Page 124 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

INTERTEXTUALITY

Intertextuality On one level the idea of intertextuality refers to the self-conscious
citation of one text within another as an expression of enlarged cultural self-
consciousness. Increased awareness of intertextuality is argued to be a sign of the
postmodern condition. Hence the intertextual historical blurring encountered 101
within postmodernism by which representations of the past and present are
displayed together in a bricolage that juxtaposes previously unconnected signs to
produce new codes of meaning. For example, shopping centres have made the
mixing of styles from different times and places a particular ‘trade mark’ while MTV
is noted for the blending of pop music from a variety of periods and locations.
There has also been a notable collapse or blurring of genre boundaries since the
late 1970s within cultural products that is a facet of intertextuality. Thus Bladerunner
and Blue Velvet are frequently cited as films that mix the genres of noir, horror, sci-
fi., etc. Likewise, conventions of film noir and the road movies are re-worked and
re-cycled in Pulp Fiction and True Romance. In television, intertextuality involves
explicit allusion to particular programmes and oblique references to other genre
conventions and styles. For example, reference to Goodfellows in The Sopranos or to
Thelma and Louise in The Simpsons. This intertextuality is an aspect of enlarged
cultural self-consciousness about the history and functions of cultural products.
More philosophically, and as argued by Kristeva in the context of her discussion
of Bakhtin and the notion of the dialogic, the concept of intertextuality refers to the
accumulation and generation of meaning across texts where all meanings depend
on other meanings generated and/or deployed in alternative contexts. This is also
the contention of the ‘later’ Barthes when he announces the ‘death of the author’,
arguing that a text has no single meaning that stems from a unified agent but is
made up of a set of already existing cultural quotations. In other words, textual
meaning is unstable and cannot be confined to single words, sentences or particular
texts. Meaning has no single originatory source, but is the outcome of relationships
between texts, that is, intertextuality.
The idea that there are no clear and stable denotative meanings, because all
meaning contains traces of other meanings from other places, has been mined most
consistently by Derrida, for whom meaning is always already deferred and in
process. In particular, Derrida critiques what he calls the ‘logocentrism’ of Western
philosophy. That is, Derrida investigates and deconstructs the idea that meaning has
a fixed a priori transcendental form that exists within human reason before any
other kinds of thinking occur. Here, words carry multiple meanings, including the
echoes or traces of other meanings from other related words in other contexts.
Language is non-representational and meaning is inherently unstable so that it
constantly slides away.
Cultural studies has taken from Derrida the key notions of deconstruction,
différance, trace and supplement all of which, along with the concept of
intertextuality, stress the instability of meaning, its deferral through the interplay
of texts, writing and traces. Consequently, no categories have essential universal
meanings but are social constructions of an inherently intertextual language. This
is the core of the anti-essentialism prevalent in cultural studies.