>
> Mark Bennett wrote:
> >
> > "There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things,
> > and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but
> > comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of
> > authors there is great scarcity." Montaigne "Of Experience".
>
> And what is your interpretation of this; what is its significance? It
> would seem to me impossible to interpret things except through the
> mdeidum of interpreting other interpretations. I would imagine that when
> consciousness dawned in the early days of homo s. (or in the late days
> of the immediate predecessor of homo s., it took the form of commenting
> on what had been the implicit interpretation of things in the activity
> of its predecessors.
>
Come now, Carrol, you can do better than this w/o going back to speculating on the origins of man - particularly since we know that our bodies, our sociality and our consciousness coevolved... so that the idea of commentaing on the activities of predecessors - where the predecessors were otherwise completely homo sapies - suggests a firm mental/discursive break where all the anthropological data indicates that there wasn't one..
Are you saying that all authors are, in fact, generating reinterprations? That they are no different from critics? While the former is certainly true, I'm not sure you're going to be able to successfully argue for the latter. In fact, while I think - particulary after the rise of materialist forms of ideology critique and cultural studies - that the assertion that authors are creatively concerned with real and critics derivative in their focus on authorial products is particularly hard to maintain today, I think it is equally the case that the labor process/goals/audiences for the two are, and are usually intended to be, quite different.
Montaigne, an essayist, was writing in an era before there was much in the way of natural, much less social, science as we know it. If we want to understand Montaigne relative to the present then a juxtaposition of the differently historical/material conditions of life is the key... not something about homo sapiens. Finally, and along these lines, even if Montaigne was right at the time - and who would argue that there are more critics than authors today? - the key to understanding the quote lies in the very different social/material mileiu of his time relative to ours. Here, I think Joanna's comment was particularly important, for many folks secondary sources are the primary means by which they learn of primary materials... we're back in a Catholic world despite our Protestant principals...