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VI. Contexts and Conventions
I round out this Taxonomy with three more terms in a somewhat cursory attempt to indicate the relevance of contexts and conventions to concepts of Text: Material Base, Social Context, and Performance Field.
Material Base—The world of sense data to which biological authors and readers and Material Texts (manuscript, book, etc.) belong. The Material Base includes all the raw materials of historicism. The term is used by J. Hillis Miller to refer not only to the book and earth and cities and to agricultural and industrial products, but he extends it to include institutions, conventions, and mores. He does so to present the view that there can be a visceral (i.e., physical) connection between "a people" and "the land" that is part of the textual complex.[37] Note that the Material Base is the "world" that the book and reader are a part of, not the "world" to which the work could be said to refer or to portray. Both of these worlds are, according to the "beliefs of the time" with which I began this paper, constructs or structured "texts of reality," but the "world the work refers to" is one construction removed from the Material Base.
Social Context—My preferred term for the complex of institutions, conventions, and mores whose expectations and habits are reflected in the Material Text and which form the extended field of inquiry along with the Material Base for new historicism. In particular with regard to Texts it should be noted that these conventions include relations and contracts and expectations between author and typists; author and publisher; publisher and editor, compositor, printer, binder, bookseller; and between author, publisher, bookseller and reader. I separate the Social Contexts from the Material Base because, as Thomas Carlyle pointed out in Sartor Resartus with more panache than originality, institutions, skills, and conventions are aeriform—they are constructs, not found objects. The principles of relativity and structuralism tell us that "found objects" are also constructs, but that insight does not smooth out the distinction between material constructs and social constructs.
Performance Field—This is where the Performance Text is "played" according to the rules of the reader's particular game of textual interaction and further limited by the performer's capabilities and resources. This is a term suggested by Roland Barthes's definition of Text, which he distinguishes from "Work" (by which he means Book or Material
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