Intersubjectivity & Intertextuality

Intersubjectivity is "The sharing of subjective states by two or more individuals." [1]
The term is used in three ways:
1. Firstly, in its weakest sense it is used to refer to agreement. There is said to be intersubjectivity between people if they agree on a given set of meanings or definition of the situation.
2. Secondly, and somewhat more subtly it has been used to refer to the "common-sense," shared meanings constructed by people in their interactions with each other and used as an everyday resource to interpret the meaning of elements of social and cultural life. If people share common sense, then they share a definition of the situation. [2]
3. Thirdly, the term has been used to refer to shared (or partially shared) divergences of meaning. Self-presentation, lying, practical jokes, and social emotions, for example, all entail not a shared definition of the situation, but partially shared divergences of meaning. Someone who is telling a lie is engaged in an intersubjective act because they are working with two different definitions of the situation. Lying is thus genuinely inter-subjective (in the sense of operating between two subjective definitions of reality).
Intersubjectivity emphasizes that shared cognition and consensus is essential in the shaping of our ideas and relations. Language is viewed as communal rather than private. Hence it is problematic to view the individual as partaking in a private world, which is once and for all defined.
Intersubjectivity is today an important concept in modern schools of psychoanalysis, where it has found application to the theory of the interrelations between analyst and analysand.
Intertextuality:
Although Saussure stressed the importance of the relationship of signs to each other, one of the weaknesses of structuralist semiotics is the tendency to treat individual texts as discrete, closed-off entities and to focus exclusively on internal structures.
Kristeva referred to texts in terms of two axes: a horizontal axis connecting the author and reader of a text, and a vertical axis, which connects the text to other texts (Kristeva 1980, 69). Uniting these two axes are shared codes: every text and every reading depends on prior codes. Kristeva declared that 'every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it' (cited in Culler 1981, 105). She argued that rather than confining our attention to the structure of a text we should study its 'structuration' (how the structure came into being). This involved siting it 'within the totality of previous or synchronic texts' of which it was a 'transformation'

The ideology of individualism (with its associated concepts of authorial 'originality', 'creativity' and 'expressiveness') is a post-Renaissance legacy which reached its peak in Romanticism but which still dominates popular discourse. 'Authorship' was a historical invention. Concepts such as 'authorship' and 'plagiarism' did not exist in the Middle Ages.

Saussure emphasized that language is a system which pre-exists the individual speaker. For structuralists and poststructuralists alike we are (to use the stock Althusserian formulation) 'always already' positioned by semiotic systems - and most clearly by language. Contemporary theorists have referred to the subject as being spoken by language. Barthes declares that 'it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is... to reach the point where only language acts, "performs", and not "me"'

Claude Lévi-Strauss declared that: 'I don't have the feeling that I write my books, I have the feeling that my books get written through me... I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no "I", no "me"'

Each translation is, of course, a re-authoring. No 'neutral' translation is possible, since languages involve different value systems - as is noted in the Cours itself. Nor can specialist translators be expected to be entirely disinterested. Furthermore, anyone who treats the Cours as a founding text in semiotics does so by effectively 'rewriting' it, since its treatment of semiology is fragmentary.

No-one today - even for the first time - can read a famous novel or poem, look at a famous painting, drawing or sculpture, listen to a famous piece of music or watch a famous play or film without being conscious of the contexts in which the text had been reproduced, drawn upon, alluded to, parodied and so on. Such contexts constitute a primary frame which the reader cannot avoid drawing upon in interpreting the text.

This is a particularly self-conscious form of intertextuality: it credits its audience with the necessary experience to make sense of such allusions and offers them the pleasure of recognition. By alluding to other texts and other media this practice reminds us that we are in a mediated reality, so it can also be seen as an 'alienatory' mode which runs counter to the dominant 'realist' tradition which focuses on persuading the audience to believe in the on-going reality of the narrative. It appeals to the pleasures of critical detachment rather than of emotional involvement.

Gerard Genette proposed the term 'transtextuality' as a more inclusive term than 'intertextuality' (Genette 1997). He listed five subtypes:

• intertextuality: quotation, plagiarism, allusion;
• paratextuality: the relation between a text and its 'paratext' - that which surrounds the main body of the text - such as titles, headings, prefaces, epigraphs, dedications, acknowledgements, footnotes, illustrations, dust jackets, etc.;
• architextuality: designation of a text as part of a genre or genres (Genette refers to designation by the text itself, but this could also be applied to its framing by readers);
• metatextuality: explicit or implicit critical commentary of one text on another text (metatextuality can be hard to distinguish from the following category);
• hypotextuality (Genette's term was hypertextuality): the relation between a text and a preceding 'hypotext' - a text or genre on which it is based but which it transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends (including parody, spoof, sequel, translation).

To such a list, computer-based hypertextuality should be added: text which can take the reader directly to other texts (regardless of authorship or location). This kind of intertextuality disrupts the conventional 'linearity' of texts. Reading such texts is seldom a question of following standard sequences predetermined by their authors.

Some defining features of intertextuality might include the following:

• reflexivity: how reflexive (or self-conscious) the use of intertextuality seems to be (if reflexivity is important to what it means to be intertextual, then presumably an indistinguishable copy goes beyond being intertextual);
• alteration: the alteration of sources (more noticeable alteration presumably making it more reflexively intertextual);
• explicitness: the specificity and explicitness of reference(s) to other text(s) (e.g. direct quotation, attributed quotation) (is assuming recognition more reflexively intertextual?);
  criticality to comprehension: how important it would be for the reader to recognize the intertextuality involved;
• scale of adoption: the overall scale of allusion/incorporation within the text; and
• structural unboundedness: to what extent the text is presented (or understood) as part of or tied to a larger structure (e.g. as part of a genre, of a series, of a serial, of a magazine, of an exhibition etc.) - factors which are often not under the control of the author of the text.

Topic 1: New Communication Technologies

The Changing Face of Communications

• The mid-twentieth century witnessed the emergence of institutionalised forms of major media, notably radio, film and television, often misleading referred to as ‘mass media’. The labels ‘mass media’ and ‘mass communication’ are both contradictory in terms, given the extraordinary disparities of access to the new communications technologies and services within different nations. Moreover, responses that individuals, audiences and consumers make to media content, across different cultures, can hardly be adequately categorised as ‘mass culture’. The products of the convergence of communications have also meant that contemporary information society is highly dependant on information networks that can distribute images, data and symbols.

• Rarely challenged is the presumed nexus between ‘an advanced information society’ and the technologies of convergence – a sophisticated telecommunications system, the widespread adoption of computing and the acceptance of enhanced media systems.

• The telecommunications carriers have tended to be quasi-bureaucratic, technology focused and driven by an engineering ethos. The publishing culture, on the other hand, has tended to be more financially free-wheeling, with higher risk-taking, but more customer-focused. Similarly, ninemsn (PBL/Microsoft) has faced creative tensions within its organisation because the television people tend to want to build web sites to promote the network’s television programs, while the Microsoft people want to use the web sites to shift the television audience to on-line purchasing.

• The formation of an alliance can mean loss of managerial autonomy, technology sharing with the possible further loss of core competence to a partner, a difficulties in reconciling global and national strategic objectives.

• Digitalisation is the process which converts any type of information into a compressed form to be sent as a stream of bits for use at the receiving end. Digitalisation enables the transmission of all kinds of communication signals – not only voice, but also data, video, graphics and music – over the network.

• Castells postulates that the present world economy ‘is global because the core activities of production, consumption, and circulation, as well as their components (capital, labour, raw materials, management, information, technology, markets) are organised on a global scale’. And it is informational, he adds, ‘because the productivity and competitiveness of units or agents in this economy (be it firms, regions or nations) fundamentally depend upon their capacity to generate, process and apply efficiently, knowledge based information’.

• This economic policy shift is generally referred to as economic rationalism, neatly interpreted by Brian Toohey:
  [E]conomic rationalism was based on the premise that markets know best. Rather than being seen as integral to its operation, governments are considered as somehow outside – and antagonistic to – the economy. Accordingly, governments should not ‘intervene’ in the market. As a corollary, individuals should be required to do more to fend for themselves, taxes should always be cut, privatisation should be accelerated, communal services funded according to the ‘user pays’ principle and deregulation of all markets, including the labour market, pursued with unremitting vigour.