The world correlate chapter 4

The Exegesis of the Texts of Culture:

Pre-texts and construction of the text between epistemology and reality

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

Written in English and translated to English

by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

    The purposiveness of this essay is to site and discuss in a mode as open as possible the senses of the concept of text as to embrace a number of possible forms of the textual through which I understand and develop it in my own research both in the sense of sociology as in anthropology of culture and society directly, meaning, from the analysis of social forms according to years of fieldwork and research in the popular markets of Venezuela as expressed in several of my recent years essays and books including the exegesis of pretextual forms as implicit, beyond the kind of performativity of research explored in epistemology, on experiences in my own cultural reconfiguration and transformations, the horizont of my own everyday quotidian environment as expressed in my books on technology environments and urban habitat according to subjectivity, sensibility, the self and other issues within medias in use from a Texas perspective

   The relation between the ethic of knowledge and the ways to afford myself reality is here in the forefront since the transformation of my own cultural parameters are in play while also presupposing my research on a variety of phenomena’s of material and immaterial culture, visual culture and imageries of several kinds

  It is not my objective however, to discuss my own books and essays, differently to that, the center of my attention is to discuss in an open form and generally from the analytical philosophy of science, how I understand the place, the proportion, the form and the levels of the work of exegesis of culture, in what forms the interpretation of cultures as text might work

    Before analyzing it I must advance some distinctions between the concept of text and the concept of pre-text because while both concept share something pre-given to our perception, knowledge and readings, a legible and readable whole, the concept of pre-text evolve a more accurate activity of choosing and selecting, meaning that what made a text a pre-text is overall the selection of it as a motive, reason, pattern and issue of our attention and the concept of text suppose to guaranty as pre-defined an independent or autonomous text in regard to our choices.

    Certainly as discussed above a text take shape also from the moment we read anything, everything we read become a text to our activity of reading and we may sustain that at this point it becomes also a pre-text or even sustain that any text we read is a pretext to our reading, under such a sense text and pre-text seem to be the same, but it is obvious that a pretext like topics and themes are, seems to be more near than the idea of text to a certain intentionality, if we choice a pretext we choice another text as the basis for our text to be about while by simply reading something already defined as text we are not necessarily overfocussing it

    At the same time we should may distinctions between text, Pretext, construction of the text and textualization

     For example, we are in the city and we observe the publicities around us which consist about a universe of colors and kinetic movements surrounding us including images, icons, mobile forms, light, computer languages, we are not committed yet to write an essay about it but just enjoining it as citizens as consumers as side walkers all that universe call our natural attention and as such we start to made it intelligible through our process of decodification while we are not choosing it as pretext to an interpretation

   Can we say that from the moment we are decoding it simply as citizens, consumers and side walkers such a publicity environment become a pre-text and or a text to our Reading?

  This question on involuntary activity versus intentionality must be asked here if we attain to really be agree on the parameters to be consider to define something as text or as pre-text, I think it is easy to recognize that the answer is yes and not at the same time as well as that to a certain point it is an issue undecidable.

   The issue of indecibility by the way is sometimes an option, i am thinking for example in how derrida decided to let the question of what is first thought or language to indecibility since taking a way instead of another evolved unwishable risk in respect to the primacy and privilege of being from the moment the relation itself is impossible to be solved without the pass by of being into both thought and language

   In a similar form we must attain to seize both sense at the same time in our definitions of texts and pre-text, a reserve or a conservation attitude should mediate our answer, instead of making both concepts fixed under one or another answer an ethical sense regarding relation persuade us to admit both definitions, a natural, involuntary definition so to speak and an intentional definition must be at the same time complementary

   With this tie up a pre-text is a concept both pre-given in culture and society as well as choiced and selected while a text must be defined as a more autonomous phenomena, undoubtedly to read is to read texts, but a text must be something more itself if we establishes the rule of the book of text as the parameter to basis what a text is, a text should be something readable in itself with independence of the activity of reading it or not so that when we are reading things which are not itself text we must speak about building text and sometimes about textualizations of the non-textual

   Thus it is needed to clarify or separate that a text must be text itself perse our reading and that a pre-text is defined by an intentional activity of reading, the pretext is a legible form we have choice to be interpreted or read from exegesis a text instead is a form whose decodification don’t need necessarily of our intentional purposiveness of reading.

    Besides we required another one distinction between a text that was already given exactly as we perceive it beyond our presence as something legible in society and culture, and forms to increase the textual such as from author works, theoretical Works, book of philosophy, novel, story, report, to form without authors such as ancient forms of the inscritural or iconographic symbols, or as in archaeology and other forms of reading ancient disappeared cultures, or jeroglifs, petroglyphs and other forms of the inscriptural including dictionaries and encyclopedia’s

   While beyond writing and inscription seen in Archaeological sense, an additional distinction is required not as much between texts with author and textual form less authorial as artisans and or interior designs or forms of material culture in general but also between as mentioned above text and textualization as to encompass forms of texts as publicity, fashion, scenifications and mise in scenes, ceremonies and rituals, urban popular markets and so on

    For example fashion as Barthes discussed it, it is without doubt a legible text in society, we don’t need yet to write a book or a semiotique tractactus on the system of fashion as to as citizens recognize it as a legible whole according to the acervo we have on such forms on the background of former styles we comply and access in our cultural alive memory, however, beyond such a legibility allow us to include fashion in what we may accept as text, a legible whole through which we can read the styles of the customs of a society, meaning to read the social text through the visual text, if fashion, as also publicity, is a text to intramundane legibility’s between persons and visual forms it is not yet text in the sense of making a read more deeper focused in a research addressed to read the social text in the visual and its subyascents senses, a citizen a consumer who transit within the city may find intelligible the forms of fashion by this reason we require a distinction between text and textualization indicating the subsequent and more focused effort to unveil a subyascent cultural text under fashion as a visual phenomena

    Another distinction is needed between textualization and construction of the text, in textualization we textualize the non-textual, we try something as text beyond if it is more or less a textual form, in constructing the text, we build a text as it is needed to make intelligible something unreadable without such a building struggle

   in term of textualization everything must be textualize, textualization mean to try as text the non textual or any thing, instead of that we can’t construct a text on everything, constructing the text is always an activity addressed to obtain a text were something is unreadable or needed of textual bridges as to be comply

   A countless level of phenomena’s in culture and society are not themselves defined as textual forms while susceptible to forms of textual readings while others are needed of constructing the text around it , a system as fashion expressed in visual forms, body and corporal styles, usages, customs is undoubtedly a type of text beyond if to be read the reader should have a significant cultural specific acervo about which such a visuals forms belong, be a part of that society and to know its fashions but a determinate visual cultural conglomerated as for example social ceremonies such as carnivals, parties or a religious liturgy are not themselves properly texts and however susceptible to be constructed as texts

    a visual imagery for example is always cuted with precision in the acervos of a culture, for example, the colonial visual imagery it can variete in colors, clothes, court-dresses, vestments, pieces of furniture and architecture characteristics between one culture and another one, but will ever maintain as colonial visual imagery certain uniformity and parameters distinguish it everywhere as one imagery, kinds of to comb, modes of dress, concepts of formal education courtesies, modes of structure architecture such as entrances to horses so that albeit a visual colonial imagery may be different in the readings of Victorian tradition in usa compared with Mexico, it will conservate always a certain delimitation

    we can enlarge the parameter of the book of text as to extend it as decodify visual culture, publicity, fashion or the visual culture of television, the internet and some other medias of this same kind, wholes susceptible to be read as texts since something cut it with regularity and stability as patters of legibility so as conditions of possibility for exegesis and hermeneutic, thus that as much as a carnival or a party are not texts around it the text might be constructed

    This are not texts in the sense of visual or material expression distributed around the relation between a message envoy with the first and priorized intention to have a destinatary to whose decodification as communication is oriented, but as symbolic expressive wholes through which culture recreate itself in its rituals, in the same mode we might afford a colonial visual imagery as a differentiated whole, around it we might realize interpretative practices and exegesis by the mean of which the phenomenological and hermeneutic analysis might construct the texts, the popular markets of Venezuela entrance under this kind, to work with it is required start from a principle of distinguishing the relation between a certain exteriorization or extrinsecation between epistemology and reality as a cut stablished to the research,

   Thus we must cut a determined cultural, symbolic and social well defined expression of visual culture and try it as a text not only by textualizing it but by doing distinctions between pre-text, text, textualization and constructions of the text.

   Sometimes the differences between textualization and constructions of the text are bloring or effaced since textualizing mean trying the non-textual as textual it looks to be a construction of the text where a text is not as much a text, the needs to construct the text are not defined by the non-textual, but by cultural and social phenomena’s about which the simply textualizing of it as pre-given is far to comply and access the stratus’s needed to be understanded and to go in deep,

    the activity of reading is not a mere physical fact, but a fact of interpreting and meaning and as such we may identify when the textualization of the non-textual offers nothing on the way to understand and comprehend, the construction of the text is thus required to comply something that can’t be legible in its levels of complexity by simply affording it as pre-given, in a few words, the difference between textualizing and constructing the text is based on the fact that sometimes textualizing is all we need but sometimes it guaranty nothing as to comply the complex levels of the stratus’s required to understand a phenomena of material or immaterial culture,

   building the text suppose then to goes beyond the pre-given, it goes usually by putting and set aside in relation textual forms of different kinds which are not related in between as pre-given

  Stablished and defined to the research we may cutt a determined cultural symbolic and social form of culture with its clear visual expression constructing under it its textuality to later relate the textual aspects with subjacent and stratified levels of meanings

  This an stratified and phenomenological concept of text as discussed above the one I usually work with was discerned by derrida in his book Margins of philosophy when he expressed

    The inter-tie of language of what may be considered as pure language and of the other thread of experience constitute a weave. The word verwebung leads to this metaphorical zone, the stratus are weaved, the imbrication is as such tan we can’t discern the plot from the urdimbre. If the stratus of logos were only something upon we could rise it and let appear below the subjacent acts and non-expressive contents, but given that such a superstructure act, whence, in an essential and decisive manner, on the unterchichts, we are obligated, from the entrance of description to associate the geological metaphor to a textual one because weave mean text, verweben here mean texere. The discursive is related with the non-discursive the linguistic stratus is mixed with the prelinguistic one according to regulated Sistema as a certain kind of text

   Between language as purely language and experience we discern what derrida defined as a weave, a textual weave, the discursive and the non-discursive mix in between with the prelinguistic stratus according to a regulated specie of text, a texere, a plot, this is nothing else but what I discussed in another paper as the pass by between the intramundane horizont and sobreordination and between life word and the symbolic, between reality and language, between text and world which the concept of world correlate try to seize and focus without forgetting my distinctions between the significant chain leads derrida to go that way and Peirce semiosis

  What is determinant from my theoretical and empirical experience in respect to this form to understand the text or the textual is that it return the concept of text to a more classical sense near to a phenomenological sense of the relation between genesis and structure in the phenomenological world something we can discern through the world of life toward the intramundane horizont and forth through forms of language and symbols distinguishing the immediacy of culture and the self-representational universe of subjectivity and conscience, thus as to know the differences between the former and the last ones as well as its moments of mix

  Whence it let us to move from exegesis of textual phenomena’s where not always and not necessarily we are affording literal textual forms considered as added to the phenomenological world to cultural formations such as enunciations, messages, discourses,

   In the field of culture as text we have first the relation between language and world, language and reality, epistemology and world, epistemology and reality, subject and object through which the cutts we do in the research of the forms of societies and cultures analyzed and studied are not themselves texts of the texts as for example a literary work of fiction is a text on the texts it represents

    pre-textual dimensions are not yet and probably will never be forms of the critique of the text on the text, for example, in interpreting how in the popular markets as visual conglomerates meet the mise in scene of the vendor and the scene of exchange presuppose a mode of seen and being seen that regulate the phenomenological expression of the forms of body, gestural and spatial interactions as well as the relation between the empirical dimension of the market and the abstract dimension of the market, its concrete level and its symbolic one, to get it so a work of hermeneutic analysis focused in constructing the text is needed with basis in understanding its stratifications

   Such a phenomenology of the market abstracted according to the empirical research allow to work later the exegesis of its corporeal and symbolic forms and to set in relation the concrete market here and now with the symbolic representation and the market internal symbolisms.

   Another example, interpreting how the mode in which the tourists make self-representation of themselves in a culture –photos, videos, etc., is a form to read how the culture in which such images are made is producing mise in scene of itself toward the economy that tourism generate and addressed to the fact that tourists made representation of themselves in a culture.

   Both cases are examples of forms of exegesis developed under a modality of constructions of the text, in both cases the construction of the text is made according to how the exegesis build the text that was read under the phenomenological stratus, meaning out of presence, in one case according to the form of seen and being seen regulate body and gestural interactions in the market spacialities, in the other according to set in relation photos and films of the tourists with analysis of the modes of mise in scene addresses to tourism so according to forms of self-representation of certain cultures in between and of each culture addressed to another.

  Now well, to resort to an archive material according to with others before us developed interpretations expressed in works of sociology and anthropology on the direct forms of culture we are studding start to approximate the parameter of the critic of the text on the text, however, still the problem in question seen from the relation subject and object, continue taking as parameter an external motive that of the topic or issue

   Both the text with resort in archives and our text share a common topic

interpreting it in writing or in fieldwork