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Verbal Icon (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954), 18.
6. Michael Riffaterre, “Textuality: W. H. Auden’s ‘Musée des beaux arts,’ “
in Textual Analysis, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: MLA, 1986), i.
7. Jacques Derrida, O f Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158.
Text: Its Vicissitudes
103
ity and for the general projects o f the humanities and social sciences. The
crucial first step was considering human activities as so many languages—
sign systems whose functioning needs to be explained: how is it that their
products have the meanings they do? Just as the task o f the linguist is to
describe the system o f rules, conventions, and practices that enable hu
man beings to produce and understand sentences, so it is the task of the
structuralist or semiotician to reconstruct the other sign systems through
which culture takes place.** A wide range o f activities and their productions
are considered in similar ways, as products o f systems o f signification and
thus as texts. The first consequence, then, is the equivalence, through the
notion o f sign systems and o f text, o f different cultural products, whether
literary works, fashion captions, advertisements, films, or religious rituals:
all can be considered as texts. In the structuralist-semiotic perspective any
thing can be a text.
The second result is that text can even come to be a neutral term:
to refer to “ Hugo’s text” is in many cases noncommittal, in that it does
not specify a genre (such as play, poem, novel) nor does it decide between
the literary and nonliterary or between the purely verbal, the behavioral,
and the visual. Text is both a technical term that carries a lot o f theoretical
weight and an apparently neutral term to designate a cultural production.
O f course, this usage does have implications: it carries a certain insistence
that we are dealing with something exact; when it is used for a nonverbal
entity it has a programmatic edge (don’t think o f this just as a painting!);
and above all, it implies a framework in which the idea o f text is basic. But
text is here opposed to some sort o f generic specification or reference to a
particular medium.^
It is also opposed to the idea o f objects that do not require interpreta
tion or do not depend on conceptual frameworks or sign systems. In “The
Ideology o f the Text” Fredric Jameson writes, “Textuality may be rapidly
described as a methodological hypothesis whereby the objects o f study of
8. For discussion see Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism,
Linguistics, and the Study o f Literature (London: Routledge, 1976), esp. 27-31.
9. In a book that calls for a return to traditional criticism, Roger Shattuck
offers “Nineteen Theses on Literature,” of which number 8 reads: “Let us eschew
the freestanding word text. Its indiscriminate use today provides evidence of dead
ening stylistic conformity. Rather, let us take advantage of the full range of terms
like book, work, poem, play, novel, essay" (Roger Shattuck, Candor and Perversion
[New York: Norton, 2000], 5).
104
C O N C E P T S
the human sciences are considered to constitute so many texts that we de
cipher and interpret, as distinguished from older views o f these objects as
reaUties or existents or substances that we in one way or another attempt
to know"^^ The advantages o f this concept are, o f course, greatest in non-
hterary disciplines, where we could say that the concept o f text does three
things:
1. it suggests that the items under consideration should not be taken as giv
en and that one should consider how they come to be produced, isolated, pre
sented to attention;
2. it marks the meaning of these objects as a problem that needs to be ex
plored; and
3. it posits that the analyst’s methods need to be considered, not just prior
to the inquiry to decide what steps will be carried out, but in the process of treat
ing the objects of study themselves.
Jameson writes, for instance, “the notion o f textuality, whatever fundamen
tal objections may be made to it, has at least the advantage as a strategy of
cutting across both epistemology and the subject/object antithesis in such
a way as to neutralize both, and o f focusing the attention o f the analyst on
her own position as reader and on her own mental operations as interpre
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