Intertextuality

The following post comes to us from Dr. Tribbey. Thanks!

A handout appropriated from the Princeton Poetics handbook which may contribute to the Sigma Tau discussion yesterday. With regard to the McCaffery quotation, remind me to tell you about the time I almost [took] him out of this material realm with a rogue van door.

DEFINITION OF INTERTEXTUALITY:
Without an ultimate referent (center) that would make possible the self-presence and meaning of a text, texts are by definition fragments in open and endless relations with all other texts.

7 MAJOR PREMISES OF INTERTEXTUALITY
(1) Lang. is not a transparent medium of thought or a tool in the service of communication; it is arbitrary and dense, and its very excessiveness leads to an infinite number of interps.
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(2) Texts are fragments, without closure or resolution. No text is self-sufficient; each text is fraught with explicit or invisible quotation marks that dispel the illusion of its autonomy and refer it endlessly to other texts--like the entries in this Encyclopedia, referring parenthetically to other references, except that there is no way to contain all possible references in any encyclopedic "whole."
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(3) Given the above, no writer can ever be in control of the meaning of the text. I. does away with the concept of "author" in its conventional meaning (authority, property, intention), supplanting it with the concepts of "author-function" (Foucault) or "subject" (Lacan).
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(4) Meaning is supplanted by the notion of "signification" (a sign is composed of signifier and signified, but in poststructuralist thinking the signified is lost, leaving the signifier in search of a referent it can never find). Poststructuralism thus discards the humanistic version of human beings as creators of meaning, and proposes them instead as creatures (effects) of lang.
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(5) Crit. is no longer an ancillary activity, but is now considered part of the poem, creative of its meaning or signification. In formalism and humanism, the task of crit. is "explication" (q.v.), which distinguishes the reading subject from the literary object and defines lit. as a discipline and a mode of knowledge. I. stands in direct opposition to explication, with its explicit distinction between primary and secondary texts, and instead opens up literary, critical, and indeed many other texts to illimitable relations.
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(6) Disciplinary boundaries are erased: such fields as philosophy and psychoanalysis are all considered discursive practices and ultimately inseparable from lit.
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(7) Finally, poststructuralist crit. defies the rules of reason and identity and suggests instead the idea of contradiction. "Contradiction," says Adorno, "indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived." Adorno's "contradiction" is very close to Derrida's "differance."

2 KEY FEATURES OF INTERTEXTUALITY
1. ABSENCE OF AN ORIGIN
2. FUNCTION OF RANDOMNESS

In the absence of an origin that would guarantee presence, meaning, and voice, there can be no originals [alas, our periodical is a doomed logocentric enterprise]--only copies.
And without a univocal and transcendent referent, all texts refer to one another--in infinite and utterly random ways.

INTERTEXTUALITY AND PATRIARCHY
Representation and reference, the mainstays of traditional humanism, underwrite a patriarchal "logocentric" ("phallocentric") order in which a work or a referent functions as a stabilizing ("seminal") source and provides the authority of meaning. Explicit in intertextuality is the dismantling ("dissemination") of paternity. Barthes claims that "there is no father-author"; Derrida argues that "writing is an orphan." Intertextuality underwrites a critique of logocentrism and of patriarchy, substituting for patriarchal self-presence the feminizing "otherness" of intertextual "lapses." [An important point when we get to the poetry of Susan Howe & Joan Retallack.]
[from The New Princeton Encyclopdia of Poetry and Poetics, pp. 620-621]

STEVE MCCAFFERY ON THE VIRTUES OF JACKSON MAC LOW'S POETRY AS CREATED BY SYSTEMATIC-CHANCE PROCEDURES:
. . . , the systematc exclusion of the subject permits a degree of semantic indeterminancy that is unobtainable in coventional (i.e. authorially directed) composition. The freeing up of textual space to establish itself as a random economy. denying the writer a personal intervention into the scene of meaning, permits a quality of verbal combinations (clashes, junctures, intersections, incompatibilities) that could not be arrived at through the controlled ordering of an intentional agent. Word order is supplanted by word distribution, and the chance juxtapositions create texts that escape the finality of logical value.

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