2Soaps

We may think of the expert interpretation of complex texts, hermeneutics, as the invocation of power like a speech-act. Hermeneutics occurs once the meaning of something is sufficiently complex yet socially important, such as legal and religious texts (Paul Fry). Due to its complexity, it cannot be transparently understood nor passed down through oral tradition. Methods of interpretation arise out of the impossibility of direct knowledge of meaning. Because the meaning of religious and legal documents cannot be maintained without hermeneutics, this meaning is fluid. Hermeneutics is therefore a form of knowledge preservation tangential to the archive. It is tangential because once it begins, it will follow its own line of reasoning in collaboration with its larger discourse.  In turn, this method of knowledge transmission reflexively redefines the object of its knowledge. This is the manner in which the flowing, interpretative, even performative, evolution of power-knowledge undermi...