McGann 1991
Text and Textualities
human culture as “network of symbolic exchanges” – which are material negotiations; entering into these exchanges is “the textual condition”
c.f. to sexual event – to e human is to be involved with many other humans
“We make love and we make texts, and we make both in a seemingly endless series of imaginative variations.” (4)
“Today, texts are largely imagined as scenes of reading rather than scenes of writing.” – readerly view embedded in hermeneutical tradition; don’t make but interpret texts
“textuality cannot be understood except as a phenomenal event, and that reading itself can only be understood when it has assumed specific material constitutions” (4-5)
textual idealists: • De Man – “labored to show the illusions involved in any project that believed it could close, even for a moment the hermeneutic circle” (6) o close reading: “pursuit of meaning involves an activity of ceaseless metaphoric production” (6) • “These metaphoric constructs are the reader’s ‘insights’ into the meaning he desires. For the traditional interpreter, the constructs re-present a version or vision of the Truth, one that is more or less adequate, more or less exemplary. For the deconstructive reader, the visions are, with respect to the ideal of Truth, simply different styles of failure. The ‘truth’ they reveal is the special form of blidnness to which a particular reader is prone.” (6) • Tanselle’s quote – all writing is corruption of truth in originally intended message
against this idealism is a model that says reading is always historically situated in material, social conditions • “In this world, time, space, and physicality are not the emblems of a fall from grace, but the bounding conditions which turn gracefulness abounding.” (9)
“The textual condition’s only immutable law is the law of change.” (9)
“Every text enters the world under dterminate sociohistorical conditions, and while these conditions may and should be variously defined and imagined, they establish the horizon within which the life histories of different texts can play themselves out. The law of change declares that these histories will exhibit a ceaseless process of textual development and mutuation – a process which can only be arrested if all the textual transformations of a particular work fall into nonexistence. To study texts and textualities, then, we have to study these complex (and open-ended) histories of textual change and variance.” (9)
readers have difference experiences of texts not only because they bring their own histories to the text, but also because of the text itself – happens on both sides of textual transmission
“Every text has variants of itself sscreaming to get out” (10)
“Various readers and audiences are hidden in our texts, and the traces of their multiple presence are scripted at the most material levels.” (10)
poetry takes the complex event of text as its “special subject”; distinct from informational texts
“Literary works do not know themselves and cannot be known, apart from their specific material modes of existence/resistance. They are not channels of transmission, they are particular forms of transmissive interaction.” (11)
textual studies “under the spell of romantic hermeneutics”; break the spell “by socializing the study of texts at the most radical levels” (12) • 1. must see textual condition “as an interactive locus of complex feedback operations” • 2. must “also demonstrate the semiotics of the text as that has been the subject of attention of bibliographers, sociologists, economists, and tradespersons of various kinds”
Genette, “Paratexts” – good start, but “not strong enough”; McGann instead is “calling attention to the text as a laced network of linguistic and bibliographical codes” (13)
redundancy and excess in texts; would be seen as “noise” in communication theory, but are “positive features in the perspective I am taking” bc “they draw our attention to that quality of self-embodiment that is so central to the nature of texts” (14)
“Poets understand texts better than most information technologists.” (14)
poems do not merely transmit meaning
“This book attempts to sketch a materialist hermeneutics. In so doing, it considers texts as autopoietic mechanisms operating as self-generating feedback systems that cannot be separated from those who manipulate and use them. Their autopoiesis functions through a pair of interrelated textual embodiments we can study as systems of lingustic and bibliographical codings.” (15)
no “theory of textuality,” at best an “anti-theory” • “What is textually possible cannot be theoretically established. What can be done is to sketch, through close and highly particular case studies, the general framework within which textuality is constrained to exhibit its transformations.” (16)
“double helix of a work’s reception history and its production history” (16)