The argument of ``The Model of Text''
Paul Ricoeur,
"The Model of the text:
Meaningful Action Considered as text"
Social Research 38 no. 3 (Autumn 1971) 529-55.
Reprinted in Paul Rabinow and Wm. M. Sullivan,
Interpretive Social Science: A Reader,
Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1979.
(Page numbers are to the Rabinow and Sullivan reprint)
Texts are not the same as spoken language, discourse.
The paradigm of text
74-75 1. Discourse is always realized temporally and in the present
a language system is virtual and outside of time
2. Language lacks a subject -- "who is speaking?" does not apply to language as such;
discourse refers back to speakers by a complex set of indicators;
every instance of discourse is self-referential.
3. Signs in language refer only to other signs,
language lacks a world, temporality, or subjectivity;
but discourse is always about something,
it has a world.
The symbolic function of language is actualized in discourse.
4. Language is only the condition for communication,
but it is in discourse that all messages are exchanged,
and only discourse has an Other to whom it is addressed.
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How discourse and text differ from one another
(this is the key: text is discourse become meaningful for later time)
1. Temporality
in discourse, the speech event appears and then disappears
text must "fix" it -- writing or recorders --
in text we save the meaning, not the uhs and ahs and stutters and incomplete or runonsentences ...
2. Speaker
back-reference to persons is obvious in discourse, not in text
what do you mean / what does that mean coincide for speech, not for text
relative importances are reversed: what the words mean surpasses what the author meant
in discourse, the speaker can rescue the meaning
in text, only the meaning can rescue the meaning:
text requires an act of interpretation of an importance that speech does not
3. Reference, worlds
in speech, the context is obvious, it needs at most pointing: ostensive reference
in text there is still reference if no longer monstrance
only man has a world and not just a situation --
"the world of ancient Greece ... or of Rolling Stone"
texts have no ostensive reference, but still are rich in references which together open up a world
what we understand first in discourse is not the other person,
but a project, something that may be or happen in the world
text, freeing itself from author and situation,
reveals this destination of discourse as projecting a world
4. Face to face
hearer / reader?
discourse, but not language, is addressed to someone
but text is addressed to anyone who can read
the narrowness of an original dialogical situation is exploded
understanding no longer a matter of two dialoguing Subjects
texts have universal address
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80 The fixation of Action
Similarities of action and speech
original action is transaction - like speech, like discourse
yet acts can be "fixed" in a way analogous to speech
acts have locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary structure, just as speech-acts
an act can leave its mark on its time
and so its significance is extracted from its context
[14th Amendment, 4 minute mile, "Newton's apple"]
83 autonomization of action
an act gets detached from its agent, and develops consequences of its own
an act leaves its "imprint" on the course of events
it is the other events which - like paper and ink -- save an act for us
-- e. g., reputation, the residue of someone's acts
relevance and importance
an act's importance can go beyond its relevance to its immediate situation
importance is meanings in situations other than the original one
human action as an "open work"
open to anyone