The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [55]
The good news is that you don’t have to learn anything new about hermeneutics because you’re already doing it. Start with this very page and the little squiggles on it. You assemble them into larger and larger chunks—words, sentences, paragraphs, sections—and extract from all them the meanings and ideas I, as a writer, am trying to convey. The essential point of philosophical hermeneutics is that you are an active participant in this transfer. You are not a passive receptacle, like a DVD reader or a scanner that just takes in the information and meanings that are specified and final. Instead, what you take away from the squiggles on this page is jointly created by my words and intentions and the way you read and understand them—a way that is shaped by your own history, your experiences, your knowledge and expectations.
Because author and reader are both involved, everything gets more complicated when viewed through hermeneutic lenses. We tend to think that meanings and ideas in works of art are objective and simply there to be understood. But that’s not so. Most hermeneutic theories accept that things like are not really “things” at all. That is, they are not objective and unchanging, as are things like tables and stones and guitars. Different listeners will find different meanings in the words and in their delivery. Take the famous first lyric, the “yeeaaahhh” that Mick sings off-mic as Keith’s and Mick Taylor’s guitars start churning: It’s like Mona Lisa’s smile. Is Mick being sarcastic? Ironic? Winking at the listener? Just clearing his throat? A bit tired from all the smoke and drink at Nellecôte? Mick himself, I bet, hears and appreciates these possibilities when he listens to the track now, almost forty years later.
the meaning of the song “Rocks Off”
If you take this ambiguity and plurality seriously, it affects the very idea of what works of art like Exile on Main Street and Exile in Guyville really are. Instead of being fixed in all their attributes and significance, they become more fluid and multivalent and complicated. This is not to say that meanings are whatever you want them to be, but it does remind us that artists like The Stones interpret and evaluate their own work not after it’s sprung from their heads in final form but as its being created. They listen to vague musical ideas, demo tapes, and countless recordings and make decisions about what’s good and bad, what works and what doesn’t, in the same way that their fans listen to the recordings that became the ‘official’ album-versions.34
The fact that fans and critics come later to this arena of interpretation doesn’t change the fact that it’s always been, and will remain, an arena of interpretation. Over time, artists and fans will revise their understandings and decide, for example, that some obscure, unsuccessful album is in fact an underappreciated gem, or that an elaborately produced album that once made a splash is not a “real” album for the band—like Their Satanic Majesties’ Request, which fits both descriptions depending on your hermeneutic stance. With hermeneutics, then, meaning flows into metaphysics and reveals it as shifting, growing, or even dying away. More let it bleed than let it be.
Testing One Two Three
How do you know whether an interpretation of a lyric, a song, or (in our case) a relationship between a pair of songs is a good and trustworthy?
One yardstick is coherence. A good interpretation must hang together internally with other accepted facts and ideas about the work in question. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, usually credited as the founder of modern hermeneutics, articulated how this process takes place within a “hermeneutic circle.” It’s circular because interpretation never advances linearly in one direction from, say, ignorance to understanding. To even begin to analyze a book or