254
PARTISAN REVIEW
That this is a wholly bizarre reading, one which if made by a mem–
ber of our own culture would be evidence either of playfulness or in–
sanity, does not in any way count as evidence against the linguistic
possibility of interpreting the text in that way. Yet, there is the com–
monsense reality that we do view ourselves as able to communicate
with one another. And included in this is the ability we feel to
"follow" a rule, as well as an expectation that others will be able to do
likewise. Otherwise, social life would be impossible .
Yet, it is this process of communication, which reduces an ad–
mittedly potential chaos of meanings (the "infinite play of signifiers")
to a finite group of possible meanings, that calls for analysis. Ronald
Dworkin, for example, has structured his jurisprudence around the
proposition that judges are committed to seeking, and then giving,
the "right answer" to legal questions, without discretion or "choice"
being involved. Many of his critics point to the obvious fact that
judges do not in fact agree and infer from this that a judge therefore
has discretion, by an exertion of will, over what a particular decision
shall be. This is, however, not responsive to Dworkin's point, which
focuses on what might be termed the phenomenology of judging.
Thus Stanley Fish, in his debate with Dworkin about the possibility
of assigning criteria to identify the "right" answers to questions of
interpretation, nonetheless agrees that the
only
answers that any par–
ticular person can give are the "right answers" from that person's per–
spective . What other kind of answers
could
be given, save for the
conscious lie? But this psychological fact says nothing about the
epistemological status of the proffered interpretation, in particular
its "objectivity" or congruence with the presuppositions of belief.
Several years ago Dworkin introduced his mythic judge, Her–
cules, who has the task of discovering the "right answer" to any legal
conundrum by searching through the copious materials of written
texts and moral principles that constitute the social order. Dworkin
has recently compared Hercules to someone writing a "chain novel,"
an enterprise in which a variety of persons collaborate: one writing
the first chapter, sending it on to the second person who writes the
next chapter in light of the first, and so on. Dworkin argues that the
initiator is quite unconstrained, except perhaps by broad genre def–
initions (novels, for example, are not conventionally written in
rhymed couplets), whereas the successor writers are progressively
more constrained. By the time the twelfth or thirteenth chapter must
be composed, the author has little choice in defining the plot, the
