Texts and Paratexts in Media Author(s): Georg Stanitzek Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Autumn 2005), pp. 27-42 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/498002 Accessed: 17-10-2018 20:26 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Inquiry This content downloaded from 128.227.134.167 on Wed, 17 Oct 2018 20:26:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Texts and Paratexts in Media Georg Stanitzek Translated by Ellen Klein Todetermine the significance and potential of the concept of theparatext for literature and cultural and media studies, it makes sense to start at a more basic level, namely, with the concept of the text, to which paratextacts as a supplement. Adorno thought it an “abominable expression” to refer to phenomena of “literature” as “texts.”1 He detected in it an abandonment of the category of the work. Dolf Sternberger, his antipodean intellectual colleague in Frankfurt, offered a similar opinion that differed only in tone: “‘Texts’—this has become the universal generic term for the products of writers, or at any rate, the term now considered ‘progressive’. They do not write poems, novels, essays or even stories—they ‘produce texts.’”2 These arguments and idiosyncratic reactions are now history. In the mean- time text has gained wide acceptance—and why shouldn’t this be the case? But in view of how the meaning of this term has developed over the years, the old objections would seem to warrant some thought. In the course of things, text has come to be used synonymously with the older term work (opus). In many respects the current definition with all its implications of aesthetics and values has simply been inherited. However, text originally had another meaning; it is not just a coincidence that it was introduced at a time when the concept of literature was being expanded to include trivial literature, essays, and general nonfiction and when there was a growing interest in the phenomena of popular culture. Since then, literary and cul- 1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment” (1962), Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 3 vols. (New York, 1992), 2:90, presumably motivated by phenomena of concrete poetry. 2. Dolf Sternberger, “U¨ ber Jargon in der gegenwa¨rtigen Literaturkritik” (1968), Sprache und Politik, vol. 11 of Schriften (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), pp. 292, 294. Critical Inquiry 32 (Autumn 2005) ᭧ 2005 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/05/3201-0007$10.00. All rights reserved. This content downloaded from 128.227.134.167 on Wed, 17 Oct 2018 20:26:31 UTC 27 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 28 Georg Stanitzek / Texts and Paratexts tural discourse has had a problem in tow, which is scarcely understood but which still causes terminological complications and uncertainty. The prob- lem can be described as follows: a simultaneous distinction and nondistinc- tion between literary work and text. That is, sometimes they are construed as designating different things and sometimes the same thing. (It is stillnec- essary to specify which meaning is intended, and the ambiguity may be re- tained for rhetorical reasons.) That this is still a problem is evidenced by recent cultural studies pro- grams, which make a strong plea for the study of culture as text. A repre- sentative programmatic statement entitled “Literature as Cultural Studies” puts it as follows: “Cultural reality [can be] perceived as a text that consti- tutes a web in a space created by society and its members. The web is pro- duced by this totality of social relations and can be deciphered through them, but at the same time it continues to rewrite itself and to change more or less autonomously. In this cultural text, articulations, readings and their media . appear inseparably linked to each other and refer to each other in varying historical constellations.”3 Apparently, the ambiguity of terms mentioned above is also present in this generalized concept of the text, which now includes an expanded notion of culture. It manifests itself in this culture-text combination especially when culture is interpretedboth as a descriptive category and as a value concept.4 This means that here the simultaneous distinction and nondistinction between text and literary work takes the form of a simultaneous distinction and nondistinction between cul- ture as text on the one hand and excellent or canonical or literary text as cultural moment on the other. How to handle this problem and, in particular, what techniques should be employed for reading these texts seem to be open questions. At present, the minimum consensus of the relevant positions on the part of the hu- manities favors an exclusive approach—directed against a “reduction of complexity”5 or against the “theoretical dead ends of poststructuralist self- 3. Gerhard Neumann and Sigrid Weigel, “Einleitung: Literaturwissenschaftenals Kulturwissenschaft,” in Lesbarkeit der Kultur: Literaturwissenschaften zwischen Kulturtechnik und Ethnographie, ed. Neumann and Weigel (Munich, 2000), p. 11. 4. See ibid., p. 12. 5. Ibid., p. 15—that is, against systems theory. Georg Stanitzek is professor of German at the University of Siegen, Germany, where he teaches literary, cultural, and media studies. He is the author of Blo¨digkeit: Beschreibungen des Individuums im 18. Jahrhundert (1989) and the coeditor of Schnittstelle: Medien und Kulturwissenschaften (2001), Transkribieren (Medien/Lektu¨re) (2002), and Paratexte in Literatur, Film, Fernsehen (2004). This content downloaded from 128.227.134.167 on Wed, 17 Oct 2018 20:26:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2005 29 references.”6 This says little about methods for readingandanalysisandthus about the tools required for starting to read at a specific place in the com- prehensive apostrophized cultural-textual “web.” One possible instrument might be the paratextuality theorem, which was first developed in literary studies; it is thought to be particularly useful for determining what kind of text or, as it should now be expressed more precisely, what kind of textual unity one is dealing with. When Ge´rard Genette proposed the concept, his focus was on the problem of the production and observation of texts as such.7 He asked the question, What makes a text a text? and even the form of this question reflects the ambiguity that has been associated with thecon- cept at least since the sixties. The general problems with the text concept will not be completely resolved by applying the theorem—indeed, they will be very much in evidence again below—but new insights will be gained. That Genette, a structuralist literary theorist with both a talent and a predilection for classification, should extract in 1987 one concept—andspe- cifically this one—from his original conceptual inventory8 and send it on a more or less isolated journey through the cultural disciplines9 and that later it should find such acceptance are indications of a problematic situ- ation that needs to be diagnosed from a cultural perspective. The problem concerns the significance of the book as a key item of cultural and intellec- tual processes. The non–self-evidence underlying Adorno’s assertion that beyond the “idea of the book . no other representation of spirit in lan- guage . might exist without betraying truth” is at work here in the back- ground.10 Adorno’s insistence on the book form is consistent with his criticism of the term text. A few years later, Derrida—though apparently reaching the opposite conclusion about their respective values—compared the “idea of the book” and the notions of “writing” and “text” from asimilar perspective: “If I distinguish the text from the book, I shall say that the de- struction of the book, as it is now under way in all domains, denudes the 6. Doris Bachmann-Medick, “Einleitung,” in Kultur als Text: Die anthropologische Wende in der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Bachmann-Medick (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), p. 11—that is, against deconstruction. 7. See Ge´rard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge, 1997); hereafter abbreviated P. 8. The history of this concept in Genette’s œuvre on literary theory includes its role within his typology of transtextual references; see Genette, The Architext: An Introduction, trans. Lewin (1979; Berkeley, 1992), p. 81 and Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (1982; Lincoln, Nebr., 1997), pp. 2–4. On Genette’s paratext concept formation as an act of baptism, see Thomas Schestag, “Call Me Ishmael,” in Paratexte in Literatur, Film, Fernsehen, ed. Klaus Kreimeier and Georg Stanitzek (Berlin, 2004), pp. 22–29. 9. Genette, “Pre´sentation,” Poe´tique 69 (Feb. 1987): 3. 10. Adorno, “Bibliographical Musings” (1963), Notes to Literature, 2:23. This content downloaded from 128.227.134.167 on Wed, 17 Oct 2018 20:26:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 30 Georg Stanitzek / Texts and Paratexts surface of the text. That necessary violence responds to a violence that was no less necessary.”11 Genette’s Seuils is dedicated to describing these two violences, and they indirectly shape the structure of his description and are the reason for the problems that result.