Interpretation as Performance

In exploring this mode of truth, we have seen Gadamer turn to the work in two overlapping modes, the classic text and the work of art.  In doing so he first distinguishes the performance arts, such as drama and music, from the nonperformance arts, such as literature; then he breaks down this distinction by suggesting that reading is a kind of performing.  The difference is that in the case of the (obviously) performing arts the primary interpreter, the actor who plays Hamlet or the pianist who plays the Hammerklavier Sonata, presents an interpretation to the audience, while in the case of the (apparently) nonperforming art the readers (note the plural) of a novel, short story, or poem present an interpretation of teh work to themselves. (1503-8)

All performance is interpretation and all interpretation is performance. (1514-15)

Gadamer repeatedly stresses that classic texts speak to us, address us, make claims on us about what is right and good and true.  In this respect they are more like persons with whom we engage in conversation than objects we subject to some methodical observation.  So we have one more model of interpretation. It is like 1) performing a play or sonata; 2) translating from one language into another; 3) applying the law to a particular, concrete situation; 4) applying a scriptural text to the life of believers; and now 5) carrying on a conversation.  The goal in every case is understanding. (1741-45)

Westphal, Whose Community? Which Interpretation? (Kindle Ed.)

New Hermeneutic

At the heart of Gadamer’s concern was the premise that the meaning of a text was not the same as the author’s meaning. The author’s meaning was, in any case, inaccessible to us. Instead, the meaning of a text was in its subject matter, which was at once independent of both the author and reader, and somehow also shared by both of them. Moreover, no one could ever say this is the meaning of a text, since the number of possible meanings was practically endless and constantly changing. And, argued Gadamer, what a text meant to an author could not be reproduced in the present. The past was alien to the present, for differences in time necessarily involved difference in being.

Kaiser in Roy Zuck, Rightly Divided (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1996), 47.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg

“To understand it does not mean primarily to reason one’s way back into the past, but to have a present involvement in what is said…Texts do not ask to be understood as a living expression of the subjectivity of their writers…What is fixed in writing has detached itself from the contingency of its origin and its author and made itself free for new relationships.” [According to Gadamer] the interpreter’s prejudgments interrogate the text and are interrogated in turn by the text. Thereby subjectivity and objectivity merge together, and interpretation becomes application as new horizons of possibility are opened. In short, both text and interpreter take part in the historical process of interpretation.

Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 469-470.