Intertextuality

From Metapedia

1 Overview of the Concept of Intertextuality
2 Julia Kristeva's Description of Intertextuality
3 Examples of Intertextuality in Popular Media
4 References

Overview of the Concept of Intertextuality

The theory of intertextuality introduced by Julia Kristeva (as an extension of ideas from Mikhail Bakhtin) assumes that meaning and intelligibility in discourse and Texts are based on a network of prior and concurrent discourse and texts. Every text (and we can insert any cultural object here: image, film, Web content, musical composition) is a mosaic of references to other texts, genres, and discourses. Every text or set of signs presupposes a network of relationships to other signs like strings of quotations that have lost their exact references. The principle of intertextuality is a ground or precondition for meaning beyond "texts" in the strict sense of things written, and includes units of meaning in any media. Essentially, intertextuality describes the foundational activity behind interpreting cultural meaning in any significant unit of a cultural object (a book, a film, a TV show, a Web genre): whatever meaning we discover or posit can only occur through a network of prior "texts" that provide the context of possible meanings and our recognition of meaning at all.

Expanding the theory for cross-media symbolic activity, we could call this "intermediality" or "intersemiality" (the structures of meaning presupposed or embedded in any set of signs like nodes in a network). In linguistics and semiotics, a "seme" (from the Greek word "semeion," sign) is a minimal unit of meaning that can be strung together in words or images or any medium that carries meaning in a culture. The notion of "intersemic" describes the interdependence and implied relation of any unit of signs (like a movie) to a network of other texts, genres, artifacts, documents, and symbolic works (images, artworks) in a culture.

Much remains to be done in building out a useful model of visual and multimedia semiotics that accounts for the cultural production and reception of meaning across media forms and technologies. See also multimedia semiotics and Dialogic/Dialogism.

Another way of getting an intuitive sense of intertextuality as a ground or condition for meaning in all our language systems (verbal, visual, sound, and all combinations) is to consider dependency or presupposition in meaning. Any text or connected series of signs, a movie, for example, presupposes a set of prior instances of the signs, which, for us in any interpretive community, function as a learned archive or encyclopedia of references, genres, background knowledge, and symbolic meaning through which we recognize meaning in what we are viewing, reading, interpreting. The generative meaning-making process that the term "intertextuality" attempts to describe is as foundational to culture as the grammar of a language and the the many uses of connected statements in all our other discourses. It names the grammar of the possibility of ongoing meaning in a culture, and allows us to see culture as living process of meaning-making.

Traditions in the Development of Concepts

One of the earliest statements of the awareness of a trans-personal encyclopedia of tradition is T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1920).

-MI

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Julia Kristeva's Description of Intertextuality

Julia Kristeva's notion of intertextuality expands upon Bakhtin's idea of dialogism (see Dialogic/Dialogism). In her "Kristeva Reader, " she describes the idea of three-dimensional textual space with three specific coordinates of dialogue--the writer, the reader, and exterior texts. Within this textual space, horizontal and vertical axes intersect and she notes that, each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read...any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double (37).

As noted in this interview with Margaret Smaller from 1985 [1], Kristeva stresses the importance of plurality on many levels with respect to texts when she tells Smaller:

...identity may be the plurality capable of manifesting itself as the plurality of characters the author uses; but in more recent writing, in the twentieth-century novel, it may appear as fragments of character, or fragments of ideology, or fragments of representation. Moreover, such an understanding of intertextuality—one that points to a dynamics involving a destruction of the creative identity and reconstitution of a new plurality—assumes at the same time that the one who reads, the reader, participates in the same dynamics. If we are readers of intertextuality, we must be capable of the same putting-into-process of our identities, capable of identifying with the different types of texts, voices, and semantic. syntactic. and phonic systems at play in a given text.

The plurality and intertextuality of literature reifies the idea that all literature is in constant conversation with other forms of literature, as they are essentially unified, as a single unit, with the greater textual mass.

Graham Allen summarizes Kristeva's notion of intertextuality quite well when he states [2]:

The fundamental concept of intertextuality is that no text, much as it might like to appear so, is original and unique-in-itself; rather it is a tissue of inevitable, and to an extent unwitting, references to and quotations from other texts. These in turn condition its meaning; the text is an intervention in a cultural system. Intertextuality is therefore a very useful concept – indeed some would say essential – for literary study, as it concerns the study of cultural sign systems generally.

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Examples of Intertextuality in Popular Media

Obviously, intertextuality is a foundation for meaning throughout modern pop literature, cinema, photography, and television. The obvious references to prior media and sources are the easiest to see, though "intertextuality" and "intermediality" describe larger dependencies and cultural knowledge beyond direct reference or quotation.

We have talked about the intertextuality apparent within the Matrix Trilogy [3], such as choreography from Kung-Fu martial arts from Hong Kong movies of the past, consistent historical and religious myths and allusions, and ideas from William Gibson's Neuromancer and other cyberpunk novels among the few. The entire trilogy is swamped with great literary allusions, symbolism, and myths, as one can see the great number of essays and articles that reference these aspects of the film if one searches "Matrix symbolism" on Google [4]

One of the longest running television shows in Television history is The Simpsons, which has been on television for 18 years now. The show depends on viewers knowing the codes for sit-coms and many other TV and popular culture genres, which are the intertextual platform for the whole show. This link [5] has a list of all of the movie references that have been made on The Simpsons since it originated. This website's creator noted "movie references" as any sort of "dialogue, camera work, characters, actors, or music that is most commonly associated with a movie." In this classic episode [6], the movie "Planet of the Apes" is spoofed.

In this YouTube compilation, every Star Trek reference ever made on the show is compiled together [7]

Furthermore, you can see many great religious references as well, like in this scene, where Noah's Arc is alluded to [8] or, here, when Jesus' relationship with God is spoofed [9]

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