Creative Misunderstandings and New Understandings

Abstract

life of its own. I really do believe that once a book is published, it stands in relation to intelligent readers the way an exam stands in relation to a professor. The refrain professors tell students-I have no way of judging you on what you intended to say, I can only grade what you wrote-can come back to haunt professorial authors. What I intended to say in The Middle Ground may be of some interest to you, yet what matters is the text: what I wrote. I am also enfeebled as an authority about The Middle Ground because of the thesis of the book. This book is, among other things, about mutual misunderstandings and the ways that new meanings are derived from them. It is about the virtues of misreading, which puts an author who accuses his readers of misreading in something of an awkward position. I think that there have been misreadings of the book, but one of my points is that such misreadings can be fruitful in their own right. The phrase ground, I realize now in ways that I did not really fully comprehend when writing the book, had twinned meanings. First, I was trying to describe a process that arose from the willingness of those who ... [sought] to justify their own actions in terms of what they perceived to be their partner's cultural premises. These actors sought out cultural congruences, either perceived or actual, that often seemed-and, indeed, were-results of misunderstandings or accidents. Such interpretations could be ludicrous, but it did not matter. Any congruence,…