1. What can texts be?

     Texts, whether spoken or written, are among the most common things in our world. We use them so easily that we hardly think about how we can do it. Within our own social group, the activities of our minds are finely attuned by shared language and culture to perform reasonably similar actions on the same text. Normally, we find it easiest to communicate if we ignore the complex problems and personal differences that may be implied in meanings, experiences, expectations, and responses. Instead of struggling for some definitive representation or comprehension of other people or the world, we are content with usable "models.” Or, we "objectify” texts by acting as if they by themselves say just what they mean.

    However, the convenience of not paying attention to the ways texts function turns out to have major disadvantages. As our objectified and objectifying technology advances, the understanding of understanding is found to be the only solid basis for defining and resituating our own intelligence in a changing environment. The understanding of texts is the decisive instance, the "paradigm case," for all the rest, and cannot be lightly dismissed as a nostalgic involvement with an obsolescent medium in a "post-Gutenberg” age.

    Among the general population, the skills of literacy are not well secured. Our lack of insight about those skills leaves us poorly prepared to impart them. When literacy must be explained, provided, and motivated for groups who do not already share its presuppositions, the superficial and simplistic character of our ordinary conceptions of text and discourse becomes painfully evident. We know how to make and use a text, but not how to ensure that other people will know. We dispense bits of advice, hints and cautions, but the effects are frequently disappointing.

    All too often, people come to regard writing and reading as unengaging chores without reliable means to ensure good performance. We face the prospect that the use of anything but immediately functional or diversional texts (newspapers, magazines, instructions, and the like) may lose currency in our society.¹ [This outline is merely intended for the general purposes of my survey of critics. For discussions with considerable detail and sources, see my volumes Text, Discourse, and Process (1980) and Text Production (1984a); and the surveys in Beaugrande 1980-81, 1982a, 1982b, and 1986.] The solution cannot be to demand that our institutions and schools merely intensify the traditional language training which has after all done little resolve the situation so far. Instead, a more dynamic training is needed to reveal the text as a meeting-place where people engage and negotiate --  riot a self-sufficient authority and arbiter of meanings, nor a vehicle for parading stilted usage. This project requires a clearer and more convincing account of how literacy in the broadest sense works or should work.

    Various language models have been proposed according to the dominant ideologies of the times. In the early part of the nineteenth century, organic models were in vogue, and language was thought to function the way a plant lives; Darwinian evolutionism added a congenial genetic perspective. By the end of that century, mechanical models were popular, inspired by the rising waves of industrial technology and conceived in terms of force, energy, inertia, and the like. In our own century, behavioristic and depth-psychological models were extracted from research in animal biology or psychotherapy, and the power of drives, rewards, and repetitions was emphasized. Gradually, this trend yielded to cognitive models drawing on research in thought, learning, and memory. The latest trend, as yet still emerging, favors performative models for all human acts, including externalized behavior and internalized cognition.

    This history roughly marks the gradual recognition of the higher capacities specific to the human being. Formerly, the strongly determined functions of plants, machines, and animals encouraged the view that the human has essentially slight control over the world, knowing just what is “out there” and reacting episodically to “stimuli," "drives," or “instincts," as each occasion requires. Higher-level conceptual knowledge and planning were acknowledged as pervasive controlling factors only recently. In the long run, research has firmly established a more complex vision of the human being in rich, realistic contexts.

    So far, linguistic theories lag behind, preferring to treat language as an independent object composed of sounds, words, or sentences. The reason is clear. When you take hold of a text or discourse (group of texts) to study it, you may feel you have picked up a curious item in the surf only to find it tied with a net to the whole floor of the ocean. Threads spin out in every direction, and the proper places to cut them off are anything but obvious. So every investigation remains implicitly incomplete, work perpetually in progress, leading merely to provisional conclusions.

    Another traditional problem is the enlistment of language in the time-honored performance known as “objectivity.” The moves are too familiar: pretending, that our discourse is a transparent window onto true reality, rather than a complex imposition of our own mental set; disavowing any personal interest in the information; treating the version we approve as enforced by the text itself; and so on. Once the role of discourse has been thus reduced, we can study it in a nicely corresponding form: as a set of artefacts not essentially different from the reassuring world of "real objects" that hold steady while we talk about them. Our reading of the text is advertised to be the “truth” or "fact" it “contains”. So expedient a scheme is attractive. A small effort buys a lot of authority -- except that, in another sense, we are impoverished. An objectified text offers sparse opportunities for introspecting or intervening in our own modes of thinking, or for negotiating those modes with other people. The comforting “objectivity” supposed to guarantee universal certainty suppresses alternative viewpoints, some of which are probably better than the one we now have. "Reality" is never more political than when it is asserted to be self-explanatory; and this relation holds especially for the reality of a text or discourse.

    The opposite extreme, however, of total subjectivity, has had an equally ominous career. Reality gets situated entirely inside the subject's mind. Disengaged from the outer world, the mind can revolve in endless spirals of solipsism and cease to learn; or can consign reality to some all-knowing spirit or substantialized idea, whose workings are as predetermined, self-sufficient, and uncontrollable as those of "objective reality." So the freedom of subjectivity frequently becomes another trap, still clouding our view of how the mind works.

    Some interaction in between these extremes must be managed, some sharable space for reality and the mind, for object and subject, that does not leave us transfixed or isolated. The most obvious testing-ground seems to be discourse, properly recognized as neither a mere reflection of the world nor a mere vehicle of personal imaginings. Discourse is our prime chance to mediate between outside and inside, between what we get from the world and what we give back. The interchange of texts is the clearest demonstration that many versions of the world await to be negotiated by subjects. In this sense, “textuality” opens out onto "intertextuality” and "intersubjectivity” in the same moment.

   Thinking about thinking may lead us to postulate a small number of classes for the basic actions of the human mind. For example, it creates order by contemplating similarities and differences, or by arranging entities in temporal sequences, spatial contiguities, or causal contingencies. But even everyday thinking deals with human experience and activity in a detail and complexity belied by facile reduction to these abstract classes. The understanding process continually generates its own elaborate frameworks which, through repeated use, eventually become habituated and self-evident. Otherwise, we could not move on to new and more complex things. As long as this progression proceeds smoothly, the consolidation of knowledge from one level of complexity to the next appears reliable. But ideal progress is unlikely to last indefinitely. The necessary strategic information may not be provided in the expedient order or in the appropriate contexts. Provisional decisions need reconsidering. New motives and goals bring things into unexpected focuses.

    Finally, we sense the pressure not merely to register new varieties of the familiar, but to revise our thinking. Though this revision might conceivably be done without discourse, it seldom is in practice. Language allows us to discuss and organize our actual experiences, as well as to mediate among those we have not encountered. Alternatives can be formulated and compared; problems and solutions can be negotiated; that which is can be re-estimated in respect to that which is not; and so on. Whether a text or discourse really serves these functions in a specific case remains an open question. Apparently, many needed revisions do not occur. Either we drift into the premature complacency that urges the present state of awareness to be the best; or we fall into premature despair that pictures the mind reaching its final limits. Menaced by these blockages on either side, we try to navigate some average rate that feeds the mind's craving for both stability and change without incurring stagnation or disorientation.

     This process too depends vitally upon our abilities to use texts advantageously. Communication regulates the rate and range of our intake of the world and our responses to it. The extremes of boredom and confusion can be skirted with techniques for upgrading what seems trivial and downgrading what seems unaccountable. Viewed in this way, discourse operates not by a principle of least effort, but by a principle of proportionality between effort and result. However, many people have little idea of how to invest effort in discourse, as compared to a more obviously performative event such as a sport. The tendency to perform below one's potential is accordingly widespread in discourse, and skills flatten out at a basic level. Having objectified the texts, the subject resigns itself to being driven by them, even at the risk of alienation, helplessness, or loss of creative initiative.

    Recovering some awareness of the performative, event-like character of the text is therefore urgent, particularly of the written text that seems so like a real object. The appropriate perspective deserves to be called “utopian,” provided the sense of this term is clarified at once. I do not mean the debilitating utopia that handily excuses partial or imperfect acts on the grounds that completeness and perfection are forever beyond human scope. Nor do I mean the complacent utopia that sees the perfect world hovering almost within reach, to be grasped easily by adopting some political, moral, or religious panacea. Nor do I mean the grim utopia of the totally automated and administrated world where the individual no longer needs to think or worry at all. Instead, I mean the projective utopia wherein the unbounded possibility of further development is construed as an imperative to push each effort as far as we can, and never to rule out later revisions. Rather than abandoning hope in view of the infinite dimensions, we steadily work to expand and progress, knowing those dimensions will never confine us. For this utopia, the true dangers are not error or incompletion, but the premature affirmation or resignation that lead people to hypostasize the status quo into some fixed and ultimate instance.

    In this sense, the utopian character of human activities is their most valuable aspect. Some of them, such as Olympic sports and performing arts, are easy to regard as utopian foreshadowings. But in a far less spectacular and self-conscious way, communication implies this function too, by projecting the prospect of mutual understanding among human beings with highly diverse personalities and stores of knowledge and experience. Writing and reading present a special challenge, because the persistence of the artefact allows continual reconsideration. Hence, a strong and strategic investment in writing and reading can both engage and revise the mind just where the stakes are highest.

    The actual practice of writing and reading is crucial here, but evidently not enough. If the mind is to reflect upon itself, discourse must be made to do the same. The most extensive and accredited reflection upon discourse, at least in our culture, takes place in literature and literary criticism, which tighter have ascended into the realms of theory of literature. Among the various functions of literature, the one of greatest interest here is its potential to open a space for diverse, individualistic performances of meaning (Ch. 2). This function renders literature the most complex textual domain in wide distribution. Criticism is one customary activity for mastering this complexity, and comprises the largest available source of documented textual responses, waiting to be made systematic and generally usable. Critical theory in turn proposes to integrate this wealth of documentation and to define its status.

    My project in this book is to embark on the next step: subsuming critical theories into a discourse precariously positioned upon an already elaborate tower of complexity. Each level adds its particular utopian tendencies we could regard in the sense I expounded: as imperatives to encompass what may be ultimately impossible, but what can certainly be done better than it has been so far. By necessity, my approach has been emphatically integrative -- compacting, rearranging, and comparing the theories so as to bring out their main contours, despite corresponding losses of individuality, personal flair, and subtle detail. Perhaps my search for a comprehensive context of literary communication is especially utopian, but, I would hope, in my preferred sense; and the goal of understanding understanding is undeniably worth the effort of expounding the recurrent themes and preoccupations that a devotion to literature and criticism entails.

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