Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics series

Sociocultural Linguistic Perspectives

Anna De Fina, Didem Ikizoglu, Jeremy Wegner, Anna De Fina, Didem Ikizoglu, Jeremy Wegner

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781626164239
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Sociocultural linguistics has long conceived of languages as well-bounded, separate codes. But the increasing diversity of languages encountered by most people in their daily lives challenges this conception, and more recent scholarship complicates traditional associations between languages and social identities. Diversity—and even super-diversity—is now the norm. This volume examines the increasing diversity of linguistic phenomena and addresses the theoretical-methodological challenges that accounting for such phenomena pose to sociocultural linguistics. Diversity and Super-Diversity brings together top scholars in the field and stages the debate on super-diversity that will be sure to interest sociocultural linguists, generating discussion and informing future research.

Chapter 1

Chronotopic Identities

On the Timespace Organization of Who We Are

JAN BLOMMAERT AND ANNA DE FINA

SUPER-DIVERSITY OFFERS SCHOLARS a broad range of opportunities to revise and rethink parts of their conceptual vocabulary in attempts to arrive at more sensitive and accurate tools for thought and analysis. The recognition of a reality that might, in some respects and to some degree, have always been there but was never enregistered in theoretical and methodological frameworks might, in fact, be seen as the most productive outcome of the current debates over whether or not super-diversity is “new.” The perspective is indeed new, but it also allows us to return to old issues armed with some fresh ideas (cf. Blommaert 2015c; Silverstein 2015; Arnaut 2016; Parkin 2016). In what follows, we take these ideas to issues of identity.

Reflections and theorizations on identity within sociolinguistics and discourse analysis in the last two decades have moved more and more toward context-sensitive, social constructionist understandings (see Bucholtz and Hall 2005; Benwell and Stokoe 2006; De Fina, Schiffrin, and Bamberg 2006; De Fina 2011). Yet, even within these new paradigms, identities are often still understood in dichotomous terms as either micro or macro, individual or social, local or global, etc., with hyphenations allowing for a limited degree of complexity, and with language separated from specific identities by “and” (see, e.g., papers in Preece 2016). In this chapter we explore the Bakhtinian notion of the chronotope as a source of inspiration for the development of an approach to identities that avoids such simplifications by taking into account the complex interactions between practice, iteration, and creativity in social life. We shall elaborate on the following central idea: It is possible to see and describe much of what is observed as contemporary identity work as being chronotopically organized. Indeed, it is organized in, or at least with reference to, specific timespace configurations which are nonrandom and compelling as ‘contexts.’

We intend to illustrate how a view of identities as chronotopic can offer invaluable insights into the complexities of identity issues in super-diverse social environments, and how it fits within a renewed sociolinguistic paradigm that stresses ethnographic, practice-oriented approaches to communication and discourse, aimed at the most minute aspects of identity practices operating as indexicals for large-scale ‘structuring’ characteristics of social practice—a nano-politics of identity so to speak (cf. Parkin 2016; Rampton 2006). We shall do this largely in a dialogue with some classic sociological statements on these topics, as a way to show the advantages of our mode of analysis over more sweeping and generalizing approaches.

Chronotopes and Sociology

In their seminal study on the unequally accessible cultural capital of French university students, Bourdieu and Passeron make the following remark: “Sans doute, les étudiants vivent et entendent vivre dans un temps et un espace originaux” (Undoubtedly, students live and expect to live in an original time and space) (1964, 48). The specific time they live in is measured by the academic year, with its semesters, lecturing times, and exam sessions. And the way they live is relaxed, slightly anarchic, and down to themselves when it comes to organizing their days, weeks, and months—“le temps flottant de la vie universitaire” (the fluid time of university life) (51). The specific spaces include, of course, the university campus, its buildings, lecture halls and staff offices; but also “des quartiers, des cafés, des chambres ‘d’étudiants’ ” (“‘student’ neighborhoods, cafés, and rooms”), cinemas, dance halls, libraries, theaters, and so forth; the Parisian Quartier Latin, of course, serves as a textbook example here (51).

It is no miracle, then, that a walk through the Quartier Latin during the academic year would reveal a specific demographic pattern—a dense concentration of young people, who would be students, and middle-aged men, who would be senior academics—different from, say, people shopping along the fashion stores on the Champs Elysées or taking the commuter trains out of Paris at 5 p.m. According to Bourdieu and Passeron, due to these specific timespace givens, students acquire a sense of shared experience, which, invariably, becomes an important part of their autobiographies later in life—“in my student days,” “we met when we were students,” etc. The specific timespace of student life involves particular activities, discourses, and interaction patterns; role relationships and identity formation modes; particular ways of conduct and consumption; of taste development and so forth, most of which are new, demand procedures of discovery and learning, and involve the mobilization of existing cultural and social capital in the (differential) process of acquiring new capital. References to similar timespace elements (a charismatic or dramatically incompetent lecturer, a particular café, or a then-popular movie or piece of music) create a shared sense of cohort belonging with others, which coexists with preexisting belongings to social groups and which enters into posterior forms of belonging. In that sense, our student days do not compensate for or replace preexisting class memberships (which the book documents at length), and neither constitute the sole bedrock for posterior identity formation. Rather, in Bourdieu and Passeron’s view, our student identity represents a relatively superficial phenomenon, “plus proche de l’agrégat sans consistence que du groupe professionnel” (closer to an aggregate without consistency than to a professional group) (1964, 56), let alone “un groupe social homogène, indépendant et intégré” (a homogenous, autonomous and integrated social group) (49), which reproduces underlying (class) differences while constructing one new layer of shared biographical experience. Thus, while students share almost identical experiences and develop particular and similar identities during their days at the university, the meanings and effects of these shared experiences will differ according to the more fundamental social and cultural identity profiles they “brought along” to university life.

Probably without being aware of it, Bourdieu and Passeron provided us with one of the most precise empirical descriptions of what Bakhtin calls a “chronotope,” (a notion that he applies to works of literature), which he defines as follows: “We will give the name chronotope [literally ‘timespace’], to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (1981, 84–85). Indeed, Bakhtin coined this term to point toward the inseparability of time and space in human social action and to the effects of this inseparability on it. In his work he identifies the “literary artistic chronotope” where “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole,” such that the chronotope could be seen as “a formally constitutive category of literature” (84). It is thanks to this concept of chronotope that Bakhtin was able to address the co-occurrence of events from different times and places in novels, the fact that shifts between chronotopes involve shifts of an entire range of features and generate specific effects. He saw the interplay of different chronotopes as an important aspect of the novel’s heteroglossia, part of the different “verbal-ideological belief systems” that were in dialogue in a novel, because every chronotope referred to socially shared, and differential, complexes of value attributed to specific forms of identity, as expressed (in a novel for example) in the description of the looks, behavior, actions, and speech of certain characters, enacted in specific timespace frames. Importantly, Bakhtin assumes also that chronotopes involve specific forms of agency and identity: specific patterns of social behavior “belong,” so to speak, to particular timespace configurations; and when they “fit,” they respond to existing frames of recognizable identity, while when they don’t they are “out of place,” “out of order,” or transgressive (see Blommaert 2015a for a discussion).

In a more contemporary and applied vocabulary, we would say that chronotopes invoke orders of indexicality valid in a specific timespace frame (cf. Blommaert 2005, 73). Specific timespace configurations enable, allow, and sanction specific modes of behavior as positive, desired, or compulsory (and disqualify deviations from that order in negative terms), and this happens through the deployment and appraisal of chronotopically relevant indexicals—indexicals that acquire a certain recognizable value when deployed within a particular timespace configuration.

Through these lenses, one can, for example, also read Goffman’s (1963) Behavior in Public Spaces as a study of the orders of indexicality operating in public spaces and not elsewhere, while his description of poker players in Encounters can be read as a study of the orders of indexicality valid in places such as the poker rooms of Atlantic City or Las Vegas (Goffman 1961). Howard Becker’s (1963) Outsiders—jazz musicians and marihuana users—also organize their behavior and the criteria for evaluating behavior determining different degrees of membership in their “deviant” community, within the clearly demarcated timespace configurations of the 1940s–1950s American-metropolitan jazz clubs. Studies of doctor-patient interaction show that these are also typically set in the highly specific, regimented, and asymmetrical timespace configurations of medical centers and consultation times therein (Cicourel 2002).¹

In such timespace configurations, Goffman situates specific actors enacting specific roles (poker players must be strangers and can never have met each other elsewhere; they gather just to play poker and do that competently), specific, relatively strict “rules of engagement,” and normative assumptions (focus on the game, play the game by its rules), as well as identity judgments (a “superb” poker player). Like Bourdieu and Passeron, Becker, and others, Goffman describes the indexical organization of specific chronotopes: the ways in which particular socially ratified behavior depends on timespace configurations, or more broadly, the ways in which specific forms of identity enactment are conditioned by the timespace configurations in which they occur. The “gatherings” described in Behavior in Public Places are such timespace configurations, and the specific modes of behavior Goffman describes and analyzes are the one...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Chronotopic Identities: On the Timespace Organization of Who We Are
• 2. “Whose Story?”: Narratives of Persecution, Flight, and Survival Told by the Children of Austrian Holocaust Survivors
• 3. Linguistic Landscape: Interpreting and Expanding Language Diversities
• 4. A Competence for Negotiating Diversity and Unpredictability in Global Contact Zones
• 5. The Strategic Use of Address Terms in Multilingual Interactions during Family Mealtimes
• 6. Everyday Encounters in the Marketplace: Translanguaging in the Super-Diverse City
• 7. (In)convenient Fictions: Ideologies of Multilingual Competence as Resource for Recognizability
• 8. Constructed Dialogue, Stance, and Ideological Diversity in Metalinguistic Discourse
• 9. Citizen Sociolinguistics: A New Media Methodology for Understanding Language and Social Life
• 10. Recasting Diversity in Language Education in Postcolonial, Late-Capitalist Societies
• 11. Diversity in School: Monolingual Ideologies versus Multilingual Practices
• Contributors
• Index