IV. Textual Performances as Write Acts
It seems useful here to add the term Performance to our taxonomy of
concepts related to Works of literary art.[32] Performance is an act, an event.
Performances take place in time and space. They are not material objects,
though they might produce results that are material and that can be used as
records of the performance. However, these outcomes of performance are
not the performances themselves. It will be useful to distinguish between at
least three types: Creative Performance, Production Performance, and
Reception Performance.
Creative Performance refers primarily to acts of authority over
linguistic texts, determining what shall be encoded as the inscription
representing a Version.[33] Creative
Performance includes all that was indicated above by the terms Potential
Version, Developing Version, and Essayed Version. Creative Performance
is primarily inventive but usually involves some sort of mechanical work
to inscribe through writing, typing or dictating. This mechanical aspect
should perhaps more properly be called Production Performance, but when
the author is inscribing new material it is clearly primarily a creative
activity. One might say, however, that when the author makes a mechanical
error in inscription, it might be a failure of production rather than of
creation. To a casual reader this difference makes no difference, but to the
editor who holds production authority over the work, it makes a significant
difference, since he will correct a production error but
not a creative failure (creative "errors" might, by the way, be creative
innovations the editor has failed to understand).
Production Performance refers primarily to acts of authority over
Material Texts, determining what material form the Linguistic Text shall
have and re-inscribing it in those forms for public distribution. Production
Performance can have a variety of methods and outcomes;
they can be nurturing or negligent, skillful or clumsy, well-intentioned and
wise or well-intentioned but ignorant. Production Performance often affects
the Linguistic Text and always affects the Material Text, but it differs from
Creative Performance in that its primary purpose is the transmission and
preservation and formal (not substantive) improvement of the Linguistic
Text. It is a process of transcription, not one of revision. Creative
Performance and Production Performance are often carried out
simultaneously by the same person, but traditionally Creative Performance
has been associated with authoring the Linguistic Text and Production
Performance has been associated with manufacture and publishing the
Material Text. In practice these two processes are not always easily
separable, for authors occasionally perform production acts and publishers,
printers, and editors quite often perform "authoring" acts. The results of
these crossings are sometimes "happy" and sometimes
not—often the judgment depends on who is judging.
Reception Performance refers to acts of decoding Linguistic Texts and
"conceptualizing" the Material Text; that is what we do when reading and
analyzing. Reception Performance differs from Production Performance in
that its primary purpose is not the reproduction of the Linguistic Text in a
new material form, but the construction of and interaction with the
Linguistic Text in the form of a Conceptual Text. Readers do not normally
distinguish consciously between the Material Text and their Conceptualized
Text derived from it. They are also often unconscious of the ways in which
the Material Text is more than just the Linguistic Text of the Work so that
their Conceptual Text is formed under the influence of material contexts
that did not attend the process by which the author materialized his
Conceptual Text by inscribing it. To put this in a simple model, the
author's Essayed Conceptual Text takes form as a Material Text which the
reader uses to construct the Reception Conceptual
Text. If we imagine, then, that the specific copy of the Work that reader X
is using is Material Text X, that copy with its textual limitations and errors
is what the reader is reading. It is a Material Text, not the
Work, though the Work can only be known through a Material Text. It
need not, however, be known through this particular copy; the
imperfections of the particular Linguistic Text as well as the implications
of the particular Material Text contribute to the uniqueness of this particular
representation of the Work. Furthermore, it is not the Work itself that is
known through the Material Text but the reader's reconstruction of the
Work that is known, the "reader's Conceptual Linguistic Text as mediated
by the Material Text," or, in short, the Reception Text. It should be noted
that the Reception Text is still what Saussure calls a "signifier," for it is no
more than the Linguistic
Text in internalized Semiotic form. It is then reacted to in a variety of ways
and according to a variety of principles of interpretation which taken all
together can be called the Reception Performance. The point to emphasize
and then to elaborate is that these reactions are to the Reception Text not
to the Material Text. (See Chart 4, where critics Q and R read the same
copy of the Work and may disagree about interpretation because of their
different skills in performing the Reception Text,
because their experiences of life and reading differ, or because they employ
different interpretational principles. Critics S and T, who read two different
editions reproducing more or less well the same Version of the Work, may
disagree about interpretation for any of the same reasons Q and R disagree,
and because the Material Texts in which they encounter the Work differ.
They may also, fortuitously, agree with each other if one or both have
managed to ignore or "misread" the Material Text. Critics X and Y, who
read different copies of the work, each representing a different Version,
may disagree for any of the same reasons affecting Q, R, S, and T and also
because the Linguistic Texts they are reading are different. To the extent
that Q, R, S, T, X and Y think their copy of the work
is the
Work, their disagreements will seem unaccountable, irresolvable, or
evidences of inadequacy in the others as critics.)
It might be useful to describe the process of Reception Performance
by adapting some terms used by I. A. Richards to describe his experiments
in practical criticism in the 1920s. Several "perusals" of a text at one sitting
constituted an "attack" on the work of art. Several "attacks" spread over a
short period of time, say a week, constituted a "reading." The reader's
commentary on the work—the record of his reading and
reaction—was
called a "protocol." We sometimes call interpretations of works "readings,"
but the word is vague and overworked; we should call them something else
such as protocols or records of the Reception Performance. I think it can
be said that Richards was interested in this process as a process of
interpretation of meaning, effect, and tone suggested by the words as
grouped into sentences and paragraphs, and that he was not concerned with
the problematic nature of the Material Texts he and his students used. Nor
was he concerned with the problematic
nature of the dematerialization of the text signs for words and punctuation.
That is, he was interested in what the Text said, not in what the Work was.
This is a common strategy of literary critics to avoid the problems of
"authorial intentions." What I have called the Reception Text is in part the
reader's decoding of the Linguistic Text as embodied in the Material Text
at hand, but it also includes the reader's semiotic reconstruction or reading
of the Material Text as a totality and to the environment in which the reader
has undertaken the Reception Performance. Anything the reader says or
writes about his experience of the work is a "protocol." The rules by which
protocols are produced and judged are as numerous as there are games to
be played in the Performance Field. (See summary of terms in Appendix
B.)
We have in these three performances a key to why observations made
about speech acts go awry when applied to writing. A speech act or
spoken utterance is one event with three basic elements: the utterer's mental
concept, the physical medium of utterance, and the listener's mental
concept. These three elements always exist together in the context of time
and place when and where the utterance is spoken. In written works all
three of these elements exist also, but the context of time and place is
fragmented, so that the writer's utterance takes place, so to speak, in the
presence of an absent reader, and the reader's reception or construction of
utterance takes place in the presence of an absent writer. Therefore, each
utterance takes place in a context of time and place that is unknown to the
other party and adventitious meanings are the highly likely result, for the
"bundle" or "molecule" has been broken, modified or replaced. Finally, to
complicate things even more, the writer's writing is seldom seen by the
reader who usually has instead the printer's printing. So a written work
entails at least three separate
events (performances) whereas the spoken work is one event.
[34] Experienced writers are, of course,
aware
of this and compensate by a multitude of strategies. That is one reason it
is normal to think of writing as more formal and requiring more care than
spoken communication. There are also many other reasons that written
language must be made clearer, among them the fact that punctuation is a
coarse substitute for intonation and gesture.
