- Email: [email protected]
Semiosis, temporality, self-fashioning: An introduction
Language & Communication 46 (2016) 14–18
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Language & Communication journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom
Editorial
Semiosis, temporality, self-fashioning: An introduction a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Available online 28 November 2015
In this short essay, we introduce a collection of papers that examines the relationship between semiosis, subjectivity and timescale. We argue that a temporal approach to the relationship between semiosis and subjectivitydi.e., one that considers, at least, the interactional, ontogenetic, and historical timescalesdcan reveal the variety of ways in which semiosis comes to be implicated in subjectivity. This approach can be understood as a reformulation of the traditional linguistic anthropological concern with linguistic relativity. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords Semiotics Linguistic relativity Subjectivity Timescales
It might seem odd or intentionally obfuscatory to introduce a special issue thusly titled with a discussion of Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the great founders of a modern linguistics. One of the enduring criticisms of Saussure, after all, is that his account of linguistic valuedthat is, the idea that a sign has value only relative to other signs within some linguistic systemdprecludes a sophisticated concern with the role of temporality in all of its guises: history, interaction, acquisition, biography, etc. Despite Saussure’s vision of synchronic systematicity, it is a vision that has its loophole. Temporality matters, even here. Saussure, for example, states his second great principle of linguistics as follows: “the linguistic signal, being auditory in nature, has a temporal aspect and hence certain temporal characteristics: (1) it occupies a certain temporal space, and (b) this space is measured in just one dimension: it is a line” (1983: 69–70). Although Saussure introduces temporality here only to diminish it conceptually (it is, after all, just a line!), it is nevertheless a moment that opens onto all of the subsequent conceptual fussdincluding our own fussiness here, in this special issuedabout the temporal characteristics of semiosis. When does this “just a line” end or begin (a clause, sentence, utterance, a chain of utterances, or a series of interactions)? What are the variety of ways in which even narrowly linguistic signals come to “form a chain” (1983: 70), as Saussure writes further along in this same section? What are the consequences for language of its temporality, perhaps especially for its relationship to subjectivity? It is this last question that animates our concerns in this special issue. When we study the variety of different “timescales” (see Lemke, 2000) with respect to which language gets implicated, we learn something about the “dynamic processes” (Enfield, 2014) that constrain and enable language and communication. Of special interest for linguistic anthropologists are the timescales across which language and culture come to be mutually consequential in some way. Although, to be sure, events of sign usage occur alongside (or: in) timescales that are, for example, geological, chemical, and cognitive, the key for scholars of language and culture is to offer an account of just those timescales that reveal the processes through which language and culture get linked up. For example, the interactional and interdiscursive: what do we learn about the relationship between language and culture when we study the relatively cumulative deployment of signs within and across realtime events (e.g., about “entextualization” [Silverstein and Urban, 1996] or “placement” [Lempert, 2012: 149])?1 The ontogenetic, or processes of socialization: what gets revealed when we examine the ways in which individuals learn about how language articulates with culture (e.g., about processes of “thickening” identities [Holland and Leander, 2004])? The
1 Combining the interactional and the interdiscursive in this way may seem idiosyncratic, but it is clearly what a good deal of contemporary theory is suggesting. It is increasingly clear that the coherency of a speech event qua eventdi.e., as something that has event-like characteristics only relative to other events (hence, the importance of interdiscursivity) – is an emergent, achieved phenomenon (Agha, 2007; Koven, 2016; Lempert, 2012).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2015.10.009 0271-5309/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Editorial / Language & Communication 46 (2016) 14–18
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historical: what do we learn about language and culture when we examine how some register, genre of speaking, or set of “subject positions” emerges as a semiotic resource for some group or population?2 In this collection, our goal is to bring the concept “timescale” to bear on a classic problem of linguistic anthropology: the relationship between language, culture, and subjectivity.3 Our core insight is that, as one studies the temporal unfolding of semiotic activity, one gains special purchase on the way in which these three dimensions of social life come to be mutually consequential. A couple of examples are in order. Wortham (2005), for example, offers an account of how, across the course of an academic year, a student goes from being understood as a promising student to one who is thought to be a disruptive presence in the classroom. In the course of mapping out this “trajectory of socialization,” Wortham identifies one kind of semiotic resourcedthat is, “denotationally explicit metasigns” of identity (2005:104)dthat, as spoken by teachers, facilitates this student’s change in identity. In the work of Suslak (2009) and Meek (2007), analogously, they show how processes of language shift come to be implicated in the production of identities that are generational (such that code-switching among youth indexes youthfulness and cool-ness [Suslak, 2009], while certain language varieties get linked to elders and tradition [Meek, 2007]). Taken together, these examples show how culturally recognizable forms of subjectivity (e.g., a classroom identity and a generational one) become achievable through semiotic processes (e.g., the use of denotationally explicit metasigns and processes of language shift) that take place across divergent timescales (e.g., across processes of socialization and history). The utility of a temporal approach to language, culture, and subjectivity is the purchase it provides with respect to an analysis of semiotic or linguistic mechanism. What, after all, is the role of language or semiosis with respect to some cultural form of subjectivity? Whereas static models of linguistic relativity have to rely on mediational or correlational arguments, a focus on timescales allows for an analysis that traces the dynamic and potentially constitutive relationship between language, culture, and subjectivity. In doing so, it expands our linguistic or semiotic object from a concern with semiotic structure and configuration to semiotic process and change. In the present volume, for example, our authors address the following kinds of semiotic processes: processes of metapragmatic/pragmatic calibration in narrative (Koven, 2016), processes of stance-taking during a tutoring session (Thompson, 2016), the form of semiosis that material things like rocks, twigs, and slopes wield over the course of marbles play (Smith, 2016), the process of mastering a gestural sign system in a multilingual environment (Haviland, 2016), a shift in how students narrate about their racialized schooling environments (Clonan-Roy et al., 2016), practices of writing understood to serve an archiving or “semiotic time-capsuling” function (Nozawa, 2016), and the racialized, projected futures of Spanish and English in the United States (Rosa, 2016). These semiotic processes extend from the interactional (e.g., processes of calibration) to the ontogenetic (e.g., mastering gestural signs) to the historical (e.g., the fate of racialized language communities). A temporal approach to linguistic relativity also has consequences for a linguistic anthropological approach to subjectivity. Following Kulick and Schieffelin (2004), we have chosen the concept “subjectivity” partly because, given its intellectual history, it allows for a clearer lens onto the political and historical character of our subjective lives (i.e., in comparison to a concept like “mind”). However, we also use it, idiosyncratically, as a superordinate term that can be used to systematize, in part, the wide variety of concerns that linguistic anthropologists have had with socially patterned forms of thinking, feeling, and experiencing. In other words, when concepts like racial models of personhood (Clonan-Roy et al., 2016), processes of self transformation (Thompson, 2016), the life trajectories of individuals (Haviland, 2016), raciolinguistic forms of identity (Rosa, 2016), gender, generational and national identities (Koven, 2016), ordinary lives (Nozawa, 2016) and human-ness as a form of social positioning (Smith, 2016) get examined relative to questions of temporality or timescale, they thereby become relatively commensurable. The following kinds of questions become possible. When examining the historical time-scale, for example, are there particular dimensions of subjectivity (e.g., perhaps the generational or ordinariness) that more regularly get implicated in the semiotic processes that partly constitute historical temporality (e.g., language shift, semiotic time-capsuling, etc.)? Could this also be true of the interactional and ontogenetic timescales? This is the reason why a superordinate term like subjectivity is useful here: it is because there may be relatively regular or presupposable ways in which different dimensions of subjectivity get linked up to specific timescales. The study of semiosis, timescale, and self-fashioning cannot only take up the relatively regular or presupposable ways in which these three phenomena come to be linked up. Part of the challenge of taking up a temporal approach to language, culture, and subjectivity is the relatively emergent characteristics of timescales and their relationships. Many of the papers in this volume will examine, for example, the way in which the interactional, ontogenetic, and historical timescales come to intersect and become mutually consequential in some specific case (see Blommaert (2007), Lemke (2000) and Wortham (2011) for a similar point). Ontogenesis, for example, happens in and through interaction (Haviland, 2016; Smith, 2016), interactions that are themselves bound up in the history of entire language or signing communities (Haviland, 2016). Interactions or, perhaps especially, mediatized discourse sometimes have a historical consequentiality (Koven, 2016; Rosa, 2016). In a more fundamental sense, it is also true that, although the interactional, ontogenetic, and historical timescales can be presupposably relevant in most any sociocultural context, there are timescales that are the emergent product of some sociocultural or institutional context (see Nozawa, 2016 on semiotic time-capsuling as a specifically modernist chronotope).
2 We draw here on Faudree and Hansen’s (2014: 230–231) comparison of the dynamic processes at stake along the historical, interactional, and phylogenetic timescales. 3 An important precedent for our approach is the work of Holland and Lave (2001).
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The most fully theorized of these institutionally emergent timescales has been “the academic year” (see Wortham (2006)). This is a timescale that is the result of a highly institutionalized conjunction of a whole host of social facts: processes of learning; ideologies about age and age-grading; semiotic objects like textbooks, lesson plans, tests (see Thompson, 2016), and classroom discourse; and a set of institutional identities like students, administrators, and instructors of various sorts, among no doubt others. Ultimately, then, we offer this take on “semiosis, timescale, and self-fashioning” as one way of re-formulating the linguistic anthropological concern with “linguistic relativity.” In doing so, we join a rich and well-populated field of inquiry. Drawing on Lucy’s typology (1996), this is a field that has been concerned with the consequences for subjectivity of both structural variation across languages (Levinson and Wilkins, 2006; Lucy, 2004; Enfield, 2002) as well as “functional” (Hymes, 1966) or discursive variation within and across languages (or, more broadly, within and across divergent forms of semiosis). Given our concern with semiosis in time, our perspective here is inherently a functional one and therefore joins an especially vibrant field of study (e.g., see Webster, 2015 and Friedrich, 1989 on the ethnopoetic tradition; Sidnell and Enfield, 2012 on the structural shaping of social interaction; and Silverstein 1976 on the relative creativity or entailing-ness of indexical forms). Although it is beyond the scope of this introduction to review these traditions, we do want to note a couple of relatively distinctive things about the approach outlined here. For one, it explicitly links the question of linguistic relativity to what has become a dominant mode of inquiry in the broader discipline (i.e., the historical). It also subsumes the enduring interest in structural variation with respect to an analytic centered on mapping the dynamic relations between semiosis and subjectivity sustained across time. This special issue includes a series of seven contributions that explore different dimensions of the way in which semiosis and subjectivity get linked up across divergent timescales. The issue has its origins in a panel (entitled “Self, Reflexivity, Semiosis”) at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, although it has since grown to include a number of other contributors. The papers are arranged according to a logic oriented by the sense in which timescales are more or less encompassing: the interactional/discursive papers come first (Koven, 2016; Thompson, 2016), then the ontogenetic (Smith, 2016; Clonan-Roy et al., 2016; Haviland, 2016), and then the historical (Nozawa, 2016; Rosa, 2016). This is an organizational logic that, to be sure, obscures as much as it reveals. It is revealing in the sense that, as noted, there are relatively regular ways in which subjectivities get linked up to divergent timescales, a fact that warrants separating these timescales out into separable and more or less encompassing bundles. However, it obscures in the sense that many of these papers explore the way in which timescales come to intersect in specific ways, a fact that might warrant a different arrangement. Koven’s paper takes up the interactional timescale, considering how, as they tell stories of their experiences of cultural differences, young Franco–Portuguese women engage in a particular fashion of speaking in which they shift from the specific to the generic (whether from the reportive to the nomic or the deictic shift from a singular pronominal deixis to the inclusive “we”). Koven demonstrates how these shifts accomplish a kind of interactional “scale-jumping” that both draws upon and constitutes seemingly timeless truths about generational, historical, and national timescales in which French-ness is seen as youthful and risqué and valuing the individual while Portuguese-ness is seen as aged and curmudgeonly and valuing traditional values. In so doing, Koven’s work explores a process that has been of much interest to anthropologistsdthe making of social types or what has come to be known as “essentialization.” Importantly, in this paper, Koven explores the discourse strategies that link specific tokens to general and timeless types, thus revealing to us how essentialization happens through these fashions of speaking. Thompson also takes up the formation of a kind of timeless truthfulness that fixes or anchors an essential subject. In his paper, Thompson brings the Du Boisian notion of stance to the consideration of a tutoring session between a high school student and a college tutor in order to consider the transformation of the students’ stance across a relatively short timescale of a matter of minutes. In so doing, Thompson points to a particular weakness of the Du Boisian notion of stance that results from Du Bois’ delimited timescale, namely, the means by which a stance becomes consequential for a subjectdwhat Du Bois refers to as stance ownership. This leads to a particularly synchronic and static view of stance. In contrast, Thompson proposes that stance ownership should be considered across longer timescales and that it should be grounded in 1) the uptake of stances by other subjects, 2) the embodied responsiveness to stance and 3) the way in which non-human things can take stances. The result is a strengthened stance analytic that can better capture the potential for ambiguity and for the transformation of stance that we commonly find in everyday instances of talk, and the latter of which are particularly important to pedagogical interactions. Smith’s paper develops a similar concern with non-human agents, including marbles, the marbles playing field, and, potentially, youngest brothers. Age-graded scales of ontogeny are created in these moments as gradings of manliness and humanness get mapped onto gradings of age via the ability to engage with the marbles playing field in proper ways. Here Smith points us to the mutual constitution of the agency of things and the developmental trajectory of these boys. On the one hand, the boys’ humanness and manliness is established via their abilities to manage the exigencies of the marbles playing field. On the other hand, the marbles playing field (and the youngest brother!) is given what Smith calls “a parasitical agency” in as much as it becomes a determiner of humanness and of manliness. Through this rather rich analysis of marbles playing, Smith introduces us to a complex array of semiotic concepts such as channels, sieves, parasites, and intermateriality that together show how a concern with non-human agents in processes of socialization makes visible a timescale that can be referred to as a timescale of “human development.” Clonan-Roy, Wortham, and Nichols consider the ontogenetic scale at a slightly older age. Drawing on ethnographic work carried out with three adolescent Latinas as they move from middle school through high school, Clonan-Roy et al. consider
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how these adolescent Latinas’ models of racial personhood are transformed. In particular they observe how these girls’ notions of African–Americans change from being critical of and perhaps racist toward African–Americans and toward being more likely to align with them in solidarity. Focusing on this ontogenetic timescale, Clonan-Roy et al. demonstrate how the development of these models of personhood happen not by any predictable developmental processes but rather based on a heterogeneous array of resources that exist on many different timescales (e.g., migrational patterns of these girls’ families, differences in the organization of schooling and of peer social groupings at these different ages). Haviland’s paper takes up a similar focus on the ontogenetic timescale, but also closely attends to the interactional as well as the historical timescales. In a series of engaging vignettes involving the use of Z sign, a home sign turned sign language, Haviland shows us how the values established on longer timescales are brought into play in the interactional timescale. The ontogenetic timescale is doubly important here, first in the difference between Jane, the first Z signer, and her two younger brothers, and second in the difference between Jane and her son Vic, a hearing Z signer who is also proficient in Tzotzil along with having some exposure to Spanish. The central comparison highlighting the issues of ontogenetic and historical differences is that of Jane and her son Vic. Haviland shows how the semiotic resources available to each of them play a crucial role in two cases where each of them are, separately, accused by Jane’s bothers of having failed to properly produce Z sign. Whereas Jane is highly distressed by these attacks, Vic, with his facility in Z sign, Tzotzil, and Spanish, is able to defend himself and laugh off these attacks. Here we see the realization of the values of longer timescaled processes in the shorter timescale of the interaction. Nozawa deals with a different kind of cross timescale interactions. Nozawa’s paper deals with a particular genre of personal life history writing in Japan called jibunshi. As Nozawa demonstrates, these jibunshi function as “semiotic time capsules,” i.e., text-artifacts that bridge timescales of hours or days (the length of time it takes to write a given element of one’s life history) and timescales of hundreds or thousands of years (the length of time across which one might imagine an audience might be reading your words). Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of a superaddressee, Nozawa details how jibunshi enacts a “’sublime’ coffining of the universal truth of a life” in as much as these writings are intended for a super-addressee, simultaneously for no one and for everyone. By this imagining of an audience of super-addressee, the jibunshi writers transcend the recognition of any actual here and now audience (i.e., “fame”) and instead opt for the (nomic?) recognition of a timeless and placeless super-addressee. Rosa’s paper brings together these concerns with the longer timescaled processes that we have termed “history” as he considers how mediatized cultural renderings of linguistic usage implicate a political economy of language and racedwhat he calls, following Povinelli, “social tense.” Through these mediatized cultural renderings of English and Spanish usage in the U.S., Rosa shows how Spanish speakers in the mediatized social tense of the U.S. today are located not just as out-of-place, but, critically, also as out-of-time, always already on the cusp of inclusion and importance, a “social tense” that marginalizes them in the current moment. This spatial and temporal dis-location is given a further dimension as Rosa further demonstrates how these ideologies of language and nation are connected to ideologies of racialized bodies such that we might speak not just of language ideologies but of raciolinguistic ideologies (cf. Flores and Rosa, 2015). This point that is captured most concisely in his examples in which learning Spanish is considered a valuable asset for people who are racialized as White. Yet for those racialized as Latino/a, losing Spanish is considered valuable. Taken together, we hope these articles can help illustrate the value of bringing together analytics of temporality, subjectivity, and fashions of speaking. Acknowledgments Many of these papers first came together in a panel sponsored by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. We are grateful for Paul Kockelman’s rich commentary on the panel. Special thanks goes, also, to Talbot Taylor and Surya Nedunchezhiyan for their support in assembling this issue. References Agha, Asif, 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Blommaert, Jan, 2007. Sociolinguistic scales. Intercult. Pragmat. 4 (1), 1–19. Clonan-Roy, K., Wortham, S., Nichols, B., 2016. Shifting racial stereotypes in late adolescence: Heterogeneous resources for developmental change in the New Latino Diaspora. Lang. Commun. 46, 51–61. Enfield, N.J., 2002. Ethnosyntax: Explorations in Grammar and Culture. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Enfield, N.J., 2014. Causal dynamics of language. In: Enfield, N.J., Kockelman, P., Sidnell, J. (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 325–342. Faudree, Paja, Hansen, Magnus Pharao, 2014. Language, society and history: towards a unified approach? In: Enfield, N.J., Kockelman, P., Sidnell, J. (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 227–243. Flores, Nelson, Jonathan, Rosa, 2015. Undoing appropriateness: raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harv. Educ. Rev. 85 (2), 149– 171. Friedrich, Paul, 1989. Language, ideology, and political economy. Am. Anthropol. 91 (2), 295–312. Haviland, J., 2016. “But you said ‘four sheep’.!”: (sign) language, ideology, and self (esteem) across generations in a Mayan family. Lang. Commun. 46, 62– 94. Holland, Dorothy, Lave, Jean (Eds.), 2001. History in Person: Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, N.M. Holland, Dorothy, Leander, Kevin, 2004. Ethnographic studies of positioning and subjectivity: an introduction. Ethos 32 (2), 127–139.
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Hymes, Dell, 1966. Two types of linguistic relativity (with examples from Amerindian ethnography). In: Bright, W. (Ed.), Sociolinguistics, Proceedings of the UCLA Sociolinguistics Conference. Mouton, The Hague, pp. 114–167. Koven, M., 2016. Essentialization strategies in the storytellings of young Luso-descendant women in France: Narrative calibration, voicing, and scale. Lang. Commun. 46, 19–29. Kulick, Don, Schieffelin, Bambi, 2004. Language socialization. In: Duranti, A. (Ed.), A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 349–368. Lemke, Jay, 2000. Across the scales of time: artifacts, activities, and meanings in ecosocial systems. Mind Cult. Act. 7 (4), 273–290. Lempert, Michael, 2012. Interaction rescaled: how monastic debate became a diasporic pedagogy. Anthropol. Educ. Q. 43 (2), 138–156. Levinson, Stephen, Wilkins, David, 2006. Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Lucy, John, 1996. The scope of linguistic relativity: an analysis and review of empirical research. In: Gumperz, J.J., Levinson, S.C. (Eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Lucy, John, 2004. Language, culture, and mind in comparative perspective. In: Achard, M., Kemmer, S. (Eds.), Language, Culture, and Mind. CSLI, Stanford. Meek, Barbra A., 2007. Respecting the language of elders: ideological shift and linguistic discontinuity in a Northern Athapascan Community. J. Linguist. Anthropol. 17 (1), 23–43. Nozawa, S., 2016. Life encapsulated: Addressivity in Japanese life writing. Lang. Commun. 46, 95–105. Rosa, J., 2016. Racializing language, regimenting Latina/os: Chronotope, social tense, and American raciolinguistic futures. Lang. Commun. 46, 106–117. de Saussure, Ferdinand, 1983. Course in General Linguistics. Open Court, LaSalle, IL. Sidnell, Jack, Enfield, N.J., 2012. Language diversity and social action: a third locus of linguistic relativity. Curr. Anthropol. 53, 302–333. Silverstein, Michael, 1976. Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In: Basso, K.H., Selby, H.A. (Eds.), Meaning in anthropology. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, pp. 11–55. Silverstein, Michael, Urban, Greg, 1996. The natural history of discourse. In: Silverstein, Michael, Urban, Greg (Eds.), Natural Histories of Discourse. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 1–9. Smith, B., 2016. Turning language socialization ontological: Material things and the semiotics of scaling time in Peruvian Aymara boyhood. Lang. Commun. 46, 42–50. Suslak, Daniel, 2009. The sociolinguistic problem of generations. Lang. Commun. 29 (3), 199–209. Thompson, G.A., 2016. Temporality, stance ownership, and the constitution of subjectivity. Lang. Commun. 46, 30–41. Webster, Anthony, 2015. The poetry of sound and the sound of poetry: navajo poetry, phonological iconicity, and linguistic relativity. Semiotica 207, 279– 301. Wortham, Stanton E.F., 2005. Socialization beyond the speech event. J. Linguist. Anthropol. 15 (1), 95–112. Wortham, Stanton E.F., 2006. Learning identity: the joint emergence of social identification and academic learning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wortham, Stanton E.F., 2011. Beyond macro and micro in the linguistic anthropology of education. Anthropol. Educ. Q. 43 (2), 128–137.
Benjamin Smith Department of Anthropology, Vassar College, 124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604, USA E-mail address: [email protected] Gregory A. Thompson * Department of Anthropology, Brigham Young University, 880 SWKT, Provo, UT 84602, USA Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected]
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Language & Communication journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom
Editorial
Semiosis, temporality, self-fashioning: An introduction a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Available online 28 November 2015
In this short essay, we introduce a collection of papers that examines the relationship between semiosis, subjectivity and timescale. We argue that a temporal approach to the relationship between semiosis and subjectivitydi.e., one that considers, at least, the interactional, ontogenetic, and historical timescalesdcan reveal the variety of ways in which semiosis comes to be implicated in subjectivity. This approach can be understood as a reformulation of the traditional linguistic anthropological concern with linguistic relativity. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords Semiotics Linguistic relativity Subjectivity Timescales
It might seem odd or intentionally obfuscatory to introduce a special issue thusly titled with a discussion of Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the great founders of a modern linguistics. One of the enduring criticisms of Saussure, after all, is that his account of linguistic valuedthat is, the idea that a sign has value only relative to other signs within some linguistic systemdprecludes a sophisticated concern with the role of temporality in all of its guises: history, interaction, acquisition, biography, etc. Despite Saussure’s vision of synchronic systematicity, it is a vision that has its loophole. Temporality matters, even here. Saussure, for example, states his second great principle of linguistics as follows: “the linguistic signal, being auditory in nature, has a temporal aspect and hence certain temporal characteristics: (1) it occupies a certain temporal space, and (b) this space is measured in just one dimension: it is a line” (1983: 69–70). Although Saussure introduces temporality here only to diminish it conceptually (it is, after all, just a line!), it is nevertheless a moment that opens onto all of the subsequent conceptual fussdincluding our own fussiness here, in this special issuedabout the temporal characteristics of semiosis. When does this “just a line” end or begin (a clause, sentence, utterance, a chain of utterances, or a series of interactions)? What are the variety of ways in which even narrowly linguistic signals come to “form a chain” (1983: 70), as Saussure writes further along in this same section? What are the consequences for language of its temporality, perhaps especially for its relationship to subjectivity? It is this last question that animates our concerns in this special issue. When we study the variety of different “timescales” (see Lemke, 2000) with respect to which language gets implicated, we learn something about the “dynamic processes” (Enfield, 2014) that constrain and enable language and communication. Of special interest for linguistic anthropologists are the timescales across which language and culture come to be mutually consequential in some way. Although, to be sure, events of sign usage occur alongside (or: in) timescales that are, for example, geological, chemical, and cognitive, the key for scholars of language and culture is to offer an account of just those timescales that reveal the processes through which language and culture get linked up. For example, the interactional and interdiscursive: what do we learn about the relationship between language and culture when we study the relatively cumulative deployment of signs within and across realtime events (e.g., about “entextualization” [Silverstein and Urban, 1996] or “placement” [Lempert, 2012: 149])?1 The ontogenetic, or processes of socialization: what gets revealed when we examine the ways in which individuals learn about how language articulates with culture (e.g., about processes of “thickening” identities [Holland and Leander, 2004])? The
1 Combining the interactional and the interdiscursive in this way may seem idiosyncratic, but it is clearly what a good deal of contemporary theory is suggesting. It is increasingly clear that the coherency of a speech event qua eventdi.e., as something that has event-like characteristics only relative to other events (hence, the importance of interdiscursivity) – is an emergent, achieved phenomenon (Agha, 2007; Koven, 2016; Lempert, 2012).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2015.10.009 0271-5309/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Editorial / Language & Communication 46 (2016) 14–18
15
historical: what do we learn about language and culture when we examine how some register, genre of speaking, or set of “subject positions” emerges as a semiotic resource for some group or population?2 In this collection, our goal is to bring the concept “timescale” to bear on a classic problem of linguistic anthropology: the relationship between language, culture, and subjectivity.3 Our core insight is that, as one studies the temporal unfolding of semiotic activity, one gains special purchase on the way in which these three dimensions of social life come to be mutually consequential. A couple of examples are in order. Wortham (2005), for example, offers an account of how, across the course of an academic year, a student goes from being understood as a promising student to one who is thought to be a disruptive presence in the classroom. In the course of mapping out this “trajectory of socialization,” Wortham identifies one kind of semiotic resourcedthat is, “denotationally explicit metasigns” of identity (2005:104)dthat, as spoken by teachers, facilitates this student’s change in identity. In the work of Suslak (2009) and Meek (2007), analogously, they show how processes of language shift come to be implicated in the production of identities that are generational (such that code-switching among youth indexes youthfulness and cool-ness [Suslak, 2009], while certain language varieties get linked to elders and tradition [Meek, 2007]). Taken together, these examples show how culturally recognizable forms of subjectivity (e.g., a classroom identity and a generational one) become achievable through semiotic processes (e.g., the use of denotationally explicit metasigns and processes of language shift) that take place across divergent timescales (e.g., across processes of socialization and history). The utility of a temporal approach to language, culture, and subjectivity is the purchase it provides with respect to an analysis of semiotic or linguistic mechanism. What, after all, is the role of language or semiosis with respect to some cultural form of subjectivity? Whereas static models of linguistic relativity have to rely on mediational or correlational arguments, a focus on timescales allows for an analysis that traces the dynamic and potentially constitutive relationship between language, culture, and subjectivity. In doing so, it expands our linguistic or semiotic object from a concern with semiotic structure and configuration to semiotic process and change. In the present volume, for example, our authors address the following kinds of semiotic processes: processes of metapragmatic/pragmatic calibration in narrative (Koven, 2016), processes of stance-taking during a tutoring session (Thompson, 2016), the form of semiosis that material things like rocks, twigs, and slopes wield over the course of marbles play (Smith, 2016), the process of mastering a gestural sign system in a multilingual environment (Haviland, 2016), a shift in how students narrate about their racialized schooling environments (Clonan-Roy et al., 2016), practices of writing understood to serve an archiving or “semiotic time-capsuling” function (Nozawa, 2016), and the racialized, projected futures of Spanish and English in the United States (Rosa, 2016). These semiotic processes extend from the interactional (e.g., processes of calibration) to the ontogenetic (e.g., mastering gestural signs) to the historical (e.g., the fate of racialized language communities). A temporal approach to linguistic relativity also has consequences for a linguistic anthropological approach to subjectivity. Following Kulick and Schieffelin (2004), we have chosen the concept “subjectivity” partly because, given its intellectual history, it allows for a clearer lens onto the political and historical character of our subjective lives (i.e., in comparison to a concept like “mind”). However, we also use it, idiosyncratically, as a superordinate term that can be used to systematize, in part, the wide variety of concerns that linguistic anthropologists have had with socially patterned forms of thinking, feeling, and experiencing. In other words, when concepts like racial models of personhood (Clonan-Roy et al., 2016), processes of self transformation (Thompson, 2016), the life trajectories of individuals (Haviland, 2016), raciolinguistic forms of identity (Rosa, 2016), gender, generational and national identities (Koven, 2016), ordinary lives (Nozawa, 2016) and human-ness as a form of social positioning (Smith, 2016) get examined relative to questions of temporality or timescale, they thereby become relatively commensurable. The following kinds of questions become possible. When examining the historical time-scale, for example, are there particular dimensions of subjectivity (e.g., perhaps the generational or ordinariness) that more regularly get implicated in the semiotic processes that partly constitute historical temporality (e.g., language shift, semiotic time-capsuling, etc.)? Could this also be true of the interactional and ontogenetic timescales? This is the reason why a superordinate term like subjectivity is useful here: it is because there may be relatively regular or presupposable ways in which different dimensions of subjectivity get linked up to specific timescales. The study of semiosis, timescale, and self-fashioning cannot only take up the relatively regular or presupposable ways in which these three phenomena come to be linked up. Part of the challenge of taking up a temporal approach to language, culture, and subjectivity is the relatively emergent characteristics of timescales and their relationships. Many of the papers in this volume will examine, for example, the way in which the interactional, ontogenetic, and historical timescales come to intersect and become mutually consequential in some specific case (see Blommaert (2007), Lemke (2000) and Wortham (2011) for a similar point). Ontogenesis, for example, happens in and through interaction (Haviland, 2016; Smith, 2016), interactions that are themselves bound up in the history of entire language or signing communities (Haviland, 2016). Interactions or, perhaps especially, mediatized discourse sometimes have a historical consequentiality (Koven, 2016; Rosa, 2016). In a more fundamental sense, it is also true that, although the interactional, ontogenetic, and historical timescales can be presupposably relevant in most any sociocultural context, there are timescales that are the emergent product of some sociocultural or institutional context (see Nozawa, 2016 on semiotic time-capsuling as a specifically modernist chronotope).
2 We draw here on Faudree and Hansen’s (2014: 230–231) comparison of the dynamic processes at stake along the historical, interactional, and phylogenetic timescales. 3 An important precedent for our approach is the work of Holland and Lave (2001).
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The most fully theorized of these institutionally emergent timescales has been “the academic year” (see Wortham (2006)). This is a timescale that is the result of a highly institutionalized conjunction of a whole host of social facts: processes of learning; ideologies about age and age-grading; semiotic objects like textbooks, lesson plans, tests (see Thompson, 2016), and classroom discourse; and a set of institutional identities like students, administrators, and instructors of various sorts, among no doubt others. Ultimately, then, we offer this take on “semiosis, timescale, and self-fashioning” as one way of re-formulating the linguistic anthropological concern with “linguistic relativity.” In doing so, we join a rich and well-populated field of inquiry. Drawing on Lucy’s typology (1996), this is a field that has been concerned with the consequences for subjectivity of both structural variation across languages (Levinson and Wilkins, 2006; Lucy, 2004; Enfield, 2002) as well as “functional” (Hymes, 1966) or discursive variation within and across languages (or, more broadly, within and across divergent forms of semiosis). Given our concern with semiosis in time, our perspective here is inherently a functional one and therefore joins an especially vibrant field of study (e.g., see Webster, 2015 and Friedrich, 1989 on the ethnopoetic tradition; Sidnell and Enfield, 2012 on the structural shaping of social interaction; and Silverstein 1976 on the relative creativity or entailing-ness of indexical forms). Although it is beyond the scope of this introduction to review these traditions, we do want to note a couple of relatively distinctive things about the approach outlined here. For one, it explicitly links the question of linguistic relativity to what has become a dominant mode of inquiry in the broader discipline (i.e., the historical). It also subsumes the enduring interest in structural variation with respect to an analytic centered on mapping the dynamic relations between semiosis and subjectivity sustained across time. This special issue includes a series of seven contributions that explore different dimensions of the way in which semiosis and subjectivity get linked up across divergent timescales. The issue has its origins in a panel (entitled “Self, Reflexivity, Semiosis”) at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, although it has since grown to include a number of other contributors. The papers are arranged according to a logic oriented by the sense in which timescales are more or less encompassing: the interactional/discursive papers come first (Koven, 2016; Thompson, 2016), then the ontogenetic (Smith, 2016; Clonan-Roy et al., 2016; Haviland, 2016), and then the historical (Nozawa, 2016; Rosa, 2016). This is an organizational logic that, to be sure, obscures as much as it reveals. It is revealing in the sense that, as noted, there are relatively regular ways in which subjectivities get linked up to divergent timescales, a fact that warrants separating these timescales out into separable and more or less encompassing bundles. However, it obscures in the sense that many of these papers explore the way in which timescales come to intersect in specific ways, a fact that might warrant a different arrangement. Koven’s paper takes up the interactional timescale, considering how, as they tell stories of their experiences of cultural differences, young Franco–Portuguese women engage in a particular fashion of speaking in which they shift from the specific to the generic (whether from the reportive to the nomic or the deictic shift from a singular pronominal deixis to the inclusive “we”). Koven demonstrates how these shifts accomplish a kind of interactional “scale-jumping” that both draws upon and constitutes seemingly timeless truths about generational, historical, and national timescales in which French-ness is seen as youthful and risqué and valuing the individual while Portuguese-ness is seen as aged and curmudgeonly and valuing traditional values. In so doing, Koven’s work explores a process that has been of much interest to anthropologistsdthe making of social types or what has come to be known as “essentialization.” Importantly, in this paper, Koven explores the discourse strategies that link specific tokens to general and timeless types, thus revealing to us how essentialization happens through these fashions of speaking. Thompson also takes up the formation of a kind of timeless truthfulness that fixes or anchors an essential subject. In his paper, Thompson brings the Du Boisian notion of stance to the consideration of a tutoring session between a high school student and a college tutor in order to consider the transformation of the students’ stance across a relatively short timescale of a matter of minutes. In so doing, Thompson points to a particular weakness of the Du Boisian notion of stance that results from Du Bois’ delimited timescale, namely, the means by which a stance becomes consequential for a subjectdwhat Du Bois refers to as stance ownership. This leads to a particularly synchronic and static view of stance. In contrast, Thompson proposes that stance ownership should be considered across longer timescales and that it should be grounded in 1) the uptake of stances by other subjects, 2) the embodied responsiveness to stance and 3) the way in which non-human things can take stances. The result is a strengthened stance analytic that can better capture the potential for ambiguity and for the transformation of stance that we commonly find in everyday instances of talk, and the latter of which are particularly important to pedagogical interactions. Smith’s paper develops a similar concern with non-human agents, including marbles, the marbles playing field, and, potentially, youngest brothers. Age-graded scales of ontogeny are created in these moments as gradings of manliness and humanness get mapped onto gradings of age via the ability to engage with the marbles playing field in proper ways. Here Smith points us to the mutual constitution of the agency of things and the developmental trajectory of these boys. On the one hand, the boys’ humanness and manliness is established via their abilities to manage the exigencies of the marbles playing field. On the other hand, the marbles playing field (and the youngest brother!) is given what Smith calls “a parasitical agency” in as much as it becomes a determiner of humanness and of manliness. Through this rather rich analysis of marbles playing, Smith introduces us to a complex array of semiotic concepts such as channels, sieves, parasites, and intermateriality that together show how a concern with non-human agents in processes of socialization makes visible a timescale that can be referred to as a timescale of “human development.” Clonan-Roy, Wortham, and Nichols consider the ontogenetic scale at a slightly older age. Drawing on ethnographic work carried out with three adolescent Latinas as they move from middle school through high school, Clonan-Roy et al. consider
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how these adolescent Latinas’ models of racial personhood are transformed. In particular they observe how these girls’ notions of African–Americans change from being critical of and perhaps racist toward African–Americans and toward being more likely to align with them in solidarity. Focusing on this ontogenetic timescale, Clonan-Roy et al. demonstrate how the development of these models of personhood happen not by any predictable developmental processes but rather based on a heterogeneous array of resources that exist on many different timescales (e.g., migrational patterns of these girls’ families, differences in the organization of schooling and of peer social groupings at these different ages). Haviland’s paper takes up a similar focus on the ontogenetic timescale, but also closely attends to the interactional as well as the historical timescales. In a series of engaging vignettes involving the use of Z sign, a home sign turned sign language, Haviland shows us how the values established on longer timescales are brought into play in the interactional timescale. The ontogenetic timescale is doubly important here, first in the difference between Jane, the first Z signer, and her two younger brothers, and second in the difference between Jane and her son Vic, a hearing Z signer who is also proficient in Tzotzil along with having some exposure to Spanish. The central comparison highlighting the issues of ontogenetic and historical differences is that of Jane and her son Vic. Haviland shows how the semiotic resources available to each of them play a crucial role in two cases where each of them are, separately, accused by Jane’s bothers of having failed to properly produce Z sign. Whereas Jane is highly distressed by these attacks, Vic, with his facility in Z sign, Tzotzil, and Spanish, is able to defend himself and laugh off these attacks. Here we see the realization of the values of longer timescaled processes in the shorter timescale of the interaction. Nozawa deals with a different kind of cross timescale interactions. Nozawa’s paper deals with a particular genre of personal life history writing in Japan called jibunshi. As Nozawa demonstrates, these jibunshi function as “semiotic time capsules,” i.e., text-artifacts that bridge timescales of hours or days (the length of time it takes to write a given element of one’s life history) and timescales of hundreds or thousands of years (the length of time across which one might imagine an audience might be reading your words). Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of a superaddressee, Nozawa details how jibunshi enacts a “’sublime’ coffining of the universal truth of a life” in as much as these writings are intended for a super-addressee, simultaneously for no one and for everyone. By this imagining of an audience of super-addressee, the jibunshi writers transcend the recognition of any actual here and now audience (i.e., “fame”) and instead opt for the (nomic?) recognition of a timeless and placeless super-addressee. Rosa’s paper brings together these concerns with the longer timescaled processes that we have termed “history” as he considers how mediatized cultural renderings of linguistic usage implicate a political economy of language and racedwhat he calls, following Povinelli, “social tense.” Through these mediatized cultural renderings of English and Spanish usage in the U.S., Rosa shows how Spanish speakers in the mediatized social tense of the U.S. today are located not just as out-of-place, but, critically, also as out-of-time, always already on the cusp of inclusion and importance, a “social tense” that marginalizes them in the current moment. This spatial and temporal dis-location is given a further dimension as Rosa further demonstrates how these ideologies of language and nation are connected to ideologies of racialized bodies such that we might speak not just of language ideologies but of raciolinguistic ideologies (cf. Flores and Rosa, 2015). This point that is captured most concisely in his examples in which learning Spanish is considered a valuable asset for people who are racialized as White. Yet for those racialized as Latino/a, losing Spanish is considered valuable. Taken together, we hope these articles can help illustrate the value of bringing together analytics of temporality, subjectivity, and fashions of speaking. Acknowledgments Many of these papers first came together in a panel sponsored by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. We are grateful for Paul Kockelman’s rich commentary on the panel. Special thanks goes, also, to Talbot Taylor and Surya Nedunchezhiyan for their support in assembling this issue. References Agha, Asif, 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Blommaert, Jan, 2007. Sociolinguistic scales. Intercult. Pragmat. 4 (1), 1–19. Clonan-Roy, K., Wortham, S., Nichols, B., 2016. Shifting racial stereotypes in late adolescence: Heterogeneous resources for developmental change in the New Latino Diaspora. Lang. Commun. 46, 51–61. Enfield, N.J., 2002. Ethnosyntax: Explorations in Grammar and Culture. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Enfield, N.J., 2014. Causal dynamics of language. In: Enfield, N.J., Kockelman, P., Sidnell, J. (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 325–342. Faudree, Paja, Hansen, Magnus Pharao, 2014. Language, society and history: towards a unified approach? In: Enfield, N.J., Kockelman, P., Sidnell, J. (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 227–243. Flores, Nelson, Jonathan, Rosa, 2015. Undoing appropriateness: raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harv. Educ. Rev. 85 (2), 149– 171. Friedrich, Paul, 1989. Language, ideology, and political economy. Am. Anthropol. 91 (2), 295–312. 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Hymes, Dell, 1966. Two types of linguistic relativity (with examples from Amerindian ethnography). In: Bright, W. (Ed.), Sociolinguistics, Proceedings of the UCLA Sociolinguistics Conference. Mouton, The Hague, pp. 114–167. Koven, M., 2016. Essentialization strategies in the storytellings of young Luso-descendant women in France: Narrative calibration, voicing, and scale. Lang. Commun. 46, 19–29. Kulick, Don, Schieffelin, Bambi, 2004. Language socialization. In: Duranti, A. (Ed.), A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 349–368. Lemke, Jay, 2000. Across the scales of time: artifacts, activities, and meanings in ecosocial systems. Mind Cult. Act. 7 (4), 273–290. Lempert, Michael, 2012. Interaction rescaled: how monastic debate became a diasporic pedagogy. Anthropol. Educ. Q. 43 (2), 138–156. Levinson, Stephen, Wilkins, David, 2006. Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Lucy, John, 1996. The scope of linguistic relativity: an analysis and review of empirical research. In: Gumperz, J.J., Levinson, S.C. (Eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Lucy, John, 2004. Language, culture, and mind in comparative perspective. In: Achard, M., Kemmer, S. (Eds.), Language, Culture, and Mind. CSLI, Stanford. Meek, Barbra A., 2007. Respecting the language of elders: ideological shift and linguistic discontinuity in a Northern Athapascan Community. J. Linguist. Anthropol. 17 (1), 23–43. Nozawa, S., 2016. Life encapsulated: Addressivity in Japanese life writing. Lang. Commun. 46, 95–105. Rosa, J., 2016. Racializing language, regimenting Latina/os: Chronotope, social tense, and American raciolinguistic futures. Lang. Commun. 46, 106–117. de Saussure, Ferdinand, 1983. Course in General Linguistics. Open Court, LaSalle, IL. Sidnell, Jack, Enfield, N.J., 2012. Language diversity and social action: a third locus of linguistic relativity. Curr. Anthropol. 53, 302–333. Silverstein, Michael, 1976. Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In: Basso, K.H., Selby, H.A. (Eds.), Meaning in anthropology. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, pp. 11–55. Silverstein, Michael, Urban, Greg, 1996. The natural history of discourse. In: Silverstein, Michael, Urban, Greg (Eds.), Natural Histories of Discourse. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 1–9. Smith, B., 2016. Turning language socialization ontological: Material things and the semiotics of scaling time in Peruvian Aymara boyhood. Lang. Commun. 46, 42–50. Suslak, Daniel, 2009. The sociolinguistic problem of generations. Lang. Commun. 29 (3), 199–209. Thompson, G.A., 2016. Temporality, stance ownership, and the constitution of subjectivity. Lang. Commun. 46, 30–41. Webster, Anthony, 2015. The poetry of sound and the sound of poetry: navajo poetry, phonological iconicity, and linguistic relativity. Semiotica 207, 279– 301. Wortham, Stanton E.F., 2005. Socialization beyond the speech event. J. Linguist. Anthropol. 15 (1), 95–112. Wortham, Stanton E.F., 2006. Learning identity: the joint emergence of social identification and academic learning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wortham, Stanton E.F., 2011. Beyond macro and micro in the linguistic anthropology of education. Anthropol. Educ. Q. 43 (2), 128–137.
Benjamin Smith Department of Anthropology, Vassar College, 124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604, USA E-mail address: [email protected] Gregory A. Thompson * Department of Anthropology, Brigham Young University, 880 SWKT, Provo, UT 84602, USA Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected]