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Dec. 1st, 2004 02:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerOkay, this is aimed at Sib and those others who tread the path of academe...
The late and apparently great Jacques Derrida was paraphrased in a book I recently read as saying that "we have witnessed not only the 'death of the author (Roland Barthes' phrase, i.e., the utter negation of authorial intent by the simple autonomous existence of the text once written) but the 'death of the book' as well." Now far be it from me to take issue with M. Derrida, but as an aspiring author who owns several hundred books, I feel the rumour of these two deaths has been slightly exaggerated. Whether "death" was the word he was after here I would hardly dare to speculate, but it's a fairly definite word with a fairly definite meaning, and since there are still authors writing books and publishers publishing them and people buying them, it seems to me that "death" in this context must mean something different from what I understand by it.
The writer goes on from the Derrida paraphrase to develop a theory which may or may not have something to do with Derrida. According to this theory, there is an infinite sea of text of which we select bits at random and assign arbitrary meanings to them and call them books. This seems a much simpler way of writing than the one I learned: no more sweating over the right turn of phrase, plotting and balancing and perfecting the structure of the story, cutting and infilling and trimming to fit. Just dip up a ladleful of sea-text, slap it in a bowl and call it macaroni, or what you will.
Okay, just seen the time, so I'll make it quick: does anyone recognise this theory of intertextuality, as it seems to be called, and if so, can they tell me, not what it means--I think I have that--but what practical meaning or value it has? Because it seems to me that, quite apart from being an insult to anyone who's ever slogged his guts out over a book (which number must include M. Derrida himself), this theory renders meaningless any attempt to use written language to communicate anything. We are all, it says, disembodied brains mumbling to ourselves in a void. And as such, I can only see it being of value to those who find satisfaction, or even glory, in impotence and futility.
The late and apparently great Jacques Derrida was paraphrased in a book I recently read as saying that "we have witnessed not only the 'death of the author (Roland Barthes' phrase, i.e., the utter negation of authorial intent by the simple autonomous existence of the text once written) but the 'death of the book' as well." Now far be it from me to take issue with M. Derrida, but as an aspiring author who owns several hundred books, I feel the rumour of these two deaths has been slightly exaggerated. Whether "death" was the word he was after here I would hardly dare to speculate, but it's a fairly definite word with a fairly definite meaning, and since there are still authors writing books and publishers publishing them and people buying them, it seems to me that "death" in this context must mean something different from what I understand by it.
The writer goes on from the Derrida paraphrase to develop a theory which may or may not have something to do with Derrida. According to this theory, there is an infinite sea of text of which we select bits at random and assign arbitrary meanings to them and call them books. This seems a much simpler way of writing than the one I learned: no more sweating over the right turn of phrase, plotting and balancing and perfecting the structure of the story, cutting and infilling and trimming to fit. Just dip up a ladleful of sea-text, slap it in a bowl and call it macaroni, or what you will.
Okay, just seen the time, so I'll make it quick: does anyone recognise this theory of intertextuality, as it seems to be called, and if so, can they tell me, not what it means--I think I have that--but what practical meaning or value it has? Because it seems to me that, quite apart from being an insult to anyone who's ever slogged his guts out over a book (which number must include M. Derrida himself), this theory renders meaningless any attempt to use written language to communicate anything. We are all, it says, disembodied brains mumbling to ourselves in a void. And as such, I can only see it being of value to those who find satisfaction, or even glory, in impotence and futility.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-02 11:03 am (UTC)You see, intertextuality evolved kind of as a reaction to structuralist semiotics – for, while Saussure stresses the importance of the relationship of signs to each other, structuralist semiotics often have the weakness of treating individual texts as closed-off, separate entities and focus in their analysis of them entirely on internal structures within the text.
Julia Kristeva first wrote about intertextuality (which is now associated with poststructuralism). She refers to texts as having two axes:
- the horizontal one that connects the author and the reader of a text and
- the vertical one which connects the text to other texts.
Now, these two axes are connected by shared codes – every text and every reading depends on what knowledge went into its production. Or, as she says “'every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it”. This is not to say that the author pulls bits at random from the ether, but rather more that we all quote things we know, all the time – and can’t help doing it.
To quote Foucault: “The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network... The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands... Its unity is variable and relative.“
We’re influenced by knowledge, other works, codes – kind of goes in the direction of ‘there are only X amount of original stories to be told’, now we but re-tell them, with changed details. (See a book called “Hero with a thousand faces” for more on that).
Hence: no, it's not about impotence and futility, but rather about noticing and becoming aware of the fact that we live in a world not of 'telling', but of 're-telling'. It's another level of reflection. Self-reflexivity, metatextuality, ... .