and my true meaning."
So even Silk must rest his self-defense on the notion that there ought limits to what one can say -- he implicitly accepts these limits, tacitly claims to be very much aware of them -- regardless of one's true intentions. Though he avoids the apathetic fallacy, his difference from his persecutors is one of degree, not kind. Silk continues to believe, as the administration of Athena College does, that you are obliged to confront common or public interpretations of your words even if those interpretations don't express your real intention. Just as one cannot defend oneself when breaking the law by claiming not to know the law -- "I shouldn't be fined because I didn't know I was supposed to curb my dog!" -- one cannot disown the significance of one's language. This in no way is meant to be a judgment about what specific consequences should follow from violating these socially determined limits, only to say that Silk seems to be on the same page as his enemies.
Bringing this discussion back to "The Apathetic Fallacy," I find myself agreeing with Miller that we should not commit the apathetic fallacy -- we should not discount subjective epistemology or confuse objectivity in epistemology with objectivity in ontology -- but I do feel we should also guard against the false belief that in not committing this fallacy we have excised the responsibility that we have for our words (both their meaning and their significance). Miller doesn't seem to hold to a strong version of this view, but in the Manichean cultures that have defined literary study over the last thirty years, and here Michaels can be deemed as guilty as those who he often rightly disagrees with, swinging too far the other way is a... significant risk.
Your discussion of Roth hits close to home since Cornell has been in the throes of discussing the repercussions of Grant Farred, an Africana and English professor here, calling two Africana graduate students "black bitches" apparently as a joke, after the students arrived late for one of his conference talks (here's an article from the Cornell Daily Sun describing the incident). He was removed form his position as Africana's Director of Graduate Studies, and there's an investigation pending to see if there will be other repercussions. Farred himself hasn't made the "I can't be racist because I'm black" argument as far as I know, though I've heard it argued that he's not black in the same way that American black people are black since he's from South Africa. So in this case, it seems that two likely unintended words are having the effect of compromising a career's worth of thought-out political positions in numerous academic publications.
The case has left me quite ambivalent, but I want to thank you for helping me through my muddle with the useful separation between intentionality and significance, and also foregrounding the complicated power relations that arise as a result of the politicization of identity. Farred and I have never spoken directly, so I can neither contextualize his comments nor attest to how I feel in his presence, but absent other egregious demonstrations of racism and sexism, I do wonder if the incident warrants the kind of reaction in this open letter, which states that the situation has created a hostile work environment at Africana. I don't question the likelihood that many people feel this way, and as a female minority I would probably have similar feelings if I were Farred's advisee, but I also wish to ask about the source of these feelings. There's no question in my mind that a culture of systematic yet often unconscious discrimination in the U.S. has made it less likely for women and minorities to occupy powerful positions, but I can't help feeling as though what has happened as a result is that single acts of overt if unintentional discrimination end up acquiring this symbolic power, as though they end up standing in for the collective discrimination that's actually going on. The potential act of heavily sanctioning Farred, such as for instance dismissing him for the incident, would certainly have significance far beyond its effect on Farred the person. But in the end, I do find it hard to justify so drastically affecting someone's life for the sake of significance, and wonder about whether such an act would indeed foster racial and gender equality in the end.
Hey -- this is really interesting, partly (wrt Roth) because I think Roth's point (missed by most readers) is that Silk probably did mean something racial by the word "spooks." Maybe without quite knowing it, but in the mode of unconscious (Freudian) self-betrayal that's a plot mechanism in Roth all the way back to Goodbye Columbus: in The Human Stain, another near Freudian slip is the letter Delphine Roux sends out, after weeks, and regrets within seconds: she, like Coleman, has flashed into anger and can't call back what she's revealed. "Spooks," for Silk, would mean something like: invisible because taking on the protective coloration of context -- for Silk being white; for the non-attending students in the class, being absent. Silk probably didn't know they were black, but thought of them as black because they were absent. The point being (Silk's unconscious point being) that passing as white is being absent, and conversely that only people who need to pass will be absent. So the accusation against him is not entirely wrong. His question is significant: "Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?" For him, at Athena, to be black is not to exist.
A lot of The Human Stain is tricky, and its tricks are underappreciated, especially the scene in which Zuckerman, near the end, meets Les Farley. Everyone I've read thinks that Zuckerman's fantasies about Farley are true, since (as in American Pastoral), those fantasies have given the novel its plot and substance. But, as in American Pastoral, they're explicitly made up.
One final reason that the plot turns on the word spooks is that, as in so much of Roth, black and Jewish experience are paralleled (this enraged Walter Benn Michaels about The Plot Against America). Roth's interest in himself and in Zuckerman and Kepish as ghost writers, from The Ghost Writer to The Human Stain to the ghosts who appear in Everyman to Exit Ghost suggests the Kafkan way that (for Roth) to be a Jewish writer is to be a ghost. The perennial accusation against Roth of Jewish self-hatred is transmuted in The Human Stain into an accusation against Silk for racism, for which, no more than for Roth, his own biological origin is not a defense. Silk, to put it too baldly, thought of the missing students as black, not because they were black but because he was. In calling them spooks he used the term to mean both blacks and ghosts, because for him to be black is to be a ghost, as for Roth to be Jewish is to be a ghost.
I've been reading through your links, Meredith, and it's disturbing to see my undergrad alma mater struggling with these issues. I can see how Farred's comments inflamed passions; the commentators on the Sun seemed really pissed. One could imagine a range of defenses Farred might offer -- he seems not to have offered any defense in public -- which would all boil down to (i) "I didn't mean what you think I meant"; or (ii) "I spoke at random with no intention whatsoever" (a kind of variation on Tourette's syndrome or waking sleepwalking). What seems most important to me is the power relation between professor and advisee. Professors are given certain powers over students, but in return they are bound by certain obligations and responsibilities. Even if Farred did not mean harm, he has likely damaged his capacity to advise students. Somehow, the unacceptability of trust-breaking acts needs to be communicated and enforced, which is not to endorse any particular punishment. Depending on the case, appropriate responses could range from dismissal to a formal letter of reprimand.
I've been trying to reply for a couple of weeks now, but somehow couldn't form a cogent argument, so I'm going to instead pose some questions. What conditions have caused Farred's act to be trust-breaking? Can we imagine circumstances and social conditions in which this wouldn't be the case? I guess I'm less interested in the existence of the power relation than in the social formations that have led to these kinds of locutory acts having so much significance.
I also found your invocation of Tourette's syndrome interesting, in that the medicalization of certain mental predisposition has allowed us in this culture to find acts that result from such conditions to be excusable. Would it indeed be okay for him to say what he said if he had a documented case of Tourette's? What about if he said that as an immigrant not entirely familiar with American social conventions, he misjudged the social norms surrounding the situation?
Lee, There's a lot to think about in this post, not least the way in which the Knapp-Michaels problem retains its difficulty and allure after quite a few years of debate. Blakey Vermeule gave a great paper a few years ago at the MLA on Knapp & Michaels and the tangles we get ourselves into as we switch in and out of the mode of ascribing intentions to (or, to use the language of Dennett, adopting the Intentional Stance towards) verbal behavior...But I can't reconstruct Blakey's conclusion exactly, as I'm far from my notes and the question is too hard!
Instead I just want to pause over the move in Miller--and in your post--from a debate about the logical rightness or wrongness of anti-intentionalism to its ethical qualities. A priori the ethical quality of a theory of linguistic interpretation has no bearing whatsoever on its rightness. But the situation in which one's responsibility for one's utterance matters morally is of course a powerful test case for a theory about intention. In the ethical examples, like that of Obama's remark or de Man's discussion of Rousseau's confession, we treat speaking like action in general. We have strong intuitions that you bear a moral responsibility not only for what you mean to do but, at least to some degree, for the consequences of your actions regardless of your intentions. A zillion Law & Order plots play with this intuition. On the other hand, when it comes to speech in particular we have strong intuitions that a speaker can legitimately correct misinterpretations, because the goal of speech is ordinarily to communicate under an assumption of mutual understanding. In this framework the "ethical" cases of Coleman Silk or the lipsticked pig are quite exceptional. They also, as your discussion rightly shows, lead far away from the matter of language and instead into zones of identity and political strategy.
Side question: what is the relationship between the persecution complex of certain kinds of war-on-Christmas-style rightwing politics and Roth's own stance vis-a-vis the persecution of Silk? Let me put that more provocatively: to what extent is Roth, having exhausted the pathos of his own experience of Jewish identity in his past work, cleverly borrowing from the pathos of black American experience--symbolically profiting from the tenacity of structural racism long after Jewish assimilation has basically run its fortunate course on the white side of the color line? Roth throws up a barrier to this kind of reading by adding Zuckerman to the mix of his book and playing very conspicuously with the questions of authorial identity and intention, but I tend to want to ignore those games. And if this betrays my wish to judge Roth, negatively, on the grounds of his intentions, well...
As the author, I should probably butt in with some revelation of my intentions in the mysterious case of the lipsticked pig.
I did, and still have, quite a few worries about the ethics of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In fact, I have all kind of concerns about Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly the way it blots out other psychoanalytic approaches in the humanities.
What I had also in mind (and should have expressed more explicitly) is what happens when a certain kind of academic audience is faced with that particular bit of Republican spin. If you're a rigorous Lacanian academic who's happy to feed all kinds of texts through the Lacanian mincer, then you should be perfectly content with the Republican hermeneutic in this case. If you're not, then it seems to imply that your real beliefs about interpretation are quite different from those you might teach and assess in the seminar room. In fact, it would be hard to call the latter 'knowledge' since it would seem to be 'knowledge' in the absence of belief. I think the parallel case would be the outrage over the de Man affair. Sean Burke in The Death and Return of the Author points out that a lot of theorists suddenly became very interested in biography and intention, whatever their explicit positions on such matters. That's why I also find Jane Tompkins interesting, since she does a good job of writing about what academics may actually be doing with texts, rather than what they claim to be doing.
In other words, I was also interested in the authenticity of claims to know or believe Lacanian anti-intentionalism, and to what extent folk may be kidding themselves daft (if I may imply some Scots idiom).