ABSTRACT
Textual materials have generally presented themselves to the sociologist as sources of information about something else, rather than as phenomena in their own right. This is, however, beginning to change. A body of work is beginning to emerge, at present very eclectic in its strategies and thematic foci, but having in common the text as a distinct phenomenon for sociological investigation. A partial list of work of this kind would include William Darrough (1978), Beng-Huat Chua (1979), Peter Eglin (1979), Alasdair McHoul (1981), Ken Morrison (1981), Bryan Green (1983), as well as my own studies appearing in Chapters 2 and 3 of this volume; there are no doubt others. Though there is a common source for some of these in ethnomethodology, the approaches are very various. Darrough (the original investigator of the texts that Eglin used and I am exploring here) exhibits the dialectical process at work in the contradictions between two versions of reality as an aspect of a social process; Eglin uses these two contradictory versions of the same event to elicit readers’ methods of handling reality disjunctures; Morrison explicates structural properties accomplishing the specific character of the text as such; and Chua focuses on texts as aspects of a political process. In spite of their variety, the approaches share a presupposition from which this chapter attempts systematically to depart. I shall call it the assumption of the inertia of the text All the analytic strategies presuppose the text as something that appears before the sociologist already in its character as a specimen, inert, dead, and out of context. Even when analysis focuses upon the reader’s interaction with the text, as does McHoul’s, the text itself appears as inoperative, uncontexted. Even when it is contexted and represented as part of an active
process of dialogue, as it is in Darrough’s work, the analysis itself still works from the presupposition of the inertia of the text, the dead text which the sociologist has read for its content, finding in that the dialectic of social conflict. The active text, by contrast, might be thought of as more like a crystal which bends the light as it passes through. The text itself is to be seen as organizing a course of concerted social action. As an operative part of a social relation it is activated, of course, by the reader but its structuring effect is its own.
