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By Root 975 0

to dominate Anglo-American scholarship of their generation. But by the 1960s the attack on artistic intention coming from a different direction and was taking a different, more politicized form in France. Roland Barthes announced “the death of author,” and Michel Foucault called for abandoning the “author-function” criticism. The French critique of intentionalism treated literature texts produced by ideological systems which were in control of writer and any intentions he might have. This opened the door to interpretations in which the forces identified by Freudian psychology or, historical materialism accounted not only for the nature of the text its reception in culture. Libidinal forces, culture, economic determinants: somewhat different: there is nothing outside the text, he said, except more texts, of course. From every direction, these ideas, pushed with Gallic bravado, were seen as freeing criticism from the dead hand of author. Barthes said, “It is language which speaks, not the author,” an interest in whom is “the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology.” Writing must therefore be regarded as the “destruction of every voice, every point of origin.” The removal of the repressive author liberates criticism, making it a kind of free play, even placing the critic in the controlling position as creator of literary meaning.

But while anti-intentionalist arguments have preoccupied academics for the last half century, intentionalism itself has stubbornly persisted most thinking about art and literature. This is because the intentionalist position is backed by powerful arguments. One of these involves how assign works of art to categories. Consider as an example ethnographic work on Hopi pottery undertaken in the 1920s by the anthropologist Ruth Bunzel. In her well-known study of Pueblo pottery decoration, she came to notice that although Hopi potters (all women) condemned copying and were convinced that their work was in fact original and creative, close inspection revealed that their designs were very similar, exhibiting only tiny variations. Bunzel’s interpretation of what she saw forced her conclude that Hopi potters suffer from some kind of general delusion about their originality. She reported that when this “sterility of imagination” was brought to their attention, they failed to see their plagiarism. Bunzel regarded this as a “very simple and rather amusing” failure to align their ideals of creativity with their actual practices of rote copying.

Has Bunzel given us an adequate account? Perhaps not. Bunzel New York and traveled to Arizona to study Hopi pottery. Suppose Hopi anthropologist were to leave Arizona for New York to study of piano playing as carried on by some of the more famous exponents. He goes to Carnegie Hall one night and hears Leif Andsnes Schubert sonata; the next night he returns to hear Hélène Grimaud, who as luck would have it happens to be performing the very same Schubert work. As he walks out of the hall, our Hopi social scientist that despite the enormous claims that are made for the artistic originality of Grimaud, it is clear that she merely “copied,” with “ “only tiny variations,” Andsnes’s piano playing of the night before.

Ruth Bunzel misunderstood Hopi pottery decoration practices in a way that is very close to our fictional Hopi anthropologist. In the artistic genre she describes, inventing entirely new designs is simply not what counts as “being original” in painting pots; rather, what matters is the use of designs and motifs already in an established decorative repertoire. In this sense, painting a Hopi pot may be more like performing from a score than it is like composing a new work.

The essential problem is that Bunzel has assigned pot decoration the wrong category of activity. This is a mistake that can only be rectified by a direct understanding of artists’ intentions. Anthropological like this one are useful because in ethnographic contexts we tempted to evaluate work in terms of ready-made, familiar conventions that we use in, say, evaluating nineteenth-century novels.