Commentary: Mobility, contexts, and the chronotope

Paper Commentary: Mobility, contexts, and the chronotope by Jan Blommaert© (Tilburg University) j.blommaert@tilburguniversity.edu September 2016 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ Commentary: Mobility, contexts, and the chronotope Jan Blommaert Mobility raises specific issues with regard to what we understand by “context”, and in this commentary I suggest that Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope could be a useful instrument enabling a precise and detailed, mobile, unit of “context”. This unit connects specific timespace arrangements with ideological and moral orders, projecting possible and preferred identities. The papers in this issue offer rich material in this direction. I thank Adrienne Lo and Joseph Park for inviting me to comment on this exceptionally insightful collection of essays. The essays, I believe, mark the increasing maturity of a sociolinguistics of globalization in which the various, highly complex challenges caused by mobility are being productively addressed. Of these challenges, perhaps that to established notions of “context” might be the most pressing. Rigorous and disciplined attention to context is what separates social and cultural approaches to language from formal linguistics; it is the thing that defines sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, pragmatics and discourse analysis. And an increasing awareness of mobility as a crucial ontological feature of “language” – or more broadly, meaning making –goes hand in hand with an awareness that our well-weathered mainstream conceptualizations of “context” fail to do justice to the complexities we observe. The papers in this issue can be read as illustrations and expressions of that unease. I propose Bakhtin's concept of “chronotope” as a fertile and more precise tool for addressing these challenges (Blommaert 2015a). Two preliminary remarks may be useful for what follows.  One: in a sociolinguistic approach to meaning making, context cannot ontologically be separated from language, for it is a fundamental part of the meanings constructed in language; context is what turns language into a “social fact” (to quote Durkheim).  Two: notions of context are built on, and invoke, imaginations of the social world and of the place of social actors and activities therein. So context is always more than just an operational-analytical category: it involves an ideological and a moral a priori. From that perspective, two things can be observed. One, context remains quite poorly integrated in several branches of the social and cultural study of language (Silverstein 1992; Blommaert 2005). And two, the social imagination underlying many forms of context appears to be “sedentary”: context is local, stable, static and given. Obviously, a notion of context adjusted to mobility needs to transcend this and stress its continuously evolving, multiscalar and dynamic aspects, as well as the intrinsic unity of context and action. There are several available building blocks. Gumperz (1982) reminded us that context is always contextualization, and Cicourel (1967; 1992) insisted that context was multifiliar, overlapping and scaled. In addition, the union between context and action, we now realize, is metapragmatics: language-ideologically ordered indexicals are at the core of the dialectics of contextualized meaning making (Silverstein 2003; Agha 2007; also Blommaert 2005). The introduction (this volume) notes that in an era of physical and technological mobility, people navigate multiple worlds. They cannot be viewed as members of a (single) closed, integrated and stable Parsonian community and are subject to normative judgments in very different places among very different people – simultaneously. This is where the chronotope might come in handy. Recall that Bakhtin (1981) defined the chronotope as a timespace configuration – an “objective” bit of context, one could say – which was characterized, and joined, by ideological, “subjective” features. Specific times and places placed conditions on who could act, how such actions would be normatively structured, and how they would be normatively perceived by others. A knight in a medieval legend, for example, is expected to be chivalric, and his concrete actions should emanate such characteristics; if not, he would not be a “real” knight. Bakhtin, thus, offered a heuristic unit in which timespace configurations are simultaneously orders of indexicalities, and in which the multiplicity of such units is a given of the dialogical and heteroglossic reality of social life. Chronotope, thus, is a “mobile” context enabling not just precise ethnographic description but explanatory potential as well. We see, for instance, how physical and social mobility operate synergistically – moving across timespace configurations involves a reshuffling of the social and cultural capital required for identity construction and power, through what Hymes called “functional relativity” (1996: 44-45). Forms of speech indexically anchored in one timespace configuration can be re-entextualized into another, in ways that involve entirely different indexical valuations. We observe this in the essays by Vigouroux and Collins, where the indexical valuations of forms deemed emblematic of the colonial (racialized) past dance up and down once they move into different timespace configurations. A descriptive stance – observing an accent in students' speech (Collins), or a “substandard” grammatical pattern (Vigouroux) – is turned into a racialized-historical stereotype whenever it is produced “elsewhere” (Agha 2007). Mobility, we can see, involves indexical restratification. Such restratifications have an outspokenly moral character. The ideological load attributed to specific forms of social action turns them into moralized behavioral scripts normatively attached to specific timespace configurations. The essays in this issue are replete with examples in which judgments of speech are formulated in terms of locally articulated claims to legitimacy, a projection of behavioral features onto “the right to do X here and now”. Chun's analysis of perceived mispronunciations of Korean names by “foreign” fans illustrates this: such fans are “not from here”, and their actions are therefore subject to normative judgments “from here”. Being “(not) from here” becomes an absolute non-negotiable benchmark that offers no bail. Ideologies of correctness and standardization, we can see, are chronotopically organized (cf. Silverstein 1996). They require a distinction between “from here” and “not from here” that can be activated as a chronotope of normalcy. Park's excellent essay shows how people who are by definition “not from here” – expatriate executives – negotiate and renegotiate the issues caused by mobility itself, shaping a separate chronotope of normalcy among themselves . Obviously, such distinctions are identity distinctions – indexical order is always a template for identity, and identities are chronotopically grounded (Blommaert & De Fina 2016). Park's managers construct themselves in elaborate metapragmatic discourses of mobility; Chun's Korean fans ascribe identities to mispronouncing transnationals; Collins' teachers construct their pupils, and the discursive pathways analyzed by Vigouroux lead to a projected “African” identity drawn from the colonial imagination. In each of these cases, moral judgments constitute the moment of identityshaping. The “corrections” offered by Chun's Korean fans come with judgments of legitimacy that extend from minute features of language into categorical identity diacritics. Moralized behavioral scripts are the on-the-ground realities of indexicality, and thus of identity-making. Typically, those who are “not from here” can achieve “approximations” of the normative “standard” order (Vigouroux); they can therefore also only approximate “standard” identities. “Standard” and “correctness” are inevitably evaluative judgments, and they fit into a package of profoundly moralevaluative notions such as “true”, “authentic”, “real” and so forth. In public debates on such topics one continually trips over collocations between terms such as “correct” and “true”, and “(not) from here”. Collins' delicate analysis of racialized enregisterment in South-African schools serves as a textbook example of this. Lo and Choi's study of an internet debate on the “truth” in the story of the Korean rapper Tablo brings together several of the points mentioned here. The critics who doubt Tablo's educational credentials (using, unsurprisingly, details of his English “accent” as evidence) draw on a chronotope of normalcy: normally, one can't finish a degree at the rhythm claimed by Tablo; normally, his English should be immaculate if he has a US degree, normally he shouldn't sound like “us” after his US-based education, and so forth. They base themselves on a “normal” behavioral script, adherence to and deviance from which are profoundly moralized. The data are bursting with moral-evaluative statements that are simultaneously statements of identity ascription, and driven by the “from herenot from here” diacritic that defines globalized mobility. But there is more. The general chronotope of normalcy can be broken down into microchronotopes specifying the indexical order of specific bits of behavior (Tablo's performance in a talk show, his translation of a short story, and so forth). So we see a fractal connection across differently scaled chronotopes, in which the order of indexicality from the highest scale (the chronotope of normalcy) is carried over into infinitely detailed lower-scale ones. We see chronotopes nested within chronotopes, with specific points and general ones interacting nonstop, chronotopically organized “frames within frames” (Goffman 1974). The essays in this issue thematize such cross-scalar connections as “discursive pathways” (Vigouroux), “re-entextualizations” (Lo & Choi), or “interdiscursivity” (Park). Such descriptors of cross-chronotope processes of uneven (scaled) quality are far more precise than “cross-contextual” analyses. Such connections – the “polycentricity” of communicative environments, in short (Blommaert, Collins & Slembrouck 2005) – are inevitable in the sociolinguistics of mobility. This leads me to a final, brief, remark. In the essays by Chun and by Lo & Choi, the internet, or (to use an epic misnomer) the “virtual world” is the context of the data offered. The analyses are outstanding; but we should not overlook the fact that the online context is not well understood. We know that it has exceptional scalar qualities (think of virality), and that it stands in complex polycentric relationships to “offline” chronotopes (Blommaert 2015b; Varis & Blommaert 2015). But the exact characteristics of these phenomena await focused study. Note that all the subjects in this issue live in the internet age; we can assume that all have been influenced by the circulation of cultural material enabled by such technologies. Precisely how this influence plays out in their actual day-to-day discourses, how it grants them yet another dimension of metapragmatic mobility, raising new issues of polycentric normativity, looks like a worthwhile topic for a follow-up volume. It is to the credit of the present issue that such fundamental questions emerge, and I repeat my sincere thanks to the editors for affording me the chance to engage with them. References Agha, Asif (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Blommaert, Jan (2005). Discourse: A critical introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981). The dialogical imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Blommaert, Jan (2015a). Chronotopes, scales and complexity in the study of language and society. Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 105-116. Blommaert, Jan (2015b). Meaning as a nolinear effect: The birth of cool. AILA Review 28: 7-27. Blommaert, Jan & Anna De Fina (2016). Chronotopic identities: On the timespace organization of who we are. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, paper 153. Tilburg: Babylon. Blommaert, Jan, James Collins & Stef Slembrouck (2005). Polycentricity and interactional regimes in 'global neighborhoods'. 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