The desire for meaning, or the hermeneutics of equivalence

The most powerful instrument for the analysis of lyrical poetry is the device that R. O. Jakobson in his seminal “closing statement” Linguistics and Poetics from 1960 called equivalence. Equivalence comprises two different relations at the same time: similarity and dissimilarity. Yu. M. Lotman takes this dialectical structure into account when he names the equivalence with the term co-opposition (in Russian: so-protivopostavlenie). There are at least three things to criticize about the use of coopposition as an instrument in analysis of lyric poetry: 1) the predominance of the cognitive and the neglect of gestalt formation; 2) the description of text structures without regard to their perceptibility; 3) he denial of the role that the desire for meaning plays in finding the equivalences to be evaluated. The structuralist belief in the objectivity of his method is questioned by hermeneutics. The hermeneuticist points out to the structuralist that he cannot methodically secure the leap from analysis to interpretation, but that each of his partial findings, which he objectively believes to be founded in the text, is based on unacknowledged anticipations of an intuitively grasped overall sense. A reconciliation between intuition and method seems possible in recourse to the father of hermeneutics, Friedrich Schleiermacher, who introduced the dichotomy of divination and construction for the problem of text comprehension. Transferred from the sacred texts that Schleiermacher had before him to lyrical poems, the combination of divination and construction seems to prevent the mere fulfillment of desires for meaning and to overcome the vicious circle of interpretation.