The PMTH focus of postmodern education seems to have faded for the moment while we approach a much more nebulous concept, the concept of letting the text stand on its own.
What does this mean, letting the text stand on its own?

My own concern with this concept of letting the text stand on its own comes from my reading of Derrida. Derrida's ideas almost always inspire me, in spite of his very obscure style of writing.  I don't know quite how it works, but after I read him I find my own head full of thoughts that I find interesting.  I'm never sure at first I have gotten it quite right, but as I read on things make more and more sense, so I feel reassured.  This is relevant, I'll try to show, to what I mean by "letting the text stand on its own."  (If you can't wait to find out exactly what this term means, however, click here and go to the bottom of the article.)

Let me show you something of what Derrida has written on this topic of letting the text stand alone.  I hope that I am giving you enough for you to glimpse what I find inspiring in Derrida.  In this passage, Derrida is talking about text standing alone under the rubric of "writing" (that's the word for it he is using here.)  Permit me to quote Derrida and then I will give you my reading of this passage.
 

This situation comes about , Derrida tells us, in one of three ways.  Either the author is temporarily absent (as for example Lois Holzman is when she takes a long absence after we talk about her work), permanently absent (as Wittgenstein is because he is dead), or because what is said is not clear enough to be interpreted unambiguously no matter how often the writer actually tries to answer our questions.  In these cases, we cannot harvest a simple meaning from the words and so the text stands alone.  There is nothing beyond the text to tie it down.  We can simply look at the text and make of it what we can.  We choose no longer be confined by trying to discern the author's intentions.

As Val Lewis and Jerry Shaffer have pointed out in PMTH discussions, this way of reading has long been the preferred way in literary reading.  In my opinion, it is often a useful way to approach works by classical authors that have either obscure or controversial meaning in philosophical works, too.  When the text must stand alone like this,  I recommend that the reader approach the text, as Donald  Davidson would say "with a Principle of Charity" or, in my own terms, by giving a "generous reading."  (See my account of these two concepts in Shawver, 1998c)

You will find this concept of letting the text stand on its own throughout postmodern writing, but  it does not necessarily go under these exact terms.  Derrida once caused himself much trouble by talking about it with the phrase "There is nothing beyond the text" which people took to mean that he was a solipsist.  Lyotard talks about it, too, in the Postmodern Condition when he calls our attention to the way in which the text is written to be sold and bought in order to inspire new writing.

What does it mean for the text to stand alone?  The text stands alone to the extent that the author does not stand with it as a kind of hidden authority pronouncing judgements on the validity of our interpretion.  We let the text stand alone when we remember that and recognize our own creative contribution to the reading of any such text. 
 

The favorite topic while I was gone seems to have been "Does the Text Stand Alone?" There were 15 posts on this single topic.  No other topic came close to that.

Although the postmodern spirit probably encourages us to let the text stand alone, no one, even in postmodernity, would be content to let all texts stand alone.  If someone wrote a public letter threatening to set off a bomb at the World Trade Center, all of us would want to know the author's intentions.  On the other hand, if you read a news article on the impeachment hearings, you might not even notice the author of the article.  That is, you would let the text stand alone.

So, as Jerry Shaffer so clearly said, "It is not a question of either-or.  We can do both [kinds of readings] at different times."

Still, Shaffer turns his attention to the evils of letting the text stand alone while  I am inclined (along with Don Smith and others) to turn my attention to the evils of tying our readings to the author's "intended meanings."
All of us seem to be concerned with the effects of letting the text stand alone will have on our social practices, our way of relating to each other -- only Shaffer points to the negative effects of letting the text stand alone and I point to the more positive ones.

Shaffer says letting the text stand alone is sometimes "disrespectful" to the author.  Okay, probably true, but let me remind you that a focus on "intended meanings" can sometimes seem disrespectful,  too.  It can sometimes go like this:
 

Letting the text stand alone is a way of slipping out of this endless frustration.  If we let the text stand alone, we can focus on making sense of what we read, interpreting it generously so that it can help us understand the world around us.  Since this kind of reading does not involve us in asserting (or accusing) others of their "intended meanings"
it can be harder for people to take offense, to feel accused.  Maybe this would free us to collaborate more in the unfolding of a variety of intended and unintended meanings.

If the text stood alone in the discussion above, for example, the conversation might have gone like this:
 

Even when we let the text stand alone, I say we should still ask "What do you mean?" because this is the phrase we use to start negotiations of local meaning.  But when all is said and done wouldn't it usually work better if we said, "That makes some sense to me because in some situations..." (even if we're wrong about what the author meant) than if we said "That makes no sense at all."  It takes some creativity at times to discover meaning in a text and let it stand alone.

Thanks to everyone for contributing to this thread.  I am just beginning to unravel all the nuances of your contributions.  Perhaps I can write another article on this topic in the next edition of PMTH NEWS.
 

Suppose you believe that areading should not ever let the text stand alone, that the author should always be the authority on what the text says.

If it is not intelligible without doing this, then it does not stand alone even though the author is not available to explicate