It is hoped that the previous chapter replaces an understanding of texts and textuality as referring only to printed products with an understanding that we are, as individuals and as groups, located on a vast terrain of discourses and other linguistic uses that actually or potentially are textual, a terrain that, along with what is not or not yet textual, provides the world or worlds in which we find ourselves. While textuality surrounds us, it does not enclose us. We can have encounters with actualities for which our texts do not prepare us. In addition, particularly when we are expected to do so by reason of our profession, we can attempt as much as possible to distinguish the textuality that we bring to encounters from the encounters themselves. People also have encounters that so outstrip or are so counter to their texts that they are unable ever to be reconciled with them, as, for example, the unexpected and untimely loss of a loved one. For the most part, though, we have a world and have our identities first of all textually, and our encounters are related to and affected by our textual identities and our locations in the textual situation.

In addition to our habit of taking texts to be objects, we also tend to view them as particulars, as discrete and self-contained. We are so accustomed to see, especially in libraries, row upon row of books and other printed materials as individual items. Indeed, we can and usually do treat texts as individual items. In addition, we expect particular texts to have demarcations, to be internally consistent, to have some kind of beginning and ending, and to differ from other texts even when sharing a topic with them. For many reasons we are justified in treating texts singularly. But we also are aware that texts are not isolated. When we pick out a book on country living, we expect it to have relations to other treatments of the topic. The interdependence of texts on one another, this intertextuality, is not a sign of inadequacy, as though we expect each text to be independent of others.