different meanings for us–with somewhat altered subject matters fused
differently to expressive and affective significances–after we have read
Freud or Marx, after we have read Eliot or Larkin, or after we have considered
critical readings that invoke further historical facts and new ranges of
comparison. Schubert can sound different affectively and expressively after
hearing minimalist music or Wagner or after reading Adorno or McClary or
Dahlhaus. Just as different interpretations of literature and the visual arts
can cast new light on them, so can different performances of musical works
do so as well.
Given, again, the complexity of the work and the multiplicity of reasons
(articulated and unarticulated) that can sensibly be held to have been at work
in its production, there is good reason to think that each of these kinds of
interpretation, and associated rereading, reviewing, and rehearing, may cap-
ture genuine aspects of a work’s meaning, of how it distinctively presents a
subject matter as a focus for thought and emotion, fused to the imaginative
exploration of material. Cultures past and present evolve and are marked by
internal conflict. When we notice cultural evolution and conflict, then we
can become aware of the different and shifting kinds of reasons that can
enter into the making of a work, thence overdetermining its production.
Different sets of these reasons can become of interest and relevance for us at
different times. Critical-elucidatory attention to a successful work’s distinct-
ive way of arranging its elements so as to present a subject matter as a focus
for thought and emotion remains a central and privileged form of under-
standing of a workas art. But exactly how critical-elucidatory interpretation
is carried out is reasonably affected by shifts in interest and by changing
contexts of comparison.
This may make it seem as though different interpretations, achieved
either by following different strategies for understanding or through critical
elucidatory attention carried out under the influence of different strategies
for understanding, simply talk past one another, or that they are even about
different objects: not a single work that two different critics approach, but
quite divergent work as seen by reader A and work as seen by reader B. It may
sometimes seem that critics are talkingonlyabout their own experiences of
the work and not about the work itself.
Perhaps this in fact happens in some cases. Not everything that is put
forward as a piece of critical understanding in fact succeeds in being one.
Efforts to understand a work critically can collapse into autobiographical164 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art