Goodbye to the priveleged status of literature, a surface without depth

Literature, that is, loses its ‘privileged’ status, and in so far as it exists at all does so not ‘autonomously’ but as part of a pattern of cultural forces or practices, and finally of a politics.

Stein stresses consistently writing as a surface without depth. Verbal complexity for Stein is the result not of deep, unconscious, symbolic, or otherwise “hidden” meanings but of the “natural” tendency of language to proliferate, refuse control and form, and exceed the intention of a discrete sender. 

The steps by which ‘writing’ came to mean what it now means, though ends with the revolutionary claim that ‘what is at stake in writing is the very structure of authority itself’.