Entextualization and the ends of temporality

LANGUAGE

Language & Communication 27 (2007) 205–211

www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom

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COMMUNICATION

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 thepast’, as it is formulaically put. Empirically, this work examines mnemonic activities andartifacts: expressions of nostalgia, commemorative ritual, monuments, self narrative, his-toriography in its myriad forms. The list is long, and it is matched only by the list of cor-responding social-pragmatic effects. ‘Memory’, write Antze and Lambek (1996), ‘isinvoked to heal, to blame, to legitimate’ (p. vii). A wealth of studies – many inspired byAnderson’s (1994) influential Imagined Communities – have considered how mnemonicpractices bolster or undermine nationalist imaginaries. For subaltern, dissident, and othersubordinate subjects, memory has been shown to be a vehicle for commenting on andresponding 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 hur-ries past the discursive and semiotic means by which mnemonic acts and artifacts can besaid 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 succinctlyput. In his work on sign use in Belau, Parmentier used this pair of notions to distinguishrepresentations of the past from the capacity of such representations to effect change in thepresent, to ‘become tokens players in the dynamics of social life because of the first repre-sentational function’ (Parmentier, 2007, this issue). We reinvoke Parmentier’s distinctionin our exploration of one expansive problematic: how temporalization effects in real-timecommunicative events articulate with and help (re)produce or transform larger scale socio-historical formations. As studies of oral narrative and reported speech have so often dem-onstrated, speakers can rapidly construct diverse spatio-temporal universes – from remotebiographical pasts to hypothetical collective futures; they can populate these realms with‘voiced’ inhabitants (in Bakhtin’s sense); and they can align these temporally distinct

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doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2007.01.005

q Adapted from ‘Temporalities in Text: From the ‘Historical Present’ to Dialogic Time’, a session held at theAmerican Anthropological Association meetings in Washington, DC, December 2005. We are grateful to AsifAgha and Richard Parmentier for their participation and incisive comments.

206 Editorial / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 205–211206 Editorial / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 205–211

realms to the here-and-now speech-event in ways that redefine the present – ‘uses of thepast’, to be sure.

In asking how and for what ends social actors create, populate, and forge relations be-tween spatio-temporal realms, we build on several lines of recent discourse-centered re-search, including research on spatio-temporal ‘transposition’ (Hanks, 1990; Haviland,1996); on interdiscursivity and intertextuality (Agha and Wortham, 2005), and on lan-guage ideologies of temporality (Inoue, 2004). Rather than choose among seemingly com-peting scales of analysis, – say, between the study of language ideologies of temporalityand the study of deictically-produced temporalization effects in discourse – we operateacross scales, moving from the spatio-temporal to the sociohistorical, and back again.The articles assembled here explore how micro-textual forms of temporal semiosis articu-late with sociologically inflected spacetime, through forms of ideological engagement, ren-analysis, and degrees of institutionalization, processes that often remake the very world inwhich they occur. In examining these processes, we acknowledge our debt to Bakhtin,whose writings have informed several of the aforementioned areas of discourse-centeredresearch and all of the articles in this issue. Evident in this volume is especially our engage-ment with two related Bakhtinian staples, ‘chronotope’ and ‘voice’, as retooled for theempirical study of discourse. In retooling these Bakhtinian concepts, we spotlight one no-tion central to the study of both: textuality, or as many have processually termed it, ‘entex-tualization’ (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 fromthe teeming sociolinguistic diversity that Bakhtin captioned with the term ‘heteroglossia’.A vast range of indexical signs – register tokens, ‘accents’, deictic forms – may serve asresources for producing voicing effects in discourse (Hill, 1997; Silverstein, 2005), whichhas spurred some to ask: what makes a ‘voice’ cohere? Urban and Smith (1998) broachthis issue when they suggest that voice is a ‘virtual locus’ of personhood produced byco-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 ‘prag-matic-poetic turn’. In a series of essays, Silverstein has shown how emergent text-metricalstructures in discourse – such as the myriad forms of repetition and parallelism (see Tan-nen, 1987, 1989; Johnstone, 1994) – can serve higher-order, denotationally implicit meta-pragmatic functions: that is, they can serve as reflexive principles for the construal ofaction (Silverstein, 1984, 1992, 1997, 2004; Agha, 1996; Parmentier, 1997). It is throughsuch 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 thatlead to large-scale social transformation through a specific logic. At the small-scale level oftextual organization, voices emerge through (a) text-metrical contrasts and (b) the typifi-cation of such contrasts through metasemiotic devices, such as proper names (yielding a‘biographically individuated’ voice) or characterological descriptors (yielding a ‘socialvoice’). In terms of typification, the voices in this issue run the gamut: in Haney’s articleon Rodolfo Garcia, a former tent show comedian who inscribed his memories in narrativeand song on a series of audio cassettes, we encounter, predictably, the biographically indi-viduated voice of his past self. But we also listen in awe as Garcia, the sole animator, pro-duces 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 fromGarcia’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 met-onym of the British empire, who, through Izzard’s deft comedic hand, is made to conversewith an Indian subject that speaks as and on behalf of a colonized India. In terms of thetypification of voices, Lempert’s article on reported speech among diasporic Tibetanmonks exhibits the most generic voice of this set: an anonymous voice of ‘tradition’ in-voked by monks who ‘distress’ or ‘antique’ their discourse. These essays offer more thanjust 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 text-artifacts and other media and modes of dissemination. As they become widely known – orenregistered – persons acquainted with these voices respond, aligning their own semioticactivities with – or against – them, reproducing or transforming them in subsequent socialhistory.

Equally salient in this volume is our engagement with a second and related Bakhtinianstaple, the notion of chronotope or ‘time-space’. For Bakhtin, chronotope meant morethan 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 prin-ciples for ordering time and space were wedded to ideals of personhood and agency (Bakh-tin, 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 asAllan (1994) observes, it often seems a ‘rich, if inchoate, concept’ (p. 195). It is tellingin this respect that Silverstein (2005) provides a more parsimonious gloss: ‘the temporally(hence, chrono-) and spatially (hence, -tope) particular envelope in the narrated universe ofsocial 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 toa denotational-textual ‘field’, a temporally situated, virtual space of emplotment – a deno-tational ‘event-horizon’, as it were (if we may be permitted to figuratively poach againfrom physics’ lexical register, the domain from which Bakhtin drew his notion of relativ-istic ‘time-space’). Agha (this issue), like Silverstein, observes how the narrated-event chro-notope, studied in respect of literary texts, is simply a special case.1 Noting this, Aghaproductively stretches Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope to accommodate diverse semioticchannels and media (increasingly recognized as important in contemporary studies of dis-course e.g., LeVine and Scollon, 2004; Norris, 2004), while highlighting the close connec-tion between voice and chronotope, the former living ‘in’ the latter, for as he defines it: achronotope 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-metricalsegments in discourse – stretches of co-occurring signs – that offer distinct but non-con-gruent 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 todiscuss the semiotics of interdiscursivity and intertextuality. Silverstein quickly leaves the orbit of thingsdenotational, turning instead to the ways social actors establish interactional event-to-event relations, not justrelations within and between denotational-textual worlds.


‘historical present’, the use of nonpast deixis for discourse otherwise presumed or explic-itly framed as ‘past’ (Schiffrin, 1981; Wolfson, 1982). This juxtaposition of noncongruenttemporalization effects can often tropically telescope the past into the present, the nar-rated into the narrating event (Silverstein, 2005, pp. 17–18). In fact, contemporary re-search abounds in descriptions of such virtual space-time travel. Felson, for instance,describes ‘vicarious transport’ in Pindar’s Pynthian Four, where deictic resources in thisGreek text help convey the audience ‘along carefully demarcated pathways, ultimatelyreturning them . . . to their place of origin’, a site of victory (Felson, 1999, p. 5; for areanalysis, see Parmentier, 2002). In oral narrative, Ochs (1994) describes rapid and diz-zying ‘perspective shifts’ among narrated-event chronotopes. Such tropic text-structuresinduce various forms of ‘transposition’ (Hanks, 1990; Haviland, 1996), empirical cases ofwhich 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 insocial history, we inquire into what Agha in this volume terms ‘cross-frame’ or ‘cross-chro-notope alignment’ (cf. Wortham, 2003, 2005), that is: how are these various spatio-tempo-rally distinct realms aligned with participation frameworks that unfold in communicativeevents? What relationship obtains between the projected chronotope and the real-timecommunicative matrix – itself a ‘chronotope’ (see Agha, this issue) –, from which the for-mer 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 pam-phlets and in responses to these text-artifacts by differently positioned social actors in Leb-anon. In her article on Senegalese oral narrative, Perrino examines demarche participative,a practice in which narrators transpose speech participants into the narrated-event chro-notope. Perrino observes how the narrator, Mr. Marc Ndome, does not always insert herinto his stories intact as a biographic individual; rather, he recasts her as various socialtypes and then aligns this quasi-fictional narrated-event chronotope with the narratingevent in a bid to redefine the interaction itself. For both Riskedhal and Perrino, thesealignments aren’t simply patterns to be duly noted, named, classified; they are also prag-matic interventions in history: if successful, they incite others to action (Riskedahl) andreform an interlocutor’s behavior (Perrino).

To recount, we have thus far described three related empirical points of departure: thestudy of entextualized voices-in-chronotopes; the virtual travel of participants within andacross chronotopic frames; and cross-chronotope alignment and its context-reinforcing orcontext-transforming effects, especially in respect of social relations in the present. But ashinted earlier, ‘chronotope’ in this construal remains ideologically thin, far from Bakhtin’smore 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 (thisvolume) labels ‘cultural time’. The three aforementioned vectors of inquiry need to beaccompanied by an appreciation of the cultural presuppositions of time and history thatmediate their construal (cf. Hanks, 1989). In saying this, we repeat Parmentier’s (1985) re-minder that cultural ideologies of time are plural, not monolithic, and they manifest in di-verse semiotic modalities, not just in language. As for plurality, we do not mean anunordered multiplicity. As Irvine (2004, p. 107) observes, temporalities often ‘come inpairs’: ‘temporal orders . . .do not appear in isolation but rather, one way or another, occurin combinations or in opposition to some vision of an alternative’ (e.g., modern–pre-mod-


ern, messianic–calendric, etc).2 Read programmatically, Irvine’s remarks about the ‘dia-logicality’ of temporal ideologies – the way they seem to react and respond to each otheras voices do – invites us to explore the implicational relations among socially distributedideologies of time. From the study of these relations, we might expose the agonistic andpolitically fraught interplay of temporalities, how situated temporalization effects workin, 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 temporalitiesat the macrosocial plane in relation to micro-textual forms of temporal semiosis in com-municative events – this issue’s primary objective. With her focus on spatio-temporaldeixis, Davidson’s article, for instance, examines how those in post-socialist eastern Berlinorient toward and morally evaluate current mass media representations of East and West,pitting the former ‘GDR times’ against ‘West times’ – these being discursively opposedperiods built around the 1989–1990 demise of the socialist state. Wirtz’s essay examinesregister juxtaposition in Cuban Santerıa ritual speech. The register termed Lucumı, asso-ciated with African slaves, is opposed to the register Bozal, and both are defined againstunmarked, Cuban Spanish. This juxtapostion of registers allows for the interplay amongthree distinct chronotopes: ‘sacred, transcendent space-time (via Lucumı), ancestral/his-torical space-time (via Bozal), and the everyday plane of the here-and-now (via CubanSpanish)’.

In this issue’s exploration of the uses of the past, we devote more attention to dis-cursive and semiotic mediation than disciplines like social history, political science, andcultural and historical anthropology can typically afford, but without succumbing, wehope, 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 thanstare at the formal and textual means for fashioning chronotopes and voices till theperiphery bleeds away, we consider the double-life that every text leads: its dynamicrelation 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 speakof 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 teth-ered to its context, to which it is pragmatically appropriate or effective, context-affirm-ing or context-transforming – a dynamic of signs in and of history that these essaysexplore.

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Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Michael LempertDepartment of Linguistics,

Georgetown University,

Washington, DC 20057-1051, USA

E-mail address: [email protected]

Sabina PerrinoDepartment of Anthropology,

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia,

PA 19104-6398, USAE-mail address: [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

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Entextualization and the ends of temporality