The ''writerly'' text

"In our age of relentless demystification, the text itself remains the last mystified object."
—George Bornstein, 2001.

    

       A text is simply the assemblage of all possible readings. The text itself as itself does not exist. It is also an ideal but ontologically empty place, without essence or value, without “intrinsic” parts. A text, like a sign, is the set of all virtual readings of itself. The text only exists as the differences of all readings that have been made, and all future readings of it that will be made. There is no “essential” text. To say that one reading coincides with the text’s interior place, its essence, is to reduce it to a timeless enigma. When a sign signifies most fully, that is when it also becomes the most non-signifying object.

    Edmond Jabès: La lecture est impossible.

    Reading as a concept that reads something out of something else, as history, psychology, semantic, aesthetic etc. This is impossible. Today, reading is its own movement, an inner momentum without a partner, without an orbit. This is the moment we cannot accept, and that is why the orbit and what is at the center of the orbit that captures the reading in its gravitational field, must exist, and continue to exist. It is the grand alibi of reading, its basis for institutionalization, and the rational for the discourse that maintains a cultural formation and identity. 

    De- and recontextualization are the normal processes that befall texts. There is no mythical whole or mystical unity in textuality. More a sociohistorical and technomaterial process, the text is not a fixed object, an idealized semantic whole. In reading, the focus should be less on the reconstruction of this mythic object, than in the creative reappropriation of textuality, and the resulting skill displayed in the new uses of language. Barthesian ''writerly'' text over the ''readerly'' one.