Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts by DF McKenzie

CITATION: McKenzie, D F, and D F. McKenzie. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How can bibliography respond to changes in the nature of critical theory and texts?
• Answer: Bibliography can think expansively about the definition of the text, the text's interconnections within society, and the text's meaning within that society.
• Method: Largely speculative, though there is an extended discussion of film conservation towards the end.
• Assumptions: McKenzie responds to the 'high' bibliography tradition of Greg and Bowers, as well as the emergent deconstructive trend of the eighties.
• Sententiae:
• "The partial but significant shift [the acceptance of historical bibliography] signals is one from questions of textual authority to those of dissemination and readership as matters of economic and political motive." (1)
• "Like every other technology [the book] is invariably the product of human agency in complex and highly volatile contexts which a responsible scholarship must seek to recover if we are to understand better the creation and communication of meaning as the defining characteristic of human societies." (4)
• "The problem is, I think, that the moment we are required to explain signs in a book, as distinct from describing or copying them, they assume a symbolic status [as opposed to icons or indices]. If a medium in any sense effects a message, then bibliography cannot exclude from its own proper concerns the relation between form, function, and symbolic meaning." (10)
• "In speaking of bibliography as the sociology of texts, I am not concerned to invent new names but only to draw attention to its actual value. Derrida's 'Grammatology,' the currently fashionable word 'Textuality,' the French 'Textologie,' or even 'Hyphologie' (a suggestion made, not altogether seriously, by Roland Barthes) would exclude more than we would wish to lose. Nor is bibliography a sub-field of semiotics, precisely because its functions are not merely synchronically descriptive. Our own word, 'Bibliography,' will do." (16)
• "The history of material objects as symbolic forms functions, therefore, in two ways. It can falsify certain readings; and it can demonstrate new ones... it could be argued that we reach the border between bibliography and textual criticism on the one hand and literary criticism on the other. My own view is that no such border exists. In the pursuit of historical meanings, we move from the most minute feature of the material book to questions of authorial, literary, and social context." (23)
• "Saussure's insistence upon the primacy of speech has created a further problem for book-based bibliography by confining critical attention to verbal structures as an alphabetic transcription of what are conceived only as words to be spoken. Other formalized languages, or properly perhaps, dialects of written language--graphic, algebraic, hieroglyphic, and, most significantly for our purposes, typographic--have suffered an exclusion from critical debate about the interpretation of texts because they are not speech-related. They are instrumental of course to writing and printing, but given the close interdependence of linguistics, structuralism, and hermeneutics, and the intellectual dominance of those disciplines in recent years, it is not surprising perhaps that the history of non-verbal sign systems, including even punctuation is still in its infancy, or that the history of typographic conventions as mediators of meaning has yet to be written." (34)
• "I find it more worrying that such a view [to never conflate any one version of a text with another] of the function of textual criticism fails to account for 'intention' as a 'speculative instrument' (in IA Richards's phrase), a means of creating a master-text, a kind of ideal-copy text, transcending all versions and true to the essential intention of the 'work.'" (37)
• "The argument that a rock in Arunta country is a text subject to bibliographical exposition is absurd only if one thinks of arranging such rocks on a shelf and giving them classmarks. It is the importation into Arunta land of a single-minded obsession  with book-forms, in the highly relative context of the last few hundred years of European history, which is the real absurdity." (41)
• "The ostensible unity of any one 'contained' text--be it in the shape of a manuscript, book, map, film, or computer-stored file--is an illusion. As a language, its forms and meaning derive from other texts; and as we listen to, look at, or read it, at the very same time we re-write it." (60)
• "[B]ibliography is the means by which we establish the uniqueness of any single text as well as the means by which we are able to uncover all its inter-textual dimensions." (61)
• "It is my contention of course that this distinction [between film as text and cinema] ultimately fails, since the definition of meaning--in reading the conventional details of a text--is logically dependent upon prior decisions and social effect." (67)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Inspiring! Although speculative, McKenzie points forward with a bibliographical approach balanced between high theory and high bibliography--and capable of generative integration with both.
• Synthesis: Immediately after reading Goldberg, McKenzie seems to be both dramatically under-theorized (it is not enough to be conversant with Barthes, one must deconstruct Barthes himself!) and sublimely clear. Aside from that, McKenzie seems to pick up on the New Historical trend with some alacrity--comparing the Arunta story-scape to an inverted Faerie Queene was a deft move, worthy of Greenblatt--though McKenzie may not necessarily de-privilege the literary according to the challenge of Shakespearean Negotiations. McKenzie's approach clearly lays the groundwork for the bibliographical image-text research of Evenden, Freeman, and Gaskell.
• Application: The large number of sententiae above indicate the passages that I believe point towards an integration not only between book history and image-text, but more significantly, book-history and a historicized theory of formalism.