Bauman Briggs – Poetics and Performance

Importance points about power: 2/28

76
" The decontextualization and recontextualization of performed discourse
bear upon the political economy of texts (104, 148), texts and power.
Performance is a mode of social production (253); specific products include
texts, decentered discourse. To decontextualize and recontextualize a text is
thus an act of control, and in regard to the differential exercise of such control
the issue of social power arises"

77
"Control over decentering and recentering is part of the social framework and
as such is one of the processes by which texts are endowed with authority
(55), which in turn places formal and functional constraints on how they may
be further recentered: An authoritative text, by definition, is one that is
maximally protected from compromising transformation (18)." WE HAVE A DIFFICULT TIME CHANGING SOME TEXTS
___________________________________________________________

Bauman Briggs – Poetics and Performance as Critical perspective on language and social life.

59

“poetics”

60

move in scholarship: verbal art – social interaction between performers

“This reorientation fit nicely with growing concern among many linguists with indexical (as opposed to solely referential or symbolic) mean-ing, naturally occurring discourse, and the assumption that speech is heterogeneous and multifunctional.”

Anthropologists: “One dimension that particularly ex-cited many practitioners was the way performances move the use of heteroge-neous stylistic resources, context-sensitive meanings, and conflicting ideologies into a reflexive arena where they can be examined critically.”

many theories play into this  construction

assumptions that  of those who “connect with” and critique “poetics research”

-          assumptions: some take culturally and historically specific ideas about language - “elevate them to the level of purportedly objective and universally applicable theories.”

-          ethnocentricity of Western thinking

-          BUT “In the context of these broader questions, performance-based research shares some of the central goals of deconstruction (80), reader-response and reception theories (154, 244), hermeneutics (207), the "poetics and politics" of ethnographic texts (75), and cultural studies (71).”

“Performance rather provides a frame that invites critical reflection on communicative processes. A given performance is tied to a number of speech events that precede and succeed it (past performances, readings of texts, negotiations, rehearsals, gossip, reports, critiques, challenges, subsequent performances (and the like)…”

61

“An adequate analysis of a single performance thus requires sensitive ethnographic study of how its form and meaning index a broad range of discourse types, some of which are not framed as performance. Per-formance-based research can yield insights into diverse facets of language use and their interrelations. Because contrastive theories of speech and associated metaphysical assumptions embrace more than these discourse events alone, studying performance can open up a wider range of vantage points on how language can be structured and what roles it can play in social life.”

Makes me think about the  way in which we “spread” information – grant

“Performance-based study challenges dominant Western conceptions by prompting researchers to stress the cultural organization of communicative processes. Linguists, of course, have long discounted native speakers' views of language structure and use;”

“Presentations of "the native model" or "theory" generally overlook difficulties in deriving indigenous perspectives exclusively from the referen-tial content of elicited data. They tend also to ignore the fact that such factors as gender and social class frequently generate competing perspectives on language and social life. To make more reliable use of native speakers' meta-level discourse on language we must regard performers and audience members not simply as sources of data but as intellectual partners who can make substantial theoretical contributions to this discourse”

As researchers – deconstruct Western conceptions THEN explore alternative ways of viewing performance

“We attempt to provide a framework that will displace reified, object-centered notions of performativ-ity, text, and context-notions that presuppose the encompassment of each performance by a single, bounded social interaction. Heeding calls for greater attention to the dialectic between performance and its wider sociocultural and political-economic context, we stress the way poetic patterning extracts dis-course from particular speech events and explores its relationship to a divers-ity of social setting”

Decentering/ Recontextualizaiong

62

language is social action – frameworks

At issue – linguistic reductionism – one to one (“performative utterances” and illocutionary forces)

“This equation becomes painfully apparent in Austin's conclusion that since "primitive languages" lack "precision" (that is, referential delicacy), explicit performatives will also be absent; it will accord-ingly be impossible to make clear distinctions between illocutionary forces.”

“Discourse analysis argues that a wide range of formal features can signal the illocutionary forces of utterances, often apart from or in spite of their referential content. One of the most controversial claims is Bloch's (50) characterization of political rhetoric in "traditional” societies. He argues that oratorical style places great constraints on linguistic form, suppresses creativ-ity, and diminishes the importance of reference; this process of formalization nonetheless greatly enhances the ability of speakers to bring about a desired course of action}

63

According to B - Performativity “can be tied to a vast range of formal features and patterns”

formalization of speech practices – Mayan rituals

McDowell- efficacy-decreases accessibility – potential performers  and audiences

How are these per formative functions varied – how are formal functions transformed?

“Hill (135) has drawn on Bakhtin (18) and Volosinov (251) in arguing that code-switching can heighten attention to competing languages and varieties to such an extent that identities, social relations, and the constitution of the community itself become open to negotiation (cf 136)”

Similarly, drawing on Jakobson's work on parallelism (72, 151-153), a number of researchers have demonstrated the way parallelistic constructions at both micro and macro levels (230, 248a) can signal illocutionary force. Haviland (131) argues that the authority of elders in mediating conflict emerges from their ability to displace a cacophony of angry voices through use of the quintessential embodiment of Zinacanteco social and linguistic order-ritual couplets; a wealth of similar examples from eastern Indonesia is available in a recent volume edited by Fox (101).

Genre is huge here

64

“A shift in genre evokes constrastive communicative functions, participation structures, and modes of interpretation”.

“Similarly, pursuit of a particular interactive focus (teaching, exhorting, befriending, confronting, etc) general-ly involves negotiated changes of genre in which features of one genre are embedded within a token of another.”

“The illocutionary force of an utterance often emerges not simply from its placement within a particular genre and social setting but also from the indexical relations between the performance and other speech events that precede and succeed it (of which more below). The illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects of courtroomt estimony are highly dependent, for example, on evidentiary rules and broader semiotic frames that specify admissible types of relations to other bodies of written and oral discourse.”

“

This body of research has greatly enhanced our understanding of per-formativity by showing that illocutionary force is not simply a product of the referential content and/or syntactic structure of particular sentences. The formal properties of discourse, larger units of speech events, frames, keys, participation structures, and the like are not simply "felicity conditions" (13) or "preparatoryc onditions" (219) that activate self-contained performative utterances” Really making me think of these speech events.

65

Really interesting:

critique:

“First, the relationship between formal features and communicative func-tions has generally been treated as one of means to ends, such that form becomes meaningful insofar as it is connected with some type of content or function. Saussure (215), for example, idealized form as a meaningless plane of undifferentiated sound that is constituted as a set of signifiers arbitrarily related to units of referential content.”

Move to:

“But some speech communities regard sound itself as a primary locus of meaning. Feld (91, 92) suggests that the Kaluli reverse the explanatory arrow, viewing the patterning of linguistic and musi-cal sound as emanatingi conically from naturals ounds, particularlyb ird calls and waterfalls; here communicative functions and socially defined ends are derived from formal patterns, not vice versa. E. Basso (20) and Seeger (222) draw on South American data in arguing that musical dimensions of per-formances can shape linguistic patterning and social relations (see also 210, 238).

“While more research is needed in clarifying these issues, it is apparent that reifying form as a collection of empty containers waiting to receive small dollops of referential content or illocutionary force impoverishes our un-derstanding of performance and of communication”

“Second, Austin's suggestion that performance renders the performative force of utterances "hollow or void" cannot simply be inverted. Performance does not always connect discourse automatically and unimpeachably with particular illocutionary forces and perlocutionary effects. Keenan (156) and Briggs (65) have noted that performances can by their very nature call into question the performative efficacy of speech forms, thus leading to negotia-tion of the relationship between utterances and illocutionary forces”

66

“Briggs (63:328-31) argues that ritual speech can invoke a special form of signification in which the distinction between signifier and signified is itself collapsed. Bauman (26) and Hymes (142) have suggested that audience evaluation of the communicative competence of performers forms a crucial dimension of performance. Particularly in ritual and political discourse, this concern with form and function is often extended to assessments of how (and even if) formal patterning becomes imbued with functional significance”

This is fascinating:

“Finally, theories of performativity presuppose conceptions of the nature of language and social action. As Heidegger (133) has argued, Western theories of language and poetics in turn presuppose Western metaphysics; Derrida (84, 85) has attempted to expose these connections by deconstructing Western discourse. The performances of non-Western societies and marginalized sec-tors of Western industrialized nations provide illuminating settings for furthering this pursuit”

Rosaldo – social meaning dependent upon views of “personhood” – dialogical research

67

role of audience

Nevertheless, a number of recent studies suggest that scholars are moving away from a focus on context, as conceived in normative, conventional, and institutional terms. Blackburn's work on Tamil bow songs provides a case in point. In an article published in 1981, Blackburn noted that "the influence of oral context on narrative content" provided a "central focus of this essay" (47:208). Five years later, while similarly declaring that "Performance . . . is whatever happens to a text in context" (48:168), he went on to argue that the analysis of text remained central to the study of performance. By the time his monograph on bow songs appeared in 1988, Blackburn asserted that what is needed is a "text-centered approach to performance" that "starts with the narrative outside its enactment"

negotiating what text is …and how to define it.

Rather, performance studies are in the midst of a radical reformulation wherein "text," "context," and the distinction between them are being redefined

68

move from context to contextualization and

text to entextualization

“Malinowski distinguishes "the context of cultural reality . . . the material equipment, the activities, interests, moral and aesthetic values with which the words are correlated" (171:22) from the "context of situation" or "social context," the "purpose, aim and direction of the accompanying activities" (171:214). 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.” extended definition of context! Issues of inclusiveness

(not sure how this is so)

false objectivity – positive character of most definitions of context

researcher becomes a  ‘judge’ of what “merits inclusion”

Interactions vs. stable “contexts”

“ (researchers)and others in proposing a shift from context to contextualization. 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”

69

“patterned contextualization cues are highlighted in performance”

The shift in emphasis from context to contextualization suggests the reason performance analysis has become simultaneously more textually and more contextually focused in recent years. In order to avoid reifying "the context" it is necessary to study the textual details that illuminate the manner in which participants are collectively constructing the world around them. On the other hand, attempts to identify the meaning of texts, performances, or entire genres in terms of purely symbolic, context-free content disregard the multi-plicity of indexical connections that enable verbal art to transform, not simply reflect, social life

To claim that researchers must choose among analyses of poetic patterns, social interaction, or larger social and cultural contexts is to reify each of these elements and to forestall an adequate analysis of any.

The shift we identify here represents a major step towards achieving an agent-centered view of performance. Contextualization involves an active process of negotiation in which participants reflexively examine the discourse as it is emerging, embedding assessments of its structure and significance in the speech itself. Performers extend such assessments to include predictions about how the communicative competence, personal histories, and social identities of their interlocutors will shape the reception of what is said. Much research has focused on the way this meta-level process is incorporated into the textual form of performances, particularly in the case of narratives.

metanarration

“Meta-narration includes a host of elements that have, as Georges (107) argues, been marginalized, overlooked, and sometimes even deleted from transcripts, owing to their supposed irrelevance to the narrated events them-selves. As Bauman has argued (32), meta-narrative devices index not only features of the ongoing social interaction but also the structure and signifi-cance of the narrative and the way it is linked to other events”

(giant bee tree)

70

Reported speech

“Reported speech enables performers to increase stylistic and ideological heterogeneity by drawing on multiple speech events, voices, and points of view. As we show below, this decentering of the narrating event and of the narrator's voice opens up possibilities for renegotiating meanings and social relations beyond the parameters of the performance itself”

shift in analytic perspective allows – active role hearers play:

“This shift in analytic perspective has fostered awareness of the active role that hearers also play in performances. In conversational narratives, audience members are often accorded turns at talk, thus rendering narration coperfor-mance (83, 113). The backchannel of audience members shapes the structure and content of the performance as speakers assess the involvement and comprehension of their interlocutors (41, 63, 89, 111, 129, 131). C. Goodwin (113) argues that audiences are shaped by discourse in keeping with the differential involvement of members in what is said; the audience also plays a key role in assessing the significance of the talk.”

“Performance-audience interaction is clearly not shaped by overt signals alone; K. Basso (23) provides a striking analysis of the way that speakers can withhold overt contextualization cues, counting on culturally defined patterns of response to enable listeners to work out the bearing of the narrative on the current setting. Even when audience members say or do practically nothing at the time of the performance, their role becomes active when they serve as speakers in subsequent entextualizations of the topic at hand (e.g. in reports, challenges, refutations, enactments of consequences, and the like).”

Why this is all important:

“The movement from context to contextualization and related concerns thus enables us to recognize the sophisticated way that performers and audiences use poetic patterningi n interpretingt he structurea nd significance of theiro wn discourse. Researchers can accordingly ground their analysis in the partici-pants' interpretive efforts. This change in orientation has profound im-plications for fieldwork. It facilitates greater awareness of the dynamics of performance in the ethnographic encounter itself.”

71

ethnography  - participants react in certain ways in front of the researcher “Haring's pioneering analysis (127) of how his informants shaped what they told him to their conception of who he was, what he wanted, and what he should be told,”

“Such reflexive attention to contextualization in the ethnographic encounter significantly affected the very formulation of performance theory: Hymes's foundational distinction between the reporting of an artistic text and the performance of it rests on an analysis of shifting and negotiated frames of contextualization in his ethnographic work with his Chinookan consultants”

dialogic anthropology

-          “Paredes finds the literature on Greater Mexican (especially Texas-Mexican) society and culture to be riddled with interpretive inaccuracies that stem from the naively referential bias of positiv-ist ethnographic practice of asking people for facts and assuming they will provide straight answers.”

72

“There is thus a predisposition toward performance and other expressive framings of communication in the contextualization of dis-course within the ethnographic encounter, regardless of whether the question at hand is verbal art or kinship”

ENTEXTUALIZATION/ DECONTEXTUALIZATION

73

in past: work of contextualization has “established how performance is anchored in and inseparable from its context of use.”

Interesting:

“We will contrastively ask what it is that makes verbal art decenterable despite all these anchoring counterforces. What makes it susceptible to decontextualization? What factors loosen the ties between performed discourse and its context?”

“At the heart of the process of decentering discourse is the more fundamental process-entextualization. In simple terms, though it is far from simple, 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”

“Basic to the process of entextualization is the reflexive capacity of discourse, the capacity it shares with all systems of signification "to turn or bend back upon itself, to become an object to itself, to refer to itself' (15, 16). In Jakobsonian terms (151), with regard to language, this reflexive capacity is manifested most directly in the metalingual and poetic functions (174).”

performance:

“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”

74.

“They remind us that participants them-selves may be directly and strongly concerned with the social management of entextualization, decontextualization, and recontextualization (7a).”

“Beyond formal features, frame analysis (109), the phenomenological in-vestigation of the "worlds" created in performance (61, 254), studies of the interaction of verbal performance and accompanying media such as music, dance, and material objects (91, 179, 222, 239), analysis of the composition process (95-97, 108), and a range of other lines of inquiry illuminate the process of entextualization in performance.”

“Performance is clearly not the only mechanism of entextualization. Our claim, rather, is that performance as a frame intensifies entextualization. It is also important to recall that performance is a variable quality; its salience among the multiple functions and framings of a communicative act may vary along a continuum from sustained, full performance to a fleeting break-through into performance”

75

“For example, in performing a treasure tale popular among Spanish-speakers in northern New Mexico, Melaqulas Romero provides a summary of the tale, a performance of his parents' version, and several retellings based on other versions of the narrative. Such recenterings may also be simultaneous rather than serial. Mr. Romero thus presents a key scene in the treasure tale, a dialog between a sheepherder and his boss, as it was retold by the boss to another sheepherder, who in turn recounted it to two friends; Mr. Romero then recounts the way these two individuals presented the narrative to him (see 66).” This is cool

transformation -

Framing - that is, the metacommunicativem anagemento f the recontex-tualized text – also, rehearsal

Form - including formal means and structures from phonology, to grammar, to speech style, to larger structures of discourse such as generic packaging principles. Focus on this dimension of formal transformationfr om one context to another affords insights into the evolution of genres

Function -manifest, latent, and performative (perlocutionary and illocutionary device

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4. Indexical grounding “including deictic markers of person, spatial loca-tion, time, etc.”

5. Translation – “including both interlingual and intersemiotic translation (150). At issue here are the different semiotic capacities of different languages and different media (168).”

6. Emergent structure “as shaped by the process of recontextualization. Texts both shape and are shaped by the situational con-texts in which they are produced.”

“None of these factors is a social or cultural given, for each may be subject to negotiation as part of the process of entextualization, decentering, and recentering”

1. Acces – “depends on institutional structures, social definitions of eligibility, other mechanisms and standards of inclusion and exclusion”

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2. “The issue of legitimacy is one of being accorded the authority to appropriate a text such that your recentering of it counts as legitimate” (77) ???

“Cultural property rights, such as copyright, academic standards of plagiarism, and their counterparts in other cultures all regulate the exercise of legitimate power over performed discourse, as do such social mechanisms as ordination, initiation, or apprenticeship”

3. Competence

“the knowledge and ability to carry out the decontextual-ization and recontextualization of performed discourse successfully and appropriately, may be locally conceived of as innate human capacity, learned skill, special gift, a correlate of one's position in the life cycle, and so on “

4. Value – status of a text

“Finally, values organize the relative status of texts and their uses into a hierarchy of preference. Texts may be valued because of what you can use them for, what you can get for them, or for their indexical reference to desired qualities or states Bourdieu's cultural capital”

Control over decentering and recentering is part of the social framework and as such is one of the processes by which texts are endowed with authority (55), which in turn places formal and functional constraints on how they may be further recentered: An authoritative text, by definition, is one that is maximally protected from compromising transformation (18).

78

“A given folktale performance, for example, may be traced through connected processes of decentering and recentering in local oral tradition, in the nationalization of culture as it is appropriated by learned elites in the service of nationalisti deology, or in the internationalizationo f culture as it is held up to view as part of world literature” Sure

dialogism

79

“The third major section of our review offers in preliminary outline a framework we believe will help to overcome the limitations we have enumer-ated. Building upon the accumulated insights of past performance analysis, the investigation of the interrelated processes of entextualization, de-contextualization( decentering), and recontextualization( recentering)o pens a way toward constructing histories of performance; toward illuminating the larger systemic structures in which performances play a constitutive role; and toward linking performances with other modes of language use as per-formances are decentered and recentered both within and across speech events-referred to, cited, evaluated, reported, looked back upon, replayed, and otherwise transformed in the production and reproduction of social life.”