TEXT AS COPY

 TEXT AS COPY:

A Prolegomenon Towards

a New Theory of Intentionality

Peter A. Hempel, Ph.D.

TEXT. As signifier, this is a term riddled with wordiness. It is tied, seemingly inextricably, to the primacy of words. Inherent in the concept of text theory is the idea that words are the source and substance of meaning; yet paradoxically, we cannot hope to find answers within the text itself, for the “words” of the text hold no meaning of their own.

Text theory is thus freighted with the baggage of past dotage on The Word, and fundamental misdirections of current efforts at “reading” a sequence of signifiers that are de jure undecipherable.

Rather than succumbing to the Platonistic seductions of “texte,” with all its implications of telos, at once both insubstantial and empirical, can we not instead examine the fallacy of directionality that we find here? For indeed if it is not the words that are the source of meaning, is it not the meaning – at least meaning in the sense of intention – that is the source of words?

I would suggest that we should be re-examining our fundamental assumptions here, that we should examine the “texte” as a specific artifact of a specific createur at a specific moment growing out of a specific intention. In seeking, therefore, to unravel the intricacies and paradoxes of text, we must look first to the text behind the text – the copy (la copie).

This approach, which demarginalizes both the creator and the act of creation, can afford us the way to begin assessing the fundamental dynamic of all textual sequences – to impact the audience: the individual and/or collective reader/experiencer.

It is argued that neither we – nor in reality even the creator – can truly “know” the intentions behind the text. Yet it is surely no more futile to cast for intention than to fish for meaning in a random sea of unsignifying signifiers.

If it is true that the primacy of that intentionality is dead at the very moment that the work is done, and that the text may thus be seen as a ghostly (ghastly?) spirit released and set free to roam among the critics, nonetheless the fact of that intentionality remains. It is, at the very least, the tombstone upon which that text is premised. And that act of textual creation is the process of copy.*

Let us, therefore, see if we cannot spell in those dusty lines some elements of rhetoricity, and auger out some shades of design and designation bequeathed to us not through history, biography, or literary history per se, but through a sympathetic understanding of the auteur and the “copyness” of his/her “texte.”

This new critical procedure is fraught with dilemmas, to be sure, for we must inevitably view the copy through the multiple levels of pleonastic dérangement of its intentionality, through shifts in the larger linguistic body and conventions, and through the profound opacity of the individual associations and agendas and momentariality of the individual experiencer/critic.

We must seek, therefore, to develop a double matrix to outline the “universe” within which that intentionality is expressed within the work specifique. The Weltanschauung of the createur/copyiste is at once the “mystification” of his/her own time and place, but also and again that individual opacity of misapprehension and aggendicity that is inherent in individuation.

It is ominously true that in life each of us dances alone in a terrifying limbo of helpless isolation. Nonetheless, to reach out towards the intentionality of others is to grasp at least at the shadow of the otherness. It is, perhaps, a chance to break down, in some tiny measure, the prison walls of total solipsism. Thus the quest for intentionality serves both as an approach that has a deep validity of its own, and as a way to make a spiritual and philosophique advance out of the morass and systeme fermé of ordinary deconstructionism.

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[* The copywriter, indeed, offers us the clearest ground for examining the process of textual creation. As paid professional, he/she is mandated to create a structure of text in support of specific clients/products, shaped to appeal to a designated audience, an audience that is often highly specifically defined. The process itself is open for discussion, and these referent points are used for explanation/justification. The process of the academic writer, or the artist/writer, most surely contains corresponding elements of intentionality (text in support of self, reputation, school of thought, sales, literary immortality, etc.) and a strong sense of audience and audience sensibilities (as in, for example, the need to be “Politically Correct” for today’s most telling academic audiences). In the case of these latter producers of texte, however, the components of intention are often disguised and even, in some cases, disavowed. Thus the issue of intention is per se a battleground that can render the texte itself a mere birdie on an academic badminton court.]

©Peter A. Hempel, Ph.D., 1991