| Chapter 1: | Writing the Colony |
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The value of that truth is neither absolute nor stable but shifting and determined by the discourses of the day: prevalent politics, personal agendas, dominant ideologies. Due to the argumentative nature of truth in textuality, any host absorbs negation and dissidence into itself, storing counterarguments until politics again endow them with discursive power. “In short, truth becomes a structure. We might then say that truth and falsity are converted to foregound and background. A true proposition is a claim that is prominent in the textual system of the discipline; a false proposition is a claim that is in the background” (Frawley 75).
The host is contingent on but clearly distinct from concepts of textuality, discourse, and canon. Textuality is the condition in which literate cultures acquire and articulate knowledge; discourses are the systematic silences in articulation that produce meaning. In contrast, I consider a host a historically specific set of texts by multiple authors. Whereas such a set of texts is considered a canon when it comprises a finite number of texts whose inclusion in the group is sanctioned by an institutionalized political power, a host is a nonexclusive group of texts that are engaged in synchronic and diachronic intertextual relationships with each other. The texts of a host have a physical presence in writing and proliferate as writing: propositions and retorts, influences, citations, commentary and their infinite reproductions, revisions, and reiterations. Because the host is in this way made up of infinite orders of adaptation, commentary, and revision, its readers are frequently its writers and vice versa. Hence the conjunction of these texts is specifically produced by their metatextual relationships.33 Therefore, the host is constantly engaged in reinterpretation and assimilation of texts and conversely lends itself to cooptation by other hosts.34 Since any discourse in the host is documented and stored in writing and dispersed in ongoing written adaptations, single arguments may be adapted or silenced for indefinite amounts of time and be rediscovered or reforgotten at any point.
Consequently, the host creates meaning through the engagement of specific texts in argument, that is, through a communicative process of signification. The truths which a host of texts produces are not contained in any of its individual propositions, agreements, or “schools of thought” but rather in the concerted inscriptive measures—discourses adopted, formats deployed, rituals performed—that its authors take to achieve written doctrine.