McKenzie ([1986] 2004)

Mckenzie 2004

Preface

• no one book would ever contain all the evidence needed to explain how it must have been produced 3
• For a book is never simply a remarkable object. Like every other technology it is invariably the product of human agency in complex and highly volatile contexts which a responsible scholarship must seek to recover if we are to understand better the creation and communication of meaning as the defining characteristic of human societies. [...] For ultimately what gives the highest significance to the history of all such forms and their making is their far from silent witness to a wealth of human experience  whose recovery is the principal end of our scholarship. As to print, its study might be called histoire du livre, or the sociology of texts, or even (since books have been traditionally its source and substance) bibliography. 4-5
• Sociologia e filosofia da produção do livro.

1 The Book as an expressive form

• Bowers: bibliografia descritiva; analitica, textual e histórica. 10
• Definição de McKenzie pós criticas das anteriores: bibliography  as the study of the sociology of texts
• If, by contrast, we were to delineate the field in a merely pragmatic way, take a panoptic view and describe what we severally do as bibliographers, we should note, rather, that it is the only discipline which has consistently studied the composition, formal design, and transmission of texts by writers, printers, and publishers; their distribution through different communities by wholesalers, retailers, and teachers; their collection and classification by librarians; their meaning for, and – I must add – their creative regeneration by, readers. However we define it, no part of that series of human and institutional interactions is alien to bibliography as we have, traditionally, practised it. [...] 
• The principle I wish to suggest as basic is simply this: bibliography is the discipline that studies texts as recorded forms, and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception. So stated, it will not seem very surprising. What the word ‘texts’ also allows, however, is the extension of present practice to include all forms of texts, not merely books or Greg’s signs on pieces of parchment or paper. It also frankly accepts that bibliographers should be concerned to show that forms effect meaning. Beyond that, it allows us to describe not only the technical but the social processes of their transmission. In those quite specific ways, it accounts for non-book texts, their physical forms, textual versions, technical transmission, institutional control, their perceived meanings, and social effects. It accounts for a history of the book and, indeed, of all printed forms including all textual ephemera as a record of cultural change, whether in mass civilization or minority culture. For any history of the book which excluded study of the social, economic, and political motivations of publishing, the reasons why texts were written and read as they were, why they were rewritten and redesigned, or allowed to die, would degenerate into a feebly degressive book list and never rise to a readable history. But such a phrase also accommodates what in recent critical theory is often called text production, and it therefore opens up the application of the discipline to the service of that field too. 12
• Sociology of texts
• A ‘sociology of texts’, then, contrasts with a bibliography confined to logical inference from printed signs as arbitrary marks on parchment or paper. As I indicated earlier, claims were made for the ‘scientific’ status of the latter precisely because it worked only from the physical evidence of books themselves. Restricted to the non-symbolic values of the signs, it tried to exclude the distracting complexities of linguistic interpretation and historical explanation. 15
• [...] the point that this confinement of bibliography to non-symbolic meaning, in an attempt to give it some kind of objective or ‘scientific’ status, has seriously impeded its development as a discipline. By electing to ignore its inevitable dependence upon interpretative structures, it has obscured the role of human agents, and virtually denied the relevance to bibliography of anything we might now understand as a history of the book. Physical bibliography – the study of the signs which constitute texts and the materials on which they are recorded – is of course the starting point. But it cannot define the discipline because it has no adequate means of accounting for the processes, the technical and social dynamics, of transmission and reception, whether by one reader or a whole market of them 
• In speaking of bibliography as the sociology of texts, I am not concerned to invent new names but only to draw attention to its actual nature. [...] Our own word, ‘Bibliography’, will do. It unites us as collectors, editors, librarians, historians, makers, and readers of books. It even has a new felicity in its literal meaning of ‘the writing out of books’, of generating new copies and therefore in time new versions. Its traditional concern with texts as recorded forms, and with the processes of their transmission, should make it hospitably open to new forms. No new names, then; but to conceive of the discipline as a sociology of texts is, I think, both to describe what the bibliography is that we actually do and to allow for its natural evolution. 16
• My argument therefore runs full circle from a defence of authorial meaning, on the grounds that it is in some measure recoverable, to a recognition that, for better or worse, readers inevitably make their own meanings. In other words, each reading is peculiar to its occasion, each can be at least partially recovered from the physical forms of the text, and the differences in readings constitute an informative history. What writers thought they were doing in writing texts, or printers and booksellers in designing and publishing them, or readers in making sense of them are issues which no history of the book can evade.19
• In the pursuit of historical meanings, we move from the most minute feature of the material form of the book to questions of authorial, literary, and social context. These all bear in turn on the ways in which texts are then re-read, re-edited, re-designed, re-printed, and re-published. If a history of readings is made possible only by a comparative history of books, it is equally true that a history of books will have no point if it fails to account for the meanings they later come to make. 23
• it must follow that any history of the book – subject as books are to typographic and material change – must be a history of misreadings. This is not so strange as it might sound. Every society rewrites its past, every reader rewrites its texts, and, if they have any continuing life at all, at some point every printer redesigns them. 25
• If a poem is only what its individual readers make it in their activity of constructing meaning from it, then a good poem will be one which most compels its own destruction in the service of its readers’ new constructions. 26
• By abandoning the notion of degressive bibliography and recording all subsequent versions, bibliography, simply by its own comprehensive logic, its indiscriminate inclusiveness, testifies to the fact that new readers of course make new texts, and that their new meanings are a function of their new forms. The claim then is no longer for their truth as one might seek to define that by an authorial intention, but for their testimony as defined by their historical use. 29
• show the human presence in any recorded text 29

2 The broken phial: non-book texts

• In textual criticism, the most obvious case of the unstable or open text is created by revision. Where an author revised a text, and two or more versions of it happen to survive, each of these can be said to have its own distinct structure, making it a different text. Each embodies a quite different intention. It follows therefore that, since any single version will have its own historical identity, not only for its author but for the particular market of readers who bought and read it, we cannot invoke the idea of one unified intention which the editor must serve. Historically, there can be no logical reason for editing one version any more than another. We can make aesthetic choices, but that is a different matter. We can choose, if we wish, to privilege an author’s second or third thoughts over his first, but we need not. The old idea that we should respect an author’s final intentions no longer compels universal assent. The only remaining rule seems to be that we must not conflate any one version with any other, since that would destroy the historicity of each. 
• All this makes perfectly good sense in terms of histoire du livre. The versions are not only discrete but are telling evidence of a precise set of significances at successive points in history. But there is a curiously cautious, conservative dullness about it. On the one hand, it rejects the old idea of recovering ‘the work’ as distinct from its versions; on the other, it stops short in theory – though never in practice – of embracing the notion of creative editing in the construction of new versions. Such a policy may seem to be justified when we think that texts might be edited ‘creatively’ for political purposes. 36-7

3 The dialetics of bibliography now

• Sobre o autor e o texto
• In the first two lectures I briefly contrasted two concepts of ‘text’. One is the text as authorially sanctioned, contained, and historically definable. The other is the text as always incomplete, and therefore open, unstable, subject to a perpetual re-making by its readers, performers, or audience. 
• To stress the first is to confirm the usual assumptions of historical scholarship: it seeks, as objectively as possible, to recover, from the physical evidence of a text, its significance for all those who first made it. To do that, I have argued, we must have some concept of authorial meaning, consider carefully the expressive functions of the text’s modes of transmission, and account for its reception by an audience or readership. As a locatable, describable, attributable, datable, and explicable object, the text as a recorded form is, pre-eminently, a bibliographical fact. Its relation to all other versions, and their relation, in turn, to all other recorded texts, are, again, pre-eminently, bibliographical facts. No other discipline – and certainly neither history nor criticism – commands the range of textual phenomena, or the technical scholarship, to deal fully with their production, distribution, and consumption. By commanding the one term common to all inquiry – the textual object itself – bibliography can be an essential means by which we recover the past 55
• the ‘text’ is in some degree independent of the documents which, at any particular moment, give it form. It is to recognize too that no text of any complexity yields a definitive meaning. The ostensible unity of any one ‘contained’ text – be it in the shape of a manuscript, book, map, film, or computer-stored file – is an illusion. As a language, its forms and meaning derive from other texts; and as we listen to, look at, or read it, at the very same time we re-write it. 60
• Whatever its metamorphoses, the different physical forms of any text, and the intentions they serve, are relative to a specific time, place, and person. This creates a problem only if we want meaning to be absolute and immutable. In fact, change and adaptation are a condition of survival, just as the creative application of texts is a condition of their being read at all. 60-1
• Nature of bibliography 61-2
• Description of all recorded texts. In principle, it is comprehensive, and therefore indiscriminate.
• because it is bibliography’s job to record and explain the physical forms which mediate meaning, it has an interpretative function which complements and modifies any purely verbal analysis.
• impartially accepts the construction of new texts and their forms
• concerned specifically with texts as social products ..... "sociology of texts"