69249454-chandler-semiotics

TEXTUAL INTERACTIONS 197
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semiotic practices, research in this area is dominated by ethnographic
and phenomenological methodologies and is seldom closely allied
to semiotic perspectives (though there is no necessary incompatibility).
A notable exception is the research of David Glen Mick in
the field of advertising (Mick and Politi 1989, McQuarrie and Mick
1992, Mick and Buhl 1992).
Having explored some of the theoretical issues concerning the
interactions between makers, texts and users we turn now to theories
of intertextuality – which concern interactions between texts.
INTERTEXTUALITY
Although Saussure stressed the importance of the relationship of
signs to each other, one of the weaknesses of structuralist textual
analysis is the tendency to treat individual texts as discrete, closedoff
entities and to focus exclusively on internal structures. Even
where texts are studied as a ‘corpus’ (a unified collection), the overall
generic structures tend themselves to be treated as strictly bounded.
The structuralist’s first analytical task is often described as being to
delimit the boundaries of the system (what is to be included and
what excluded), which is logistically understandable but ontologically
problematic. Even remaining within the structuralist paradigm,
we may note that codes transcend structures. The semiotic notion of
‘intertextuality’ introduced by the literary theorist Julia Kristeva is
associated primarily with poststructuralist theorists. 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’ (Kristeva 1974,
388–9; translation by 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’ (Kristeva 1970, 67–9; translation by Coward
and Ellis 1977, 52).