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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.