- Email: [email protected]
Entextualization and the ends of temporality
LANGUAGE & COMMUNICATION
Language & Communication 27 (2007) 205–211 www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom
Editorial
Entextualization and the ends of temporality
q
1. Introduction In recent decades, a vast industry of scholarship has dedicated itself to the ‘uses of the past’, as it is formulaically put. Empirically, this work examines mnemonic activities and artifacts: expressions of nostalgia, commemorative ritual, monuments, self narrative, historiography in its myriad forms. The list is long, and it is matched only by the list of corresponding social-pragmatic effects. ‘Memory’, write Antze and Lambek (1996), ‘is invoked to heal, to blame, to legitimate’ (p. vii). A wealth of studies – many inspired by Anderson’s (1994) influential Imagined Communities – have considered how mnemonic practices bolster or undermine nationalist imaginaries. For subaltern, dissident, and other subordinate subjects, memory has been shown to be a vehicle for commenting on and responding to diverse states-of-affairs in the present, from racialized poverty in post-9/ 11 Los Angeles (Mattingly et al., 2002) to urban neoliberal restructuring in Zanzibar (e.g., Bissell, 2005). But in its pursuit of the ends of temporality, this literature often hurries past the discursive and semiotic means by which mnemonic acts and artifacts can be said to have ‘uses’ at all. It is here that we pause and begin our inquiry. In broadest terms, this special issue examines signs ‘in’ and ‘of’ history, as Parmentier (1987) has succinctly put. In his work on sign use in Belau, Parmentier used this pair of notions to distinguish representations of the past from the capacity of such representations to effect change in the present, to ‘become tokens players in the dynamics of social life because of the first representational function’ (Parmentier, 2007, this issue). We reinvoke Parmentier’s distinction in our exploration of one expansive problematic: how temporalization effects in real-time communicative events articulate with and help (re)produce or transform larger scale sociohistorical formations. As studies of oral narrative and reported speech have so often demonstrated, speakers can rapidly construct diverse spatio-temporal universes – from remote biographical pasts to hypothetical collective futures; they can populate these realms with ‘voiced’ inhabitants (in Bakhtin’s sense); and they can align these temporally distinct
q Adapted from ‘Temporalities in Text: From the ‘Historical Present’ to Dialogic Time’, a session held at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Washington, DC, December 2005. We are grateful to Asif Agha and Richard Parmentier for their participation and incisive comments.
0271-5309/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2007.01.005
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Editorial / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 205–211
realms to the here-and-now speech-event in ways that redefine the present – ‘uses of the past’, to be sure. In asking how and for what ends social actors create, populate, and forge relations between spatio-temporal realms, we build on several lines of recent discourse-centered research, including research on spatio-temporal ‘transposition’ (Hanks, 1990; Haviland, 1996); on interdiscursivity and intertextuality (Agha and Wortham, 2005), and on language ideologies of temporality (Inoue, 2004). Rather than choose among seemingly competing scales of analysis, – say, between the study of language ideologies of temporality and the study of deictically-produced temporalization effects in discourse – we operate across scales, moving from the spatio-temporal to the sociohistorical, and back again. The articles assembled here explore how micro-textual forms of temporal semiosis articulate with sociologically inflected spacetime, through forms of ideological engagement, renanalysis, and degrees of institutionalization, processes that often remake the very world in which they occur. In examining these processes, we acknowledge our debt to Bakhtin, whose writings have informed several of the aforementioned areas of discourse-centered research and all of the articles in this issue. Evident in this volume is especially our engagement with two related Bakhtinian staples, ‘chronotope’ and ‘voice’, as retooled for the empirical study of discourse. In retooling these Bakhtinian concepts, we spotlight one notion central to the study of both: textuality, or as many have processually termed it, ‘entextualization’ (Bauman and Briggs, 1990; Silverstein and Urban, 1996). Consider ‘voice’, Bakhtin’s (1981) familiar term for the way verbal (and nonverbal) signs index personae and personae-attributes. Voices do not spring forth as wholes from the teeming sociolinguistic diversity that Bakhtin captioned with the term ‘heteroglossia’. A vast range of indexical signs – register tokens, ‘accents’, deictic forms – may serve as resources for producing voicing effects in discourse (Hill, 1997; Silverstein, 2005), which has spurred some to ask: what makes a ‘voice’ cohere? Urban and Smith (1998) broach this issue when they suggest that voice is a ‘virtual locus’ of personhood produced by co-textual iconicity (esp., parallelism) and anaphoric co-reference, as does Wortham (2001) when he invokes Jakobson’s (1960) classic discussion of the ‘poetic function’. Wortham, in this respect, participates in what Silverstein (2004) has dubbed the ‘pragmatic-poetic turn’. In a series of essays, Silverstein has shown how emergent text-metrical structures in discourse – such as the myriad forms of repetition and parallelism (see Tannen, 1987, 1989; Johnstone, 1994) – can serve higher-order, denotationally implicit metapragmatic functions: that is, they can serve as reflexive principles for the construal of action (Silverstein, 1984, 1992, 1997, 2004; Agha, 1996; Parmentier, 1997). It is through such text-metrical structures [which are not limited to linguistic signs (Perrino, 2002; Agha, 2006)] that an elementary type of ‘textuality’ emerges. Agha (2005) has argued that voices unfold through small scale events of textuality that lead to large-scale social transformation through a specific logic. At the small-scale level of textual organization, voices emerge through (a) text-metrical contrasts and (b) the typification of such contrasts through metasemiotic devices, such as proper names (yielding a ‘biographically individuated’ voice) or characterological descriptors (yielding a ‘social voice’). In terms of typification, the voices in this issue run the gamut: in Haney’s article on Rodolfo Garcia, a former tent show comedian who inscribed his memories in narrative and song on a series of audio cassettes, we encounter, predictably, the biographically individuated voice of his past self. But we also listen in awe as Garcia, the sole animator, produces out of thin air a ‘live’ nightclub scene peopled with three – sometimes four – distinct
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but unnamed voices, themselves composites of mass media figures and fragments from Garcia’s autobiographical past. In Glick’s article on Eddie Izzard’s stand-up comedy, we encounter voices of historical collectivities, like the voice of a British colonizer, a metonym of the British empire, who, through Izzard’s deft comedic hand, is made to converse with an Indian subject that speaks as and on behalf of a colonized India. In terms of the typification of voices, Lempert’s article on reported speech among diasporic Tibetan monks exhibits the most generic voice of this set: an anonymous voice of ‘tradition’ invoked by monks who ‘distress’ or ‘antique’ their discourse. These essays offer more than just an event-centered perspective on the textuality of voicing, however. As Agha (2005) further argues and as these articles illustrate, at the relatively large scale of social history, voicing effects are disseminated across social populations through the circulation of textartifacts and other media and modes of dissemination. As they become widely known – or enregistered – persons acquainted with these voices respond, aligning their own semiotic activities with – or against – them, reproducing or transforming them in subsequent social history. Equally salient in this volume is our engagement with a second and related Bakhtinian staple, the notion of chronotope or ‘time-space’. For Bakhtin, chronotope meant more than implicit conceptions of time and space that help differentiate literary genres. In the ‘adventure-time’ chronotope of the early Greek Romance, for example, we learn that principles for ordering time and space were wedded to ideals of personhood and agency (Bakhtin, 1981). In his capacious notion we thus find a number of distinct cultural ideologies. Many who appropriate this notion choose to preserve its expansive meaning, though as Allan (1994) observes, it often seems a ‘rich, if inchoate, concept’ (p. 195). It is telling in this respect that Silverstein (2005) provides a more parsimonious gloss: ‘the temporally (hence, chrono-) and spatially (hence, -tope) particular envelope in the narrated universe of social space-time in which and through which, in emplotment, narrative characters move’ (p. 6). In this reading, which holds cultural ideologies at bay, chronotope becomes akin to a denotational-textual ‘field’, a temporally situated, virtual space of emplotment – a denotational ‘event-horizon’, as it were (if we may be permitted to figuratively poach again from physics’ lexical register, the domain from which Bakhtin drew his notion of relativistic ‘time-space’). Agha (this issue), like Silverstein, observes how the narrated-event chronotope, studied in respect of literary texts, is simply a special case.1 Noting this, Agha productively stretches Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope to accommodate diverse semiotic channels and media (increasingly recognized as important in contemporary studies of discourse e.g., LeVine and Scollon, 2004; Norris, 2004), while highlighting the close connection between voice and chronotope, the former living ‘in’ the latter, for as he defines it: a chronotope is a ‘representation of time and place peopled by certain social types’ (Agha, 2007, this issue). If chronotopes seem to circumscribe social types, they also afford virtual space-time ‘movement’ and ‘travel’. The impression of movement is often created by text-metrical segments in discourse – stretches of co-occurring signs – that offer distinct but non-congruent temporalization effects (cf. Agha, 1996). A paradigmatic case is the so-called 1
Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope serves only as a point of departure for Silverstein (2005), who proceeds to discuss the semiotics of interdiscursivity and intertextuality. Silverstein quickly leaves the orbit of things denotational, turning instead to the ways social actors establish interactional event-to-event relations, not just relations within and between denotational-textual worlds.
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‘historical present’, the use of nonpast deixis for discourse otherwise presumed or explicitly framed as ‘past’ (Schiffrin, 1981; Wolfson, 1982). This juxtaposition of noncongruent temporalization effects can often tropically telescope the past into the present, the narrated into the narrating event (Silverstein, 2005, pp. 17–18). In fact, contemporary research abounds in descriptions of such virtual space-time travel. Felson, for instance, describes ‘vicarious transport’ in Pindar’s Pynthian Four, where deictic resources in this Greek text help convey the audience ‘along carefully demarcated pathways, ultimately returning them . . . to their place of origin’, a site of victory (Felson, 1999, p. 5; for a reanalysis, see Parmentier, 2002). In oral narrative, Ochs (1994) describes rapid and dizzying ‘perspective shifts’ among narrated-event chronotopes. Such tropic text-structures induce various forms of ‘transposition’ (Hanks, 1990; Haviland, 1996), empirical cases of which are now familiar in the literature (e.g., Perrino, 2005; Shoaps, 1999; Wortham, 1994) and are well-represented in this volume (see esp., Haney, Perrino, Riskedahl, Wirtz). To the question of how chronotopes and virtual space-time travel might intervene in social history, we inquire into what Agha in this volume terms ‘cross-frame’ or ‘cross-chronotope alignment’ (cf. Wortham, 2003, 2005), that is: how are these various spatio-temporally distinct realms aligned with participation frameworks that unfold in communicative events? What relationship obtains between the projected chronotope and the real-time communicative matrix – itself a ‘chronotope’ (see Agha, this issue) –, from which the former is issued forth? In her article on Lebanese political rhetoric, Riskedahl, for instance, examines the political significance of efforts to align or disjoin past and present, in pamphlets and in responses to these text-artifacts by differently positioned social actors in Lebanon. In her article on Senegalese oral narrative, Perrino examines de´marche participative, a practice in which narrators transpose speech participants into the narrated-event chronotope. Perrino observes how the narrator, Mr. Marc Ndome, does not always insert her into his stories intact as a biographic individual; rather, he recasts her as various social types and then aligns this quasi-fictional narrated-event chronotope with the narrating event in a bid to redefine the interaction itself. For both Riskedhal and Perrino, these alignments aren’t simply patterns to be duly noted, named, classified; they are also pragmatic interventions in history: if successful, they incite others to action (Riskedahl) and reform an interlocutor’s behavior (Perrino). To recount, we have thus far described three related empirical points of departure: the study of entextualized voices-in-chronotopes; the virtual travel of participants within and across chronotopic frames; and cross-chronotope alignment and its context-reinforcing or context-transforming effects, especially in respect of social relations in the present. But as hinted earlier, ‘chronotope’ in this construal remains ideologically thin, far from Bakhtin’s more expansive, if unwieldy, notion. In the interest of crossing scales of analysis, we add, finally, a vast fourth area, the study of cultural ideologies of time, what Parmentier (this volume) labels ‘cultural time’. The three aforementioned vectors of inquiry need to be accompanied by an appreciation of the cultural presuppositions of time and history that mediate their construal (cf. Hanks, 1989). In saying this, we repeat Parmentier’s (1985) reminder that cultural ideologies of time are plural, not monolithic, and they manifest in diverse semiotic modalities, not just in language. As for plurality, we do not mean an unordered multiplicity. As Irvine (2004, p. 107) observes, temporalities often ‘come in pairs’: ‘temporal orders . . . do not appear in isolation but rather, one way or another, occur in combinations or in opposition to some vision of an alternative’ (e.g., modern–pre-mod-
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ern, messianic–calendric, etc).2 Read programmatically, Irvine’s remarks about the ‘dialogicality’ of temporal ideologies – the way they seem to react and respond to each other as voices do – invites us to explore the implicational relations among socially distributed ideologies of time. From the study of these relations, we might expose the agonistic and politically fraught interplay of temporalities, how situated temporalization effects work in, with, for, and against larger scale ‘chronopolitical imaginaries’ (Kelly, 1998, p. 845; cf. Fabian, 1983). Once exposed, it becomes possible to study the interplay of temporalities at the macrosocial plane in relation to micro-textual forms of temporal semiosis in communicative events – this issue’s primary objective. With her focus on spatio-temporal deixis, Davidson’s article, for instance, examines how those in post-socialist eastern Berlin orient toward and morally evaluate current mass media representations of East and West, pitting the former ‘GDR times’ against ‘West times’ – these being discursively opposed periods built around the 1989–1990 demise of the socialist state. Wirtz’s essay examines register juxtaposition in Cuban Santerı´a ritual speech. The register termed Lucumı´, associated with African slaves, is opposed to the register Bozal, and both are defined against unmarked, Cuban Spanish. This juxtapostion of registers allows for the interplay among three distinct chronotopes: ‘sacred, transcendent space-time (via Lucumı´), ancestral/historical space-time (via Bozal), and the everyday plane of the here-and-now (via Cuban Spanish)’. In this issue’s exploration of the uses of the past, we devote more attention to discursive and semiotic mediation than disciplines like social history, political science, and cultural and historical anthropology can typically afford, but without succumbing, we hope, to what Latour (1993) has called the ‘autonomization of the sphere of meaning’ (pp. 62–63; cf. Atkinson, 1989; Ortner, 1994, p. 130; Parmentier, 1997). Rather than stare at the formal and textual means for fashioning chronotopes and voices till the periphery bleeds away, we consider the double-life that every text leads: its dynamic relation to co(n)text (hence Silverstein and Urban’s (1996) terminological amalgam, ‘text-in-co(n)text’). Entextualization and contextualization are, as Silverstein notes, ‘two sides of the same semiotic coin’. To speak of ‘text’, writes Silverstein, is to speak of an ‘achieved separation’ of co-occurring signs from what is felt to be their readable, text-external co(n)text (2005, p. 8). Though separated, a text remains indexically tethered to its context, to which it is pragmatically appropriate or effective, context-affirming or context-transforming – a dynamic of signs in and of history that these essays explore. References Agha, Agha, Agha, Agha,
2
A., A., A., A.,
1996. 2005. 2006. 2007.
Tropic aggression in the Clinton-Dole presidential debate. Pragmatics 7 (4), 461–497. Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1), 38–59. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Recombinant selves in mass mediated spacetime. doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2007.01.001, this issue.
‘Compare with Bakhtin’s suggestive remark that Chronotopes are mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in ever more complex interrelationships . . . The general characteristic of these interactions is that they are dialogical (in the broadest sense of the word). Bakhtin (1981, p. 252).
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Agha, A., Wortham, S.E.F., 2005. Special issue: discourse across speech events: intertextuality and interdiscursivity in social life. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1), 1–150. Allan, S., 1994. ‘When discourse is torn from reality’: Bakhtin and the principle of chronotopicity. Time & Society 3 (2), 193–218. Anderson, B., 1994. Imagined Communities. Verso, New York. Antze, P., Lambek, M., 1996. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. Routledge, New York. Atkinson, J.M., 1989. The Art and Politics of Wana Shamanship. University of California Press, Berkeley. Bakhtin, M.M., 1981. Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel. In: Holquist, M. (Ed.), The Dialogic Imagination. University of Texas Press, Austin, pp. 84–258. Bauman, R., Briggs, C.L., 1990. Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19, 59–88. Bissell, W.C., 2005. Engaging colonial nostalgia. Cultural Anthropology 20 (2), 215–248. Fabian, J., 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. Columbia University Press, New York. Felson, N., 1999. Vicarious transport: fictive deixis in Pindar’s Pynthian Four. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 99, 1–31. Hanks, W.F., 1989. Text and textuality. Annual Review of Anthropology 18, 95–127. Hanks, W.F., 1990. Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Haviland, J.B., 1996. Projections, transpositions, and relativity. In: Gumperz, J.J., Levinson, S.C. (Eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 271–323. Hill, J., 1997. The voices of Don Gabriel: responsibility and self in a modern Mexicano narrative. In: Tedlock, D., Mannheim, B. (Eds.), The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. University of Illinois Press, pp. 97–147. Inoue, M., 2004. Special issue: the history of ideology and the ideology of history. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14 (1), 1–109. Irvine, J.T., 2004. Say when: temporalities in language ideology. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14 (1), 99– 109. Jakobson, R., 1960. Closing statement: linguistics & poetics. In: Sebeok, T. (Ed.), Style in Language. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp. 350–377. Johnstone, B. (Ed.), 1994. Repetition in Discourse: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Ablex, Norwood. Kelly, J.D., 1998. Time and the global: against the homogenous, empty communities in contemporary social theory. Development and Change 29 (4), 839–871. Latour, B., 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. LeVine, P., Scollon, R., 2004. Discourse and Technology: Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C. Mattingly, C., Lawlor, M., Jacobs-Huey, L., 2002. Narrating September 11: race, gender, and the play of cultural identities. American Anthropologist 104 (3), 743–753. Norris, S., 2004. Analyzing Multimodal Interaction: A Methodological Framework. Routledge, New York, NY. Ochs, E., 1994. Stories that step into the future. In: Biber, D., Finegan, E. (Eds.), Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register. Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 106–135. Ortner, S.B., 1994. Theory in anthropology since the sixties. In: Dirks, N.B., Eley, G., Ortner, S.B. (Eds.), Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp. 372–411. Parmentier, R.J., 1985. Times of the signs: modalities of history and levels of social structure in Belau. In: Mertz, E., Parmentier, R.J. (Eds.), Semiotic Mediation: Sociocultural and Psychological Perspectives. Academic Press, New York. Parmentier, R.J., 1987. The Sacred Remains: Myth, History, and Polity in Belau. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Parmentier, R.J., 1997. The pragmatic semiotics of cultures. Semiotica 116 (1), 1–114. Parmentier, R.J., 2002. Review article: representing semiotics in the new millennium. Semiotica 142 (1/4), 291– 314. Parmentier, R.J., 2007. It’s about time: On the semiotics of temporality. doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2007.01.006, this issue. Perrino, S.M., 2002. Intimate hierarchies and Qur’anic saliva (te¨fli): textuality in a Senegalese ethnomedical encounter. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 12 (2), 225–259.
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Perrino, S.M., 2005. Participant transposition: text and trope in Senegalese oral narrative. Narrative Inquiry 15 (2), 345–375. Schiffrin, D., 1981. Tense variation in narrative. Language 57, 45–62. Shoaps, R., 1999. The many voices of Rush Limbaugh: the use of transposition in constructing a rhetoric of common sense. Text 19 (3), 399–437. Silverstein, M., 1984. On the pragmatic ‘poetry’ of prose: parallelism, repetition, and cohesive structure in the time course of dyadic conversation. In: Schiffrin, D. (Ed.), Meaning, Form, and Use in Context: Linguistic Applications. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, pp. 181–199. Silverstein, M., 1992. Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. In: Lucy, J. (Ed.), Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 33–58. Silverstein, M., 1997. The improvisational performance of ‘culture’ in real-time discursive practice. In: Sawyer, R.K. (Ed.), Creativity in Performance. Ablex, Greenwich, CT, pp. 265–312. Silverstein, M., 2004. ‘Cultural’ concepts and the language-culture nexus. Current Anthropology 45 (5), 621–652. Silverstein, M., 2005. Axes of evals: token vs. type interdiscursivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1), 6– 22. Silverstein, M., Urban, G., 1996. Natural Histories of Discourse. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Tannen, D., 1987. Repetition in conversation: towards a poetics of talk. Language 63 (3), 574–605. Tannen, D., 1989. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge University Press, New York. Urban, G., Smith, K., 1998. The sunny tropics of ‘dialogue’? Semiotica 121 (3/4), 263–281. Wolfson, N., 1982. CHP: The Conversational Historical Present in American English Narrative. Foris, Dordrecht. Wortham, S., 1994. Acting out Participant Examples in the Classroom. John Benjamins, Philadelphia. Wortham, S., 2001. Narratives in Action. Teacher’s College Press, New York. Wortham, S., 2003. Accomplishing identity in participant-denoting discourse. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 13 (2), 189–210. Wortham, S., 2005. Learning Identity: The Joint Emergence of Social Identification and Academic Learning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Michael Lempert Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057-1051, USA E-mail address: [email protected] Sabina Perrino Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6398, USA E-mail address: [email protected]
Language & Communication 27 (2007) 205–211 www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom
Editorial
Entextualization and the ends of temporality
q
1. Introduction In recent decades, a vast industry of scholarship has dedicated itself to the ‘uses of the past’, as it is formulaically put. Empirically, this work examines mnemonic activities and artifacts: expressions of nostalgia, commemorative ritual, monuments, self narrative, historiography in its myriad forms. The list is long, and it is matched only by the list of corresponding social-pragmatic effects. ‘Memory’, write Antze and Lambek (1996), ‘is invoked to heal, to blame, to legitimate’ (p. vii). A wealth of studies – many inspired by Anderson’s (1994) influential Imagined Communities – have considered how mnemonic practices bolster or undermine nationalist imaginaries. For subaltern, dissident, and other subordinate subjects, memory has been shown to be a vehicle for commenting on and responding to diverse states-of-affairs in the present, from racialized poverty in post-9/ 11 Los Angeles (Mattingly et al., 2002) to urban neoliberal restructuring in Zanzibar (e.g., Bissell, 2005). But in its pursuit of the ends of temporality, this literature often hurries past the discursive and semiotic means by which mnemonic acts and artifacts can be said to have ‘uses’ at all. It is here that we pause and begin our inquiry. In broadest terms, this special issue examines signs ‘in’ and ‘of’ history, as Parmentier (1987) has succinctly put. In his work on sign use in Belau, Parmentier used this pair of notions to distinguish representations of the past from the capacity of such representations to effect change in the present, to ‘become tokens players in the dynamics of social life because of the first representational function’ (Parmentier, 2007, this issue). We reinvoke Parmentier’s distinction in our exploration of one expansive problematic: how temporalization effects in real-time communicative events articulate with and help (re)produce or transform larger scale sociohistorical formations. As studies of oral narrative and reported speech have so often demonstrated, speakers can rapidly construct diverse spatio-temporal universes – from remote biographical pasts to hypothetical collective futures; they can populate these realms with ‘voiced’ inhabitants (in Bakhtin’s sense); and they can align these temporally distinct
q Adapted from ‘Temporalities in Text: From the ‘Historical Present’ to Dialogic Time’, a session held at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Washington, DC, December 2005. We are grateful to Asif Agha and Richard Parmentier for their participation and incisive comments.
0271-5309/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2007.01.005
206
Editorial / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 205–211
realms to the here-and-now speech-event in ways that redefine the present – ‘uses of the past’, to be sure. In asking how and for what ends social actors create, populate, and forge relations between spatio-temporal realms, we build on several lines of recent discourse-centered research, including research on spatio-temporal ‘transposition’ (Hanks, 1990; Haviland, 1996); on interdiscursivity and intertextuality (Agha and Wortham, 2005), and on language ideologies of temporality (Inoue, 2004). Rather than choose among seemingly competing scales of analysis, – say, between the study of language ideologies of temporality and the study of deictically-produced temporalization effects in discourse – we operate across scales, moving from the spatio-temporal to the sociohistorical, and back again. The articles assembled here explore how micro-textual forms of temporal semiosis articulate with sociologically inflected spacetime, through forms of ideological engagement, renanalysis, and degrees of institutionalization, processes that often remake the very world in which they occur. In examining these processes, we acknowledge our debt to Bakhtin, whose writings have informed several of the aforementioned areas of discourse-centered research and all of the articles in this issue. Evident in this volume is especially our engagement with two related Bakhtinian staples, ‘chronotope’ and ‘voice’, as retooled for the empirical study of discourse. In retooling these Bakhtinian concepts, we spotlight one notion central to the study of both: textuality, or as many have processually termed it, ‘entextualization’ (Bauman and Briggs, 1990; Silverstein and Urban, 1996). Consider ‘voice’, Bakhtin’s (1981) familiar term for the way verbal (and nonverbal) signs index personae and personae-attributes. Voices do not spring forth as wholes from the teeming sociolinguistic diversity that Bakhtin captioned with the term ‘heteroglossia’. A vast range of indexical signs – register tokens, ‘accents’, deictic forms – may serve as resources for producing voicing effects in discourse (Hill, 1997; Silverstein, 2005), which has spurred some to ask: what makes a ‘voice’ cohere? Urban and Smith (1998) broach this issue when they suggest that voice is a ‘virtual locus’ of personhood produced by co-textual iconicity (esp., parallelism) and anaphoric co-reference, as does Wortham (2001) when he invokes Jakobson’s (1960) classic discussion of the ‘poetic function’. Wortham, in this respect, participates in what Silverstein (2004) has dubbed the ‘pragmatic-poetic turn’. In a series of essays, Silverstein has shown how emergent text-metrical structures in discourse – such as the myriad forms of repetition and parallelism (see Tannen, 1987, 1989; Johnstone, 1994) – can serve higher-order, denotationally implicit metapragmatic functions: that is, they can serve as reflexive principles for the construal of action (Silverstein, 1984, 1992, 1997, 2004; Agha, 1996; Parmentier, 1997). It is through such text-metrical structures [which are not limited to linguistic signs (Perrino, 2002; Agha, 2006)] that an elementary type of ‘textuality’ emerges. Agha (2005) has argued that voices unfold through small scale events of textuality that lead to large-scale social transformation through a specific logic. At the small-scale level of textual organization, voices emerge through (a) text-metrical contrasts and (b) the typification of such contrasts through metasemiotic devices, such as proper names (yielding a ‘biographically individuated’ voice) or characterological descriptors (yielding a ‘social voice’). In terms of typification, the voices in this issue run the gamut: in Haney’s article on Rodolfo Garcia, a former tent show comedian who inscribed his memories in narrative and song on a series of audio cassettes, we encounter, predictably, the biographically individuated voice of his past self. But we also listen in awe as Garcia, the sole animator, produces out of thin air a ‘live’ nightclub scene peopled with three – sometimes four – distinct
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but unnamed voices, themselves composites of mass media figures and fragments from Garcia’s autobiographical past. In Glick’s article on Eddie Izzard’s stand-up comedy, we encounter voices of historical collectivities, like the voice of a British colonizer, a metonym of the British empire, who, through Izzard’s deft comedic hand, is made to converse with an Indian subject that speaks as and on behalf of a colonized India. In terms of the typification of voices, Lempert’s article on reported speech among diasporic Tibetan monks exhibits the most generic voice of this set: an anonymous voice of ‘tradition’ invoked by monks who ‘distress’ or ‘antique’ their discourse. These essays offer more than just an event-centered perspective on the textuality of voicing, however. As Agha (2005) further argues and as these articles illustrate, at the relatively large scale of social history, voicing effects are disseminated across social populations through the circulation of textartifacts and other media and modes of dissemination. As they become widely known – or enregistered – persons acquainted with these voices respond, aligning their own semiotic activities with – or against – them, reproducing or transforming them in subsequent social history. Equally salient in this volume is our engagement with a second and related Bakhtinian staple, the notion of chronotope or ‘time-space’. For Bakhtin, chronotope meant more than implicit conceptions of time and space that help differentiate literary genres. In the ‘adventure-time’ chronotope of the early Greek Romance, for example, we learn that principles for ordering time and space were wedded to ideals of personhood and agency (Bakhtin, 1981). In his capacious notion we thus find a number of distinct cultural ideologies. Many who appropriate this notion choose to preserve its expansive meaning, though as Allan (1994) observes, it often seems a ‘rich, if inchoate, concept’ (p. 195). It is telling in this respect that Silverstein (2005) provides a more parsimonious gloss: ‘the temporally (hence, chrono-) and spatially (hence, -tope) particular envelope in the narrated universe of social space-time in which and through which, in emplotment, narrative characters move’ (p. 6). In this reading, which holds cultural ideologies at bay, chronotope becomes akin to a denotational-textual ‘field’, a temporally situated, virtual space of emplotment – a denotational ‘event-horizon’, as it were (if we may be permitted to figuratively poach again from physics’ lexical register, the domain from which Bakhtin drew his notion of relativistic ‘time-space’). Agha (this issue), like Silverstein, observes how the narrated-event chronotope, studied in respect of literary texts, is simply a special case.1 Noting this, Agha productively stretches Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope to accommodate diverse semiotic channels and media (increasingly recognized as important in contemporary studies of discourse e.g., LeVine and Scollon, 2004; Norris, 2004), while highlighting the close connection between voice and chronotope, the former living ‘in’ the latter, for as he defines it: a chronotope is a ‘representation of time and place peopled by certain social types’ (Agha, 2007, this issue). If chronotopes seem to circumscribe social types, they also afford virtual space-time ‘movement’ and ‘travel’. The impression of movement is often created by text-metrical segments in discourse – stretches of co-occurring signs – that offer distinct but non-congruent temporalization effects (cf. Agha, 1996). A paradigmatic case is the so-called 1
Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope serves only as a point of departure for Silverstein (2005), who proceeds to discuss the semiotics of interdiscursivity and intertextuality. Silverstein quickly leaves the orbit of things denotational, turning instead to the ways social actors establish interactional event-to-event relations, not just relations within and between denotational-textual worlds.
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‘historical present’, the use of nonpast deixis for discourse otherwise presumed or explicitly framed as ‘past’ (Schiffrin, 1981; Wolfson, 1982). This juxtaposition of noncongruent temporalization effects can often tropically telescope the past into the present, the narrated into the narrating event (Silverstein, 2005, pp. 17–18). In fact, contemporary research abounds in descriptions of such virtual space-time travel. Felson, for instance, describes ‘vicarious transport’ in Pindar’s Pynthian Four, where deictic resources in this Greek text help convey the audience ‘along carefully demarcated pathways, ultimately returning them . . . to their place of origin’, a site of victory (Felson, 1999, p. 5; for a reanalysis, see Parmentier, 2002). In oral narrative, Ochs (1994) describes rapid and dizzying ‘perspective shifts’ among narrated-event chronotopes. Such tropic text-structures induce various forms of ‘transposition’ (Hanks, 1990; Haviland, 1996), empirical cases of which are now familiar in the literature (e.g., Perrino, 2005; Shoaps, 1999; Wortham, 1994) and are well-represented in this volume (see esp., Haney, Perrino, Riskedahl, Wirtz). To the question of how chronotopes and virtual space-time travel might intervene in social history, we inquire into what Agha in this volume terms ‘cross-frame’ or ‘cross-chronotope alignment’ (cf. Wortham, 2003, 2005), that is: how are these various spatio-temporally distinct realms aligned with participation frameworks that unfold in communicative events? What relationship obtains between the projected chronotope and the real-time communicative matrix – itself a ‘chronotope’ (see Agha, this issue) –, from which the former is issued forth? In her article on Lebanese political rhetoric, Riskedahl, for instance, examines the political significance of efforts to align or disjoin past and present, in pamphlets and in responses to these text-artifacts by differently positioned social actors in Lebanon. In her article on Senegalese oral narrative, Perrino examines de´marche participative, a practice in which narrators transpose speech participants into the narrated-event chronotope. Perrino observes how the narrator, Mr. Marc Ndome, does not always insert her into his stories intact as a biographic individual; rather, he recasts her as various social types and then aligns this quasi-fictional narrated-event chronotope with the narrating event in a bid to redefine the interaction itself. For both Riskedhal and Perrino, these alignments aren’t simply patterns to be duly noted, named, classified; they are also pragmatic interventions in history: if successful, they incite others to action (Riskedahl) and reform an interlocutor’s behavior (Perrino). To recount, we have thus far described three related empirical points of departure: the study of entextualized voices-in-chronotopes; the virtual travel of participants within and across chronotopic frames; and cross-chronotope alignment and its context-reinforcing or context-transforming effects, especially in respect of social relations in the present. But as hinted earlier, ‘chronotope’ in this construal remains ideologically thin, far from Bakhtin’s more expansive, if unwieldy, notion. In the interest of crossing scales of analysis, we add, finally, a vast fourth area, the study of cultural ideologies of time, what Parmentier (this volume) labels ‘cultural time’. The three aforementioned vectors of inquiry need to be accompanied by an appreciation of the cultural presuppositions of time and history that mediate their construal (cf. Hanks, 1989). In saying this, we repeat Parmentier’s (1985) reminder that cultural ideologies of time are plural, not monolithic, and they manifest in diverse semiotic modalities, not just in language. As for plurality, we do not mean an unordered multiplicity. As Irvine (2004, p. 107) observes, temporalities often ‘come in pairs’: ‘temporal orders . . . do not appear in isolation but rather, one way or another, occur in combinations or in opposition to some vision of an alternative’ (e.g., modern–pre-mod-
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ern, messianic–calendric, etc).2 Read programmatically, Irvine’s remarks about the ‘dialogicality’ of temporal ideologies – the way they seem to react and respond to each other as voices do – invites us to explore the implicational relations among socially distributed ideologies of time. From the study of these relations, we might expose the agonistic and politically fraught interplay of temporalities, how situated temporalization effects work in, with, for, and against larger scale ‘chronopolitical imaginaries’ (Kelly, 1998, p. 845; cf. Fabian, 1983). Once exposed, it becomes possible to study the interplay of temporalities at the macrosocial plane in relation to micro-textual forms of temporal semiosis in communicative events – this issue’s primary objective. With her focus on spatio-temporal deixis, Davidson’s article, for instance, examines how those in post-socialist eastern Berlin orient toward and morally evaluate current mass media representations of East and West, pitting the former ‘GDR times’ against ‘West times’ – these being discursively opposed periods built around the 1989–1990 demise of the socialist state. Wirtz’s essay examines register juxtaposition in Cuban Santerı´a ritual speech. The register termed Lucumı´, associated with African slaves, is opposed to the register Bozal, and both are defined against unmarked, Cuban Spanish. This juxtapostion of registers allows for the interplay among three distinct chronotopes: ‘sacred, transcendent space-time (via Lucumı´), ancestral/historical space-time (via Bozal), and the everyday plane of the here-and-now (via Cuban Spanish)’. In this issue’s exploration of the uses of the past, we devote more attention to discursive and semiotic mediation than disciplines like social history, political science, and cultural and historical anthropology can typically afford, but without succumbing, we hope, to what Latour (1993) has called the ‘autonomization of the sphere of meaning’ (pp. 62–63; cf. Atkinson, 1989; Ortner, 1994, p. 130; Parmentier, 1997). Rather than stare at the formal and textual means for fashioning chronotopes and voices till the periphery bleeds away, we consider the double-life that every text leads: its dynamic relation to co(n)text (hence Silverstein and Urban’s (1996) terminological amalgam, ‘text-in-co(n)text’). Entextualization and contextualization are, as Silverstein notes, ‘two sides of the same semiotic coin’. To speak of ‘text’, writes Silverstein, is to speak of an ‘achieved separation’ of co-occurring signs from what is felt to be their readable, text-external co(n)text (2005, p. 8). Though separated, a text remains indexically tethered to its context, to which it is pragmatically appropriate or effective, context-affirming or context-transforming – a dynamic of signs in and of history that these essays explore. References Agha, Agha, Agha, Agha,
2
A., A., A., A.,
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‘Compare with Bakhtin’s suggestive remark that Chronotopes are mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in ever more complex interrelationships . . . The general characteristic of these interactions is that they are dialogical (in the broadest sense of the word). Bakhtin (1981, p. 252).
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Michael Lempert Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057-1051, USA E-mail address: [email protected] Sabina Perrino Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6398, USA E-mail address: [email protected]