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The terms and definitions provided thus far represent a "structuring of reality," which cannot be "true" but can perhaps be useful. It can be used in two fundamentally different ways that correspond to hermeneutics and literary critical theory. Photography again provides a good though not perfect analogy, since photographs can also be treated in these two ways. One could say that the Material Text is not the Work, but like a photograph, it represents the work, so that a person contemplating the Material Text (photograph) can create a mental construct corresponding to that which was photographed. There are, in this view of the matter, two reception images: one of the photograph or Material Text itself and another of that which was photographed or the "created world" in the work of art.[35] Another useful analogy to emphasize this hermeneutical use of the taxonomy is musical. The Material Text is like

the score of music; the Reception Performance is like the concert which created the musical event when the score is played. Thus the documentary musical score and the musical performances it enables are separate though related referents; likewise the Material Text and the Reception Performances it enables are separate though related. Reception Performances actually have two distinguishable parts—the first is the construction of a Reception Text, the second is the interpretation of and response to it. In the analogy with music, constructing the Reception Text is like an orchestra playing the music. Response to the Reception Text is analogous to listening to and responding to the played music. The reader is orchestra and audience rolled into one for a literary work. This distinction is readily seen as applicable to drama. Not only is there a difference between the written text of a play and the performances on stage—both of which precede Reception Performance by the audience in a theater—but there are often differences between the written text for performance and the written text for publication, the later intended to be performed as a reading (closet drama) rather than as a stage performance.[36] It is important to note that the reader's responses are not to the "work itself" but to the Reception Text. The quality of the Reception Text depends in part on the Material Text used as a basis and in part on the skill and quality of its rendition as performance; halting or inattentive readers are not likely to perform technically "good" Reception Texts, but this will not keep them from responding to them.

The taxonomy I have suggested, then, shows not only how interpretation or other protocols depending on a specific Material Text to reconstruct a Work might differ from other protocols depending on other Material Texts with the same title, but it shows how interpretations of the same Material Text by two persons or by the same person on two different occasions might also be different—each experience of the Work is based on a separately constructed Reception Text in a separate Reception Performance using a particular (and partial) representation of the work.

The second way of looking at this taxonomy is analogous to literary critical theory, focusing attention on the phenomenon of works embodied in Material Texts rather than focusing on the interpretation of those texts. In the analogy with photography, it is an examination of the photograph as photograph and photography as a process rather than seeing the photograph as representation of something else. The photograph becomes, in a way, an end in itself with its own meaning and ways of meaning regardless of any correspondence between itself and some other object or objects towards which the camera was aimed when the exposure was made. The critic's attention might be focused on technique, composition, texture and any number of other things relevant to the photograph as object and as result of process, all of which are unconcerned with "realism" or accuracy of representation. In photography each newly developed picture from a single negative is a material object which may be considered as a separate work; viewers of more than one copy might comment on the differences and prefer one to another for various technical and aesthetic reasons. We can use this taxonomy, therefore, to illuminate a variety of interests relating to process rather than to interpretation.

Literary critical theory has focused its attention primarily, though not exclusively on the portion of this taxonomy indicated by the terms Linguistic Text, Creative Performance, and Reception Performance. These correspond to the West, North, and East in the "map" of related interests described in section II. Literary critical theory has tended to neglect the portions indicated by Versions, Material Texts, and Production Performance. These correspond to the South and, astonishingly, the center of the "map." Marxist criticism has paid attention to Material Texts and Production Performance, but has tended to neglect or down-play Creative Performance and the mental constructs of Works and Versions. Textual criticism, until recently focused primarily on the Linguistic Texts and Creative Performance, has tended to neglect or deemphasize Production Performance and Reception Performance. To the

extent that textual critics neglect Reception Performance, they turn a blind eye to the role of their own Reception Performance in "reconstructing" authorial intention.