Abstract
The major outlines of enregisterment as a metasemiotic process are well understood in linguistic anthropology, so we can turn to its further systematic implications. The article explores three “moments” in enregisterment, positing that practices and value projects create registers that act as clasps, relays, and graftings, each producing interdiscursivity and thus circulation. They connect arenas of social action in different ways. The connections are rightly called social organizations of interdiscursivity, since they link and organize not only discourses and registers but also the societal arrangements—NGOs, nonprofits, welfare offices, political platforms, academic circles—that are constituted around registers and through which registers have their powerful effects of connection (and separation) in specific historical moments. The examples, mostly from the politics of Hungary, surely have parallels elsewhere.
Early linguistic anthropology focused on meaning making in face-to-face speech events. But the larger aim was to understand how society is communicatively constituted. That goal motivated questions about how speech events themselves were constructed and has led to the study of linkages among events. In parallel, and at roughly the same time, sociocultural anthropology switched decisively from studying the practices of delimited social groups to wider interconnections. Both moves were in part responses to the increasing salience of international exchange, not least because the end of state socialism meant the end of major obstacles to a single, worldwide capitalist market in labor, goods and texts. For analyzing the processes that organize the spread of people, commodities, values, linguistic forms, and cultural practices, “circulation” has been the most powerful image proposed in sociocultural studies. Critics of “circulation” as an analytic have charged that it falsely presumes free “flow,” ignoring opposition, “friction,” and obstacles, or that it merely echoes the interests of a international corporate order.Footnote Linguistic anthropology has taken a different critical tack. I bergabung the research of the last few decades in asking instead how circulation happens, with what effects. What are the communicative processes that result in what is seen as circulation, and how do they shape the political and economic organization of social life?
This line of research finds that in “circulation,” texts, messages, utterances, ideas, and practices are not physically or spatially displaced, nor do the semiotically relevant aspects of people and things “travel.” Rather, the effect of movement is the metasemiotic achievement of interdiscursivity; it arises from a perceived repetition and hence a seeming linkage (across encounters) of forms that are framed, reflexively, as being the “same thing, again,” or as yet another instantiation of a recognized style in some cultural framework. Formal features signal similarity, but similarity never inheres in the forms themselves. Framing is therefore a necessary aspect of creating the effect of sameness, repetition, and replication—or that of difference. Put another way: “likeness” (iconicity) across encounters and connection (indexicality) between events are recognizable only through metapragmatic presuppositions and entailments. Linguistic ideologies orient participants to criteria of “sameness.” Building on the fundamental insight that metadiscourses (ideologies) regiment the perceived relationships between events in this way, many aspects of interdiscursivity/circulation have been identified: for instance, forms of reported speech, in culturally specific participation frameworks contribute to defining how (and how much) a performance counts as a token of a genre; they shape how speakers’ responsibility or authority for utterances is attributed or distributed. In making links across semiotic events, signs have the capacity to formulate identities, reputations, genres, and publics.Footnote