Retroactive Thematization, Interaction, and Interpretation: The Hermeneutic Spiral from Schleiermacher to Goffman

Retroactive Thematization, Interaction, and Interpretation:
The Hermeneutic Spiral from Schleiermacher to Goffman
José Ángel García Landa
Universidad de Zaragoza
Abstract

This paper examines some common concerns of hermeneutics, Bakhtin’s dialogism,
American deconstruction and Goffman’s pragmatics of interaction, in order to provide a
theoretical basis for literary criticism grounded on wider communicative processes,
more especially on the retroactive dynamics of communicative interaction.


The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the
circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has
been set free….
If, in the spiral unwinding of things, space warps into
something akin to time, and time, in its turn, warps into
something akin to thought, then surely, another dimension
follows—a special Space maybe, not the old one, we trust,
unless spirals become vicious circles again. (Vladimir
Nabokov, Speak, Memory)
1. Introduction
This paper explores some aspects of the interface between the study of linguistic interaction
and literary interpretation, in particular the common ground between Friedrich
Schleiermacher’s philological hermeneutics, Bakhtinian dialogism, post-structuralist
interpretive theory, and the pragmalinguistic study of communicative interaction proposed
by Erving Goffman. Bakhtin’s work, in particular, might be conceived as a nexus between
Schleiermacher, who wrote in the early nineteenth century, and the pragmaticists and
poststructuralists, but there is no need to argue a direct influence between these lines of
reflection—they are to be conceived as responses to a common problem which therefore
present some common features, in spite of the different disciplinary contexts to which these
writers belong.1
2. Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic circle
According to Schleiermacher, a hermeneutic process consists in the interaction of two
distinct interpretive processes, one of a more objective nature, the other more oriented
towards subjectivity. They are named by Schleiermacher, respectively, “grammatical”
interpretation and “technical” (or “psychological”) interpretation. Through grammatical
interpretation we interpret a word or sentence as the manifestation of a common language;

José Angel Garcia Landa 156
technical interpretation considers that word or phrase a manifestation of “style,” the
expression of an individual mind and of a concrete communicative intention.
Just as every speech has a twofold relationship, both to the whole of language and to the
collected thinking of the speaker, so also there exists in all understanding of the speech
two moments: understanding it as something drawn out of language and as a “fact” in
the thinking of the speaker.2
These different approaches and objectives coexist in any given interpretive labour. They
interact with one another, and they seek a common aim—understanding—so that “[i]n this
interaction the results of the one method must approximate more and more those of the
other” (1986:190). Nonetheless, one or another of these aspects may become dominant,
and we find thus different intepretive “schools” or modes—for instance, “structuralism”
versus “New Criticism,” to use a well-known twentieth-century example in the field of
literary theory, or “formal” versus “integrational” linguistics as modes of approaching
language, or, in a still broader consideration, “linguistics” versus “literary studies” as two
philological disciplines.
There are, besides, two methods interpreters use in order to grasp a new meaning, if
we follow Schleiermacher’s account. On one hand there is the comparative method, which
compares a word, text or author with similar words, texts, or authors. On the other hand,
there is the divinatory method, based on personal intuition, on the interpreters’
spontaneous contact with the genius of a language and on their perspicacity to grasp what is
unique and individual in a given author or text.
Hermeneutic comprehension is therefore for Schleiermacher a complex process
involving a mediation between linguistic system and individual message as well as an
interaction between a comparative linguistic approach and an intuitive psychological
approach.
The scope of hermeneutics gradually broadens as the interpreter lays an increasing
emphasis on the second terms of the aforementioned binomials—the individual message and
the psychological approach. Understanding a word or a syntagm is a predominantly linguistic-
grammatical operation. The intuitive or psychological aspect of interpretation becomes more
important as we try to grasp the sense of larger units—of the connections between
sentences, or texts; the sense of a literary work, or of the whole production or personality
of an author.
But even in the case of single words, one must also understand the unique and
individual sense they may acquire in a specific context. There is no hermeneutic process so
simple that it does not require an interpretive negotiation between general and specific
dimensions, between the abstract norm and the concrete instance. We must understand the
complete sentence containing it before we decide on the precise meaning of a word, but in
order to construct the sentence we must already understand the word, at least
provisionally. The same circular—or rather, circulatory—relationship exists between the
individual sentences in a text and the complete text. This leads Schleiermacher (following
Ast and other authors) to enunciate a key principle: the process of comprehension takes
place through a hermeneutic circle. A part of a text is understood always in terms of the
whole to which it belongs, and a whole is understood with reference to the parts it is made
of. Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic circle could be described as this constant back-and-forth
movement of attention from the part to the whole as we try to make sense of a text. This
oscillation goes hand in hand with another complementary to-and-fro swing: the passage
from a grammatical interpretive strategy to an intuitive-psychological one (a stylistic or

The Hermeneutic Spiral from Schleiermacher to Goffman 157
“technical” one, as Schleiermacher names it)—a to-and-fro swing between two modes of
approach to interpretation. As we interpret, we continually reelaborate, in a retrospective
or retroactive way, what is already known, in the light of the global coherence between
those already-known elements and the new context. (I emphasize here the temporality of the
circle).
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is highly versatile. His account addresses a variety of
communicative phenomena, from Biblical interpretation to first-language acquisition, or
(especially apposite to the present paper) the analysis of thematic sequences or topics in
conversation. These processes have all in common the hermeneutic interaction established
between a relatively well-known part and the whole the sense of which the interpreter tries
to “divine” or guess.
3. The hermeneutic spiral
Still, the image of the circle as a description of the hermeneutic process is unfortunate (in
spite of its good fortune), and it may create some confusion. The interpreter’s attention
does shift from the part to the whole, with the help of comparisons and of intuition, and
then back from the whole to the part, in order to reintepret that part (thus, interpretation
constantly requires reinterpretation). But once we return to it, the part on which we fix our
attention is no longer what it was: it has been transformed by our improved comprehension,
and will provide a firmer foothold for a second prospection of the whole to which it belongs.
We see, then, that the celebrated hermeneutic circle is more exactly a hermeneutic spiral.
Only interpretations which do not produce new meaning are circular, with the circle
becoming in fact a vicious circle.3
If this schematization of the hermeneutic process as a growing spiralling movement is
accepted, it comes as no surprise that no complete understanding can ever be achieved,
since a spiral is an open curve which, unlike a circle, does not circumscribe a finite space.
Any interpretation is provisional and relative to a given (and situated) critical project. In fact,
from the moment a text is contemplated as a component part of a larger whole, the
interpretive moment begins anew. It is easily seen that the attempt to read any cultural text
opens up a potentially ever-expanding interpretive process. Once it has been actualized by
the receiver and contextually interpreted, a sign acquires a more precise sense. But there
are no fixed principles on how to delimit the relevant aspects of context, since what is
relevant is relevant not in itself but with respect to a specific communicative process.4
4. Dialogism and interaction
Schleiermacher’s conception is highly suggestive, and it might sustain systematic comparison
with a number of present-day concepts in discourse analysis, for instance with the notion
that the processing of a complex syntactic structure, or of discourse generally, requires an
interplay of top-down and bottom-up strategies. It also brings to mind the analysts’ accounts
of reprocessing in garden-pathing syntactic constructions or narrative structures.5 It may also
be usefully compared with other theories which have studied the diverse interactional
processes in communication.
One such theory is Bakhtin/Voloshinov’s account of dialogism. In Voloshinov’s
materialist theory of language, interaction is constitutive of language. Linguistic meaning does
not consist solely of logical propositions: it includes valuation and stance, an attitude towards
the subject matter and the interlocutor, and the confrontation of the presuppositions or
perspectives of speakers and hearers. There exists, to be sure, a measure of common

José Angel Garcia Landa 158
ground as a necessary basis for communication. Further still, each enunciation anticipates to
some extent the interlocutor’s answer: it is addressed to a hearer whose implicit image is
constructed to some extent by the speaker: “The word is oriented towards an addressee,
towards who that addressee might be.”6
These effects of interlocution may assume complex forms, such as the multiplication of
speaker and addressee figures described by narratologists (narratees and implied readers,
both of which may be single or multiple, and proliferate by juxtaposition as well as by
embedding). There is, at any rate, much common ground here between linguistics and
literary theory. Discourse is for Bakhtin dialogic, it is “always already” embarked in an
implicit dialogue with previous utterances,7 whether or not it is actually followed by an
answer, and whether or not the answer is the one anticipated by the speaker or writer.
Interaction with the other is inherent in language use to such an extent that many of the
principles governing enunciation are to be found outside the speaker, in the attitudes and the
presence of the addressee, even if the addressee is absent or is invisible, as happens in
literature or other media of temporally or spatially deferred communication. Alterity is thus
a constitutive principle of action in Bakhtin—an insight which is also present in the ethical
philosophy of Buber and Levinas.
Bakhtin and Voloshinov provide a model for integrational and interactional linguistics
avant la lettre. Their assumptions could be usefully compared with those of integrational
linguists like Roy Harris and Michael Toolan, and, in a wider methodological sense, with the
work of symbolic interactionalists like Herbert Blumer in the social sciences.8 Here I will
focus on another theory whose emphasis on integrational analysis and interaction provides
yet another methodological analogue and a grounding for an interactional theory of
interpretation—Erving Goffman’s analysis of verbal interaction and framing in Forms of Talk. I
will briefly compare some of his concepts with the notions of hermeneutic reelaboration
expounded above.
5. Action and retroaction: Goffman
Goffman criticises analytical approaches to speech which disregard the context—in
pragmatics as well as in grammar (1981:31). Part of the limitations of the linguistic
approaches he criticises stem from the tendency of formal linguistics to limit context to the
linguistic co-text, thereby ignoring that the governing principle of interaction often lies not in
the semantic coherence of discourse but in the pragmatic coherence of non-verbal action.
Discourse thus rests on a global framework of interaction which is not necessarily verbal in
nature. Many times these non-verbal aspects of context become accessible to observation
gradually, as the interactional process takes place. They become manifest in the responses to
earlier enunciations, as such responses (which are not necessarily ‘replies’ in a semantic
sense) often verbalize in an explicit way what Austin would call the interlocutors’
perlocutionary reaction, their interpretation and evaluation of the speaker’s utterance or
actions, their response to the interactive mutual positioning proposed verbally or non-
verbally by the speaker. Enunciative interaction therefore acts, according to Goffman, as an
interpretation of what has been said and done up to then, both for the interlocutors and
(perhaps especially) for the student of communication who analyzes a decontextualised
transcription of the original exchange (Goffman 1981:33-34).
Following Gunter (1974), Goffman observes that the interactants, as well as the
student analyzing their interaction after the event, cannot predict what the next

The Hermeneutic Spiral from Schleiermacher to Goffman 159
communicative move will consist in. Instead, the thematic connection between an
enunciation and the reply/response to it can be established only retrospectively:
what is available to the student (as also to the actual participants) is not the possiblity of
predicting forward from a statement to a reply—as we might from a cause to its
effects—but rather quite a different prospect, that of locating in what is said now the
sense of what it is a response to. For the individual who had accepted replying to the
original statement will have been obliged to display that he has discovered the
meaningfulness and relevance of the statement and that a relevant action is now
provided. (Goffman 1981:33)
Sometimes, the sense which is discovered retrospectively in the original speaker’s utterance
and is brought to light through the hearer’s response is not intentional in its origin, and may
have escaped the speaker’s or the bystanders’ consciousness. The hearer can then underline
his/her interpretation of that sense either directly or indirectly, trusting his/her
interpretation of what has been said to the interlocutors’ or bystanders’ inferential
reconstruction. For instance, through our answers or responses we can retrospectively
uncover slips of the tongue, puns or unintentional obscene meanings present in the speaker’s
words, and direct the speaker’s or other interactants’ attention toward these aspects of the
utterance. We can even ‘construct’ them retroactively, that is, we can attribute to a
speaker’s utterance, on the basis of the words used by that speaker, an intention or a sense
which we know was not originally there before our intervention, but which may be planted
there for some practical purpose, either playful or confrontational.9
It is apparent that the response can be verbal or non-verbal, and can refer to a verbal
or non-verbal element of our interlocutor’s performance. Thus, each conversational turn
retrospectively highlights those elements of the other interlocutor’s previous intervention
the speaker chooses to respond to.
And what conversation becomes then is a sustained strip or tract of referencings, each
referencing tending to bear, but often deviously, some retrospectively perceivable
connection to the immediately prior one. (Goffman 1981:72)
Goffman argues that speech activity does not rest on a verbal structure of conversational
turns, but on an interactional sequence in which non-verbal action is determinant, with
verbalization often occurring as a means of explicitly repositioning the interlocutors on the
basis of preexisting non-verbal interaction. Consider Goffman’s account of the role of
discourse (or “talk”) in a service encounter such as paying at a checkout counter: although
verbal discourse may occur,
talk and its characteristic structure hardly provides a characterization of the service
sequence in progress, this servicing being a game of a different kind. In the serious sense,
what is going on is a service transaction, one sustained through an occasion of
cooperatively executed, face-to-face, nonlinguistic action. Words can be fitted to this
sequence, but the sequencing is not conversational. (1981: 39)
We may extend this insight, through a rather blunt reformulation, in the sense that the basic
sequencing of human communication as a whole is not conversational, discursive or verbal—
though words may be partly fitted to it, and it may be partly fitted to words.
Goffman’s account of the relationship between language and action shares much
ground with the theories of some major linguists such as Pike or Firth. According to Pike,
one should “give for the total event, as a unit, a unified description” which “would
simultaneously analyse and describe non-linguistic behaviour as well as the smallest and most
intricate elements of linguistic structure.” 10 Likewise, from a phenomenological perspective

José Angel Garcia Landa 160
on language, Maurice Merleau-Ponty contends that language does not make sense if we
understand it with respect only to things said: for him, the mistake made by semanticists
consists in closing up language upon itself, as if it only spoke about itself— for language takes
its life from a preexisting ‘silence’.11 Any act of speech or writing, therefore, involves a
negotiatiation with the unsaid, and a choice on the part of the speaker or writer as to which
aspects of the unsaid can be presupposed, and which ones need pointing out in order to
become interactionally relevant or usable.
We have noted that, according to Goffman, a response may refer to non-verbal
aspects of communicative interaction, and may thereby contribute to the reelaboration or
redirectioning of interaction. Also that, more specifically, the response to non-verbal
elements may itself be more or less explicitly verbalised. A response which gives a verbal
formulation to non-verbal interactional elements may be interpreted in linguistic analysis as a
change in the topic of conversation (to the extent that the notion of conversational topic is
restricted to the coherence of what is verbally expressed, and not of what is expressed at
large). At this point an observation may be introduced regarding the different types of non-
verbality which may be subject to interactional reinterpretation. On the one hand we have
non-linguistic or paralinguistic phenomena—proxemics, gesture, tone, etc., which are the
primary object of Goffman’s analysis, given that his study centers on face-to-face verbal
interaction. On the other hand, this retroactive interpretive process also bears on the
understanding of non-codified information, and of information which is not explicitly
thematized. Such information becomes therefore a species of linguistic gesture, even if it
presents itself in a verbally accessible mode—as individual style, or as the specific form or
wording given to the message.12
6. Post-structuralist rereadings
Several modes of literary interpretation may be explained, at least in part, following this line
of reasoning. They involve retroactive reelaboration within an ongoing deferred dialogue
with the original work, or with other readings of that work (in this case it is the critic who
proposes the “ratified” participants in a given instance of critical interaction). The critic may
be writing in the mode of what may be called “friendly criticism,” elaborating a critical
discourse which abstains from thematizing any elements not thematized by the author, or, at
any rate, thematizing only elements which are ideologically consonant with the work’s
intentional theme, or subordinated to it. On the other hand, the critic may engage in what
Judith Fetterley calls “resisting reading,” a mode we might also call “critical criticism,” or
“polemical criticism”—sometimes even “confrontational criticism” or “unfriendly criticism.”
Such criticism addresses metalinguistically (and thereby verbalizes) ideologically dissonant
stylistic or “gestural” elements—dissonant either with the work’s explicit theme or with the
critic’s own values.
A reading path which is marginal in a given text may be thematized in the metalingual
model of the work constructed by the critic’s discourse, and may become the main object of
interpretation for a specific critical reading. Thus, critical processes instantiate (and evince)
the general principles of communicative interaction, and relevant connections may be
established between the linguistic theories describing basic communicative interaction (oral
and in praesentia), such as conversational analysis, and other metalingual activities or
language games, such as deconstruction, which at first might seem to have little in common
with them.

The Hermeneutic Spiral from Schleiermacher to Goffman 161
Let us take Paul de Man as an example. The main thesis of his book Blindness and Insight
is that critical labour is not as lucid regarding itself as it might seem to be. This book is
devoted to the deconstruction of other critical texts, and it holds that criticism achieves its
best insights when it is literary and not literal, when critical texts require to be read between
the lines, so that their profoundest sense contradicts the literal assertions made by the critic.
In what follows, “reader” refers to de Man’s position as the reader of the critical text, and
“critic” (or sometimes “author”) refers to the critic who is the author of the critical text
analyzed by de Man:
The reader is given the elements to decipher the real plot hidden behind the pseudo-
plot, but the author [critic] himself remains deluded.... it is left to the reader to draw a
conclusion that the critics cannot face if they are to pursue their task. (de Man 1983:
104)
That is, the critic’s blindness is the necessary condition for the lucidity of his (sic) text:
Critics’ moments of greatest blindness with regard to their own critical assumptions are
also the moments at which they achieve their greatest insight. (de Man 1983:109)
It is by no means clear, though, who is the subject of that insight. It is not the critic (the
author of the critical text analyzed by de Man), as we have seen that that critic is blind to the
deeper sense of his text. It could be argued it is Paul de Man’s insight which is at issue
here—in deconstructing Derrida’s text, for instance, de Man shows Derrida’s relative
blindness. But, curiously enough, de Man ignores these subjective attributions; he silences his
labour as a critic and objectifies the insight saying it belongs to “the text”—it is well known
that for the American school of deconstruction “the text deconstructs itself.” But, which
“text”? Not, it seems, the text written by the critic (the “author”), who remains blind to the
deconstructive reading—nor the text as it has been read by other readers, who unlike de
Man, have remained oblivious to this problem. The text is not a brute fact: it is a text insofar
as it is read by someone. The lucidity pointed at by de Man belongs only to the text as read
by de Man, and to the text de Man teaches us to read. The insight is de Man’s reading the
text, and ours insofar as we make his reading ours.
And, correlatively, a blind spot is created retroactively: something which did not exist
before de Man’s reading, or at any rate something which did not exist in the same sense,
exists now, in the text which other readers had read without perceiving that blind spot
(being blind to blindness, as it were). The text has been transformed by the critical reading,
although de Man experiences (to my mind) a moment of critical blindness similar to the ones
he describes, and does not put it this way—instead, he holds that the whole task had already
been done by the self-deconstructive text.13
Another critical mode which may serve to exemplify the processes of explicit
thematization I have described as a “hermeneutic spiral” is psychoanalytic criticism. Freud’s
famous dictum promising that the ego will be where the unconscious used to be, can be seen
as a programmatic declaration as to the role of the verbalization of behaviour and of
retroactive thematization. It comes as no surprise, given this methodological standpoint, that
retroaction will also appear as a pathological phenomenon to be studied by the
psychoanalyst—for instance in Freud’s account of phantasized childhood traumas, in which
the traumatic scene is a post facto retroactive elaboration and should not be interpreted
literally. What is more problematic is the reluctance of much psychoanalytic criticism to
acknowledge and explore this uncanny parallelism between the neurotic phenomenon and
the analyst’s own retroactive constructions.

José Angel Garcia Landa 162
Lacanian psychoanalyis has been most aware of such hermeneutic issues. Lacan’s well-
known seminar on Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” describes a triangular relationship between
symbolic positions available to the subject which may be described in terms of the
hermeneutic spiral described here. The symbolic positions ascribed by Lacan in the earlier
part of the analysis to the King, the Queen and the Minister may be described as follows:
- The King is blind to what he should see.
- The Queen perceives the King’s blindness, but becomes vulnerable insofar as
she believes herself to be in the position of the one “who sees”—because she
forgets that she can also be seen.
- The Minister is the one who sees the Queen’s mistake, and takes advantage of
it; he flaunts his superior position by outwitting the Queen’s police—but then
makes the same mistake himself, and is bested by Dupin.
These positions may be rewritten, for our purposes here, as the positions of the author, the
“reader” and the critic, respectively. Thus, we might describe de Man’s position as
represented in the above account as the intermediate symbolic position, that of the “reader”
of a critical work whose interpretive activity (bearing on a critic’s reading of a literary text)
is being observed by us—a position which in Poe’s story is occupied first by the Queen and
then by the Minister).14 The critical process therefore provides a displacement analogous to
the one narrated in Poe’s/Lacan’s allegory of interpretation:

C. Minister D. Dupin
⇓ → ⇓
B. Queen ⇒ A. King C. Minister ⇒ B. Police (Queen)

C’s dominant comprehension of B comprehending A is displaced the moment C’s
comprehension becomes observed and comprehended by a third party, D. Analogically,

C. de Man (“reader”) D. Ourselves
⇓ → ⇓
B. Critic (“author”) ⇒ A. Writer C. de Man ⇒ Critic (“author”)

It is significant that de Man should use the word “reader” to label his position—while it is
apparent that he is a reader who leaves a trace which can be read, i.e. a critic. By calling
himself a “reader” de Man tries to efface the agency and one might say the very existence of
his critical text.
It has of course been noted that the critic’s subject position is by definition liable to
displacement—the critic will inevitably become the object of another deconstructor’s
reading, as observed by Derrida.15 In the above scheme, the reader should mistrust, to begin
with, the term I use (“ourselves”) to conflate my position and my reader’s. A different
interpretive perspective (which may involve language games imported from a different
discipline) shows the underside of a writer’s lucidity, revealing it as the effect of textual
structures which become visible from the new angle adopted. The significance of the text is
thereby altered and reinterpreted—but not from any stable or definitive viewpoint: only in a
given interpretive context or even a given discursive encounter.
Even a first reading, especially if it is not a naive one, may involve such retroactive
intervention on the text. But the fullest manifestation of this retroactive reworking is to be

The Hermeneutic Spiral from Schleiermacher to Goffman 163
found in critical modes which partake of the “hermeneutics of suspicion”—psychoanalysis,
ideological and political criticism, deconstruction. These critical modes involve a drastic
recontextualization of the text being analyzed. The middle ground is to be found in more
consonant or “friendly” critical approaches which try to recover and expand the meaning of
the text. All criticism, though, involves rewriting, in the form of interpretive summarising,
highlighting of patterns, or discursive recycling for use in another context.
Processes of rereading favour retroactive elaborations and reformulations of theme,
due precisely to their cumulative effect. Actually, all criticism rests on rereading. Critical
readings to some extent de-thematize the text in the long run, so that due to the requisite
originality of critical readings, there are aspects of canonical works which become exhausted
or become intractable. That very intractability enables other subordinate reading tracks to
become visible or tractable—which they would not have been as a first-hand approach to
the text. A critical reading creates, therefore, an intertextual network both with the work
being analyzed and with other readings of that work (which may or may not be addressed
explicitly). These intertextual networks must be described in the analysis of critical
metalanguage. It is on this intertextual complex that the thematization proposed by the
critical discourse rests: the critical discourse’s ability to formulate in an explicit way textual
relationships which have been imperfectly perceived or described before, as well as its ability
to retroactively intervene on the signification of previous literary or critical texts. In this
way, (literary) history is constantly rewritten, as the present significance of past texts and
historical phenomena is reinterpreted—our representations and understanding of past
events and texts are the result of this constant retroactive intervention, and involve the
explicit thematization and linguistic articulation of previously intimated but as yet unstated
relationships.
7. Recapitulation (Philology)
There exists, therefore, a structural continuity between the modes of intertextual
reelaboration proper to critical debate on the one hand, and the interaction between verbal
and non-verbal communication which is so exemplarly described in Goffman’s conversational
analyses. A critical reading, like a conversational turn, may provide either a reply or a
response to the text being analyzed. For Goffman, “although a reply is addressed to
meaningful elements of whole statements, responses can break frame and reflexively address
aspects of a statement which would ordinarily be ‘out of frame’” (Goffman 43). For our
purposes here: a critical response may choose to address what is conveyed by the text, not
just what is said in it, carving out its own reference in the textual body, thematizing semiotic
structures and relationships which heretofore had a non-propositional status—even if they
were relationships between words—and giving them a propositional interpretation which is
a in effect a retroactive reworking (and a construction) of the text’s significance.
It was the awareness of a continuity between linguistics, historical studies, hermeneutic
theory and literary criticism that gave rise in the nineteenth century to the general
hermeneutics of Ast and Schleiermacher. The nineteenth-century theoretical paradigm for
philological studies underwent radical transformations after the formalist and anti-historicist
movements of the earlier twentieth century. But perhaps today, after the revolutions and
spirals of the twentieth-century—of poststructuralism and pragmalinguistics—it is worth
noting that the continuity between linguistics, hermeneutics, history and criticism is still
current in an interdisciplinary space where time and communicative interaction give rise to
meaning and thought. “A special Space maybe,” to quote from my epigraph from Nabokov—

José Angel Garcia Landa 164
not the old one, but still a space we can call by the time-honoured name, Philology, as long
as it keeps unwinding and spiralling, and producing new significance.
Notes
* A preliminary Spanish version of this paper was read in December 2002 at the annual conference of
AEDEAN, the Spanish Society for Anglo-American Studies.
1. Goffman does cite an early translation of Voloshinov’s chapter on reported speech (1986:529).
2. Schleiermacher, quoted in Palmer (1969:88). Note that the notions proposed here by
Schleiermacher prefigure some aspects of the Saussurean dyad langue / parole.
3. On the classical image of the circle as a scheme for understanding, and its “opening” in modern
philosophy since Hegel, see Schmidt (1990).
4. Compare a similar observation by Beaugrande and Dressler (1981:35) concerning the termination
of linguistic processing in any given instance.
5. On “top-down,” “bottom-up” and other coherence-building processes see f.i. van Dijk (1980). On
garden paths, see f.i. Jahn (1999), Oertel (2000).
6. Voloshinov (1973:85; quoted in Harland (1999:158), whose exposition of dialogism I partly follow
in this paragraph.
7. For instance, my use of the scare-quoted expression ‘always already’ in this sentence signals to
readers familiar with deconstruction an implied analogy between Bakhtin’s theories and
deconstruction which may be further explored by these readers.
8. On the principles of integrational linguistics, see Toolan (1996) or Harris and Wolf (1998).
Blumer’s methodological papers are collected in Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (—
actually a critique of formalized, non-interactional methods).
9. See Leo Hickey (1994).
10. Pike (1967:26). Firth notes the importance of describing the relations “between elements of
linguistic structure and nonverbal constituents of the situation” (1968:203, 148, 173, 177). Consider,
likewise, the implications of the “interactionist assumption” and the “situational assumption” for
discourse processing as described in Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983:7f): that discourse is interpreted
within “the whole interaction process” among speech participants, including “verbal and nonverbal
interaction”, and that this interaction is “part of a social situation” wherein participants may have
“functions or roles”, and special “strategies” and “conventions” may apply. I owe my awareness of
Pike’s and Firth’s concern with the articulation of verbal and nonverbal elements to Robert de
Beaugrande’s account (2000, chapters 5, 8 and 11—the chapter on van Dijk and Kintsch, wrongly
titled 12 in the current online edition of de Beaugrande’s volume).
11. Merleau-Ponty (1969:167). I became aware of this aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s thought through a
lecture on his work by Mª Carmen Hernández Sáenz (2003).
12. R. P. Blackmur’s notion of “language as gesture” could therefore undergo a pragmalinguistic
reformulation—and this suggestion of mine might perhaps serve too as a practical example of
retroactive reelaboration, by rereading Blackmur in the light of the theory proposed here.
13. I have dealt with this issue at greater length (1998).
14. “[L]’on est en droit de douter qu’il sache ainsi ce qu’il fait, à le voir captivé aussitôt par une
relation duelle où nous retrouvons tous les caractères du leurre mimétique ou de l’animal qui fait le
mort, et, pris au piège de la situation imaginaire : de voir qu’on ne le voit pas, méconnaître la
situation réelle où il est vu ne pas voir. Et qu’est-ce qu’il ne voit pas ? Justement la situation
symbolique qu’il a su lui-même si bien voir, et où maintenant le voilà vu se voyant n’être pas vu.”
(Lacan 1970:41).
“([W]e may properly doubt that he knows what he is thus doing, when we see him immediately
captivated by a dual relationship in which we find all the traits of a mimetic lure or of an animal

The Hermeneutic Spiral from Schleiermacher to Goffman 165
feigning death, and, trapped in the typically imaginary situation of seeing that he is not seen,
misconstruct the real situation in which he is seen not seeing.
“And what does he fail to see? Precisely the symbolic situation which he himself was so well able to
see, and in which he is now seen seeing himself not being seen.” (Lacan 1988:44).
The passage quoted here may therefore be read as a description of de Man’s account of blindness—
blind to its own vantage point, which is thus conflated with ‘the text’s.’
15. “And today no exercise is more widespread” (Derrida 1988:112). A model of this deconstructive
chain is to be found in the collection The Purloined Poe, which collects a chain of readings of Poe’s
story in which each critic discovers the blind spots in the work of the previous deconstructor—
Derrida being one of them.
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