Is Textual Criticism Really that Deomcratizing? And what's with all the variables?

In his essay The Textual Condition” Jerome McGann makes some really throught provoking claims about what constitutes a text which go beyond a consideration of origination or authorial intention and call for a return to what has always been right in front of us, the text itself. He posits that all interaction takes place within a material, physical dimension and that since the acts of reading and writing are communicative and epistemological exchanges we should examine them as they are.

The most interesting aspect of the article for me was when McGann introduced this idea of “variables” because I feel like it so succinctly characterized what post-structuralist thinkers fall all over themselves to articulate, which is this idea of the proliferation of meaning in any one text. On page 10 he writes of the differences in interpretation that arise in the consumption of any kind of text ,“These differences arise from variables that will be found on both sides of the textual transaction: in the texts themselves and in the readers of the texts...Every text has variants of itself screaming to get out, or antithetical texts screaming to make themselves known...Various readers and audiences are hidden in our texts, and the traces of their multiple presences are scripted at the most material levels.” We see this at work in the Introduction to Billy Budd with the various revisions Melville’s manuscript was subjected to and how the various editors were always missing something either purposely or accidentally.

McGann goes on a few pages later to talk about how studying the materiality of a text, a practice he calls “material hermeneutics”, offers a “more global and a more uniform view of texts and the process of textual production” (14). While I understand that with his turn to materiality he is trying to craft a more egalitarian approach to textual analysis, I don’t see how this can be so because I feel like what he is doing requires access to very privileged, archival information. I used to think literary theory was elitist until I realized it was presenting me with a range of tools with which to analyze perspectives and most importantly the contexts of those perspectives. I guess in a nutshell it has real political and cultural implications, implications which I’m failing to see in textual criticism. I’m sure I’m missing something, but this kind of criticism just seems tedious and almost anti-intellectual. Really looking forward to some clarification in our discussion tomorrow night!