The advent of new textualities, that is, hitherto unknown modes of entextualization and contextualization generated by audiovisual and computer technologies, has been the most important historical change for the last twenty years. Taking stock of these new modes of textualization, that have radically changed our views on language, one of our objectives is to construct a new critical history of European linguistic ideologies and policies, substituting a dynamic and dialogical approach to language issues in terms of actual speech performances and interactive textualities, for conventional views in terms of cut-and-dried languages.
Premiers relais de la voix (intérieure), la parole et le chant (à pleins sons). Puis nous passons de la parole à l'écriture. Depuis son invention, en effet, l'écriture était le second relais de la voix. Mais depuis le tournant des années quatre-vingt-dix, nous disposons de relais du troisième type. L'électronique a rendu possible l'enregistrement auditif et visuel, l'archivage et la diffusion de la vive voix, de la gestuelle qui l'accompagne et du cadre de son accomplissement (performance).
La notion de «mise en textes» de la voix (entextualization) est un développement américain tardif (puisqu'il vient vingt ans plus tard) de propositions formulées par Jacques Derrida (écriture au sens de Derrida) et Paul Ricœur (article en anglais datant de 1971) à la fin des années soixante ou au tournant des années soixante-dix, c'est-à-dire au moment où naît l'anthropologie linguistique américaine.
Bibliographie
bauman_briggs.pdf — Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, “Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life,” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 19, 1990, pp. 59-88.
briggs_metadiscursive.pdf — Charles L. Briggs, Metadiscursive Practices and Scholarly Authority in Folkloristics, The Journal of American Folklore, Volume 106, No. 422, Autumn 1993, pp. 387-434.
ricoeur_text.pdf — Paul Ricoeur, The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text, Social Research, Volume 38, Number 3, Autumn 1971, pp. 529–562.
silverstein_contemporary.pdf — Michael Silverstein, “Contemporary transformations of local linguistic communities,” Annual Review of Anthropology , Vol. 27, 1998, pp. 401-426.
Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (Edited by), Natural Histories of Discourse, Chicago, UCP. Particulièrement l'introduction.
Indications de lecture
1 /Robert C. Ulin, Remembering Paul Ricoeur: 1913-2005, Anthropological Quarterly, 78.4 (2005): 885-896. Spécoalement p. 888:
Ricoeur's insight is to extend the formality of language to the critical analysis of texts, whether in the version of objectified cultural products or objectified social action as captured in memory, oral tradition or archives. That is, Ricoeur is very much interested in examining the internal structure of texts much as one examines the internal and systemic structure of language. Such a methodological move involves bracketing, in the sense of the phenomenological epoché, the referential dimensions of the text or what we anticipate the text to be about.
2 / Bauman & Briggs, Poetics and performance, p. 73:
... Distinction between discourse and text. At the heart of the process of decentering discourse is the more fundamental process—entextualization... It is the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit—a text—that can be lifted out of its interactional setting. A text, then, from this vantage point, is discourse rendered decontextualizable.
3 / Silverstein, Local linguistic communities, p. 418, “Shifting Entextualization—Contextualization in the Contemporary World”:
The actualities of using language result in texts-in-context; the processes underlying are termed entextualization and contextualization, and are simultaneous semiotic moments of an experientially unitary phenomenon...
[C'est la double vie de la voix comme étant, à chaque instant et simultanément, enregistrée, relayée et réincarnée dans d'autres lieux que celui de sa production sensori-motrice.]
There are new modes of text-artifactuality [de nouvelles textualités] (creation of objectual inscriptions that mediate entextualization—contextualization), such as print, audio—videotape, electronic storage, and the like, that are transforming the roles of senders and receivers of texts in the circulation of culture...
4 / Silverstein & Urban, Natural Histories of Discourse, pp. 1–2:
To turn something into a text is to seem to give it a decontextualized structure and meaning, that is, a form and meaning that are imaginable apart from the spatiotemporal and other frames, in which they can be said to occur. Such an autonomously meaningful object, indeed, becomes a trope for culture, understood in the sense of an ensemble of shared symbols and meanings, so that we should not be surprised at its appeal for students of culture. For if a text has a despatialized and detemporalized meaning—in short, a deprocessualized one—then that meaning can be clearly transmitted across social boundaries such as generations, without regard for the kinds of recontextualizations it might undergo. Texts can thus be seen as building blocks or atoms of shared culture. We should observe here how congenial this simplistic construction is to notions that confuse an anthropological concept of culture with those folk-derived concepts in our various learned traditions of shared or common possession of texts, whether as quasi-physical or quasi-mental objects, as the attribute of “being cultured” or “having culture.” Such congeniality should, perhaps, make these concepts all the more epistemologically suspect for us, of course, in a comparative and cross-cultural enterprise.
[Footnote. We might, in fact, speculate on this trajectory of conflation, licensed apparently by Ricoeur (1971), of “text” with “text-artifact,” the latter a more or less permanent physical object like an “inscription.” Such a text-artifact stimulates an entextualization in an appropriate context; it is the mediating instrumentality of a communicative process for its perceiver, for example, a reader of an alphanumeric printed page such as the one before you. To confuse the mediating artifact and its mode of production (“inscription”) for a text and the sociosemiotic processes that produce it perpetuates a particular fetishized substitution…]
But this utility of texts is precisely what “the natives” (including us) see as well. They engage in processes of entextualization to create a seemingly shareable, transmittable culture. They can, for example, take some fragment of discourse and quote it anew, making it seem to carry a meaning independent of its situation within two now distinct co(n)texts. Or they can transcribe a fragment of oral discourse, converting it into a seemingly durable and decontextualizable form that suggests to interpreters a decontextualizable meaning as well. Or they can take such a durable text and reanimate it through a performance that, being a (mere) performance of the text, suggests various dimensions of contextualized “interpretive meaning” added on to those seemingly inherent in the text.
From this point of view, then, text is a metadiscursive notion, useful to participants in a culture as a way of creating an image of a durable, shared culture immanent in or even undifferentiated from its ensemble of realized or even potential texts. It is a metadiscursive construct—“this stretch of discourse is a text whose meaning is . . . ”—that grows out of and refers to actual cultural practices, which themselves are presumably to be studied ethnographically, in addition to constituting the essence of ethnographic method itself.
