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Text/Textuality

The Global Social Text

Derrida, Kristeva, and Sollers were all still writing. Barthes died in 1980. Of the "textual survivors," none has assumed Barthes's ambassadorial responsibilities. In that sense the hour of the text may have passed. However, precisely because the semiological text posed the question of the literary, indeed the cultural, institution, thereby challenging the very logic of disciplinary reason and the ethnocentrism supporting it, the text retains what Benjamin called a "weak Messianic charge." This utopian and necessarily metacritical residue is nowhere more evident than in Gayatri Spivak's concept of "text-ility." Deftly picking up the etymological thread of the semiological text as a weaving, Spivak, in the controversial A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason (1999), deploys "text-ility" as the conceptual means by which to think the making and unmaking of the global social text. Specifically, she attempts to articulate the geopolitics of textile production in "the South," the multicultural fashion system supported in sectors of postcolonialism, and the "traveling theories" (a term derived from Edward Said's essay by that name) of largely Western academic intellectuals. Unashamed of her debts to Barthes and especially Derrida, Spivak makes it clear that in important ways the theory of the text, especially as it supplements itself, remains unfinished. At the very least she reminds us emphatically of what the text has always asked that we make of it: the theoretical and practical loom of the not there, the not yet—perhaps even the undefinable.

See also Literary Criticism; Literary History; Literature.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Edited and translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

——. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Originally published in French, 1973.

——. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Originally published in French, 1970.

Benjamin, Walter. "On the Image of Proust." In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 4 vols., edited by Marcus Bullock et al. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (Belknap), 1996–2003. Vol 2 (1999), 237–247. Originally published in German, 1929.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Book To Come. Translated by Charlotte Mendell. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Originally published in French, 1959.

Charles, Daniel. "La musique et l'écriture." Musique en jeu 13 (1973): 3–13.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Originally published in French, 1967.

——. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Originally published in French, 1967.

Ducrot, Oswald and Tzvetan Todorov. Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language. Translated by Carolyn Porter. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Originally published in French, 1972.

Jameson, Fredric. "The Ideology of the Text." In The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–86. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Vol. 1, 17–71.

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Edited by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Originally published in French, 1969–1979.

——. Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Originally published in French, 1974.

Metz, Christian. Language and Cinema. Translated by Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. Originally published in French, 1971.

Mowitt, John. Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992.

Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire. Le texte divisée. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981.

Said, Edward. "The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions." Critical Inquiry 4, no. 4 (summer 1978): 673–714.

Sollers, Philippe. Logiques. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Stoïanova, Ivanka. Geste, Texte, Musique. Paris: Union Générale d'Éditions, 1978.

The Tel Quel Reader. Edited by Patrick ffrench and Roland-François Lack. London: Routledge, 1998.

John Mowitt

Additional topics

Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Swim bladder (air bladder) to ThalliumText/Textuality - Etymology, Text And Semiological Text, Tel Quel, Jacques Derrida: Writing, The Text As Philosophical Paradigm