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Intertextuality: Why Discourse, Narrative and Genre?

It will be noticeable that the focus on intertextuality and discourse which I pointed to in Fairclough's work and my own above does not figure in the accounts by van Dijk and Wodak, (it does figure in Wetherell et al. (2001)) although they are both also concerned with the complex relations between linguistic and social forms (the macro/micro debate) which intertextuality tries to theorise. I want to return here to my earlier point about forgotten histories and try to rethink what we gain and lose by moving back and forth between different theoretical and disciplinary domains.

In my own feminist work, I have argued that what 'mediates' between textual forms and the social has to be the embodied subject. It is such subjects who, in negotiation with textual processes, make and remake themselves and the social. The body is marked and branded by these histories of material engagements with texts, carries the histories with it, and provides the resources for the performance of textuality in everyday life and social contexts (Threadgold 1997: p.97 ff.). What is in the body, inscribed on the body, lived through the body as institution and the social made flesh (Bourdieu 1990: 57), cannot be contained by any given context (Threadgold 1997: 101). Until we theorise the body in the ways that Bourdieu and feminist theorists have done, we will continue to have trouble understanding and theorising texts and contexts.

What is 'in the body' has been theorised in CDA, often only insofar as it leaves traces and marks in texts, and identified as the 'resources' subjects used to make texts with. Thus we have 'accumulated cultural and economic capital', habitus, (Bourdieu 1990), 'members' resources (Fairclough 1989), 'linguistic potential' (Halliday 1978), intertextuality and interdiscursivity (Bakhtin 1981; Kristeva 1970; Pecheux 1982). Bakhtin, Kristeva and Bourdieu all deal explicitly with the body and with exchanges between networks of bodies and texts, but in general the terms have been appropriated to describe and theorise relations between texts, again eliding the body and the material.

In a good deal of poststructuralist work the categories of genre (Derrida 1980), narrative (Lyotard 1984), discourse (Foucault 1973), myth (Barthes 1973) and metaphor (Ricoeur 1978) have also been privileged as constituting some combination of the resources subjects use to make texts with. These are resources derived from experience on and with other texts, large chunks of pre-processed reality, ready-made text to use again as the occasion arises. The references I have just given are at least the source of my own use of this terminology. The terms along with 'subjectivity', 'intertextuality' and 'performativity' have become part of the poststructuralist metalanguage I discussed above and also part, as we have seen, of that of some forms of CDA. They do not any longer however 'mean' the same things in these different places.

Fairclough uses intertextuality, discourse and genre to analyse a text's relations with other texts in the orders of discourse of which it is a part in a very Foucauldian move. I used them to do that too but also to think about subjectivity and embodied experience as these things leave corporeal traces in texts: the 'I' of the enonciation and the 'I' of the enonce (Benveniste 1966), the subject who writes/speaks and the subject who is written/spoken (Barthes 1986; Kristeva 1980). Foucault's concern, in his early work at least, is always with the positioned, disciplined subject. He has relatively little to say about the 'I' who speaks, self-consciously and intentionally. I have also explained this as being about the difference between the agentive subject who produces a well-formed generic text as opposed to the subject positioned/constructed in discourses and genres (and in my work also narratives) which are incorporated unconsciously (much as the system of language is used without conscious articulation of a metalanguage) into the texts s/he produces and which traverse the well-formed generic structure of those texts vertically and in ways which do not map easily onto the kinds of structures linguistic modes of analysis identify.



The 'I' of a specific genre occupies a different position to the subject spoken in the discursive statements that may traverse her speaking . The first 'I', equally constructed and produced in language, nevertheless knows what it does, and assumes a position as knower which does not recognise itself as 'a subject in process', split between the conscious and the unconscious (Kristeva 1980: 19).

Kristeva's use of 'intertextuality' came from her reading of Bakhtin on heteroglossia and dialogism and she uses it to describe the transposition of one or more systems of signs into another with always a difference in enunciative and denotative positionality. Her examples are of the transposition of the sign systems of courtly love, carnival and scholastic discourse into the novel. She was exploring a genre which was the hybridisation of several earlier genres or modes of utterance and her analysis involved locating the transformations of these sign systems within the text of a single novel (Kristeva 1979). Bakhtin had argued (1986) not only that the word 'discourse' always carries with it the histories of where it has been before but that genres and the intertextual fragments they embed are always in a dialogic relation, so that there is the potential for constant recontexualisation and resignification. Importantly, in this work, intertextuality was as much about how to make texts as how to analyse them. Speakers make texts chunk by chunk as well as word by word and there are many systems they use as resources, not just the linguistic system. Rossi-Landi (1977) is the only linguist I know who has begun to theorise this.

As the terms of this metalanguage are adopted in new and different contexts it is precisely a process of Bakhtinian recontextualisation and resignification that we see at work. In the use of intertextuality in both cultural studies and CDA, the word cannot be relied upon, contra Bakhtin, to bring all of its histories with it: and the partial histories dialogue with new contexts and become transformed again. Much of cultural studies and CDA compares quite easily with Kristeva's hybrid genre. Thus the use of the word often conflates or confuses Foucault's understandings of the way discourses circulate in networks of texts, the complex interdiscursive relations between the discursive and the non-discursive in Foucault's work, with Bakhtinian notions of heteroglossia and dialogism derived from Kristeva and Barthes and the additional terms citation and iterability derived from Derrida and others. There is a mix here of an early Marxist theory of language (Bakhtin), an anti-representational, anti-semiotic discourse (Foucault), a psychoanalytic semiotics (Kristeva) and a philosophical discourse on language (Derrida and Butler). This may not matter if the definitions and uses in the new contexts are clear, but it does suggest that there is still a good deal to learn from the work that provided the terms of the metalanguage in the first place and that forms of CDA have to date engaged with a very small part of the richness that is there to be explored.

Moreover, it seems to me that we need a lot more research on intertextuality. The metalanguage that I developed for talking about it was derived intertextually from the texts of critical theory, borrowed from there intertextually into the work of Kress/Threadgold (1988) and then again into Fairclough's work. We all made it work on other texts to theorise how they functioned in networks of other texts but we did not go looking for other kinds of intertextuality than those already projected into our research by the histories our metalanguage brought with it. There is for example still work to be done on exploring the connections between the cognitive discourse of 'frames' and 'scripts' and the intertextual categories used above. There is work to be done on citations in texts which are attributed and therefore not unconscious in their use. Derrida's texts are full of such citations. So is every academic literature review and every academic paper of the kind I am writing now. We do know that this is part of the way in which subjects are disciplined. apprenticed in an academic field, but we talk less about this as a way in which subjects are unconsciously positioned as well. The relationship between intertextuality and plagiarism is ripe for investigation as well: somehow if the chunks of text we make texts with are part of the 'murmur of the culture', oral, unauthored or at least with no named author, that is not to steal words. The speech/writing binary is at work here too. The minute the chunk comes from an identifiable written text there has been a robbery. What is the difference between intertextuality as citation and quotation and projection of the kinds recognised in linguists' grammars? What of dialogues between texts? I described one such dialogic process in which texts take up from where others leave off over many years in chain of interactions moving from media discourse to documentary to novel to film and so on (Threadgold 1997). The way in which journalistic news texts interact and dialogue would be another example. We have not really researched that as a key part of the ways in which meanings are made. There may be a new role for conversational analysis here. And if texts and bodies do fold into one another, if the body and the subject mediate the relationship between text and context, how do we research that?

 


Date: 2016-01-14; view: 883


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