A Charter, Not an Answer: Bauman 2005

In Bauman's response to the papers in LA 15, he outlines the reasons for understanding and exploring interdiscursivity (his extension of the term coined by Kristeva to explain Bahktin, which in and of itself represents a through-line of prior texts informing the current.) Bauman argues that interdiscursivity helps us to understand that all utterances are ideologically informed; they all carry with them the weight of all that has been said before and in this way, all speak back to the texts around them.

Bauman puts forth three primary reasons for us to be interested in interdiscursivity. One, it helps us transcend the limits of the bounded speech event to understand the ways in which a speech event is situated within the ideology of the groups that created it and the ways in which it responds to other speech events and speaks to new speech events which may occur in the future. Two, interdiscursivity keeps us aware that all utterances are ideologically informed, that is, that they all rely on the ideologies which their speakers and hearers bring to the table; these ideologies are based on prior interpretations of other texts, which are ideologically informed and so on and so on. And last, interdiscursivity provides a discourse-centered way of "elucidating and calibrating" the terms, modes and degrees of alignment; as Agha shows, it helps us piece together exactly how something becomes enregistered, or how someone becomes known as a particular persona.

Bauman calls Bakhtin's work "a charter, not an answer," and perhaps this is the most useful of all. Intertextuality, it seems to me, is a jumping-off point for understanding a host of phenomena, whether it be internet etiquette and behavior (my study), the creation of register (Agha 2005), alignment in a family (Tovares 2006), legal history and precedent (Raisch 2008), and many others, each as seemingly different as the next. Interdiscursivity lays the groundwork by which the workings of our communication are better understood; it gives no answers, only a map.

Sure Footing: Agha 2005

Perhaps the most useful part of Agha's article is his careful picking apart of the way that enregisterment happens, and so it is there that I'd like to focus my own thoughts, as it is also the most useful for me in my own work. He describes the following three-step process:

contrastive individuation, where by one voice is recognized as contrasting against another

biographic identification, or the "naming of voices," where the voice becomes typified

and

social characterization - assigning an individual voice to a social character.

This process in many ways is similar to Bauman's concept of entxextualization. In this, Agha essentially breaks down the process of entextualization even further, showing exactly how one instance comes to be known as a typification of a larger pheonmenon. Once a text (a voice in this case) goes through Agha's three stages, it has been entextualized as characteristic of a particular social persona, and then is free to be decontextualized and recontextualized at will.

For my own work, this makes good sense. White knighting is nothing if not a process by which one voice is isolated as not being a part of the broader conversation, and then typified as not only outside of but also an antagonist to that conversation. This process helps narrow down and identify the precise moves that are made to make that happen.

Intertextuality and Performance: Bauman Ch. 1 and 5

Performativity has always been an interest of mine, so reading these works on performance and intertexuality is very interesting. I am most intrigued again by the ways in which meaning arises from the gaps—from the ways that these texts intersect one another. For example, in the “Spotted Pup” story, it is the way in which the text genres of tall tale, personal experience narrative, and practical joke all come together that ultimately make the story itself a success, and reflect well on Ed Bell’s narrative style.

Bauman’s description of performance as a mode of communication where not only the topic is being communicated but also that the speaker him or herself is drawing attention to the fact that s/he is “on display” seems a useful distinction to me.

This calls back the acknowledgement not only of speaker-hearer participation frame a la Goffman, but also an additional layer—the breaking of the “fourth wall,” to borrow a term from theater. In performance, the audience is acknowledged not only as a hearer participant in the participation framework, but also an audience in the sense of theatre, one for whom the speech itself is designed to produce some noticeable effect. Ed Bell signifies this to his audience through metalinguistic cues, prompting them to challenge him, or acknowledging their probable skepticism of the tall tale or practical joke about which he is speaking. Cues like this tell us a great deal about the performative aspects of any given (discourse) text. I think this may be a useful line of inquiry in my own research, as there is a certain element to which any given speech act in an internet community is being performed for, by the standards of, and with cognizance of the community in which it is written.