The Murder of the Text

In the liberal-rational quest to do away with all things deprivileged as irrational and mystic, it is necessary to deny the ability of a text to speak for itself. All texts, which when properly engaged with are able to act as a linguistic system of meaning with which to begin from and work within in for a creative process from reading, must instead become an enclosed object which can then be packaged and then investigated and dissected. Instead of speaking for itself, the text is made into an object for interrogation at the hands of an external phallic sign which seeks to, through rationalist inquiry, map out the perfect anatomy of the dead object and then move on.

Of the various objectivities, one in particular that has attained unique popularity in social media based communication, wherein one's social and economic capital is increased through a building of a “presence”, lines of communication flowing into a social media user’s profile, is an objectivity which prizes above all else, the author’s soul as the object’s complete makeup. As social media is built around an expression of a single user building themselves (signified by the username, profile picture, etc) through the content they create, showing their “self” through things which they produce (thus making the author the central meaning inherent in all content produced), so does this style of reading work. All texts are content which extend from the central figure of the author, making therefore, the task of the reader to penetrate into the text and judiciate the objective fact of the text, that being the content creator, the author.

What emerges is a style of reading which is incapable of reading texts as existing for themselves, but texts as being ruled by overcoding signs, the sins of the author, uncovered in the text. A text, for example, contains a scene in which rape takes place. This is interpreted, not in the context of the text, but, as the text is an extension of the author and nothing more, as an individual act which occurs within the sphere of the person of the author, interpreted thus in the moralistic language of sin. The text loses all meaning except to signify that the author is a rape-author, nothing except evidence of the internal nature of the author. In opposite, when a text contains a virtue, the text is valued for no reason other than as evidence of the author’s virtue, the author now being a woke-author.

It is this which is the full and final impact of social media on culture. Criticism becomes no longer a method of dealing with texts, but of dealing with authors, with their texts being nothing more than evidence for the true nature of the author. This is the product of social media, The Murder of the Text.