Text, Science, and Technology: Construing text as a system

The article takes into consideration the application of cladistic methods developed by systematic biologists to textual criticism as practised by philologists in the establishment of stemmatic relations between manuscripts. The theoretical reasons that motivate the applicability of common methods in biology and textual studies are investigated and text is considered from the point of view of autopoietic systems and their organization. The paradigm of biological autonomy provides a model for the understanding of text as a system, and more specifically as an ‘inter-representation network,’ a notion inspired by D. Bohm’s theory of implicate- and explicate-order and by by H. Haken’s synergetics approach to self-organization. From this point of view text can be considered also as a technological artefact and its life cycle and evolution can be modelled and processed by a computer program. The article concludes then by inquiring whether a digital representation of the text could be of service in the analysis of textual dynamics.