ABSTRACT
This chapter applies integrational semiology to the re-examination of linguistics and textual studies as textualization enterprises and theories. The chapter opens with the argument that linguists are preoccupied with an autonomous, “detextualized” entity called a linguistic/verbal text at the expense of the artefact in which the text arises; but while textual scholars – especially material philologists – problematize one facet of detextualization (namely, the abstraction of a written text from the artefact) and redirect focus onto the artefact, the integrational semiologist warns against detextualization in the more fundamental sense, in terms of the alienation of the text and/or artefact from the human textualizer from whose perspective the text and the artefact are integrated. Adopting the integrational theorization of signs and writing, one then realizes that both contemporary linguistics and textual studies presuppose a detached concept of the written sign in formalizing a scientific notion of a bipartite speech sign and of language, or in centring textualization around artefacts instead of textualizers.
