Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the Ge ...

This is to say that the intertextual field of engagement of a host does not exhaust itself in instances of Barthes’ “déjà lu,” that is, evidence of who quoted or plagiarized whom (and who didn’t), read or referenced whom (or didn’t), or created hidden meanings by plays with allusion. Rather, Culler’s concept of intertextuality mistrusts notions of contained textual influence that defer to authorial intentions, since any source is, like the text that harbors it, itself composed of multiple influences, languages, and modes of articulation.

Roland Barthes, who is even more radical on the notion of the reader than Culler, does away with the last vestiges of absolute meaning embodied in the reading subject. The subject, he argues, is itself nothing but a textualized entity, a product of cultural discourse, of the power structures that have guided its selection and consumption of texts and the mechanisms by which it constructs meanings out of them: “This ‘I’ which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost)” (S/Z 10). The integrity of the subject and specifically its exteriority to the text it reads is paradox. The subject is itself inscribed by and into the text it reads. As a consequence, the distinction between the reader and the writer becomes redundant: “The Text requires an attempt to abolish (or at least to lessen) the distance between writing and reading…by linking the two together in a single signifying process” (Barthes, “Work” 79). Reading, for Barthes, is a productive process of rewriting, out of the signifying polysemy of the written text, the meanings that at any given historical moment are warranted by discourse.

Barthes’ “I” serves to elucidate how the reader-writers of the host are inextricably invested in its proliferation of text. Allowing that a host is but a subset of the totality of the cultural text, and that perhaps there is, therefore, a vantage point somewhere that might justifiably be said to be exterior to a host, its borders are nevertheless infinitely diffuse. What is more, engaging the host means engaging in it, and so critique is destined to be absorbed into the dialectics of the host itself.