Free Interpretation

An a t A s c h e r

"Double Exposure" presents viewers with a selection of short films, which each
feature two interpretations of a single artwork. In this manner, the project
attempts to articulate a meta-approach to the concept of hermeneutics, and
more specifically to the interpretation of photography. The individual acts of
interpretation included in the films accumulate into a single whole that invites a
reflection on the meaning of interpretation including the discourse on art and
photography in the public sphere.
Hermeneutic discourse thrives in the contemporary world not only in
the field of art and culture, but also in a range of other discursive fields, including
politics, economy, sports, and current events, among others. In this context,
a number of questions concerning the act of interpretation come to the fore:
does anyone at all have the right to engage in a process of interpretation? Is
the discourse of hermeneutics an exclusionary discourse controlled by experts,
or rather an open one in which everyone may participate? Does the culture of
interpretation shape the organization of our social reality? In what follows, I would
like to suggest that the proliferation of interpretations is of value not only in terms
of their contents or contribution to aesthetics, but also as a truly emancipatory
practice that undermines the hierarchical structures of meaning present in our lives.
Moreover, the act of undermining these hierarchical structures of meaning may in
turn prove to undermine the related hierarchy of social structures.
Liberty, Equality, and Interpretation

In order to understand why the practice of hermeneutics is predicated upon

and to a certain extent even promotes equality and liberty, one may turn to the
ideas of Joseph Jacotot, a nineteenth-century pedagogue whose revolutionary
theory is referred to in a number of essays by the important contemporary
political and aesthetic thinker Jacques Rancire. Jacotot, an instructor of French
literature, left France in 1818 for Holland, where he was asked to teach literature
to a class of Flemish-speaking students. Jacotot himself spoke no Flemish, while

Franois Fnelon, Les

aventures de Tlmaque.
This didactic novel tells
the story of the journeys
undertaken by Telemachus,
son of Odysseus, who is
accompanied by his teacher
and guide (towards the end
of the novel, this teacher is
revealed to be Minerva, the
Greek goddess of wisdom).

his students spoke not a single word of French. In order to cope with this strange
and problematic situation, Jacotot purchased a bi-lingual French-Flemish edition
of the novel The Adventures of Telemachus by the Archbishop Franois Fnelon,
which had just been published in Brussels.1 With the help of an interpreter, Jacotot
instructed his students to read the French text by relying on the Flemish translation.
When they had read through the first half of the book, he asked them to write
an essay in French about what they had read. To his astonishment, his students
were able not only to successfully read through the first part of the novel, but also
to produce worthy essays in a language they had no knowledge of just several
weeks earlier.
Following this experience, Jacotot developed what he called his
theory of "the equality of intelligences" (l'galit des intelligences). He concluded
that any person could learn and teach others anything at all, since all intelligences
were, in principal, equal. On this basis, Jacotot argued that a teacher's attempt to
transmit the "correct" knowledge in order to seemingly reduce the gap between
what he knows and what his students know only serves to perpetuate this gap; for
a practice predicated upon fostering a student's understanding of the "correct"
body of knowledge is implicitly based on a hierarchical structure of knowledge
governed by "those who know," and thus contributes to actively perpetuating
the same gap it attempts to close. The first thing a student learns within such a
framework, based on her relations with her teacher, is that she cannot learn
by herself. Jacotot calls this type of teacher "the stultifying master" (le matre
abrutissant), since his actions serve to disempower the student by downplaying her
own value and abilities. Instead, Jacotot presents an educational model centered
on what he calls "the ignorant master" (le matre ignorant). This teacher does not
attempt to transmit the "correct" knowledge, but rather demands of his students to
study independently and to teach themselves. He asks them to come to terms with
the surrounding world and all of its challenges, and to interpret it for themselves
in the manner that makes the most sense to them. In other words, he asks them to
become active interpreters of reality.
It is important to understand that, ultimately, the goal pursued by
Jacotot was not that of instruction, but was rather political and emancipatory.
He was not interested in training the next generation of scientists, but rather in
educating human beings so that they would deeply internalize their inherent
equality, and realize that they each had the basic right to make use of their
intelligence as they wished and to interpret the surrounding world as they saw
fit. Based on this underlying recognition of "the equality of intelligences," Jacotot
sought to foster the development of social creatures who would insist on their
liberty and their rights without attempting to strip others of their rights and liberty.
In this sense, the strategy of abandoning traditional educational methods for a
practice predicated upon interpretive activity is legitimated by the belief in a basic
form of equality. At the same time, it is a strategy aimed at promoting and actively

realizing the idea of equality, as well as the experience of liberty to which it gives
rise. Jacotot's approach thus sheds light on the social importance embodied in the
act of interpretation, and on its political and emancipatory potential.
Truth and Multiplicity: Understanding and Possible Understanding

Yet is this perspective applicable to any process of interpretation? And more

specifically, is it applicable to the interpretation of art? Can Jacotot's approach
be applied to such a hermeneutic process, or even to economic and political
interpretations of the kind I mentioned earlier on in my discussion? Such
interpretations are presented to us on a daily basis in the media in sports
commentary, military commentary, or economic commentary as information
provided by experts whose role is to mediate the "correct" understanding of reality
for the ignorant masses. Expert commentary, moreover, may be viewed not as
an interpretation but rather as a form of judgment; as such, it may be compared
to the educational strategy of "the stultifying master." At the same time, such
presumptuous commentaries, which bear the stamp of expertise and of exclusive
knowledge, may also provoke the opposite result that is, an ever-proliferating
number of interpretations. At present, this proliferation is given expression by
the culture of talkbacks, as well as through more subtle manifestations of the
democratization of discourse. How, then, are we to understand this contradiction
between the promotion of "expert knowledge" and its undermining through multiple
interpretations? What I would like to suggest is that this contradictory phenomenon
is closely related to the premises underlying the structure of interpretation, which I
already touched upon in my discussion of Jacotot's theory.
In contrast to an educational approach that assumes the existence
of a single body of knowledge which must be imparted to all, the very essence
of interpretation precludes the belief in an exclusive truth. Rather, interpretation
offers a possible understanding of reality, and seeks to come to terms with it
by organizing it into a coherent, meaningful structure. The interpreter focuses
on certain details within a given environment, and arranges them to create a
particular kind of order and produce a clearcut, meaningful statement. What is at
stake in such a process is not an attempt to capture "things as they are," but rather
to gather certain elements from the plethora of surrounding details in order to
create a meaningful narrative, one possible scenario among many. Such a stance
concerning reality is not far from Nietzsche's well-known assertion that facts that
do not exist, only interpretations.
What follows is that any interpreter's claim for exclusivity is inherently
problematic, since she must be able to fulfill the likely impossible task of proving
that her hermeneutic order is the only coherent and legitimate one. Nevertheless,
an interpretive approach to reality is not necessarily pluralistic and open, and does
not inherently promote interpretive multiplicity, just as a public sphere filled with
interpreters will not necessarily be devoid of exclusion and oppression. Indeed, in

Jean-Luc Nancy, "Finite and

Infinite Democracy," in Giorgio
Agamben et al., Democracy
in What State? (New York:
Columbia University Press,
2011), p. 72.

many cases one interpretation claims for itself a hegemonic status while attempting
to discount any other understanding of reality. Even in such cases, however, the
inherently relative nature of interpretation enables multiplicity to exist in potential,
thus constituting a constant "threat" to the monopoly imposed by a single order of
meaning. The challenge faced by a society that aims to be free is to realize the
potential of multiplicity and recognize the legitimacy of multiple interpretations, of
the many ways in which reality may be organized and perceived. As the French
philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes, "The sphere of the common [] comprises
multiple approaches to the order of meaning each of them itself multiple, as in
the diversity of the arts, thought, desire, the affects, and so on. What 'democracy'
signifies here is the admission [] of all these diversities to a 'community,' which
does not unify them, but, on the contrary, deploys their multiplicity, and with it the
infinite of which they constitute the numberless and unfinalizable forms."2
Photography as Interpretation

The challenge faced by photography, as Noam Yuran argues in one of the films
included in "Double Exposure" (speaking of a work by Oded Balilty) is "to say
something new while building solely on what there is. How is it possible to say
something beyond what there is, using only what there is?" In contrast to other
artistic mediums, which are at liberty to create their world anew, and which can
plan and design their contents from scratch, photography must first come to terms
with existing materials while attempting to say something new. Whether the image
is a photogram that captures the projection of an object, a puzzle composed
of an infinite number of photographic particles, an optical manipulation or an
unmanipulated photograph, its underlying basis is something that already exists;
something expropriated from its original context and captured as part of a new
work. The photographer does not create his materials from scratch; rather, as
David Adika puts it in another film in the series, he "steals" them from the sphere
of the everyday. In this sense, photography as an artistic medium has an internal
logic similar to that of interpretive action. In both cases, what is at stake is a
process of selection and organization; a reordering of details culled from an
existing reality, which gives rise to a new order of meaning.
The photographic act casts the photographer as an interpreter. The
photographer, in turn, culls materials from the surrounding reality, organizes
them and presents them in a certain manner and in a certain order; in doing
so, he brings into the world new subject matter, and produces new meanings.
So, for instance, an Arab family standing against the background of a fishing
boat in northern Tel Aviv recreates an autobiographical narrative of clandestine
Jewish immigration to the country, which took place in a Zionist context (Simcha
Shirman); portraits cut out of a book become casualties of an unidentified war
(Assaf Shaham), while another portrait cut out of a newspaper raises questions
concerning the relations between center and periphery (Deganit Berest). Different

Jacques Rancire, "The

Emancipated Spectator," in
Artforum International, vol. 45,
no. 7 (March 2007), p. 280.

thematic worlds are interwoven, and the connections forged between them give
rise to original meanings, to new perspectives on familiar things.
If photography is indeed an art based on an act of interpretation,
what, then, is the status of interpretations of photography, such for instance as
the interpretations presented by the speakers in the films included in "Double
Exposure"? Do they amount to interpretations of interpretations? Can interpretive
observation accrue layer upon layer ad infinitum? Given what has been said thus
far, the answer seems clear: in a free society, there is no end to interpretation. In a
free society, every individual may offer her own interpretation of the surrounding
reality, including surrounding interpretations whether the interpretation is a work
of photography or a discussion of such a work. The films included in "Double

Anat Ascher, a lecturer

Exposure" follow upon this logic by presenting the viewer with two interpretations

and scholar in the field

of a single work. In doing so, they seem to be urging her to form the next link in the

of philosophy and a
doctoral student at Tel Aviv

chain of interpretation, whose future trajectory remains unknown.

University, is writing her

Artists, like researchers, build the stage where the manifestation and

doctoral dissertation on

the effects of their competences become dubious as they frame the

the connection between

the political and the

story of a new adventure in a new idiom. The effect of the idiom cannot

aesthetic in the thought of

be anticipated. It calls for spectators who are active interpreters, who

Rousseau and Rancire. She

is responsible for scholarly

render their own translation, who appropriate the story for themselves,

and research activities at

and who ultimately make their own story out of it. An emancipated

the Shpilman Institute for

Photography.

community is in fact a community of storytellers and translators.3