A 2007 issue of The Chronicle contains an essay by Louis Masur titled “How the Camera Frames Truth.” Masur’s
How Truth Masur s
argument is a familiar one; he claims that “photographs seduce us into believing that they are objective
records, but, in fact, all images are interpretations, texts that must be read” (Masur, 2007, p. B8, emphasis
added). I doubt that many in our field would disagree with this statement, and therein lies the central
problem. Certainly Masur is partially correct; photographs are framed by the photographer, and they indicate a
particularized way of seeing. B photographs are not texts; calling a photograph a text i i
i l i d f i But h h lli h h is inaccurate and self-
d lf
seving, privileging a historical paradigm of hermeneutic, literary research.
1

This is an example of the dangers of commonplacing of the naturalized discourse that surrounds concepts that
commonplacing,
we take for granted. I want to explore two core disciplinary commonplaces in this presentation, to question
their assumptions: for example, what broadly constitutes text, and how have we come to use that term in our
field? What is intertextuality, and how useful is that term for contemporary writing research? How did our
field come to adopt both terms, and what are the implications for their continued use? Finally, what are (some
of) the means and ends of writing? D / h ld writing always result i text?
f) h d d f i i ? Does/should i i l l in ?
2

These questions are similar to the questions Johnson-Eilola and Wysocki ask about literacy. Johnson-Eilola
Johnson Eilola literacy Johnson Eilola
(1997) states that “when any discourse is successful in naturalizing its own operations (i.e., of hiding its
interests), the discourse operates in a repressive manner” (p. 11). In addition, he argues that “we allow our
nostalgia to channel new possibilities into old pathways (while continuing to proclaim radical revolution)”
(Johnson-Eilola, 1997, p.13). Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola (1999) dismantle the commonplace uses of literacy
h h k “Why
when they ask “Wh are we using li h for hi l ?” They h “we
i literacy as a metaphor f everything else?” Th argue that “ cannot
pull ‘literacy’ away from the [. . .] bundles of meanings and implications” that are carried along with that term
(1999, p.359). They ask, “do we want to use a word that contains within it a relation to a singular object that
we use to narrow our sense of who we are and what we are capable of?” (1999, p. 360). They ask “what else
might we be [. . .] if we did not see ourselves and our world so defined in books?” (1999, p. 359).
g [ ] ( p )
I ask, what might writing be if it were not consistently and overwhelmingly strong-armed into texts (and
analyzed as such)?
3

What connotation does the term text imply? What baggage is brought along when we use that term? Literary
critic Cathy Davidson's approach to textuality still resonates with many. She argues that “a book [is] a unique
sign-system in which the reader necessarily participates as a producer of meanings, the locus of which is that
one particular text” (1986, p. 15). Here, the term text is conflated with the term book, a conflation whose
traditional importance cannot be understated. Text equals book in the vast majority of both historical and
contemporary understandings of textuality; this conflation h resulted i common usage of an almost
d di f li hi fl i has l d in f l
taxonomic inseparability (see, for example, our use of the term “textbooks” in classrooms across North
America).
4

Davidson argues that “novel reading could [ . .] provide as much of an emotional or spiritual experience (as
novel [. ]
well as a guide for living) as did the earlier intensive reading of the Bible” (1986, p. 73). So, from the Protestant
Reformation's insistence on sola scriptura (the Bible alone), to contemporary instances of textual mysteries
(The Secret), the notion of text has been consistently associated with book culture, and a concomitant ethos of
mystery, power, truth, and revealed insights. Most importantly, the very notion of text is built upon the
i f ii f i i d i d finite ibili
containment of writing, of restriction, reduction, and fi i accessibility.
Is this what we wish to mean as a discipline when we use the term text? Can we easily and unproblematically
leave behind these prominent vestiges of book culture that are carried along in our widespread usage of the
term? What does such a notion do to our understanding of writing? Is writing always bound by texts?
g g g y y
5

In much of the influential scholarship cited by early figures in our discipline notions of text were substantially
discipline,
broadened, particularly by literary critics and semioticians, a move that served text-based paradigms of
research and criticism. Scholars in Rhetoric and Writing Studies who explicitly invoked these theorists and text-
based research paradigms promoted such notions of text in our field, notions that have now become
commonplace.
Susan Miller’s 1983 College English article is emblematic of the often conflicted nature of formative scholarship
in the discipline, and her approach is ultimately text-centric; instead of focusing on the complexities of writing,
she is instead consumed by the vagaries of the artifact, what writing must necessarily become. Miller claims
that “writing is textbound,” which leads her to create a series of visuals that evoke her understanding of “The
g g
Writing Event,” a flow-chart diagram that begins with history (the “Cultural Context” on the one hand, and the
“History of Texts” on the other; p.230), and ends with “The Text.” There is a teleology of the writing event, one
that Miller claims is not hierarchical, but one that all the same ends with an artifact, with the Text. For Miller,
there is no writing that is not textual, that is not contained, restrained, and textbound.
6

White’s “Post-Structural Literary Criticism and the Response to Student Writing” is one of many early articles
White s Post Structural Writing
that draws specifically from literary criticism and semiotics to greatly expand the notion of text. Drawing on
Vincent Leitch he contends that:
“‘In the era of post-structuralism, literature becomes textuality and tradition turns into intertextuality. [. . .]
Selves, whether of critic, poet or reader, appear as l
S l h h f ii d language constructions—texts.’” (Leitch, quoted i Whi
i ’” (L i h d in White,
1984, p. 190)
White explicitly promotes the idea that human beings are themselves texts. White and Miller place
p g y
composition within the larger domain of literary studies through research that is dominated by textuality.
g y y
Projections of textuality on broader social and cultural phenomena are not limited to early scholarship in the
field. Gee and Green (1998) draw on research that sees “life as text,” and genre theorists Amy Devitt (1991,
1993) and Charles Bazerman (2004a, 2004b) have each placed tremendous emphasis on textual interpretation
in writing studies. Devitt even goes so far as to place a textual frame on verbal discourse, pointing to the
“verbal text” resulting from the phone conversations of the accountants she studied (1991 p 338)
verbal text (1991, p. 338).
7

Similarly Stephen Witte’s 1992 Written Communication article suggests that writers rely on “oral ‘texts ’” and
Similarly, Witte s oral texts,
he argues that even memory is somehow textual (p. 265). He claims that
“from a semiotic perspective […] it is difficult not to regard as ‘text’ any ordered set of signs for which or
through which people […] construct meaning, regardless of whether that set of signs manifests itself in day to
day human relations, religious rituals, h k games, paintings, grocery li
d h l i li i i l hockey i i lists, rock and roll songs, novels,
k d ll l
motion pictures, scholarly articles, and so on.” (Witte, 1992, p. 269)
I see little justification for a linguist or a writing researcher to claim that memory (or a hockey game) is textual;
however, for the literary critic or semiotician, doing so promotes textual paradigms of research and
y g p p g
interpretation, promoting in turn disciplinary relevance and legitimacy.
8

Orr’s 1986 College English article takes textual projection to absurd extremes again relying on literary and
Orr s extremes,
semiotic paradigms of research. He suggests that “culture is made of a web of semiosis, a thick tapestry of
interwoven sign systems,” a concept that he calls the “cultural text” (1986, p. 813). Drawing on Barthes, he
argues that “nontextual information is ‘textualized,’” and that “everything that can be conceived or described is
part of some ‘text’ understood within the terms of cultural text” (1986, p. 814, emphasis added).
9

When notions of text become extended to include nearly all manner of meaning-making and material reality,
meaning making reality
the notion of intertextuality becomes a master term for all manner of associational complexity and
interconnectedness. Porter’s seminal “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community” illustrates how literary
notions of text have become unproblematically incorporated within our field.
His i l k lli for d
Hi article makes a compelling argument f a postmodern approach to research that f
h h h foregrounds the potential
d h i l
of rhetoric. But like the others I’ve mentioned, his scholarship is informed by a literary paradigm of
interpretation. Porter casts his net wide, drawing on theorists such as Barthes, Riffaterre, Kristeva, and
Derrida, promoting the idea that the cultural episteme is textual (1986b, p. 34), and that discourse (presumably
) y y y p y ( p
written and otherwise) itself is inherently, naturally, seamlessly, and unproblematically “intertextual” (1986b, p.
34).
He invokes critics like Leitch who see culture as textual, and he argues that traditions, clichés, and “phrases in
the air” become a part of a work’s intertext (1986b, p. 35); this is an interesting bit of reverse engineering, the
application of a textual frame to discursive events that may very well exceed the bounds of the written wordword.
10

For Porter, “texts not only refer to but in fact contain other texts (1986b p 36) But why should writing and
Porter texts texts” (1986b, p. 36). writing,
even the idea behind the notion of intertextuality, be bound inextricably to other texts, or further, to be
contained by them? For example, if I write a blog post about my daughter’s soccer game, why should the
conversations I heard there, the smell of the grass, the sight of my daughter slotting the ball past the
outstretched hands of the keeper be ascribed textual properties? Porter’s (and Miller’s, and White’s, and
Wi ’ ) notion of i
Witte’s) i f intertextuality d just h
li does j that. A d d i so di i i h our di i li
And doing diminishes disciplinary theory and practice.
h d i
Discursive events, culture at large, “selves,” are retrofitted with textual properties because doing so serves the
veneration of alphabetic texts and hermeneutic research. This is the tacit reality of the commonplace
assumption of literary notions of text.
Porter even provides an example of such reverse engineering. He includes a “close reading” of a cultural
“text,” a mid-1980’s Pepsi commercial. In so doing, he gives us a model for “reading” non-alphabetic discourse
textually. Yet the Pepsi commercial is no more a text than the conversations overheard at my daughter’s soccer
game. Moreover, ascribing textuality to either discursive event marginalizes rhetoric. While Porter has a
sensible rationale for invoking the concept of intertextuality what he invokes keeps writing tethered to
intertextuality,
methods of research and interpretation that are reductive and potentially stifling to rhetoric. In these
instances, complex networks of cognition, discourse, social interaction, and meaning-making are subsumed
within the rubric of intertextuality. Clearly, many of these processes are extratextual forms of meaning-making.
11

I’ve been make the claim that these views of text and intertextuality are rooted in a fundamentally
I ve
hermeneutic research paradigm, and while I acknowledge the role of hermeneutics in meaning making, the
study of rhetoric and writing is ultimately truncated by too great a focus on artifactual interpretation. Where is
production in this paradigm? What does it do to rhetoric, techne, metis, and heuristic reasoning? I’ll give you
another example, one that I hope will make clear the strong differences in hermeneutic and rhetorical
approaches to writing and di
h ii d discourse. L me ill
Let illustrate with two statements that evoke the two di
ih h k h divergent
methodologies I’ve been exploring:
Buildings are discursive.
“A Boston skyline, the old juxtaposed with the new [. . .] An architectural intertextuality.” (Yancey, 2004, p.
311)
Illustrating the ways in which architecture, built environments, and public spaces exhibit and are shaped by
discursive properties is indicative of a rhetorical approach to language and meaning making Arguing that
meaning-making.
buildings are intertextual applies the hermeneutic framework to objects that, while discursive, cannot
rationally be described as textual. When we attempt to “read” a building as text, we decontextualize
materiality in the interests of interpretation. When we see a building as a complex material-discursive
construction, we open, rather than close our object of study. 12

I want to briefly summarize my argument to this point
point.
First, the notion of text, like the notion of literacy in Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola’s essay, simply carries too
much baggage and brings along the vestiges of book culture whether we like it or not.
13

Second,
Second most of the things that impact writing are simply not textual—as Brannon notes “the act of writing is
textual as notes, the
a complex sociocognitive interaction with the world.”
14

Third intertextuality has become shorthand for all manner of polycontextual interrelated associational
Third, polycontextual, interrelated, associational,
networked influences and meaning-making, many of which clearly can’t be so casually bound or textualized.
The problems with intertextuality as a productive term for our discipline begin with the concomitant
acceptance of broad notions of text. But the larger problem is that the term simply isn’t complex enough to
encompass the realities of contemporary rhetorical knowledge work.
15

Let me show you a few more examples before I wrap up.
up
Moreville notes that folksonomies are “user-defined labels and tags” that are used to “organize and share
information,” and the term is derived from a “neologism that unites folks and taxonomy” (Moreville, 2005, p.
136). “The core idea is simple,” Moreville (2005) states, “users tag objects with keywords, with the option of
li l
multiple tags [ . .]. Th tags are shared and b
[. ] The i
h d d become pivots f social navigation” (
for i l i i ” (pp. 136 37) Social
136-37). S i l
networking applications like Digg, Flickr, and del.icio.us rely upon folksonomic classification; taxonomic
hierarchies are not imposed from above, but develop from below. As Moreville (2005) points out, user defined
relationships to metadata like tags “serves as a seed for emergent community” (p. 137).
16

Is user-defined metadata and tagging writing? Unequivocally yes especially in the rich sense indicated by
user defined yes,
Brannon. Do users in these digital environments produce texts? No. Traditional alphabetic texts could never
self-organize, could never replicate the agility and swift social interconnectedness inherent in folksonomies.
I want to conclude by arguing that the use of intertextuality and broad notions of text in contemporary
Rh
Rhetoric and W i i S di scholarship i a di
i h
d Writing Studies h l hi is discourse that operates repressively, enacting our complicity i
i l i li i in
the continued hegemony of English departments. If we can’t move beyond the kind of thinking that forces a
textual frame on forms of meaning-making that are clearly extratextual, then we will simply perpetuate
disciplinary norms that originate outside of our own discipline, limiting what we can see and conceive in
writing research.
g
What we need are not new terms to replace text and intertextuality, but new approaches to writing that leave
textbound hermeneutics behind. What prevails is the complexity of writing and the promise of rhetorical
research, which cannot be contained by text, intertextuality, or any other current term. We need to reconceive
writing and rhetoric beyond the framework of textuality.
textuality
17

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