Page 77 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
they have engaged with materials drawn from a wide range of
fields (e.g. literature, the media, popular culture, fashion, art) and
shown that such materials, in spite of their diversity, can all be
regarded as texts. Secondly, they have addressed the question of
textuality in the light of a broad spectrum of disciplines (literary
criticism, cultural studies, semiotics, art history, politics, psycho-
analysis, gender studies), thereby advancing the cause for interdis-
ciplinarity. This plurality of approaches suggests that if it is the
case that any cultural product can be treated as a text, it is also
the case that any such text can be examined by recourse to all the
interpretive tools available in a culture. It should no longer be a
matter of making one particular text the exclusive object of study
of one particular discipline but rather a matter of showing how
disparate disciplines criss-cross in a culture and in the decoding of
its products.
Thirdly, both Barthes and Kristeva have experimented with a
variety of textual forms, thus releasing the concept of the theoreti-
cal text from conventional generic constraints. Indeed, they have
challenged traditional distinctions between critical and creative
writing by producing critical texts that read very much like
fictional texts, like stories, and - in Kristeva's case - novels that
are also vehicles for articulating theoretical issues. In both writers,
interdisciplinarity is corroborated by intertextuality. Kristeva
coined this term in 1966 to describe the interdependence of dispa-
rate texts. No text is wholly autonomous and self-contained. In
fact, texts always absorb and transform other texts. They are built
from traces and echoes left by other stories and voices. To this
extent, any text can be thought of as a tapestry of quotations, a
mosaic of allusions. If texts are intertextual, subjective (i.e.
personal or individual) responses to texts are intersubjective: that
is, dependent on how each person's interpretation of the world
interacts with the interpretations proposed by other people within
the codes and conventions of a community, and is accordingly
endorsed or rejected. The operations of intertextuality are exempli-
fied by some of Barthes's writings: a text like A Lover's Discourse,
for example, is a veritable palimpsest in which many texts drawn
from various historical and generic contexts come together.
Finally, both critics have speculated about the relationship
between textuality and the body, suggesting that texts and bodies
are analogous. Bodies can be read, for our experiences are invari-

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