The Textual Society

Rolf Hellebust is a professor of Russian language and literature at the
University of Calgary.

The title of this book is an intriguing one. The back-cover blurb
further intrigues—but vaguely irritates with its breathless “[w]e
are disparate beings made up of multiple forces. We are isolate and
interactional, social and biological; we are forms of thought and
thoughts are forms of energy.” By the end of the introduction, the
reader, offered a preview of the author’s conclusion (that “human
experience is a dialogical experience of multiple realities”),
hesitates. Will this be worth the trip?

The basic aim of the book is to study society as a text. This is,
indeed, the fundamental semiotic task. Moreover, the names dropped in
the index are all the right ones (Aristotle, Bakhtin, Chomsky, Derrida,
Eco, Foucault, etc.); and Taborsky does have some genuinely imaginative
ideas. Unfortunately, her discourse never comes in for a landing. She
struggles to develop her analysis beyond the abstract level of the
initial society = text equation. While the book offers a glossary for
Taborsky’s more obvious terminological inventions (“Actual
Conceptual Energy,” “Group Reality Syntax,” and so on), a number
of crucial categories are never defined. One is soon convinced that the
author intends to stretch the intuitive meaning of such terms as
“text,” “society,” “reality,” “energy,” and
“body”—but in what direction?

Taborsky’s partiality for the definite article with the phrase
“textual society” makes one wonder what other sort of nontextual
societies there could be. Why does society = text in the first place?
Because it is an “organic entity,” a “constant interplay of
multiple powers, voices, realities.” Surely the term “text” means
more than this! The wonderful pliant semiotic metaphor that invites us
to approach systems of meaning in culture using the tools of literary
scholarship is here fatally weakened. Semiotics as a whole can only
retain its usefulness (not to speak of escaping the “confinement
within the humanities” from which Taborsky seeks to liberate it) if
its followers can keep a clear eye on the nature of textuality, and its
applicability to concrete problems in understanding the unwritten texts
of our lives.