The Meanings of a Publication in the Humanities: Meaning, text, and authorship in critical perspective

Abstract

A publication is meaningful in different ways. It is more than objective materiality. A writer sees in a book a great achievement within a tradition of thinking. The corresponding reader finds in the same publication a hermeneutic device. For public discourse, the latest bestselling crossover book provides handy information to special interest readers. To philistine management, a publication is formal authorship in a research assessment exercise. And to varying degrees, all four such personas come together in the ordinary scholar, making the different types of meaning an imbricated whole. In this article, I provide a language for this meaningfulness. I make use of the structural hermeneutics of cultural sociology to demonstrate four key notions of meaning. This language helps to understand the way humanities scholars and other actors in contemporary academia deal with publications. I further illustrate what these abstract notions mean in practice with the recent monograph Also a history in philosophy by Jürgen Habermas.