The Vicissitudes of Text Jonathan CULLER The concept of text, which has been central to literary studies, has undergone many mutations, as it has traveled from the work of classical philologists, for whom it was and is the object of a powerful disciplinary formation, to postmodern theorists of the text, for whom, the concept might be summed up by the title of a fine book by John Mowatt: Text: the Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object. Of course, the interesting thing about a travelling concept is not that it travels — travelers, tales about their travels can be quite boring and wholly unprofitable — but what it reveals through its travels. One very striking point in the itinerary of "text," though — unparalleled, to my knowledge in the travels of other concepts, is that in Oswald Ducrot's and Tzvetan Todorov's Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage of 1972, texte has two contradictory entries. In the main body of the dictionary it is defined as an organization of the utterance beyond the sentence: "le texte peut coincider avec une phrase comme avec un livre entier; il se définit par son autonomie et par sa clôture (même si, en un sens, certains textes ne sont pas 'clos')." (375) But then the appendix, which seeks to take account of recent developments that had challenged the idea of a "science du langage," also contains an entry for texte — the only concept thus honored — under the heading "le texte comme productivité." Citing the recent work of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva among others, this entry tells us that "par opposition à tout usage communicatif et représentatif — donc re-productif — du langage, le texte y est défini essentiellement comme productivité." Texte involves the "mise en place d'une procédure qui fasse jouer à plein son pouvoir génératif. Le texte a toujours fonctionné comme un champ de transgression au regard du système selon lequel sont organisées notre perception, notre grammaire, notre métaphysique, et jusqu'à notre science : système selon lequel un sujet, situé au centre d'un monde qui lui fournit comme un horizon, apprend à déchiffrer le sens supposé préalable, voire originaire, au regard de l'expérience qu'il en fait." (443)1 The double inscription of text, as a key concept in the reorganization of the human sciences around the linguistic model and in the almost immediate and gleeful critique of the possibility of a scientific model, is a measure of the importance, of the pivotal nature of this concept. Today one no longer sees as many books as one once did with text or textual in their title, and "textualism," as it has come to be called, is often considered a sin, or at least an insult. I don't think, though, that stopping talking about text and textuality is going to solve any of the problems of literary and cultural study. If we don't engage with the problems clustered around the notion of text, we are going to be programmed by our own unexamined assumptions, for the problem of the text is always with us. Let me briefly sketch what I take to be the principal travels of text as a way of taking up major issues we approach through it. In philology the notion of the text — as in the idea of "the establishment of the text — is already dual. Textual critics or textual editors contrasted the object before them, a text, with the text in the putatively perfect state in which it left the author's hands and to which the editor aspired to restore it. The text is thus both the pure origin, the manifestation of the final intention of the author, and an object marked by a history of material practices of transmission, which bring corruption. Textual scholarship was and indeed still is a process of reconstruction, based on methods which themselves are much open to debate, but it is only recently that the idea of the text as the corrupted material form in which the original intentions must be divined has been challenged. Modern textual scholars such as Jerome McGann have sought to reconceive the text as social act and to focus on the materiality of the social practices of transmission and publication, from inks and papers to book prices and editorial practices, and to think of these things as socially significant. (12) McGann thus tries to move away from the idea that the material practices involving texts are above all so many possible forms of corruption that may befall the final authorial intention, of which the text ought to be the materialization. 1 This entry for texte in the appendix sounds as though it were written by Julia Kristeva (at least it presents idiosyncratic concepts of hers as normative) and for anyone interested in this topic is well worth reading. Through these recent developments, the idea of text in textual scholarship may come to intersect, here and there, in its travels, with other modern ideas of text, but we have yet to see, I believe, how far this may go or how much of a rapprochement there will turn out to be. What I would like to stress here, then, is that in the idea of text in traditional textual scholarship we see a duality that will reappear in different forms. The notion of text is that of a material object but also of the very form of the work, in its original, ideal state. Thus the term text gestures towards matter, manifestation, indeed, the colloquial notion of text is this: the text is the writing that you see before you, "the text of this law," for instance. But texts are of interest above all because of that which is or ought to be carried by or manifested in the material text, and thus seldom identified unreservedly with what appears on paper. In Anglo-American New Criticism, the notion of "the text itself" comes into its own in its most useful form — in an opposition. The text itself, the aesthetic object of literary study, as opposed to what is it said to mean or reflect or manifest: as opposed to history, biography. Students were enjoined to pay attention to the text itself, to cite evidence from the text itself, to set aside what is said about it, or about the author. They are urged to focus on what the text says or better, does, as opposed to what it is supposed to say. "The text itself" — the emphatic pronoun so often accompanies it — is a complicated positivity: words on the page. But despite the banning of the intentional fallacy (confusing what something means with what someone is supposed to have meant by it), and the rule that arguments about meaning are not settled by consulting the oracle (i.e., asking the author, directly or indirectly) (Wimsatt 18), the new critical notion of the text is not wholly divorced from authorial intention, which takes the form of a powerful posited teleology. The text is the words on the page, yes, but these words are presumed to be organized as a complex whole — otherwise we wouldn't speak of the text but just of writing. Michael Riffaterre, who despite his theorization of intertextuality inherits and articulates this concept of the text, writes, "By textuality I mean the complex of formal and semantic features that characterize a self-sufficient, coherent, unified text, and legitimize its forms, however aberrant they may be, by removing any hint of the gratuitous." (1) The textuality of a text (its essence as text) is the complex internal organization that sets it off from any context. If aesthetic objects are, in Kant's phrase, purposive wholes without purpose, it is the artistic intention embodied in the text that warrants our expecting that the parts will be related to each other, that obscurities will have their reasons, and that everything will contribute to the effect of the whole. Having said this, we have to stress that the work itself reveals that artistic intention in ways that no information about the writer and his or her plans or intentions can, so that the text itself, though subtended by an artistic purpose, is separate from any other kinds of information, which can all be regarded as ancillary and set aside by oppositions. It was in the inherited context of this idea of the text — an autotelic whole governed by a powerful aesthetic teleology — that Derrida's lapidary formula, "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" was interpreted to mean something like "everything outside the actual text or texts we are considering is irrelevant and doesn't really exist," whereas in fact, it means something like the opposite, that there is only text, since you can't get outside of text. But I am getting ahead of myself and my text. The structuralist revolution, which is the turning point in the interdisciplinary fortunes of the text and thus the source of the interest of the notion for us today, consisted first of all in 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 of the linguist is to describe the system of rules, conventions and practices that enable human 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.2 The result is that the products of numerous semiotic activities are considered in similar ways, as products of systems of signification and thus as texts.