2.21.13 notes/ 2/28/13 definitions

recontextualization - 
entextualization - not repeating; making new information - taking pieces - used in another information - binders full of women
What does it do?

Grant proposal - making a case that the theme would fit within a conference

What do we do to make the words ours? And how do others "take" that? Agency - picking apart what it means for language being dialogic.

But who controls the message? (Communications/ Politics = controlling the message) - events become recontextualized

Chains of communication - can't just say "I am just quoting what he said" - powerful analytic concept. Meaning is constantly shaped.

interdiscursivity – Fairclough

-          students as customers

-          medical field – as customer – consumer need

-          discursive and social changes

Decontextualizatin – discourse or text that has no meaning outside of itself – schools do not embody knowledge

Freud

Science language accessible

Recontextualize – materials – lose/ gain

Language can be elitist – education (decontextualize) Latour “Black Box” – debates led up to E=MC 2; we don’t realize that

The god particle – has nothing to do with how we understand god

down stream – upstream (phrase comes from) – dipped back into to figure out new knowledge

How do we interrogate pieces of information? Especially ones that have been “entextualized” – gets you into cultural analysis/ broader social system.

Thibault – systems of disjunctions

Moving away from unity of language

multicentrality

heteroglossic

dialogism

p. 122 systems of disjunctions

power weeds out certain types of discourses – just because we don’t see it , doesn’t mean its there

It is hard to get in another discourse “in”

system keeps a lid on “multicentrality” – knows how to use certain words in use –

CMU - certain body of discourse (Donald Murray not welcome) – learning writing; culture – authoritative – cognitive is only way to go in terms of the writing process.

Controlling meaning – world acts as if there are certain meanings

Trajectory of meaning

9/11 – naturalized the appearance of new national security (logic – cause and effect dynamic)

bush – documents based on historical texts

Other texts – Cheney – superpower/global hegemony – certain documents deemed irrelevant

Recontextualizion /decontextualization and SCHOLARSHIP!!

Managing the meaning – Newtown – engage in a discourse about gun control NRA – its not abut the guns – its about mental illness etc. etc. 

Trying to cast “gun control” as “evil”

124;
“A critical intertextual analysis is a means of challenging the autonomous, objectlike

status of texts. It is more than merely positioning the text in its context of

situation. This would tend to fix or naturalize the text in terms of an allready given

social situation. Such a naturalizing function suggests a seamless, unproblematic

relation between a text and its context, masking the gaps, disjunctions, incoherencies,

and potential sites of intervention in texts and still wider intertextual formations.

Critical analysis aims to relate the text to the social meaning making practices

in and through which texts and their meanings are made, used, intervened

in, and changed. Texts are not autonomous objects among other spontaneously

arising objects. Instead, they are instantiations of the intertextual relations and

processes out of which they are made.”

9/11 – Vietnam or WWII “natural”- attack on our nation

text – data – places for texts to go in a different way: Opportunities

for example:                                                                                                   

May 4^th – temporal  relations (causal organization) –

How the Iraqi ambassador was marginalized

Bauman and Briggs

Poetics – a part of what we do as a society (reclaim it) NOT just ornamental

Move text from object of study  - performance

indexical meanings  - discourse is often a way of linking to

Performance – “specially marked artful way of speaking that sets up an interpretive frame in which the act of speaking is understood – reflexive/ invites reflection

“Performance, the enactment of the poetic function, is a highly reflexive mode of communication. As the concept of performance has been developed in linguistic anthropology, performance is seen as a specially marked, artful way of speaking that sets up or represents a special interpretive frame within which the act of speaking is to be understood. Performance puts the act of speaking on display-objectifies it, lifts it to a degree from its interactional setting and opens it to scrutiny by an audience. Performance heightens awareness of the act of speaking and licenses the audience to evaluate the skill and effectiveness of the performer's accomplishment. By its very nature, then, performance potentiates decontextualization”

vocal fry?

perform as teacher

protest – certain gestures – “mike check”- reflexive

Colbert/ Stewart – political satire

“Rather, performance studies are in the midst of a radical reformulation wherein "text," "context," and the distinction between them are being redefined. This shift is signaled grammatically in the addition of affixes that effectively move the emphasis from product to process and from conventional structures to agency as the terms "entextualization"a nd "contextualization"g ain currency. The remain-

68 BAUMAN & BRIGGS der of this section is devoted to a consideration of the move from "context" to "contextualization";w e discuss the transition from "text"”

68

can’t describe everything:

“Bau-man (30) expands the list to six elements, including the "context of meaning," "institutional context," "context of communicative system," "social base," "individual context," and "context of situation." All such definitions of context are overly inclusive, there being no way to know when an adequate range of contextual factors has been encompassed”

can’t be objective about what the context is

“They argue that communicative contexts are not dictated by the social and physical environment but emerge in negotiations between participants in social interactions. The ongoing contextualization process can be discerned by attending to the "contextualization cues" that signal which features of the settings are used by interactants in producing interpretive frameworks”

contextualization – context emerges IN THE COURSE of an interaction – process vs. physical features

Contextualization

Definition:
The concept of contextualization started with a group of scholars who believed that contexts are not pre-made and objective but rather created and shaped by language and text. One of the first scholars to define contextualization was John Gumperz. Gumperz (1982) defines contextualization in relation to discourse analysis as the process through which participants in a conversation “foreground or make relevant certain aspects of background knowledge and underplay others,” (p. 131). He emphasizes that contextualization is an activity conducted by speakers and hearers that “is not a static structure, but rather reflects a dynamic process which develops and changes as the participants interact” (p. 131). Therefore, there is never a single “context” that can be imposed on a whole set of data but rather multiple contexts that are created and shaped by participants during interaction. As researchers, we look for contextualization cues to help us define what the participants see as relevant to the context.

Contextulization cues:
A contextualization cue is “any feature of linguistic form that contributes to the signaling of contextual presuppositions” (p. 131). When participants understand each others’ contextual cues, then conversations go smoothly. However, when contextual cues are misunderstood, conversation does not run smoothly, and participants often label each other as rude, socially awkward, foreign, strange, etc (p. 132).

Context and Culture:
Bauman and Briggs (1990) discuss the shift from looking at a context to looking at contextualization as a process within the realm of performance studies. They also state that “communicative contexts are not dictated by the social and physical environment but emerge in negotiations between participants in social interactions” (p. 68). They argue that researchers are faced with multiple contexts and the best way to interpret a communicative event is to conduct an “agent-centered view of performance” (p. 69 ). Therefore, when studying cultural rituals and traditions, scholars can better grasp what these cultural practices mean to the people performing them.

Context and political rhetoric:
Murphy (2001) cites Bakhtin (1981) when referring to the analysis of political rhetoric, arguing that even the most classic pieces of public address still exist “not at a sacred distance or in an absolute past but rather within a zone of direct and even crude contact with all other discourses, past and present” (Murphy, 2001 , p. 48-49). Thus, rhetorical texts are contextualized by their intertextual relationships and “conversations” with other texts and discourses. As stated by Bakhtin (1981), “Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (p. 293).

De-contextulization and Re-contextualization:
One more issue must be addressed when discussing contextualization and that is the processes of de-contextualization and re-contextualization. Decontextualization occurs when language becomes separated from its “social and cultural contexts of production and reception” (Bauman & Briggs, 1990, p. 72). This often happens because words are entextualized, or transformed into texts, which can easily be lifted out of their original contexts. Of course, words cannot hang by themselves as an abstract entity without any context, and therefore, “decontextualization from one social context involves recontextualization in another,” (p. 74). Often, when words are recontextualized, they bring along with them parts of their old context(s) into their new ones (p. 75).

Urciuoli (2009) discusses how the words “culture” and “diversity” are de- and re-contextualized on different pages of a university’s website and how these uses compare with how students at the university use the words culture and diversity. Urciuoli (2009) finds that although these words are “invested with interpretive residues from prior usages and shape and classify succeeding usages in ways coherent with previous usage” (p. 23), their meaning is regarded as unchanged by participants who use them in different contexts.

Contextualization is a useful tool when trying to identify the appropriate context(s) behind a communicative event. Viewing context as a process rather than as a static noun gives power to the producers of the communication to create, maintain, and change what contextual factors are relevant to them.

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References
Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bauman, R. & Briggs, C. (1990). Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19, 59-88.

Gumperz, J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Murphy, J. (2001). History, culture, and political rhetoric. Rhetoric Review, 20(1/2), p. 46-50.

Urciuoli, B. (2009). Talking/not talking about race: The enregisterments of culture in higher education discourses. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 19(1), 21-39.

entextualization - creating a distractable unit (not transformation - but might not be a "moment")
Intertextual gap

2.28
Bauman and Briggs - poetics/ performance
through poetic performance - speech itself is put on display - attempt to gain reflexivity in terms of
presupposes the ability to decontextualize - objectify it.
leads to decontextualize - decenter - presupposes entextualization (not linear)
entextualization - take stream - make a discrete textual unit that can be lifted out and placed in another moment p. 73; text is discourse rendered decontextualized (not pure extraction)

how can you decontextualize if discourse is anchored in context - what loosens some types of discourse?
State of Union - speech pulled out of broader discursive exchange - speech "circulated " - can be studied later etc. Circulated in ways in situ discussions cannot be shared. Within the speech itself, certain parts may be pulled out.  (most recently - victims of gun violence getting a vote)

Entextualization is the ‘process of rendering a given instance of discourse as text, detachable from its local context’ (Silverstein and Urban, 1996: 21; see also Hanks 1989). This can be done through writing, but in cultures whose predominant mode of encoding knowledge is oral, people invest enormous effort and thought in rendering spoken words memorable and recuperable. Entextualization is a ubiquitous and continuous process, involving incessant efforts to make words stick, whether orally, in manuscript or in print. Text, then, is best seen as a process rather than as a body of finished products. In this sense, it seems safe ...