Texts on the Move: Textuality and Historicity Revisited

Abstract

The last time texts were brought onto the general theoretical and methodological agenda of the human and social sciences, they were reintroduced into history in terms of an indefinite set of indefinitely complex contexts, which gave every text a specific date and location in a network of other texts and events. A couple of decades later, however, a more prominent feature of texts seems to be that they are permanently on the move: they circulate, have effects on other things, change and transform realities, and are at the same time themselves translated and modified. In the literature exploring the textuality of history, these dimensions have been under-theorized and often ignored. To meet this challenge, we need to develop concepts and approaches that enable us to place the mobility of texts as well as their mobilizing force at the center of our current historical concerns. In this article we will explore what the consequences of this move could be, and what resources are already at hand in different scholarly traditions. Exploring the entanglements between actor-network theory (ANT in the version of Bruno Latour), on the one hand, and literary criticism, linguistics, and book history, on the other, enables us to focus on how texts move and how they move others. We will proceed in this essay by identifying three decisive moments in twentieth-and twenty-first-century textual scholarship, often conceptualized as "turns," which are linked to the works of three path-breaking authors and which at the same time represent three different stages or forms of textuality: the linguistic turn (Saussure), the turn to writing (Derrida), and the turn to print (Eisenstein). Our discussions of these three moments and forms of textuality aim at uncovering how they also represent seminal moments in Bruno Latour's development of the theoretical and methodological complex now referred to as ANT.

More than just a product: Strengthening literature in sociological analysis

“…Brown, ; McHoul, ; Szakolczai, ; Watson, ). To emancipate and strengthen literature vis‐à‐vis sociological analysis, some scholars have recently made a pact with the teachings of Latour () (further see Asdal & Jordheim, ; Felski, , ), whose famously known actor‐network theory was inspired by the concept of the “actant,” developed by literary theorist A. J. Greimas. By re‐introducing a Greimasian approach to the study of literature through “material semiotics,” Latour encourages us to look at texts as autonomous objects endowed with their own share of agency (Felski, ).…”

“…Literature is to a considerable extent autonomous. Literature has agency and the potential “to mobilize” (Asdal & Jordheim, , p. 58). Literature mediates understanding of social experience differently than sociology, but in a way that is no less valid or important.…”

Den offentliga ohälsan : En historisk studie av barnpsykologi och -psykiatri i svensk media 1968-2008

“…I relation till studien kan tidningsdiskussioner ses som ett sätt att göra detta på genom att de artiklar som publicerades i tidningen iscensatte och ordnade barns och ungas psykiska ohälsa på ett vis som kunde transporteras över tid och rum (cf. Asdal & Jordheim, 2018).…”

“…Especially as historical studies have been rather marginalized within ANT, while ethnographic methods have been more dominant. But there are exceptions, one being Kristin Asdal whose discussions (see for example Asdal & Jordheim, 2018) have been of great importance for the thesis's theoretical framework and analytical focus. Clearly drawing on the relational and performative ontological stance that I outlined above, Asdal (2012; see also Asdal & Moser, 2012) argues that instead of assuming that historical texts exist in a context, texts can also include and enact parallel and partially contradictory contexts -or sets of human and non-human actors.…”

Medisinen mellom linjene

“…Men historie er også noe man gjør; historien er noe som blir til (2). Tekster er ikke bare passive representasjoner av svunnen tid.…”