The Textual Space: On the Notion of Text

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One of the most important problems faced by theorists who deal with the analysis of signifying practices is the ambiguity of the key term upon which, in one way or another, their discussions hinge: the notion of text. Ever since the early activities of OPOYAZ and the Moscow Linguistic Circle, literary theory has functioned with three models of semiotics. The first two are based on the work of Saussure as well as on the mathematical theory of information presented by Shannon and Weaver (1949); for both models, the text has an autonomous system of signification, whether in terms of structure, as in the first case, or in terms of message, as in the second case. The third model derives from the work of Peirce and does not define the on the basis of entities or relationships. Rather, it confronts the semiotic problem from a different perspective, namely, the analysis and description of the conditions that are necessary for actions, facts, or objects to function as signs. The first two models belong to a semiotics of communication and are dedicated to the study of the means and processes used by sign producers, not only to affect others in various ways, but also to gain recognition and acceptance from them. In a broader sense, the third model belongs to the semiotics of signification and includes all uses and behaviors that become significant only because they take place in a social context. In this essay, we wish to address ourselves to the productive manifestations of the work of signification. It is perhaps after May 1968 in France that semiotics ceases to be understood as a of signs and starts to function as a critical discipline. Because its critical objects come to be defined as (a) communication, (b) the structures of communication, and (c) the languages that are implied within communication, semiotics appears no longer as a study of the signified, but rather, as a study of the operations of signifying. Yet there is no human science (and semiotics is no exception) that does not compromise those who practice it, since a practice necessarily situates its practitioners in a fixed zone of knowledge (saber) and obliges them to select among cultural options that in turn act upon the very process of investigation. So it is that the dominant ideologies in capitalist modes of production not only determine the models of communication but also the instruments used to analyze the structure and function of those models. There are no neutral sciences: the myth of neutrality is an ideological illusion that arises with the scientific man of the Renaissance. There is implicit in any process of the production of meaning (sentido)