When Is Writing Already Quotation? A Developmental Perspective on a Postmodern Question

by Rebecca Wells-Jopling


Introduction

Postmodern literary-critical thinking introduced into many disciplines in the 1950s and 1960s the quite peculiar, yet intellectually engaging, idea that what is written is always already-quoted. This idea is a logical derivation from the concurrent idea that writing is "prior to history"; thus, what was written and what is written were simply always there, and someone wrote it long before the reader held the written document in hand. The semiotician Roland Barthes claimed that "Every text, being itself the intertext of another text, belongs to the intertextual, which must not be confused with a text's origins: to search for the 'sources of' and 'influence upon' a work is to satisfy the myth of filiation. The quotations from which a text is constructed are anonymous, irrecoverable, and yet already read: they are quotations without quotation marks." In a similar vein, the cognitive psychologist David Olson argues that writing may be conceived not as transcription of speech, nor as a completely different mode of expression from speech, but rather as a type of reflexive language that points to itself as language. Writing is thus "quotation" that calls for "a distinctive mode of interpretation." The purpose of this article is to offer some reasons why conceiving of what is written as always already-quoted is likely not accurate as an ontological claim, but it may hold in particular circumstances and at a particular moment in human development.