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can refer in order to resolve disputes. The use and understanding of
language, on the other hand, depends on tacit consensual regularities
which are multiplex and fluid; except in very gross ways, these
regularities are uncodified, and probably uncodifiable. In our practice,
therefore, we must rely not on rules, but on linguistic tact-a tact
which is the emergent result of all our previous experience with
speaking, hearing, writing, and reading the language.
Stanley Fish seems to me right in his claim that the linguistic
meanings we find in a text are relative to the interpretive strategy we
employ, and that agreement about meanings depends on membership
in a community which shares an interpretive strategy. But if we set out
not to create meanings, but
to
understand what the sequence of
sentences in a literary work mean, then we have no choice except to
read according to the linguistic strategy the author of the work
emp loyed, and expected us to employ. We are capable of doing so,
because an immense store of cumulative ev idence provides assurance
that the authors of literary texts belonged to the linguistic community
into which we were later born, and so shared our skill, and the
consensual regularities on which that skill depends, with some
divergencies-which we have a variety of clues for detecting-which
are the result both of the slow change of communal regularities in time
and of the limited innovations which can be introduced by the
individual author.
When a Newreader, on the basis of his contrived interpretive
strategy, asserts that a passage means something radically different
from what it has been taken to mean, or else that it means nothing in
particular, we lack codified criteria to which we can appeal against the
new interpretation; in the last analysis, we can only appeal to our
linguistic tact, as supported by the agreement of readers who share that
tact. But such an appeal has no probative weight for a reader who has
opted out of playing the game of language according to its constitutive
regularities; nor is the application of our own inherited practice
verifiable by any proof outside its sustainedly coherent working. All we
can do is to point out to the Newreader what he already knows-that he
is p laying a double game, introducing his own interpretive strategy
when reading someone else's text, but tacitly relying on communal
norms when undertaking to communicate the methods and results of
hi s interpretations to his own readers.
We can 't claim that the Newreader's strategy doesn 't work, for each
of these ways of doing things to texts indubitably works. Allowed his
own premises and conversion procedures, Derrida is able to deconstruct
any text into a suspension of numberl ess undecidable significations,
