effusions on the part of the critic or one or another form of projection, in
such a way that contact with the work is lost. But this seems relatively rare,
even considering the range of Freudian versus Marxist versus poststructur-
alist versus humanist versus formalist styles of critical understanding that
are in circulation. As interpretations in these various styles bump up against
one another, contending critics will often want to accuse one another of
empty projection or reading-in, on the one hand, or of“mere”appreciation
and decorous paraphrase, without critical-political historical understanding,
on the other. Sometimes these accusations may be well founded, in either
direction. More typically, however, we become able ourselves in light of new
readings to see particular works both more comprehensively and with more
awareness of the multiple significances of details–as long, at least, as the
critical readings that guide our exploration of the work do engage with its
elements and are not generalized screeds or free fantasias. New critical
readings are generally achieved against a background of already shared
understandings of what a work of art is as an overdetermined, complex,
meaning-bearing object, of what a particular work of art means at the level of
immediate paraphrase, and of what its maker and many people of its epoch
cared about. As Stanley Fish usefully observes about understanding in
general,
The change from one structure of understanding to another is not a rupture but a
modification of the interests and concerns that are already in place; and
because they are already in place, they constrain the direction of their own
modification...The [hearer, viewer, reader] is already in a situation informed by
tacitly known purposes and goals, and [after encountering a new reading] he
ends up in another situation whose purposes and goals stand in some elaborated
relation (of contrast, opposition, expansion, extension) to those they supplant.
(The one relation in which they could not stand is no relation at all.)^54A new reading can help us to see a work in a larger and more comprehensive
light, with greater awareness of how its maker’s complex pursuit of multiple
artistic, communicative, expressive, and affective interests align and mis-
align with our own.
Given the standing possibility of new critical understandings, arising out
of new strategies that invoke new ranges of relevant comparisons, it can
(^54) Fish,“Is there a Text in this Class?,”pp. 530B–531A.
Understanding art 165