Just as scholars might directly quote, or paraphrase, the words of Shakespeare into their own work—as Erving Goffman (1959) does in developing his theory of dramaturgy, or Jacques Derrida (1994) in his work on Marx—social actors routinely “cite” cultural commodities in everyday life. In fact, Shakespeare’s words and works have themselves become cultural commodities circulating in the marketplace, purchased and cited by consumers seeking to valorize the situation into which they are recontextualized. The exchange value (Marx 1967) of such a cultural commodity derives not only from its function in delivering another value, such as “literary value,” into the new situational context, but also from its use as a citational resource for the identity construction of the subjects involved.
As Mikhail Bakhtin and his associates argued, the words of others—as meaningful signs which pre-exist their users—are continually incorporated into the utterances of the self (Vološinov 1986). For the Bakhtin Circle, the subject necessarily takes an evaluative stance toward these “words of the other,” as they are configured into particular syntactical formations within the utterances of self. Subjects can “report on” the words of co-present or distant others with approval or disdain, taking evaluative stances toward their implied cultural values. For V. N. Vološinov, “reported speech” is “speech about speech” (115; italics in the original), as in the case of a direct quote or a paraphrase of the words of others. However, in a more general sense, the very selection of particular words of others, in order to formulate one’s own utterances, is already a kind of reported speech—in that subjects make evaluative choices regarding which words of others to “report upon.” The words of others come to subjects with historically sedimented meanings and values, available as resources to incorporate into their own evaluative utterances.
This process can be seen as a kind of citational practice, where selected words of others are “cited,” or “grafted” (Derrida 1988, 12), into the reporting utterances of the self. Bakhtin and his colleagues argued that every material, syntactically configured utterance issued by a subject not only enacts a relationship with others, but a relationship between the values of self and those of others (Vološinov 1976; Holquist 2004; MacCannell 1985). The citation of the words and images of the other thus involves a continual re-negotiation of social values in everyday life. Given that language has itself increasingly become a “cultural” commodity within post-industrial economies—distributed in formats such as television shows, websites, films, or books—the commodified words of others can be reported upon, and evaluated, when re-cited by the subject.
In this book, the contributions of the Bakhtin Circle on reported speech are moved into a framework of “performative citationality,” as developed through the work of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler (see Derrida 1988; Butler 1993, 12; Nakassis 2012, 635). Using the work of the Bakhtin Circle, Butler’s formulation regarding the performative citationality of gender is extended to the performative citationality of value—especially the re-citation of exchange value in everyday life. The first section of this book develops the theoretical frame which will be used. The second section applies the theoretical frame to the description of the contemporary U.S. cultural economy, while the third section applies the frame to its critique.
Jacques Derrida (1988) famously argued, in his discussion of John Austin’s work on linguistic performatives, that any “mark” must be recognizable across social contexts in order to be meaningful—and thus is inherently separable from the intentionality of any particular subject. For Derrida, words or gestures, although uniquely singular in context, must also be repeatable and recognizable across contexts in order to have social meaning. He calls this unresolvable tension, between the singularity and repeatability of language, the “iterability” of language (7; 10).
Another way Derrida says this is that language must be “citable” across social contexts—spatially and temporally separable from the “presence” of the intentional subject who first utters or writes the words. Meaning must be abstractable from a situated use by an individual subject, and thus is beyond the intentional control of that subject. Words can be re-cited and re-interpreted by audiences in ways never intended by subjects. Thus, meaning can never be finally fixed, and is endlessly deferrable into unknown future contexts. In Derrida’s terms, meaning is never quite “present,” as assumed in the tradition of Western metaphysics (Derrida 1973; 1981). Derrida considers this insight to be applicable to any meaningful identity, including the social identity of subjects. Because any identity must be repeatable across contexts in order to be socially meaningful, it cannot be “identical” with itself across those differing spatial and temporal contexts.
Judith Butler extended this argument in her work on gendered identity. In Gender Trouble (1999), Butler argued that the social identity category of “gender” must be continually re-performed across situations in order to remain normative and socially meaningful. For Butler, this means that “gender” must be re-cited across situated contexts, as a kind of cultural script which must be continually recontextualized and re-performed in social interaction in order to remain normative. In her following works (1993; 1997), Butler increasingly incorporated Derrida’s notions of iterability and citationality into her performativity theory (Kirby 2006, 87; Lloyd 2007, 115; Hollywood 2002; 95). This theoretical move brought an increased emphasis on Derrida’s critique of the “presence” of meaning and identity. In addition, Butler reworked a term from Louis Althusser in arguing that gendered identity does not pre-exist language use, but rather is interpellated from situated re-citational practices (1997, 27). The “performative citationality” of gender means that the re-citation of this identity category in everyday life, to a greater or lesser extent, re-imposes its normative boundaries upon social action.
The thesis of this book is that just as in the case of gender, any “value” must be continually re-cited in order to remain meaningful and normative. Subcultural values are performative in that they are continually re-enacted—and thus re-emerge—through everyday citational practices. In this sense, it is less that pre-existing subcultural communities “hold” particular values, and more that patterns of social behavior lead to the re-interpellation of particular social identities, which are “grafted” with particular values. From this perspective, the values of subcultural communities do not reflect a pre-existing group consciousness, but rather are re-cited and re-emergent in situated linguistic practice.
A theory which emphasizes the performativity of value differs from a “representationalist” perspective, which assumes that language merely describes the pre-existing cultural values of individuals or groups, or that the exchange value of commodities pre-exists everyday economic transactions. In contrast to the representationalist perspective, the “performativity of value” suggests that subcultural values and exchange value only re-emerge from citational practices. It is also argued in the book that the performativity of value generally occurs in the manner described by the Bakhtin Circle—in material, syntactical configurations where subjects continually re-make their stances toward normative value domains. However, the work of the Bakhtin Circle, which greatly emphasized linguistic utterances, is extended to more generally include other types of social action involving material forms.
This book particularly explores the process of the re-citation of economic or exchange value by subjects. The “performativity” of exchange value refers to the idea that exchange value does not represent the pre-existing market value of meaningful material forms, but rather that—like any identity, value, or meaning—it is re-cited through situated practice in everyday life. In the sense that the “performative” brings into being that which it appears to merely represent, the re-citation of exchange value continually re-enacts the U.S. cultural economy.
In this cultural economy, where language itself has increasingly become a commodity in the syntactical forms of television shows, films, or Internet sites, exchange value is re-cited as subjects continually re-position themselves relative to those material forms. Exchange value is thus re-generated through re-citational practices, as cultural commodities are continually re-grafted into the utterances or behavioral practices of subjects. Corporations produce marketable material forms, or “institutional utterances,” which are distributed to subjects for the construction of their individual identities. These citational resources allow consumers to align their individual identities with those of particular subcultural reference groups. Indeed, Miranda Joseph (2002) has argued that the very notion of “community” is complicit with capitalism’s efforts to market different products to different identity groups, presumed to hold a variety of subcultural values.
Exchange value is thus performative in the sense that it is continually re-cited and re-produced in everyday life, as social actors use institutionally produced citational resources to construct social identities, and to negotiate social values with others. This book further asserts, agreeing with the argument of John Guillory (1993), that exchange value has become the hegemonic value in contemporary U.S. culture, relative to all other cultural values (323). In other words, exchange value has now grafted itself onto all other types of value in such a way that virtually no “value” can be signified today without a consideration of the worth of the material signifier in “representing” those values.
In addition, the theory of performative citationality as developed by Butler suggests a space for the critique of this consumer economy, dominated by the hegemony of exchange value. If, following Derrida, the identity of any individual or community is not entirely “present,” then neither are the values which are normatively affiliated with that identity. Those political, moral, or ethnic values which are typically associated with particular social identities are also unstable. In this sense, the very necessity of the continual re-citation of exchange value suggests that there can never be—in the language of the Frankfurt School—a system of “total reification” (see Rose 1978; Buck-Morss 1979; Jay 1973).
As Butler shows in the case of gender, while the re-citation of social identity categories may reproduce existing social inequalities, it simultaneously opens the possibility for the resistance of normative identities and values in future recontextualizations. Butler thus argues that the “citationality” of gender means that while particular gendered performances are required by power, the very fact that they must be re-cited in order to remain normative opens a space for their alteration. In this Derridean sense, the meaning of gender categorizations are unstable, given that they are necessarily altered through their repetition in differing situational contexts.
This book suggests that this insight can be applied in a similar way to the re-citation of both subcultural values, and exchange value—and in this way develop a poststructuralist critique of the commodification of language in the United States. As meaningful social categories, all “values”—including exchange value—are necessarily altered through their performative re-citation. The utterances of subjects, in syntactical configurations with the commodified words of others, can thus either “re-site,” or resist, normative values.
A constellation of theorists—Bakhtin, Derrida, Butler, Mead, Goffman, Adorno, Benjamin, and others—are used in developing the thesis of this book. The book attempts to bring together the contributions of each of these major theorists, along with some relevant secondary literatures, to show how contemporary social identity is constructed through the re-citation of cultural commodities, and how this process re-cites the system of exchange value in the contemporary U.S. cultural economy. It may be worthwhile then, for clarification, to quickly summarize how the thesis advanced in this book is positioned relative to the ideas of the major theorists used, and how their work is extended as the argument is developed.
The book incorporates a number of key insights from the work of the Bakhtin Circle. In utterances, subjects wrap their words around the words of others in syntactical formations, thereby enacting a particular stance toward the values of others. For Bakhtin and his associates, the materiality of the utterance becomes the site of value negotiation between self and others. The book expands on this formulation in a number of ways.
First, subject not only respond to the words—and implied subcultural values—of others, but also respond to their commodified words. In their utterances, then, subjects also take a stand toward the exchange value frame itself. Subjects recite, or resist, the commodification of language—and the exchange value frame itself—to varying degrees, as enacted in their utterances. The material form of the cultural commodity—shaped by profit considerations—enters into the overall materiality of the subject’s utterance in a particular, syntactical configuration. In this sense, subjects not only “report on” the implied subcultural values of the words and images of others, but also take a stand relative to their material, commodified form.
Second, this focus on re-citation brings the Bakhtinian work on reported speech into a more contemporary theoretical frame—that of performative citationality. Subjects not only report upon the pre-existing identities and values of others, but continually re-cite and re-enact them. Social identities and values must be re-cited in order to remain meaningful and normative. In addition, the work of the Bakhtin Circle on linguistics is extended to the citation of other meaningful material forms, such as images, events, or social objects.
The Bakhtin Circle also emphasized—influenced by Einstein’s theory of relativity—that the referential contexts of both self and other were necessary to produce meaning (Holquist 2004, 20–21). The third way that the work of the Bakhtin Circle is extended in this book concerns how value is generated through the grafting of the referential contexts of self and other. In Derrida’s sense, the exchange value of a meaningful material form is generated not through the intentionality of its producer, but as it crosses from the referential context of the other to that of the subject. The material configuration of the utterance grafts together, while re-differentiating, the subcultural perspectives of self and others. Like a quote, the cultural commodity brings together at least two referential contexts, while simultaneously re-enacting the differences between them. Indeed, the term “exchange value” already suggests travel across contexts.
Fourth, the work of the Bakhtin Circle is extended to include institutional utterances. Corporations “report” the images and words of others to the subject in the syntactical forms of television shows, films, websites, books, and other cultural commodities. The words and works of artists, writers, photographers, and others are appropriated by economic institutions, and marketed to consumers as citational resources for individual identity construction.
In chapters three, four, and five, these extensions of the Bakhtinian approach are used to describe the contemporary functioning of the U.S. cultural economy. In the sixth chapter, an additional theoretical move is made in order to criticize this version of the “performativity of exchange value.” Specifically, the Derridean critique of presence is added to this formulation. As subjects cite the words of others in their own utterances, the normative assumption is that value becomes “present” as the subject experiences the words and images of others. However, as Butler’s work on recontextualization suggests, such a re-citation of the words and images of others does not result in the stable presence of exchange value; rather, exchange value is never quite “present.” In fact, this instability of exchange value is today revealed in the difficulties experienced by corporations in measuring the value of their brands (Muniesa 2011; Adkins and Lury 2011; Moor and Lury 2011).
The book incorporates Derrida’s critique of “presence,” as well as his insights regarding the iterability of meaning. His work is extended in this book in a number of ways. First, Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence in Western philosophy and culture is extended to a critique of the temporality of value in the U.S. economy. For example, chapter three ends with a Derridean critique of the presence of subcultural values, and chapter six develops a critique of the presence of exchange value in the contemporary cultural economy. Although subcultural values, and exchange value, are considered to be “present” in cultural commodities—and in the experiences they deliver to the subject—the iterable nature of language means that value is never quite “present.”
Second, Derrida’s work on the iterability of meaning is extended to a thesis regarding the iterability of value. Like any meaning, the “meaning of value” is continually deferred. Just as Derrida reveals the necessary instability of any meaning as its material form crosses contexts, so the meanings of language-commodities cannot “represent” stable subcultural values, nor stable exchange values.
Third, these Derridean insights are used to criticize the central ideology of the contemporary cultural economy—that the commodification of language generates the presence of exchange value, which is “experienced” by consumers. Inasmuch as contemporary marketers and academic theorists speak of an increasing tendency toward the “co-creation” of value by consumers, their approach often re-cites the ideology fundamental to both Western metaphysics and contemporary capitalism—that value becomes “present” through product development and marketing.
Fourth, Derrida’s work on the “aporia” of the promise—that what is promised can never actually be fulfilled (Caputo 1997)—is extended to the promise of value. In a performative sense, it is the claim or promise of the presence of value which is re-cited in consumer practices in everyday life—as opposed to its actual presence. Advertisements continually promise valorized experiences for Cartesian subjects, and consumers re-cite such promises in identity construction. As Haug (1986) has argued, the promises of advertising are betrayed when the commodity fails to fulfill these expectations, and their promised value never becomes present. Of course, whether ideological or not, in practice investors make real money on the temporary stabilization of the “value” of language—just as the temporary stabilization of meaning in everyday life enables communication. While Derrida’s notion of citationality may allow for the theoretical critique of the presence of exchange value—and may even help explain the unpredictability of an economy based on the commodification of language—in everyday economic practice the cultural assumptions regarding presence largely go unquestioned.
Fifth, Derrida’s critique of the Cartesian subject of Western metaphysics is extended to the “experiencing” subject who consumes the words and images of others. Both the Cartesian and the capitalist versions of subjectivity are together interpellated from today’s commodified cultural forms. The ideology of presence governing Cartesian subjectivity thus comfortably co-exists with the presence of exchange value in the cultural economy. The commodification of language extends the reach of both the Cartesian and exchange value frames, as it re-cites the temporality of presence. Alternately, the research of linguistic anthropologists in non-Western cultures shows that a different conception of subjectivity emerges from alternate linguistic forms (Strauss 1989).
To illustrate how capitalist and Cartesian subjectivities have developed together in Western culture, the example of tourism is used in the book. The commodification of visual experience has historically reinforced both of these types of subjectivity. In tourism, commodified objects and images of the other are subject to the “gaze” of experiencing, consuming subjects (see Foucault 1965; 1994; Mulvey 1989; Dworkin 1989), as they travel to exotic “sights/sites/cites.” The tourism model is also extended to consider contemporary citational technologies which allow for mediated forms of “travel,” such as television, film, and the Internet.
Finally, Derrida’s notion regarding the anticipation of an unknown future is extended in the development of a critique of the calculative orientation toward the future as found in contemporary investment and marketing practices. As marketers and product designers attempt to co-create value, they anticipate and shape how language will be commodified—in order to distribute citational resources with market value in the future. As Callon (1998a) shows, a market-based economy requires a particular type of agency—that of calculative agents who are able to anticipate and predict the behavior of other actors relative to economic contracts. In contrast to this type of calculative “anticipation” of the future—that is, a continued unfolding of the ideology of presence—Derrida (2007) argues that a real “future” requires an anticipation of, and a kind of hesitant eagerness for, the unknown.
This book adopts Butler’s central insight that social identity categories, and relations between identities, must be re-cited in order to remain normative. This insight not only explains the persistence of normative identities and values, but also opens a space for their potential alteration. In addition, the book adopts Butler’s reworking of the Althusserian notion of interpellation to show how identities do not pre-exist utterances, but are actually retroactively constructed from them.
Butler’s work on the performative citationality of identity is extended in the book to the performative citationality of value—both of subcultural values, as well as exchange value. Bringing in the work of the Bakhtin Circle, we can see that subcultural values are re-cited as the material utterances of the subject re-align individual identity with that of larger valuing communities. The material utterances of subjects necessarily “take a stand” relative to the interpellated values of particular “imagined communities” (see Anderson 1991). Thus, the process of interpellation involves the ongoing re-construction of social identities, which normatively align with the values of particular groups. The re-citation of subcultural affiliation also re-cites the exchange value frame, as citational resources are assigned an exchange value in their functional effectiveness of representing these other “non-economic” cultural values.
Butler used the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, as well as Derrida’s work, in the development of her theory of performative citationality. A second way in which this book extends the ideas of Butler is through the incorporation of the work of the social psychology of the Bakhtin Circle and of George H. Mead, rather than the psychoanalytic framework of Lacan. The theoretical perspectives of Bakhtin and Mead allow for a more sociological development of a theory of socialization oriented toward childhood citational practices. Incorporating their theories of the self into a framework of citationality, the process of “learning to value” is explored. Along with some work in linguistic anthropology, Butler’s notion of re-citation is used to consider how children learn to re-cite important subcultural values, as well as the exchange value frame. In doing so, the book re-envisions the field of social psychology within a theory of performative citationality, and emphasizes the emergent nature of values through situated behavioral practice. The use of Mead also underscores the point that citational practices can be anticipated and rehearsed, as part of the sedimented history of normative performances.
A third way that the work of Butler is extended regards the thesis that the (cultural) economy is itself re-performed through the re-citational process. Michel Callon (2007) has suggested that the formulas of economists, as used by investors, shape the nature of the economy itself. In other words, economic formulas which purport to merely describe economic conditions actually contribute to their emergence. In addition, the work of marketers becomes performative of the economy, as these agents of institutions appropriate subcultural values in the design and marketing of their brands (Lury 2004, 8). This book extends these arguments to suggest that the citational practices of consumers are also performative of value—particularly in those sectors of the U.S. economy involved in the commodification of culture (see Nakassis 2012). The re-citation of the commodified words and images of others, as individuals align their identities with those of subcultural groups, re-generates demand in the market and thus “re-performs” the cultural economy.
Fourth, while Butler’s work is used in the second section of the book to describe the contemporary functioning of the U.S. cultural economy, in the third section it is used to develop a poststructural critique of the commodification of language—and thus explore the possibilities of resistance to the re-citation of the exchange value frame. As the Bakhtin Circle argues, every utterance—which reports on or re-cites the words of others—necessarily takes a stance toward their implied values. This position aligns with Butler’s notion that recontextualization involves a space for the resistance of normative values, given that each utterance “re-takes” a stance toward normative identities and values.
Finally, Butler’s work is extended to more strongly emphasize the materiality of language—consistent with the Bakhtin Circle’s focus on the material, syntactical configurations of utterances. One important issue in the literature concerns whether Butler’s formulation of performativity theory neglects issues of social class and political economy (Boucher 2008). This book argues for the continuing importance of class and material conditions to a theory of performativity, and attempts to show how a theory of the performativity of value might address some of the issues involved.
The thesis developed in this book argues that it is the materiality of language which both—using Butler’s terms—“enables” and “constrains” everyday social interaction (1997, 16). The materiality of institutional utterances, driven by the marketability of language, particularly constrains social action and contributes to the reproduction of inequality. Material resources used in the process of everyday identity construction are unequally distributed, as are the differential rewards received in society for the use of various class-based citational “styles” (Bourdieu 1984). In this way, the materiality of language, as cultural commodity, constrains social opportunities—as mediated through normative citational practices and identity categories. On the other hand, the materiality of language also enables utterances to “play against” the constraints of normative material conditions.
Derrida’s notion of iterability suggests that while a meaningful “mark” must be recognizable across situations, it is not identical with itself across those situations. While Derrida sees the repeatability of the mark as a structural and inherent feature of the mark, Butler wants to shift the focus to a social iterability—emphasizing the historical “sedimentation” of repetitions (1997, 145; 152). It is precisely an emphasis on the materiality of language which enables such a theoretical move. Normative re-citational practices enable the persistence of material, “institutionalized” social environments within which everyday citational practices occur. The citational practices of individuals both reproduce, as well as play against, these sedimented material environments. The meaningful materialities of social environments can be altered precisely because they cannot be identical across re-citational instances—even while materiality has to be recognizable across situations in order to remain meaningful.
The meaningful materiality of an utterance is always in tension with the interpretive context which emerges in part through it (see MacCannell 1985, 984–85; Hollywood 2002, 109; Kendon 1997)—as well as through the other meaningful materialities which typically accompany that utterance in a social situation. Because the mark differs from itself over repetitions, it also “differs” in its stance relative to the meaning of the situational context of which it is a part. In other words, when the materiality of the meaningful mark differs—to a greater or lesser extent—across situations, it carries the potential to disrupt the interpellated meaning of the overall material constellation into which it is grafted.
Thus, a repetition which signifies differently than expected can disrupt not only the meaning and value of that particular utterance, but also the normative interpretive context against which all of the materialities belonging to that situation are interpreted. In addition, the meaning and value of any or all of those associated materialities, in that social situation, are also potentially affected by the proximity of the “subversive” material form. Using Butler’s famous example, a gender parody performed in a nightclub—as an utterance which repeats “with a difference”—might not only draw into question the meaning and value of the gendered performance itself, but also draw into question the normative identities and values of the audience, of the workers in the establishment, or of the nightclub itself as a certain “type of place.”
For an utterance to have normative performative effect, the interpellated context which its materiality “calls forth” must align with that of the other meaningful materialities in the situation. However, as Butler has argued in a commentary on Bourdieu (2000), when a performance is misaligned with authorizing context, this does not mean that it fails to “work”; rather, it simply fails to “work” as expected or authorized. While a “deviant” performance may indeed be sanctioned by social authorities, or even appropriated within normative valuing frames, there is also the possibility—especially through repeated or widespread iterations of “frame-breaking” (see Goffman 1986, 493)—that the normative frame or valuing context is itself altered. Thus, an utterance whose materiality repeats “with a difference” may indeed “misfire,” but it may also lead to a change in the interpretation of the material constellation into which it enters.
Mead (1969) has shown the importance of language in the construction of the self, and revealed the ability of humans to anticipate the likely reactions of others to their considered actions. Mead’s work also shows the importance of significant symbols in this regard, and how social actors can share definitions of situations, social objects, and concepts—thus enabling the coordination of social action. As a theory of contemporary social identity formation, this book seeks to update Mead’s theory of self through the incorporation of contemporary work on the citational practices of social actors.
Research in linguistic anthropology has shown how “entextualized” strips of language—which have been materially prepared to “represent” particular cultural traditions (Bauman and Briggs 1990)—are ritually re-cited into new situational contexts. As children are socialized, they learn to recognize those entextualized forms which represent group values, as well as learn how to recontextualize those material forms in everyday social interactions. In Mead’s (1969) sense, children learn to anticipate the normative responses of others to their citational practices, and thus align their utterances with group expectations. In the contemporary U.S. cultural economy, children learn to value as adults prioritize particular cultural commodities within the home. “Values,” including exchange value, are reproduced over generations through normative re-citational practices. Mead’s work on significant symbols and role-taking is thus brought into the framework of performative citationality.
What Mead’s work restores to this framework is the notion that re-citational performances can be anticipated. While the poststructuralist tradition has been eager to move away from the notion of intentional subjectivity, it is clear that utterances can be rehearsed through internal conversations with self, and adjusted before actualized. Mead’s notion of meaning—as an anticipation of the behavioral practices of others (Joas 1997, 105)—can help to restore the notion of “anticipation” to poststructuralist theory, without re-locating “meaning” in a shared group consciousness which pre-exists behavioral practice. Rather, the moment of rehearsal or anticipation is itself part of the sedimentation of normative practices (see Schechner 1985). It is argued that while Mead’s more pragmatic notion of meaning helps his theory largely escape the Derridean critique of presence, some of his work on significant symbols is in need of revision along contemporary poststructuralist lines.
Mead’s notions of the “I” and the “me” phases of the self are retained within the theory of performative citationality developed in this book. The identity categories and subcultural affiliations interpellated from citational practices are the “me” of public social identity. While this identity is constraining, individuals always retain a freedom to actively respond, as “I,” within and against those constraints. As Butler has shown, the active re-citation of identity categories like gender necessarily dislocates the presence of social identity across spatial and temporal contexts—in Mead’s language, the singularity of the “I” always disrupts the stable repeatability of the “me.”
If, as Mead argued, we think of the “me” of the self in a language, then today we think of our identity through commodified language. In other words, the very language used to construct the self has increasingly become a commodity itself, with an exchange value. The “experiences” of self come to be ranked in an evaluative hierarchy as to their worth, and the “self” becomes an archive of purchased and valued experiences.
Goffman’s (1961) notion of role distance is an important concept in this book. For Goffman, the social actor experiences, and often communicates, a sense of dislike for roles that they may be forced to play. Goffman sees the self as a stylized combination of role-embracing, and role-distancing, behaviors (Goffman, in Lemert, and Branaman 2003, 90). In a performance, material props may be used to communicate one’s dissatisfaction with a role.
This concept is extended in the book to argue that citational resources are marketed precisely to enable consumers to play against, or distance one’s self from, normative roles, identities, and subcultural values—as alternatives are simultaneously embraced. As interpellated from material forms, identities and values of individuals align to varying degree with dominant cultural valuing domains. Social identities thus become a site where normative values are re-cited or challenged. Cultural commodities have an exchange value not only as they function to align the self with particular subcultural groups, but also as they distance the self from others.
Extending the work of Goffman on role distance into a performativity frame, the book thus considers how particular linguistic forms can acquire an exchange value as oppositional citational resources, designed precisely to “play against” dominant cultural values. In other words, given that social roles are affiliated with particular social values, the phenomenon of “role distancing” can be extended to the notion of “value distancing.” Resistance to normative roles occurs not only through deviant expressions of role distance—as in Goffman’s classic example of the acting out of older boys on a merry-go-round (97–98)—but also through consumption, or the citation of commodified cultural resources.
As Ferrell (1999) has shown in his work on “cultural criminology,” deviant behavior may also be considered as a stylized performance within a particular subculture, as a kind of deviant “aesthetics” (403–4; see also Ferrell and Sanders 1995; Hebdige 1996). In other words, there is an aesthetic to “delinquent” patterns of role-distancing (see Sherlock 2013), which builds a “linguistic market” (see Bourdieu 1991) for oppositional citational resources. Dissatisfaction with normative identities and values today occurs not only through law-breaking behaviors, but also through the citation of cultural commodities.
Even illicit drugs—as commodities designed to evoke alternative experiences and play against normative economic and political realities—acquire an exchange value in their function as oppositional citational resources. Like advertising generally, what is marketed as the drug experience is the promise of a valorized experience for a Cartesian subject. In other words, both normative and deviant citational resources can be assigned a market value, and re-cite the hegemonic “frame” of exchange value—even if they “play against” normative subcultural values. If, as Goffman (1986) suggests, “frames” organize social experience, then the exchange value “frame” organizes the commodification of both normative and deviant “experiences.”
The Frankfurt School generally, and Adorno and Benjamin specifically, saw the culture of late capitalism as nearly completely commodified. Their work, influenced by Lukács (Jay 1973, 174–75), attempted to develop a critical theory by which the reification of consciousness could be resisted. They saw the culture industry as leading not to the liberation predicted by Marx, but rather as an increasingly entrenched system which led to the regression of the critical capacities of citizens.
This focus on the “reification of consciousness” is shifted in this book into a poststructuralist frame, emphasizing situated behavioral practice. As Butler argues, the political economy responsible for the commodification of culture is itself continually sustained through re-citational practices. This requirement for re-citation opens up the space for political resistance. In particular, it is argued that aesthetic constellations of materiality have a potential for the disruption of the normative materiality of cultural commodities—from which normative identities and values are interpellated.
Adorno’s aesthetic theory, as interpreted by Christoph Menke (1998), becomes the basis for a critique of the commodification of language in the contemporary cultural economy, once moved into the frame of citationality. For Adorno, the materiality of art is seen as having the potential to generate an experience of “aesthetic negativity” (xi), and thus disrupt normative meanings. This book extends Adorno’s aesthetic theory by arguing that the materiality of art has the potential to unsettle known value frames, including that of exchange value.
For example, the work of Henry Louis Gates (1988) on the historical use of “Signifyin(g)” (46) within the African-American community shows how literary syntactical forms can disrupt normative meanings; in a similar way, literary utterances—or any aesthetic constellation—can unsettle normative values. Artists, art critics, or even participants in everyday dialogue may issue strips of language which, when recontextualized in particular situations, have the aesthetic effect of disrupting dominant values—as well as disrupting the social identities normatively associated with those values. In this way, even today’s “commodities” may have an aesthetic effect in unknown future material configurations.
Walter Benjamin’s work was particularly focused on the potential of modern citational technologies, especially film, to disrupt the normative exchange value system (see Buck-Morss 1983; 1979; Caygill 1998; Cadava 1997; Jay 1973). Benjamin argued that while modern technologies may indeed re-cite dominant values, they also have the potential to initiate political change. Cultural commodities may be re-cited in future material configurations with the aesthetic effect of disrupting known values, including exchange value. The social identities of subjects are made ambiguous when interpellated from aesthetically configured forms of unknown value.
The materiality of aesthetic configurations introduces an element of chance into the future (see Derrida 2007, 360–61)—as opposed to those citational practices of calculative actors who seek to secure the future for investment purposes. Even as institutions attempt to commodify language into a “closed future” framed by economic contracts, the re-citation of language into aesthetic configurations potentially reopens the future. A different, Derridean sense of “anticipation” emerges with aesthetic configurations. This involves a kind of eagerness for an unknown—rather than a calculable—future (see Derrida 1994).
In this book, the work of Adorno and Benjamin on aesthetics is aligned with a Derridean critique of the presence of exchange value. This book also aligns the work of the Frankfurt School with Butler’s notion of how re-citational practices can dislocate normative identities and values. In this constellation of theorists, art emerges as a kind of dissonant materiality—a repetition with a difference. By taking a resistant stance relative to the normative material configurations into which it enters, art disrupts the value contexts which normatively rule over those configurations. While the material form of the commodity tends toward the repetition of normative values, the exchange value of an aesthetically configured material form is less easily cited.
While several of the theoretical ideas, and some of the empirical research, used in the book originated in other countries, they are selected here inasmuch as they seem to illustrate aspects of contemporary U.S. culture. The central thesis of this book is limited to an analysis of the United States. In other words, the claim of the book is that research on other (mainly Western) cultures is relevant to the analysis of the United States—rather than that the thesis developed in this book is necessarily generalizable to other countries. Having said this, it does seem that many of the features of the contemporary U.S. cultural economy also describe contemporary trends in the United Kingdom. As Lury (2004) puts it, citing Marilyn Strathern, “Describing the societies in which we live is a general Euro-American project” (163).
The term cultural economy is meant to direct attention toward the cultural or symbolic dimension of today’s commodities, rather than their utilitarian functions—although it is true that the symbolic dimension of commodities cannot be strictly separated from their utility (Jhally 1987, 4–5). Haug (1986) has shown, in his work on commodity aesthetics, that manufactured goods like automobiles that are today marketed with symbolic language associating them with adventure or status. In fact, a celebrity’s signature on a branded piece of clothing, or an athlete’s endorsement of a pair of tennis shoes, usually multiplies the exchange value of that “object” many times over.
Clearly in these examples, the language or meaning associated with goods has currency in the cultural economy. For this reason, while this book focuses primarily on the marketing of words and images, social objects cannot be entirely excluded from the analysis; as Slater has noted, the strict dichotomy between the “materiality” of objects and the “immateriality” of signs has been a “dubious distinction that has plagued much social theory” (2003, 95). As mentioned, branded “objects” are certainly cited in the construction of contemporary social identity, and thus are included in the discussion of a “cultural” economy.
The term “cultural economy” is thus used as a kind of shorthand to refer to the marketing of images, events, status symbols, words, brands, and so forth—that is, the marketing of meaning in the contemporary U.S. economy. As Celia Lury has noted, the “symbolic or cultural aspects of material objects have come to take on a special importance and distinctive organization in contemporary Euro-American societies, so that consumer culture is said to be drenched in meaning” (1996, 226). While the phrase “commodification of language” is sometimes used instead of “cultural economy,” the book argues for the inclusion of images, events, and other social objects beyond the more narrow sense of “language.” Also, while it is true that cultural commodities serve other functions beyond that of identity construction, the thesis of the book focuses on how the commodification of language serves that function.
The term “syntactical,” as used in this book, refers to the material arrangement of the words of self and the words of others within an utterance. However, the term is not limited to the linguistic arrangement of words in a sentence, but more generally refers to how elements in any meaningful, material configuration are positioned relative to each other—as in how words in an advertisement are played off against its images. The more general term, “constellation,” refers to the material configuration of multiple meaningful forms. The term “syntactical” is not used to exclude semantics, or to favor form over content, but rather to emphasize the Bakhtinian argument that evaluative intonation is imparted through the way in which the speech of others is reported.
In this book, the term “identity” generally refers to what Mead (1969) called the “me” phase of the self. This social identity involves the categorization of an individual, by others, into culturally available identity categories. Subjects can internally anticipate such categorization by others through the role-taking process, and thus tentatively apply the category to themselves when considering various social actions. The broader term, “self,” is also used in Mead’s sense, as comprised of both the “I” and “me” phases. The “I” is the active response of the individual to the actual, or anticipated, imposition of social identity by others.
In this book, the term “exchange value” is used interchangeably with the term “market value,” or the worth of a meaningful material form in the U.S. cultural economy. It is retained from Marx in this book to particularly link with the work of the Frankfurt School, and their concern with the commodification of culture.
Given the contested nature of the authorship of some key works surrounding Mikhail Bakhtin and his colleagues, this general term is often used. The exception is when other researchers are cited who have chosen to grant authorship to Bakhtin himself. The term “Bakhtinian” is meant to describe the intellectual tradition of the entire group, regardless of the authorship of individual works.
This term “citation” refers to the positioning of a subject relative to meaningful materiality. Subjects take a stand relative to the values of others through the strategic positioning of self—whether reporting on their words in an utterance, or through sitting in the front row and applauding during a cultural event. The values of others are cited, or reported, by subjects in particular ways, as individual identities are aligned with those of subcultural groups. The term “citational utterances” refers to the syntactical, material formations which result as subjects report on the words and images of others in their own utterances. The term “citational resources” refers to the words and works of others which are culturally available for use in identity construction. As mentioned, this book is particularly concerned with the commodification of citational resources. The phrase “citational technologies” refers to the mechanisms by which citational resources are delivered to consumers. Today, language is moved across situational contexts via mobile phones, laptop computers, and other evolving technologies. These citational technologies, themselves part of the constellation of materiality in a social situation, deliver the materiality of language into particular situations with an “enabling constraint” (see Butler 1997, 16)—shaping and framing language as a commodity for use by the consuming individual.
The term “performativity” is used as an alternative to “representationalism.” In J.L. Austin’s (1975) sense, a performative utterance is one which brings a social phenomenon into being through language use, as opposed to merely describing a pre-existing phenomenon. When the term “performativity” is used by itself, it includes the metaphysical presupposition that the meaning and value of that which is “performed” actually becomes “present.” The term “performative citationality” is used to distinguish Butler’s version of performativity theory, which draws upon Derrida’s notions of iterability and citationality. The addition of the notion of “citationality” brings a critique of presence to performativity theory, and thus allows—within performativity theory—a space for a critique of the presence of value.
Constantine Nakassis (2012) uses the term “citational performativity” in an article showing how the “performativity” of brands depends on their citationality. That term is specifically used by Nakassis in a discussion of how for Celia Lury (2004), the “interface” of the brand allows for the formulation of a “feedback loop” between consumers and brand developers, which “links uniquely contextualized consumer enactments of brand identity to processes of brand design, manufacture, and marketing, and back again” (Nakassis 2012, 634). While the use of this related term, by Nakassis, refers specifically to Lury’s point regarding the re-appropriation of consumer “post-purchase” practices back into brand development, the alternate term used in this book—“performative citationality”—will especially emphasize two related, though distinct, points. The first point is that the re-citation of cultural commodities by consumers normatively re-cites the hegemonic frame of the exchange value system itself, as well as the cultural ideology of the “presence” of exchange value. The second point concerns how the iterability involved in this practice potentially leads to the destabilization of that hegemonic frame, and creates a space for an intervention in the ongoing commodification of language in U.S. culture. In fact, Nakassis uses the term “performative citationality” later in his article, when characterizing the work of Derrida and Butler (635).
It is also important to clarify that two versions of “performativity theory” are now emerging across several academic disciplines. One of the versions, which we can increasingly find in marketing research and theory, will be employed in section II of this book in order to describe the functioning of the U.S. cultural economy. This “Austinian” version of performativity theory shares some assumptions with the ideology prevalent in today’s marketplace, and with normative cultural practices—most notably, the metaphysical assumption that exchange value comes to be “present” when co-created by firms and consumers. The other version of performativity, as developed by Derrida and Butler, draws upon the notion of citationality in order to criticize this ideological assumption regarding identity and value; again, this version is distinguished by the use of the term “performative citationality.” The critique of the performativity of exchange value appears in section III of this book, which also draws upon the work of the Frankfurt School on the commodification of culture.
This book focuses on language as a commodity. This includes both the marketing of words, as well as the marketing of “language” in the broader sense—such as the distribution of images or branded objects. In Mead’s sense, this process involves the marketing of “significant symbols,” or shared meaning, inasmuch as this cultural dimension is perceived to “add value” to the merely utilitarian function of goods. It seems clear that as the U.S. economy has transitioned to a post-industrial economy, the “language-commodity” is traveling through its marketplace in an unprecedented way.
For example, we can see this trend when considering the increased number of websites, the rapid growth of the video game industry, or the development of new citational technologies to move words and images quickly across situational contexts. As Dean MacCannell (1976) has pointed out, increasingly in late capitalism it is meaningful “experiences” which are being marketed to consumers. In the U.S. cultural economy, the commodification of language generates exchange value through the delivery of such experiences. Finally, it should be noted that this book focuses specifically on how language-commodities are used in the identity construction process, rather than on other functions of language-commodities—such as how a purchased instruction manual is used to learn how to build or operate something.
The argument of this book regarding the materiality of language follows the lead of Jacques Derrida—that “materiality” is that which enables the recognition of social forms across contexts, and thus enables them to be meaningful. Language is “material” in the sense that written words or spoken sounds are able to be recognized by all users in differing contexts. For example, a hand-drawn or photographed image of a house is recognizable because shapes and visual forms can be meaningfully repeated.
Of course, the “modality” of material forms differ; as Louis Althusser once put it, “the material existence of the ideology in an apparatus and its practices does not have the same modality as the material existence of a paving-stone or a rifle” (1971, 166). Clearly, some re-enactments of meaning stay “materialized” for longer durations than others. As used in this book, the list of “material,” repeatable, and meaningful forms could thus include written marks, physical gestures, social objects, the sound of a voice, or digital images. Given the multiple modalities that material forms take, the term “meaningful materiality” will sometimes be used in this book to refer to not only spoken or written language, but also any materiality which bears a social or cultural meaning. In this sense, cultural commodities involve words or images in the form of websites, television shows, or other social forms which generally derive their economic value from the marketing of social meanings.
For Derrida, this suggests that the meaning-generating function of language is not tied to the subjective intentionality of users, or what subjects “intended to mean.” Rather, meaning results from the ability of materiality to be recognized as “the same” across situational contexts—in the sense that a word or image can mean the same thing across iterations to different people. As Derrida argues, meaning is possible because of this “citational” aspect of language. The repeatable, material form can be quoted or cited into different contexts, and continue to repeat its meaning—even in the absence of any particular user. Cultural commodities, like books or websites, can acquire recognized economic value because shared meanings are possible across contexts. In this repeatable, stable form, economic “value” can be co-produced by consumers, and measured by economists.
The emphasis in this book on the materiality of language allows us to incorporate Bakhtin’s view of language into a more poststructuralist frame, inasmuch as Bakhtin and his colleagues strongly emphasized the materiality of utterances. For the Bakhtin Circle, it was through the syntactical, material form of utterances where the values of subjects engaged with the values of others. Given that in the cultural economy subjects receive the words and images of others in an increasingly commodified form, the value negotiations between self and others increasingly occurs within—to use Butler’s term—the “enabling constraints” of the exchange value frame. Subjects are enabled to either reproduce, or resist, this constraining frame through utterances which continually take a stand relative to it.
In the contemporary marketing literature, there is an increased recognition that consumers “co-create value” along with firms (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004). In the advanced capitalist economies of post-industrial nations—like those of the United States and the United Kingdom—corporations and market researchers have increasingly become attentive to the lifestyles and subcultural values of consumers. They now actively solicit customer input into production, product design, and marketing processes. As cultural commodities routinely take the social forms of websites, books, films, or television shows, the appropriation of words and images from everyday life have become essential to the (co)production of economic value.
Both marketers and marketing researchers have begun to adopt some of the terminology of performativity theory, as they describe the process of the co-creation of value. Increasingly, consumer subcultural values are incorporated into products and brands, which are then marketed back to consumers for use in the identity construction process. Inasmuch as it helps us to understand these processes, this literature contributes to an understanding of the performativity of exchange value in the contemporary cultural economy.
A number of theoretical contributions have recognized that the fields of both economics and marketing have become performative of the economy itself. Callon’s (2007) work has shown that the formulas produced by economists themselves influence investment decisions, thus bringing about particular economic conditions. Others have argued that in today’s marketing practices, the appropriation of consumer values into the development of brands has become performative of their market value (Lury 2004, Arvidsson 2006; Nakassis 2012). As mentioned above, Constantine Nakassis notes that for Celia Lury, the brand acts as an “interface” between consumer and marketers; as consumption patterns change, marketers are then able to adjust features of the brand to sustain their desirability (Nakassis 2012, 625). Nakassis recognizes that it is precisely the “citational” aspect of the brand—that consumers re-cite its continually co-constructed meaning in various situated contexts—which enables it to be performative of market value (625).
These arguments regarding the “performativity” of the contemporary economy align with the thesis of this book. This book explores how the practices of consumers re-perform, as well as potentially resist, the exchange value frame. In developing a critique of the increasing commodification of language and the “presence” of exchange value, this book extends the thesis of the “performativity of exchange value” in a specifically Derridean direction. The metaphysical assumption regarding the “presence of exchange value” persists as the central ideology of the contemporary cultural economy. As mentioned above, Adorno’s work on aesthetics is also important in the development of a poststructuralist critique of the commodification of language, especially as his work is brought into a constellation with that of the Bakhtin Circle on the materiality of utterances.
Consumer demand for particular cultural commodities, normatively used as citational resources in the identity construction process, re-cites the cultural economy and the system of exchange value. The words and images of others, having been incorporated into the product development of cultural commodities, or integrated with branded goods, become citational resources for the utterances of subjects in everyday life. Subjects construct their individual identities as they both align themselves with, as well as distance themselves from, particular group identities and values. On the “consumption side,” then, consumer practices are re-performative of exchange value—as subjects continually re-generate demand for the citational resources provided by economic institutions.
Just as alterity is controlled politically through a kind of “reporting on” the speech of the subordinated (see de Certeau 1988; Inoue 2006), it is also controlled economically as institutions shape the “words of others” into marketable utterances. The commodified words and images of others are reduced to syntactically arranged “consumption experiences” for subjects, and assigned an economic worth. Language is thereby reduced to the “enabling constraints” of commodity form, which limits its possibilities for future recontextualizations. In other words, the citational resources used in self-construction today, and those citational resources left for future generations, are driven primarily by profit considerations based on the marketability of language.
In the United States, the process of commodification has been extended from the worth of manufactured goods in an industrial-based economy, to the marketing of meaning itself in the post-industrial economy. In such a cultural economy, every utterance potentially acquires an exchange value in the media market, as new technologies make language eminently “re-citable.” Those types of language-based commodities which bring the most profit, as indicated by measured patterns of consumer behavior, are those most likely to be re-produced or “re-uttered” by corporations. The economic system which—as a measuring apparatus (see Barad 2007)—assigns a market worth to commodities simultaneously shapes the material forms which those cultural commodities take.
As the U.S. economy becomes increasingly “cultural,” and meaning itself has become a commodity, the signification process has become central to capitalism—as well as to its critical analysis. Late capitalism involves the re-generation of exchange value through the continual re-commodification of language. While thinkers like Theodor Adorno saw how culture could itself become a commodity, this process has become even more accelerated and—with the increasing proliferation of the mass media—now includes the Internet as delivered on new citational technologies.
As social theory analyzes the production of economic and cultural value, then, it is necessary to move away from theories oriented toward the value of manufactured objects, toward a theory based in an analysis of the value of the meaningful “experiences” which commodified cultural forms now provide. Since commodities increasingly are language, the research and theories of semioticians, linguistic anthropologists, literary theorists, and others who work in areas dealing with the philosophy and rhetoric of language have become increasingly relevant to the sociological analysis of the U.S. cultural economy. This book attempts to contribute to the analysis of the nature of “value” in a cultural economy based on the copyrighting, marketing, and citation of commodified language—that is, the exchange value of words, images, events, and branded social objects. There is a gap in the field of sociology regarding a contemporary “theory of value” which seems to persist—despite the increased commodification of language in the U.S. economy, and despite the increased importance of cultural commodities for practices of identity construction today.
In this chapter, the theoretical framework to be used in the book is developed. The work of the Bakhtin Circle, on both the “utterance” and “reported speech,” is moved into the framework of performative citationality as developed by Judith Butler. Butler’s version of performativity theory builds on Jacques Derrida’s notion of iterability, and argues that identity categories must be re-cited in order to remain normative. While the Bakhtin Circle emphasized that values are negotiated in syntactical, material utterances, this insight is extended to argue that values must be re-negotiated and re-cited in order to remain normative. This formulation, developed in this chapter, will be used to explore the “performativity of subcultural values” in chapter three, and the “performativity of exchange value” in chapters four and five. In addition, Butler’s formulation regarding the re-citation of identity categories opens a space regarding the potential alteration of normative identity categories through their recontextualization. This insight is extended in chapter six, as a critique of the commodification of language is developed.
For the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, the concept of the “utterance” is central to the understanding of both self and social interaction (Holquist 2004, 59). Bakhtin argued that the “self” is constituted through the utterances of the subject, in interactive dialogues with others (see Gardiner 1992, 28). Through the choice of words to be included or excluded in the utterance, as well as through the manner of phrasing, particular relations with others are enacted and re-enacted in social interaction. For Bakhtin and his colleagues, relationships between self and others are thus continually re-negotiated through situated linguistic practices.
In their work, Bakhtin and his colleagues—the “Bakhtin Circle”—emphasized the responsive nature of the social utterances issued by self to an ongoing cultural dialogue (Holquist 2004, 60). Subjects respond to words received from others, which are part of the broader language system that precedes their birth. As Graham Allen (2000) points out, for Bakhtin, words are not only social in the sense that they establish relations with others when spoken, but also in the sense that they are signs drawn from a cultural linguistic system which pre-exists individual usage (21). Given that the values and attitudes of others differ from those of the self, the social utterances of subjects become a site of conflict or value negotiation between self and others (Holquist 2004, 37; 61; 65; Gardiner 1992, 28; Vološinov 1976, 103). For the Bakhtin Circle, the self is constructed as social actors enact an evaluative position or stance relative to the values of others, via utterances which both select, and respond to, particular “words of the other” in situated social encounters.
For the Bakhtin Circle, this process is clearly illustrated in the dialogical phenomenon of “reported speech.” Reported speech concerns the way in which the words of others are characterized in the subject’s own utterances, including the quotation and paraphrasing of their words (Vološinov 1986, 115). Generalizing beyond this concern with the direct or indirect reproduction of prior speech acts, it could be argued that the speech of subjects in everyday life always involves a kind of “reporting” on the words of others; indeed, the very selection of words into an utterance is already an evaluative choice. Words bearing historically negotiated meanings are thus, in everyday life, continually incorporated into the “authorial context” of the subject (Vološinov 1986, 116). To use a term from Jacques Derrida (see 1988, 12), the words of the other are “grafted” into the utterances of the self on an ongoing basis. Because of this, Vološinov suggests that the phenomenon of reported speech reveals a great deal about the variable relationships between self and others, such as their social statuses relative to each other.
The way in which the words of others are “reported” involves the representation and negotiation of values, and as such is a political matter. For example, the words of others might be distorted, reported upon in a mocking tone, or represented more neutrally; cultures and individuals vary in their use of particular syntactical forms to report, and “report on,” the words of others (Vološinov 1986). Vološinov argues that standard syntactical practices emerge within different languages as to the normative ways in which the words of others are to be reported. Such practices reflect underlying cultural ideas about the relationship between self and other. For example, the extent to which a culture recognizes the self as uniquely individual, or as an undistinguished member of a larger social group, will be reflected in the particular linguistic, syntactical forms of reported speech (see Strauss 1989; Lee 1993).
For Vološinov, reported speech involves not only the “external” way that the speech of the other is reported in social situations, but also concerns the “inner” speech of the self (1986, 118). The internal dialogue of the self involves an ongoing engagement by self with these “words of the other”—as a kind of internal “reporting” on them. In this sense, cultural forms regulating reported speech, which themselves carry assumptions about the relationships between self and other, also affect the nature of the internal dialogue of the self.
For the Bakhtin Circle, reporting practices involving politicized words not only enact relationships between specific individuals, but also enact the relationship between the self and more general social norms and values. Reported speech given by subjects in various situations not only “takes a stand” relative to the values of co-present others, but also assumes a stance relative to the norms and values of the society at large—what the Bakhtin Circle alternately termed the “hero,” the “superaddressee,” or the “third” (see Vološinov 1976, 103; Clark and Holquist 1984, 205; MacCannell 1985, 980; Holquist 2004, 38). These terms generally refer to the normative discourse of the larger culture, which serves as the often unverbalized backdrop of assumptions relative to the interaction between self and co-present “addressee” (see Clark and Holquist 1984, 207). Any particular utterance therefore has to mediate between the values of the subject and the normative discourse of the culture, as well as take a position relative to the values of co-present others in a particular situation. In other words, the “superaddressee”—or the “generalized other” in Mead’s (1969) sense—serves as the backdrop against which interactants politically negotiate social relationships.
After the self enacts a social position by reporting the words of others in various ways in “outer speech,” the utterances of the subject will then be received by others. Of course, these others who receive and reply to the utterances of self are not only those who are physically co-present, but—especially in an age enabling the mass distribution of language—may be quite spatially and temporally distant from the situation in which they were uttered by self. The social “contexts” into which the (reporting) utterances of the self will later be grafted are often beyond the anticipation and the control of the subject making these utterances (Derrida 1988)—just as the words chosen and used by the self in constructing their own utterances had slipped well beyond the intentionality of prior users. Thus, the chain of “reported speech events” might best be thought of not in terms of the intentionality of individual subjects, but rather as a process involving a continuing re-citation, and recontextualization, of the words of others across situations.
This insight provides an important connection between the work of the Bakhtin Circle, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler. To “report on” the words of others involves a process of quoting, paraphrasing—or even just using—those words within the utterances of the self, while taking an evaluative stance toward their implied values. The words of others are thus “cited” in a favorable or unfavorable way in particular situations. Just as the “identity” of an academic work is constructed through a series of citational references with which the author agrees or disagrees, the social identity of the subject is constructed through the incorporation and evaluation of the words of others into one’s own utterances—a process of citation. Butler’s work is particularly concerned with how gendered identity categories are continually re-cited across situated contexts.
In a Derridean sense, it is because words can be re-cited across situations that social meanings, and thereby social values, are possible (see Derrida 1988). Before discussing more fully how the work of the members of the Bakhtin Circle on reported speech can be incorporated into a theory of performative citationality, however, it is first important to recognize the insistence of Bakhtin and his colleagues on the materiality of the utterance—and thus the materiality of re-citational practices.
In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Vološinov (1986) emphasizes the importance of the materiality of the sign for human “experience.” Experience, he argues, occurs through material signs, and consciousness itself is constituted “only in the material embodiment of signs” (Vološinov 1986, 11, italics in the original). Vološinov also emphasizes that meaning cannot be separated from its material embodiment. He suggests that the meaningful materiality of empirical reality is not only the basis of shared cultural meaning, but also is the basis of the self’s “inner experience” (28). From this perspective, it is the meaningful materiality of the sign, as embodied in “objective” social forms, which is the basis for the formation of the self—as well as for the enactment of social relations between self and others. The values of self, relative to the values of others, are always constructed in an utterance in a syntactical form—that is, a particular material configuration of linguistic signs.
In this book, utterances will be considered as “material” in the sense expressed by Derrida in Limited Inc (1988), and in this way be linked to the position of the Bakhtin Circle. In that work, Derrida argues that every meaningful sign inherently must be able to function in the absence of any author or reader in order to be socially recognizable. Every sign, including those which represent social identities, carries the possibility of being removed from any particular context, and “grafted” or “cited” into a different context (1988, 7; 12)—a break from authorial context which is both spatial and temporal. For Derrida, the very nature of “understandability” already implies the temporal reproduction of linguistic forms from the past into the future, as well as across different spatial locations. This “iterability” means that every mark must be able to leave any context, and be insertable into any other context, if it is to be socially meaningful. Derrida thus describes “the possibility of disengagement and citational graft which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written” (12).
In this sense, materiality is that which is recognized as “the same” across situational contexts, and given (shared) meaning. Of course, the “modality” (Althusser 1971)—or what Bruno Latour calls the “mutability” (in Bolt 2004, 24)—of material forms differ. The list of potentially meaningful material forms could thus include written marks, physical gestures, social objects, the sound of a voice, or digital images. It is in this sense that this book will speak of the “materiality of language”—as a meaningful materiality which is recognizable across situational contexts. “Language” will thus be considered in its broadest sense, including not only words, but also including any culturally meaningful “materiality”—such as images or social objects. It is also in this sense that we will consider language as a material commodity, which—in contemporary syntactical forms such as television shows, websites, or films—can come to have a (meaningful) exchange value across situated contexts.
We can thus see an affinity between the notion of reported speech in the Bakhtin Circle, and Derrida’s notion of citational grafts. Both refer to the movement of meaningful materialities into another “context.” For Vološinov, reported speech involves moving the words of others into the utterances of self; for Derrida, citational grafting involves the possibility of a meaningful mark carrying its meaning into a new context, when quoted or cited into that context. Given that these meaningful materialities can themselves acquire an exchange value, as well as “represent” other subcultural values, we can see that individual and institutional utterances are a site for the negotiation of values within a culture. Bringing Derrida’s work on citationality and Bakhtin’s work on the utterance together, we might thus consider how the images, objects and words of the other become “citational resources” for subjects, who establish their own social identities via material utterances which take an evaluative stance toward those resources.
When the words or images of others are “cited,” the new syntactical arrangement socially positions the subject relative to cultural values, and—in Vološinov’s sense of “inner speech”—becomes the basis for the subjective “experiences” of the subject. These syntactical configurations of meaningful materialities “play off” values against each other. Such configurations would include not only the sequencing of words in an utterance, but would also include the arrangement of words and images in a magazine advertisement, or the use of images and sounds together on a website. These material, syntactical arrangements not only provide citational resources for the construction of the self, but are themselves more or less marketable as the (material) basis of cultural experiences for others.
If, in a Derridean sense, the “identity” of meaningful marks can only occur through their repeatability across contexts, then the identity of such signs must be a function of the spatial and temporal differentiation of contexts. If identifiable meaning thus involves both the material grafting of marks into new contexts, as well as the differentiation of those contexts, an interesting question emerges as to whether it is more accurate to say—in Derrida’s sense—that words have meaning “across contexts,” or rather that meaning emerges as contexts are both grafted together, and (re-)differentiated, in syntactically arranged material signs. In addition, it might be worthwhile to remember here that for the Bakhtin Circle, the context against which an utterance makes sense is itself enacted through the utterance (MacCannell 1985, 984–85)—rather than pre-existing it. In this sense, the very presence of what appear to be autonomous and separable valuing contexts, which pre-exist their citation, is actually the result of particular syntactical arrangements of meaningful materialities (see Barad 2007).
This grafting of contexts occurs through socially meaningful material forms, which simultaneously cite more than one (referential) context—as in the case of reported speech, where the values of both self and other are grafted together. It is through the material form of utterances that subcultural values, such as religious or political values, are continually re-differentiated and re-negotiated. It is argued in this book that unequal social relations and hegemonic social values, including the system of exchange value, are re-cited or resisted through the ongoing syntactical grafting of meaningful material forms—in both institutional and individual utterances.
Bakhtin, influenced by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, argued that the meaning of social identity—like all meaning—requires two referential contexts (Holquist 2004, 20–21). The self, for the Bakhtin Circle, requires the other in order for this meaning to emerge. It is through the materiality of signs that the self cites the words of the other into its own unique utterance, thus bringing together—yet differentiating—these two referential contexts of self and other. The self encounters the “words of the other,” in their materiality, and weaves them into its own responses. In this sense, the self emerges as “intertextual” (see Allen 2006), and constructed from an ongoing dialogue with others. The referential contexts of others are thus “grafted” with the referential context of self. As suggested above, the assertion that “meaning crosses contexts”—and as such is abstractable and repeatable—somewhat obscures the materiality of the grafting process, inasmuch as it is the form of the material sign which shapes how particular contexts are both united and differentiated. For Bakhtin, it is through the materiality of language—syntactical formations of linguistic signs—that the referential contexts of self and other(s) intersect.
To emphasize the “materiality of the graft” is to open the Derridean theory of citationality to the contribution of the Bakhtin Circle, which precisely emphasized how the syntactical arrangement of (material) words in utterances continually negotiates social relationships between self and others. Cultural values are grafted and situationally negotiated into particular hierarchies through utterances, as in reported speech. The subject grafts or cites the words of the other as they “report” on those words. When interactants in a social situation construct a dialogue using words from the larger culture, they actively craft relationships to each other against the backdrop of those larger cultural meanings and values. The self and co-present others select from the range of possible values from the larger culture to enact, and make relevant, to their situated interactions—necessarily taking an evaluative position toward those values.
The self thus encounters the words (and values) of others in their materiality. This not only includes those words of others addressed to them in everyday life, but also those words which are culturally available in the media—that is, “marks” of others not physically present. The responses of the subject may incorporate any of these “citational resources” into their own utterances, thus establishing and re-establishing relations with co-present others relative to larger cultural values. The “mark of the other” not only includes the ways the physical bodies of others meaningfully signify as they present themselves when co-present in a situation, but also—in the absence of the other—includes the books they've written, the music they've recorded, and other cultural commodities they may have produced. Utterances, as citational practices of the self which incorporate the signs of the other, thus (re-)enact particular social relationships with others.
The situational utterances issued by subjects continually re-incorporate the other in particular ways. The Bakhtin Circle argues that this incorporation of the perspective of the other, into the utterances of the self, is always a question of proportion or ratio—how much of the utterance of the self will remain “individual,” and how much the utterance will “repeat” the referential perspective of another person (Holquist 2004, 29). The phenomenon of “reported speech,” for example, directly speaks to the issue of how the values of the other are grafted with the values of the self in various proportions.
For example, the words of others can be reported verbatim with authorial neutrality on the part of self, or instead paraphrased with a great deal of added sarcasm. Syntactical forms of such citational reporting enact political relationships between self and other, and become mechanisms for value negotiation in everyday life. The material forms in which the words of others are reported, within the utterances of self (i.e., the citational grafts), enact the social identities of self and other in particular social relationships—such as the unequal relationship between gendered identities. The material form of any citational utterance both grafts together, and differentiates, the values of self and other—through the enactment of a hierarchy of values which are normatively taken to be associated with particular social identities.
It is important to note, however, that there is no necessary match between the intended meaning of one’s utterances, and the actual responses of the other. While one’s utterances may attempt to altercast the other in a particular way by re-citing a particular social relationship, as in the case of gender, there is no guarantee of its success. Subjects often anticipate one type of addressee, only to find another. In this sense, there can be no definitive addressee to an utterance, given that there can be no definitive correspondence between the anticipated response of another and their actual response. The social identity of the recipient cannot be secured in advance, but is only tentatively assumed. Thus, the “meaning” of the relationship implied by the utterance is only tentatively stated. Once an utterance is actually issued, the situation between self and other has necessarily changed from that anticipated by the subject.
When Derrida argues that a sign must be able to function in the absence of any addressee, his discussion speaks to the iterability of the mark; it is not to deny that subjects have ongoing relationships with real “addressees,” who take up and respond to each other’s utterances in everyday life. These are not incompatible positions: that an utterance expresses an ongoing situational relationship with an addressee (whose actions cannot be entirely predicted), and that the utterance must be made within repeatable, recognizable social forms which have the ability to function beyond any particular situational context.
What a Derridean reading adds to the framework of the Bakhtin Circle is to emphasize that the meaning of the relationship between self and other is not given once and for all in any particular utterance, but rather is continually deferred into the future. In Derridean terms, the meaning of a social relationship—like any meaning—is never quite “present” (see Derrida 1988; 1981). Utterances spoken or written in the past can, as material signs, always be reinterpreted. Future utterances can rewrite the meaning of past utterances. Thus, if an utterance may be said to posit or enact the “meaning of a relationship” between self and other (relative to normative cultural values), it is always a temporary, incomplete meaning. While, as the Bakhtin Circle argued, the (anticipated) “other” must be temporarily “closed” in order for identities to emerge at all (see Holquist 2004, 26–28; 84), it is also true that the meaning of those identities—as well as the meaning of the relationship between identities—is continually “torn apart” by the actual, situated responses of the other (see Vološinov 1986, 106).
Derrida’s work on citationality can be used to link the work of the Bakhtin Circle to the more contemporary theoretical work on performativity—especially the version of performativity theory developed by Judith Butler. In this section, Butler’s insights regarding the “performativity of gender” will be extended into a more general theory regarding the performativity of all values, especially exchange value. Just as identity categories such as gender are re-cited in performative utterances across situational contexts, so are the values normatively associated with those identities. In “reporting on” the words and images of others in evaluative utterances, normative identity categories and cultural value discourses are recited or resisted.
As mentioned above, Derrida (1988) shows that for a speech act or any cultural form to be meaningful, and socially identifiable, it must be citable—that is, it must be repeatable across situational contexts. We find in Derrida’s discussion of the citability of linguistic marks not only a dislocation of the autonomous, intentional subject normatively assumed in Western metaphysics, but also an alternative version of identity construction—which foregrounds a process by which the subject is constituted in a relationship with alterity. The construction of any meaningful social identity involves the repetition or re-citation of particular meaningful signs across situations, at the exclusion of other signs and meanings.
Butler, like Derrida, criticizes the notion of a sovereign, autonomous subject, arguing instead that the “subject” is an effect of citational practice (1997). For Butler, the citation of cultural scripts in everyday social performances constructs certain types of gendered subjects. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, Butler argues that inasmuch as the subject is born into a system of normative citational practice which always already positions certain types of subjects, the subject is not entirely free to construct utterances according to a sovereign intentionality.
While gendered performances constitute and constrain the subject along gender lines, at the same time they make (gendered) agency possible—a kind of “enabling constraint” (1997, 16). This enabling constraint issues a social positionality—or, in Bakhtin’s terms, a social “addressivity” (Holquist 2004, 48)—from which the subject responds. In a Derridean sense, even as re-citational practices attempt to re-establish stable social identities across contexts, regulated identities are necessarily disrupted because of the singularity of the situated re-citation; that is, repetition necessarily alters identity (Derrida 1988). Just as subjects cannot “fix” the intended meaning of their utterances, neither can a citational performance absolutely stabilize the social identity which is implied by the utterance. For Butler, then, while particular forms of speech acts re-enact particular kinds of subjects, they can never fully determine those subjects.
The kind of social agency which Butler (1999) envisions is situated between a determinism which involves the mere repetition of identity categories within a closed system, and that of a voluntaristic subject who is free to enact a social identity according to their own intentionality. The re-citationality of social performance enables the subject, but at the same time it disrupts the presence of that identity. We thus find Butler’s position in line with Derrida’s critique of the presence of the sovereign Cartesian subject.
Along with the notion of iterative citationality, Butler also agrees with Derrida’s critique regarding J.L. Austin’s notion of a performative speech act. In Austin’s speech act theory, as Butler puts it, a “performative” is “that discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names” (1993, 13)—such as in Austin’s example of the pronouncement of a couple as “married.” For Austin, the performative utterance does not merely describe a social situation, but rather brings one into being. As Butler notes, Derrida’s (1988) critique of Austin moves the performative away from the (authoritative) control of the intentional subject, in the direction of the citational aspect of performatives—recognizing that performatives re-cite authoritative conventions. Butler states that, “If a performative provisionally succeeds . . . it is . . . only because that action echoes prior actions, and accumulates the force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices” (1993, 226–27; italics in the original).
For Butler, then, performances are not given by a sovereign subject; rather, they are re-enactments of prior performances which are socially recognizable and normatively re-enforced within a culture. It is Butler’s thesis that gender is performative in this sense, given that the continual re-enactment of a gendered cultural script in turn continually re-constitutes the gendered subject. This behavioral re-enactment is not merely voluntary, however, but enforced by power within society—what Butler, influenced by Foucault, calls the “forced reiteration of norms” (1993, 94). The gendered subject is enabled as agent through this social ritual, yet is simultaneously constrained by—or “subject” to—the identity category.
This enabling constraint not only applies to the regulated form of one’s own utterances, but also applies when others altercast them into particular social roles and social categories—as in Louis Althusser’s well-known example of a citizen being “hailed” by a police officer on the street. For Althusser (1971), this process of “interpellation” occurs through the practice of re-citation—in Butler’s words, “that continually repeated action of discourse by which subjects are formed in subjugation” (1997, 27). Hailing or interpellating a subject as a potential police suspect “works” as a performative because the action of the police officer cites prior instances of this practice—that is, it has become normative. In Excitable Speech (1997), Butler argues that hate speech precisely attempts to “interpellate” a subject into a subordinate position using such a practice—thus re-establishing a particular political relationship between subjects (2).
For Butler, the success of this attempt at altercasting the identity of others is not guaranteed in advance; she thereby criticizes the notion of a deterministic “discursive constitution” (19) of the other. Butler argues that one cannot totally guarantee an effective interpellation of the identity of the other, regardless of the level of social authority “behind” the citational practice. For Butler, attempts to altercast the other are not only acts of constraint, but simultaneously establish the social addressivity which enables the agency of subjects. She thus argues that while injurious speech attempts to position a subject within a stigmatized social category, there is no guarantee of its success. While constraining the other, it simultaneously constitutes, rather than removes, the social positionality of their agency.
Butler also argues that Althusser’s notion of interpellation must be not be considered as originating from the “presence” of an authority figure, as in the case of the police. For Butler, Althusser retains such a metaphysical assumption regarding the “voice” of the authoritative, intentional subject (32–3). Instead, she argues that the effectiveness of the police officer’s command is derived from the re-citation of a social convention, which re-establishes the authority (and identity) of the officer. In this book, the term “interpellation” will be used to refer to the way that particular re-citational practices position both social actor and addressee as certain types of individual subjects, as well as construct particular collective subjects who are assumed to share “subcultural values.” In the Western ideology of “presence,” these interpellated subjects are mistakenly taken to be the origin and motivator of the citational practices themselves—a move which disguises the process by which identity is itself enacted through citational practice (Butler 1997; Derrida 1988; Althusser 1971; Weber 1991).
Social conventions that interpellate racialized or gendered subject categories, for example, are repeated on an ongoing basis—a re-occurring social citationality which re-establishes these normative identity categories. As Butler notes, the category of gender, which both enables and limits the gendered subject, must be repeatedly re-performed in order to reconsolidate its effects. Citing Antonio Gramsci, Butler notes that “hegemonies” such as the discourse of gender operate only through “rearticulation” or repetition (1993, 132). Thus for Butler, a structure of inequality “only remains a structure through being reinstated as one” (1997, 139). We can see here the affinity of Butler’s view of performativity with efforts in sociology to bridge the gap between agency and structure (see Giddens 1984).
Social relationships between self and other, then, are re-established through the repeated citation of those conventions which reinforce particular social identities of subjects and others. For Butler, however, agency includes not only the possibility of the repetition and reproduction of normative social identities and relationships, as in the case of re-establishing the gender hierarchy, but also the possibility of dislocating normative relationships through the same process. Butler argues that precisely because of the possibility of future repetitions in unknown situations, different social relationships are possible between self and others.
Just as one’s utterances may attempt to interpellate an identity for others, these utterances simultaneously interpellate a social identity for self. Utterances issued from within situated and constraining identity categories—as in the case of gender—either “re-cite” and re-interpellate that normative category, or resist and interpellate an alternate identity which plays against the norm. If social identity is constituted through linguistic practices, and re-produced through a process of normative re-citationality, then alternative subjectivities become possible—through the dislocation of normative practices.
While the process of citationality necessarily restricts identity, for Butler it is only through the process of citationality that any possible “reconfiguration” can occur (1999, 185). In Bodies That Matter, Butler discusses what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has termed “an enabling violation” (Spivak, in Butler 1993, 122), noting that “The 'I' who would oppose its construction is always in some sense drawing from that construction to articulate its opposition; further, the 'I' draws what is called its 'agency' in part through being implicated in the very relations of power that it seeks to oppose” (Butler 1993, 122–23). The agency of subjects, while framed and limited by normative identity categories, can never be finally extinguished or determined through the process of interpellation.
For example, in her work on gendered performances, Butler shows how a performed parody may recontextualize “gender” and thus disrupt its normative meanings (1999, 186–89). For Butler, the spread of such practices of dislocation across a culture may force a “resignification” of the identity category itself, and open a possibility that future re-citations may signify differently. Butler thus argues that since structures of inequality—involving identity categories—are dependent upon re-citation for their continued functioning, it is precisely at the point of re-citation where their legitimacy might be most effectively challenged.
“Agency,” for Butler, is thus linked to possibility (see 1999, 185; italics in the original); any situated repetition of identity categories reproduces or resists normative forms to varying degree. In their work, citing the contributions of Dwight Conquergood, Homi Bhabha, Jill Dolan, D. Soyini Madison, and others, Madison and Hamera also argue that performances carry the possibility of disrupting normative, sedimented citational practices (2006, xviii–xix). As Madison has noted, “Subversive performativity can disrupt the very citations that hegemonic performativity enacts” (Madison, quoted in Madison and Hamera 2006, xix). In fact, Butler has tied the question of moral responsibility to citational practices which either re-cite or resist normative constructions—as opposed to a morality situated within the autonomous consciousness and intended actions of a Cartesian subject (1997, 39).
While Butler thus follows Derrida’s use of citationality as a way to criticize the sovereign subject of Western metaphysics, she also argues that Derrida loses the social dimension of citationality by locating it in the “structure of iterability”; that is, as an inherent feature of language. As noted above, Derrida (1988) shows in his critique of Austin that the meaning of a “performative” derives not from the intentionality of a subject, nor from the dictates of a particular context, but rather from its ability to move across contexts. For Derrida, this structural feature enables the repeatability and recognizability of the meaning of performances across contexts.
Butler, however, favors what she calls a “social” rather than a “structural” iterability (1997, 152). She argues that the force of the performative becomes “sedimented” (145) based on prior social repetitions. While it is true that social meaning depends upon repetition across contexts, Butler contends—though not without challenge (see Kirby 2006, 105)—that Derrida’s “structural” formulation of iterability fails to give proper emphasis to the social character of these re-enactments, and thereby underestimates the potential for disruptive re-citational practices. For Butler, “structure” is just another name for the accumulated social force of normative citational practices, rather than an inherent (asocial) feature of the mark. Citational performance thus involves an ongoing “re-structuring” of meaning.
However, against Pierre Bourdieu, Butler (1997) simultaneously argues that this accumulated or sedimented social force cannot be guaranteed in advance through the intentionality of powerful social actors, or the “legitimate” authority of social institutions—inasmuch as re-citationality always carries the possibility of transformation. Butler thus attempts to retain a Derridean view of citationality, while at the same time recognizing that each instance of citational practice re-establishes a social relation between self and other—here coinciding with the position taken by the Bakhtin Circle in their discussion of reported speech.
An important aspect of Butler’s argument is that, as we see in the case of gender, a social category pertaining to group membership enables and constrains the agency of individuals. When a social actor engages in citational practices—such as wearing particular types of clothing in accordance with normative gender roles—they are re-interpellated as a member of that particular community. In addition, particular social values are typically associated with interpellated group memberships and identity categories; for example, stereotypes about masculinity and femininity in the U.S. involve the attribution of particular social values to each gendered category. In this sense, citational practices which evoke identity categories such as gender simultaneously interpellate particular social values.
In this way, we might generalize beyond Butler’s work on gender to suggest that all social values are performative. Citational practices in everyday life—whether words uttered, images displayed, or social objects positioned within the home—re-align the subject with particular valuing communities. For example, the placement of a religious object within the material environment of the home re-interpellates membership in that religious community, and re-aligns the identity of the subject with particular religious values. Given that words, objects, or images are normatively taken to “represent” particular subcultural values, their citation indicates membership in that valuing community. Engaging in re-citational practices, then, results in the re-interpellation of social identities, as well as the values normatively associated with those identities.
In this way, the work of the Bakhtin Circle on values can be linked to Butler’s theory of performativity. Every utterance, which necessarily reports on and evaluates the speech of others, re-cites or resists normative value categories. The identity of the subject, as a “representative” member of a particular valuing community, is thus re-interpellated through everyday utterances. In a Derridean sense, the values of subjects—like any meanings—must be continually re-cited across situational contexts in order to remain meaningful. This re-citation of values is re-enacted through the material, syntactically-configured utterances of everyday life.
Judith Butler’s approach allows us to move the work of the Bakhtin Circle, on how utterances negotiate the values of self and others, in a poststructuralist direction—that identity and value categories are interpellated from utterances, rather than pre-existing them. Normative identity and value categories re-emerge through a process of performative citationality. In turn, the work of the Bakhtin Circle allows us to extend Butler’s work on the performativity of gender toward a more general thesis regarding the performativity of values. Social identity becomes an interpellated site where hierarchical arrangements of multiple social values are continually negotiated and displayed. To put it differently, social identities are interpellated from particular syntactical arrangements of material signs, as subjects respond from within, and to, the material environments constructed by the utterances of others.
The material form of meaningful signs always already depends on the interests of those who have prepared that materiality in such a way as to enter into particular contexts—as in the case of institutional utterances configured in marketable forms relative to the referential contexts of consumers. Bauman and Briggs (1990) have used the term “entextualization” to refer to the process of selecting a strip of language from the flow of everyday life, and readying it for insertion into another context (73). Particular material forms are entextualized in particular ways by institutions as citational resources, and marketed to subjects for use in identity construction. In this sense, economic forces shape normative material environments.
Incorporating Foucault’s notion of “regulatory norms,” Judith Butler similarly considers the materiality of the body to be an “effect of power” (1993, 2), where dominant economic and political forces shape how materiality communicates. As Foucault argues, power is invested in material forms (Butler 1993, 34–35; Foucault 1995). Adding the language of the Bakhtin Circle, we might say that cultural forms are shaped into particular material, syntactical constellations given the “regulatory norms” of a culture, and the workings of the political economy. These socially sedimented material forms, in turn, interpellate socially differentiated subjects.
The material, syntactical forms of language continually re-constitute, through normative citational practices, the political relationships between interpellated social identities. The prioritization of certain material forms in the culture thus relates to social hierarchies. Those material forms interpellating dominant cultural values are not only more often re-produced, but those economic networks which distribute or circulate these forms become “more institutionalized.”
On the other hand, for Butler, the very citational practices which reproduce relations of power also enable the agency of subjects within these relations. Butler follows Derrida in arguing that the construction of any identity involves the “abjection” of excluded alterity (Butler 1993, 3). Given that any recognizable material sign always already holds its abjected “other” within, the social identity interpellated from such a sign is necessarily hybrid. This holds not only for the construction of social identity, but—in the Bakhtinian sense—simultaneously for the hybrid social relationships between self and others, as enacted through such identity categories. With their alterity within, such identities and relationships can never be finally secured in their “presence.” Unequal social relationships between identities can be altered.
For Butler, the openness of the future to the continual recontextualization of identity categories means that there can be no final abjection or interpellation of the other into a subordinate social position. Butler thus argues that the “rematerialization” which occurs, as normative material signs are re-cited, offers the possibility of the dislocation of normative meanings and identities. For Butler, then, the identity that is enabled through the iterative re-citation of imposed categories can never be entirely stable or final.
Committed to the poststructuralist critique of the intentional, autonomous subject of the Cartesian metaphysical tradition, Butler states that “the question of agency is not to be answered through recourse to an ‘I’ that pre-exists signification. In other words, the enabling conditions for an assertion of ‘I’ are provided by the structure of signification” (1999, 183). As Butler puts it in a commentary on writing styles, citing the work of Monique Wittig, “gender itself is naturalized through grammatical norms” (1999, xix). With her notion of “enabling constraint,” Butler attempts to steer a course through the difficult sociological opposition between agency and structure (see Lloyd 2007, 40). She supports neither the notion of a voluntaristic subject, nor a structurally determined one.
From Butler’s perspective, “structure” is always re-cited and re-performed. In this way, Butler wants to oppose a “structural” determination of the subject as based on their positionality within a system—as in the case of Jean Baudrillard’s determinant “code” (see Kellner 1991, 18–19; 28). On this point, she puts forth an argument similar to that of Anthony Giddens’s (1984) work on structuration, or the work of Alexander, Giesen, and Mast (2006) on social performance. Those theorists insist that any “structure” must be continually re-performed in everyday life; as Giddens puts it, “structuration theory is based on the proposition that structure is always both enabling and constraining, in virtue of the inherent relation between structure and agency (and agency and power)” (1984, 169). Butler thus argues that agency is always a matter of re-enactment or re-citation, occurring within the material constraints that past citational practices have constructed—but which simultaneously enable new recontextualizations that have the potential to alter existing identities and values.
In a performative sense, “values” do not pre-exist their material enactment; rather, they emerge from particular material configurations—and are negotiated within those syntactical forms. From a performative perspective, neither the “values” of autonomous subjects, nor the “exchange value” of social objects, can be said to pre-exist their citational re-enactment. In addition, given the continual negotiation and contestation which occurs syntactically within material utterances, the values interpellated from those utterances are not “pure” value domains. Rather—in a Bakhtinian sense—a hybrid, or hierarchically arranged mix of values, are interpellated from any utterance (see Gardiner 28–29; 83–84; 107).
While a representationalist perspective assumes that value pre-exists its communicative expression, a performative perspective instead suggests that both subcultural values, and exchange value, are normatively re-enacted through citational practices. However, despite recent turns in contemporary marketing toward performativity theory—especially in the recognition of the co-creation of value by consumers (see Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004)—the ideology of representationism persists in the U.S. cultural economy. In addition, while Derrida’s version of citationality, resting on a notion of iterability, shows that value can never be fully “present,” the metaphysical and ideological notion of the “presence of value” also persists in normative practice in the U.S. cultural economy. The theories of Bakhtin, Derrida, and Butler can be used both to describe the current workings of the U.S. cultural economy—in its ideological functioning—as well as contribute to its critique and transformation. In this section, it is shown how Bakhtin’s work is compatible with the more critical version of performativity put forth by Judith Butler, as based on Derrida’s notions of citationality and iterability.
In her essay, The Temporality of Textuality: Bakhtin and Derrida, Juliet Flower MacCannell (1985) argues that by revising Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of a “synchronic” system of language into a “scene or synchronization” (974, italics in the original), Bakhtin is able to show how utterances continually re-negotiate values in situated linguistic practice. Bakhtin demonstrates that “values” continually re-emerge from syntactical forms—as opposed to the notion that the material forms merely “represent” particular values as differentiated in a pre-existing linguistic system. In this sense, Bakhtin’s work clearly does not re-enact the type of “presence” which is the target of Derrida’s critique of Western metaphysics (970).
For Bakhtin, the differential meanings which make up the “synchronic” system of language always involve differing values (974). An utterance which re-cites a differential system of meanings thus also re-cites a differential system of social values. As MacCannell points out, for the Bakhtin Circle what is exchanged within the language system is not the pre-existing meanings expressing the thoughts of participants, but words with values (974). As Vološinov puts it, “In actuality we never say or hear words, we say and hear what is true or false, good or bad, important or unimportant, pleasant or unpleasant, and so on” (Vološinov 1986, 70, italics in the original).
In this view, material signs are always already “ideological” (10), or carry a particular “evaluative accent” or “intonation” (103). Thus, MacCannell argues that the evaluative utterance enacts the “synchronic” system. In other words, the self, by taking a “value stance” in an utterance, puts into play the system of differential values and meanings which Saussure calls the “synchronic.” The “elements” in a linguistic system are not just differential to each other, but are hierarchically arranged or evaluated; that is, they are continually re-arranged through situated linguistic practice.
For Bakhtin, the relationship between the utterance and the valuing context against which it is interpreted is a reciprocal one—the interpretive context implied by the utterance does not pre-exist it, but rather re-emerges via the utterance (MacCannell 1985, 984-85). If “values,” such as political values, economic value, or moral values, can be thought of as interpretive or valuing “contexts”—as the ground against which certain behaviors are evaluated—we can see that citational utterances continually re-evoke, or re-interpellate, such value contexts. In other words, the utterances of an individual subject continually conjure imagined collectivities, whose values and group identities the utterance is (ideologically) taken to “represent” (Butler 1997; Althusser 1971; MacCannell 1985, 984–85; see also Anderson 1991).
In the language of a theory of citationality, we can see that the syntactical forms of utterances, which graft the words of self with the words of others, necessarily interpellate differentiated, hierarchically arranged values and affiliated identities. In the utterance, the values of both self and other are negotiated in material form. In other words, it is not the case that an utterance interpellates a single valuing context against which it is interpreted; rather, any utterance necessarily initiates an interpellative re-grafting which involves differential values, arranged in a hierarchy. The syntactical, material form of reported speech necessarily prioritizes these differential valuing contexts, and thus simultaneously takes an evaluative stance relative to several cultural value discourses. The “synchronic,” hierarchically–differentiated system of values interpellated from the utterance, to a greater or lesser degree, aligns with the normative value hierarchy within the culture—that is, the utterance “takes a stand” toward it.
At the same time, the social identities of individuals are also interpellated from such “hybrid” citational grafts; therefore, no individual social identity interpellated from an utterance can be a “pure” representative of a particular valuing community. In this sense, individual identity becomes a site of multiple, hierarchically–arranged values. The identity achieves some measure of stable social meaning through a consistent re-prioritization of multiple valuing contexts.
We can see here an affiliation with the line of thought developed in poststructuralism around Althusser’s notion of “ideological interpellations” (Althusser 1971; Laclau 1977; Butler 1997). For example, Wolfreys (2004) has noted that for Slavoj Žižek and for Ernesto Laclau, the subject becomes the site where ideological discourse is consolidated. As Laclau puts it, “what constitutes the unifying principle of an ideological discourse is the ’subject' interpellated and thus constituted through this discourse . . . There are different types of interpellations (political, religious, familial, etc.) which coexist whilst being articulated within an ideological discourse in a relative unity” (Laclau, in Wolfreys 2004, 118; italics in Laclau).
In this regard, Bakhtin’s work can be useful to emphasize the materiality of the process of “ideological interpellation.” The syntactical forms of reported speech—in grafting the words of self with those of others—not only unify, but also differentiate interpellated “value contexts” in hierarchical fashion. Normative value and identity hierarchies not only are re-produced through the re-citation of normative material forms, but also can be challenged by the citation of materialities which are syntactically configured in alternative, non-normative forms.
As discussed above, Judith Butler endeavors to move Derrida’s theory of “iterability” away from emphasizing the “structural” capability of an utterance to cross contexts, toward a more “social” iterability recognizing the sedimented, and politically motivated, meanings of utterances (see 1997, 148–52). We see here, as MacCannell reads Bakhtin, room for such a move. For Bakhtin, the differential contexts of identity and alterity—the two referential contexts “structurally necessary” for the production of meaning—are put into play by the utterance itself. These utterances, involving meaningful signs, contain socially sedimented meanings (and values). The relationships between these differentiated values are continually re-negotiated and re-structured via the material form of the utterances themselves. Dominant social values and identity categories, such as gender, are continually re-cited and once again “put into play” in new utterances in new social situations—a social iterability. In this sense, to “materialize” utterances is to embrace or resist normative value hierarchies in a “scene of synchronization” (MacCannell 1985, 974)—or, echoing the language of performative citationality, a scene of “re-synchronization.”
A system of differential values—those of self, other, and the normative culture—is thus continually “put into play” materially with every utterance. The stance taken by the subject relative to the values of co-participants in situated interaction, as well as toward those of the larger culture, shapes the syntactical form of utterances (see 980–82). In other words, after considering the implied values of words of co-present others received in dialogue—relative to the normative values of the culture—the subject replies with a citational utterance which simultaneously enacts a particular relationship to both.
Thus for Bakhtin, utterances do not express the thoughts of an autonomous subject, as much as establish and re-establish relationships between self and others—a position compatible with Derrida’s critique of the “intentional” subject. Normative materialities have come to be differentiated as “representing” various cultural value domains, such as political, moral, ethnic, or religious values. Given that utterances always “report” on and use the words of others in their very formation, we can say that citationality is the mechanism by which “values” are continually re-enacted and re-interpellated—as the continuing “re-synchronization” of social relationships between self and others. The social identities of self and others become retroactive “representations” of larger valuing communities. The normative re-citation of material forms thus continually re-establishes normative social identities, as well as the normative relations between these “valuing” identities.
The words of the other thus come to the self not only with abstractable “dictionary meanings,” but with meaningful materialities which always already imply particular social relationships involving particular social values—as when someone refers to normative gender categories. In the process of issuing one’s own situated utterances—as responses to the words of the other—subjects are able to consider the general cultural implications of the words they select, as well as the situational implications relative to the values of fellow co-participants in everyday life. Co-participants in dialogue re-negotiate their situated relationships using the normative citational resources of the larger culture, with their already-implied values.
There is an ongoing tension between normatively valued linguistic forms, and the particular intonation given to those forms in specific social situations by individuals—which may either reinforce, or undermine, those normative meanings. This formulation by the Bakhtin Circle is quite compatible with Derrida’s notion of iterability, which precisely recognizes the tension between the contextual singularity, and the requisite repeatability, of any identifiable sign. Material forms can be taken as representations of stable and meaningful valuing contexts, yet also may dislocate those interpellated contexts when moved into new configurations with other material forms.
Just as valuing contexts are interpellated from the entextualized utterances of the social actor, social identity is also interpellated from these utterances. The utterances of social actors simultaneously draw together two contexts—that of interpellated social identity categories and that of interpellated value domains. Reciprocally, the material sign is normatively taken as an entextualized representative of both contexts. Just as value genres, such as “political” or “religious” domains of value, become sedimented as repeatable and recognizable social categories across situations, so do social identity categories. Identity and value contexts are grafted together in entextualized material forms, and are thus interpellated together.
Through their utterances, embodied social actors thus become representatives of both social identity and value categories, earning (repeatable) reputations as “religious” or “family-oriented” types of people. The citation of a religious artifact in everyday life, for example, overlays the identity of the subject with religious values. Through such practices, the subject is taken as a representative of particular valuing communities, enacting a stance in relation to the values of others. This view regarding the interpellation of a group subject from citational practice inverts normative metaphysical assumptions regarding the relationship between the subcultural “consciousness” and social rituals.
Émile Durkheim’s (1965) writings on the “elementary forms” of religion are interesting in this regard. Studying the beliefs of Australian clans, he notes that particular material “totems”—often animals or plants—are sacred to particular groups and provide the name (or identity) of the group (123). Drawings or paintings of the totem, which Durkheim refers to as “emblems,” appear on everyday objects such as stones; these material objects become sacred inasmuch as they bear “a design representing the totem” of the group (140, italics in the original). While Durkheim’s sociology in general emphasizes that “social facts”—like collectively held beliefs or values—exist as objective and autonomous social meanings which influence social action (1996), he also recognizes that “the emblem is not merely a convenient process for clarifying the sentiment society has of itself: it also serves to create this sentiment . . . It is by uttering the same cry, pronouncing the same word, or performing the same gesture in regard to the same object that they become and feel themselves to be in unison” (262, italics added).
In other words, while it is clear that for Durkheim a “collective consciousness” is what he calls a “social fact”—a sedimented cultural meaning and social force autonomous from individual consciousness—it is not altogether clear in Durkheim’s study of religion whether the group consciousness actually motivates its material representation, or is interpellated from it. For Durkheim, the “material intermediaries,” or emblems, “do not confine themselves to revealing the mental state with which they are associated; they aid in creating it” (263). Thus, the rituals relative to these materialities “gives the group consciousness of itself and consequently makes it exist” (263, italics added).
Durkheim argues that behavioral rituals in everyday life re-integrate members into the social group, and function to maintain its cohesion. This reading of Durkheim is quite compatible with a poststructuralist emphasis on citationality. The behavioral rituals relative to the meaningful materiality of sacred objects can be seen as shared citational practices, from which “collective values” are continually re-interpellated—making possible the normalization of citational references to an imagined collective community. Just as Butler argues that social identities such as gender must be continually re-cited in situated practices to remain normative, Durkheim notes that “these systems of emblems, which are necessary if society is to become conscious of itself, are no less indispensable for assuring the continuation of this consciousness” (263, italics added). For example, a Fourth-of-July parade in the United States, complete with quasi-sacred flags, is a normatively shared citational practice which re-interpellates an “imagined community” bound together by a sense of nationalism and patriotism (see Anderson 1991).
However, the detection of sociological patterns in citational practices—as in the case of youth citing differently than their elders (see Rochberg-Halton 1986)—should not lead to the assertion of “citational communities” which presumably share values pre-existing their shared citational practices. Rather, in a poststructuralist (and sometimes Durkheimian) sense, the emergence of shared citational practices help to “create” and sustain a sense of collective consciousness. Because of this, sociological research which studies the relationship between citational practices and variables such as age, gender, and so forth should consider the ways that differential citational practices are normatively grouped into “identities”—both by sociologists, as well as by social actors in everyday life. Put differently, contemporary sociology might focus less on the “influence” of pre-existing group values on their individual members, and focus more on the situated citational practices and interactional strategies by which social group memberships (and affiliated values) are re-cited—and through which ingroup/outgroup boundaries are continually redrawn.
In his study, Durkheim located the origin of religion in the experience of “crowd interaction”—that is, the “experience” of a social force larger than the individual (Turner, Beeghley, and Powers 2007, 304). This force, attributed in traditional cultures to the realm of the sacred—was then perceived as a “pre-existing” cause of events in everyday life—even though, according to Durkheim, the sense of the “larger force” was emergent from the interaction. Similarly, in the contemporary ideology of “presence,” group identities and affiliated subcultural values—actually interpellated from citational practices—are instead perceived as the motivation of those very practices (Althusser 1971; Butler 1997; Weber 1991). From a poststructuralist point of view, as collectivities differ in what they cite as “sacred” or “profane,” their differing group identities and values retroactively emerge.
Another contribution from Durkheim’s model involves the persistence of the “quasi-sacred” nature of material representations into modern, secular cultures (Turner, Beeghley, and Powers 2007, 308). The modern discourses of value emerge with the prioritization of some “quasi-sacred” signs over other mundane signs, as re-enacted in citational rituals. Specific words, images, and objects of the other are re-cited as valuable through their social positioning and prioritization in time and space, as in the case of “quasi-sacred” objects prominently displayed in the home. Individual and group interpellations of identity occur through the hierarchical arrangement of valued or quasi-sacred signs; in other words, as displayed through citational rituals.
Through socialization processes, then, social actors are able to learn normative citational practices relative to valued material signs, as well as learn the identity attributions made to those who cite them—thus enabling subjects to take an active role in constructing their own social identities. Social actors envision themselves as members of valuing communities as they cite their way into them, grafting their social identity with the values of others engaged in similar citational practices—the citational practice itself taken as evidence of these shared values. As Vološinov has put it, “the whole formal structure of speech depends to a significant degree on what the relation of the utterance is to the assumed community of values belonging to the social milieu wherein the discourse figures” (1976, 103).
Of course, as the Bakhtin Circle has shown, the modern subject has multiple, competing reference group affiliations. In differing social situations, social actors “double-voice” (see Bakhtin 1984, 185) differing value domains through their citational practices. In other words, the voices of others are “heard” through the subject’s voiced utterance—with varying levels of compatibility and value alignment. The unique value prioritization of any contemporary subject differs from that of others, as each individual’s voicing of utterances simultaneously takes a unique stance relative to multiple cultural discourses. Thus, while each value genre itself—as socially meaningful—is repeatable and citable across situations by many different people, the “web of values” for any particular subject is a unique constellation (see Simmel, 1955). In this sense, social actors hold simultaneous “conversations” with many others, the consequence of which is that any interpellated identity simultaneously becomes positioned relative to multiple valuing contexts.
Thus, the utterances of self are not just double-voiced, but multi-voiced. If indeed the process of grafting multiple contexts via material signs produces “meaning,” then we might say that the meaning of one’s social identity refers to the hierarchical gathering of several valuing contexts together at the unique “site/cites” of the subject. A similar argument has been advanced in political theory regarding how a hegemonic ideology unifies multiple valuing discourses in the “identity” of the subject (Althusser 1971; Laclau 1977; Butler 1997; Wolfreys 2004). It is argued in this book that the exchange value discourse has emerged as such a unifying force in contemporary U.S. culture.
Social identity is interpellated from material utterances which are a unique combination of inclusions and exclusions—that is, some values are prioritized while others are abjected. As Butler shows, these inclusions and exclusions regarding the values of individual utterances are not entirely voluntary; they are both enabled by, and restricted by, normative identity categories such as race, class, and gender (see 1993). Normative identity categories thus arrive to subjects already grafted with particular value discourses. Subjects respond to, and from within, normative grafts of identity and value categories. Each of these normative contextual grafts enable certain behaviors, and restrict others. For example, Bourdieu (1984) shows how working-class identity is associated with “inferior values,” resulting in the reproduction of social inequality in French schools and in the job market. The devaluation of the “cultural capital” of the poor in schools, in turn, restricts their later access to particular citational resources.
In Mead’s (1969) sense, the “me,” or “social identity,” is not only interpellated by self and others from already completed utterances, but can also be interpellated by a social actor when anticipating future utterances. This moment of anticipation, however, should not be considered as belonging to a voluntaristic subject; rather, a subject’s consideration of how others are likely to react toward an utterance is actually an “internal” repetition of past citational practices. The anticipatory rehearsal of a future citational practice thus belongs to a chain of re-enactments which give the social behavior meaning, falling in the gap between past and future actualizations of the considered behavior. In this sense, the moment of anticipation allows for a kind of “play” within the chain of re-enactments, where the possibilities of recontextualization can be considered—albeit within the constraints of existing material configurations, as well as the social constraints of the likely responses of others.
It is important here to distinguish between “social identity” and the “self.” Using Mead’s language (1969), the self is not limited to the social identity which is interpellated from a particular utterance (the “me”), but also includes an “I” phase. For Mead, this “I” phase—as in Bakhtin’s formulation—keeps the self open to continual revision in new situations and therefore “unfinished.” Reading Mead through poststructuralist theory, we can say that the self is thus comprised of both the “me”—the repeatable aspect of social identity as interpellated from particular entextualized forms—as well as the ongoing response (the “I”) to such interpellated identity and value categorizations. The “self” continuously oscillates between the “I” and the “me” phases; but only the “me,” or social identity, is interpellated from meaningful material forms. Because of the “I” phase, the self can never be identical with, or reduced to, a particular social identity; nor, in Derrida’s sense, can the “me” remain identical with itself across contexts.
Mead’s “anticipatory” phase of the act involves an awareness of how social identity will likely be interpellated from entextualized material forms, as well as how this entextualized identity is potentially repeatable in new situations. Thus, a person normatively refrains from a deviant act, knowing that their social identity will be entextualized by others in certain material forms (in words like “criminal,” or in photographs in post offices, etc.). Subjects can anticipate how particular citational practices will likely interpellate a negative contextual framing—perhaps leading to the attribution of deviant values by others.
Identity must therefore be continually managed as an ongoing interplay between the anticipation of, and the retrospective interpretation of, that social identity. Responding to ongoing material constraints, a subject anticipates and actualizes syntactically arranged material utterances. These utterances by the subject incorporate, and play against, normative material configurations. It is from these constellations of meaningful materiality that social identity and affiliated values are continually re-interpellated.
The social psychology of George Herbert Mead emphasizes the human ability to anticipate the reactions of others to one’s considered behavior, and make adjustments based on these anticipations (1969). Performativity theory and the critique of representationalism suggest that meaning, identity, and value do not pre-exist their behavioral enactment, but rather are interpellated from situated practice. The difficulty in incorporating Mead’s work into a theory of performativity is to properly account for the fact that citational practices can be rehearsed and anticipated—without slipping back into the notion of the autonomous, intentional subject.
One of the goals of this book is to attempt such a task of incorporating Mead into a theory of performativity. It is argued that Mead’s own view of “meaning” is helpful in this regard, in that for Mead “meaning” is located in a “social” awareness of the relationship between the actions of self and the likely social responses of others (Joas 1997, 105). In this formulation, meaning is not located in a self-reflective consciousness of an autonomous subject, but rather in shared, interactive “behavioural expectations” (116). If meaning, for Mead, involves the knowledge of normative patterns of behavior relative to shared material conditions—in other words, a knowledge of normative citational practices—then it seems a short step to move Mead’s position into a poststructuralist framework, where the meanings of identity and value classifications are interpellated from such practices.
What Mead adds to the poststructuralist notions of “iterability” and “interpellation,” then, is an appreciation that social behavior can be anticipated—because it is normatively patterned relative to meaningful material forms. The social constraints imposed by identity and value categorizations play out in intersubjective re-citational processes, where participants often have a shared awareness of the constraints “in play” in particular situations. To say that agency is enabled, through the imposition of an identity or value categorization, means that even given the social constraints of normative “re-citational expectations,” a choice between behavioral alternatives always remains possible. As Anthony Giddens puts this point in his theory of structuration, “Each of the various forms of constraint are thus also, in varying ways, forms of enablement. They serve to open up certain possibilities of action at the same time as they restrict or deny others” (1984, 173–74). Mead’s perspective thus helps shift the notion of “enabling constraint” away from individual consciousness, toward an interactive framework involving shared behavioral expectations.
Bakhtin’s sociological version of how the self is constructed, in situations oriented toward others, is similar in many respects to that described by Mead. Indeed, Michael Holquist has commented that both Mead and Bakhtin try to develop a “language-based social psychology” (2004, 55). Both thinkers objected to theories of the self which abstracted from the situated corporality of lived existence (see Joas 1997; Holquist 2004). Like Bakhtin, Mead focused on how language allows for the coordination of human action—via “reciprocal expectations about behaviour” (Joas 1997, 114). This pragmatic concern with social action grounds Mead’s theory of language—like Bakhtin’s—in everyday, situated, social interaction. For Mead, these situated actions are the “precondition” of consciousness (Mead 1969, 18)—in contrast to the Western philosophical tradition which favors an autonomous consciousness pre-existing behavioral practices. This approach aligns Mead with the more recent turn in poststructuralist theory toward situated linguistic practices—as in the case of Butler’s work on performative citationality.
In Mind, Self and Society (1969), Mead asserts that social communication involves the interactive use of culturally shared “significant symbols” (46–47). It is through the use of significant symbols that humans can anticipate the reactions of others to their considered gestures. The responses of others which normatively take place in actual social situations, then, can be anticipated by social actors—allowing humans to envision and adjust their social actions before they occur.
For Mead, “meaning” concerns shared knowledge of the normative responses by both self and other to identifiable symbols. Significant symbols (or “significant gestures”), have an “identical” content (89), in that both self and other respond to them in the same way. For Mead, the social awareness of this shared, repeatable response to “significant” materiality—both anticipated and actualized—is meaning. Mead thus locates the possibility of “stable” meaning, across situational contexts, in the shared knowledge of social interactants relative to significant material forms. In this reading of Mead, meaning is not stable because of the inherently repeatable and “identity” of the sign. Rather, meaning becomes sedimented and stable through re-occurring social responses to material signs (i.e., normative citational practices), which can be anticipated.
Because of this situated, pragmatic focus, it could be argued that Mead’s framework provides for the kind of social iterability sought by Butler (Butler 1997, 152), especially given Mead’s focus on the interactive subject’s “anticipation of,” and “adjustment to,” the potential citational practices of others. While the anticipation of the responses of others rehearses normative meanings (i.e., “identities” of signs), the actualization of this citational practice is always a situated event, which necessarily unsettles any assumed equivalence between the anticipated and actualized meanings.
For Mead, one’s social identity is also a significant symbol—with a shared meaning to both self and others. He argues that the “meaning” of one’s ongoing social identity (the “me”) involves a continual anticipation of how others will react to self’s utterances, and—in the language of citationality—how they will likely interpellate a particular social identity from those utterances. Mead, like Bakhtin, emphasized the importance of the anticipated response of the other in self-construction. From this perspective, human agency thus involves a consideration of the “attitude of the other” (Mead 1969, 162) toward citational practices envisioned as completed, as well as actually completed.
We can see here how Mead’s framework can accommodate the theoretical shift away from “consciousness” toward “citationality.” One’s social identity, as a significant symbol with shared meaning, is interpellated from the citational practices of both self and others. Describing Mead’s position in the essay “The Social Self,” Joas notes that “our self-image results from the internal representation of others’ responses to us” (Joas 1997, 110). Thus, to actively “construct” a particular social identity involves the attempt to anticipate, and influence, the social responses of others. The self’s own citational practices involving particular material signs—using symbolic interactionist terms from Gregory Stone—“announce” particular social identities, as subjects attempt to influence the way that others will interpellate social identity from those signs. These others will then communicate (through their citational practices) whether or not they will indeed “place” the subject into the announced identity category (see Hewitt 2011, 77).
In Mead’s perspective, the “me” is “linguistic” in the sense that we think about social identity in a language, using evaluative categories which have shared social meanings—such as a “patriotic” or “successful” person. Inasmuch as language itself—as a citational resource—has an exchange value in the contemporary cultural economy, this means that subjects think about the self in “commodified language.” In the case of gender, for example, the images of women sold for profit in the media are the very same citational “resources” used in gendered self-reflection—such as the “experience” of masculinity through the objectification of women (see MacKinnon 1987; Mulvey 1989; Dworkin 1989).
Cultural commodities, such as television shows or Internet sites, have an exchange value which is considered to be the measure of their “worth”—both as an “experience” for the Cartesian subject, as well as in their function in “representing” a particular set of subcultural values. In a sense, one’s social identity centers, or anchors, this hegemonic system of exchange value—as a kind of identity archive for the accumulation of valued experiences. The subject can experience the “worth” of citational experiences inasmuch as one is able to anticipate the evaluative responses of others—that is, social actors have a shared knowledge of the normative exchange value of the citational resource. Thus, the very language used to construct the “self” has an exchange value in the contemporary cultural economy. In this sense, the market worth of material signs, associated with the experience of certain subcultural values, presides over the construction of contemporary social identity.
In this chapter, the work of the Bakhtin Circle on reported speech was tied to that of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler on citationality. Bakhtin and his colleagues showed how the values of self and others are negotiated through utterances. In reported speech, the words of others are quoted or paraphrased in particular syntactical forms, which reveal the subject’s stance toward the cultural values implied by those words. It was argued that social identities and social values are negotiated materially, in syntactical formations involving the citation of, or reporting on, the words of others.
Derrida’s work on the repeatability of meaning across situations was extended by Butler in her work on the performativity of gender. Gendered behavioral practices are continually re-cited by social actors across situated contexts, thus reproducing normative meanings and identities—as well as inequalities between identities. This chapter extended these insights to argue that values are performative in the same way, through re-citational practices from which identities and their affiliated subcultural values are continually re-interpellated. Bakhtin’s work on the negotiation of values in utterances was incorporated into the poststructuralist framework of Butler and Derrida, to argue that the performative re-citation of values occurs in syntactical, material formations—utterances issued by subjects and social institutions.
The theoretical framework developed in chapter two was also enhanced by some insights from George Herbert Mead. Not only do values and identities emerge from actualized utterances, but these interpellations can be anticipated by subjects—and altered before their actualization. Because Mead’s theory of meaning focuses on intersubjective behavioral practices, it is compatible with the poststructuralist frame advanced here—though not without some difficulty regarding the exact nature of agency within a theory of performative citationality.
The main goal of chapter two was to construct a theoretical frame showing that social identity is constructed through a process of citational performativity, through which the values affiliated with various social identities are negotiated. In this sense, social values are continually re-cited, or reproduced, through utterances—the “performativity of values.” Rather than pre-existing their behavioral re-enactment, as is assumed from a representationalist perspective, normative values and identities are continually re-performed and re-interpellated. Chapter three will focus on the performativity of subcultural values, such as religious, political, or ethnic group values, while chapters four and five will focus on the performativity of exchange value.
At this point it is important to distinguish between two differing “types” of performativity theories. The first, following the work of Austin (1975), argues that a performative utterance brings a phenomenon into being. Rather than simply describing a state of affairs, the performative utterance makes the state of affairs “present.” From this point of view, subcultural values and exchange value are both manifest and measurable. While this theory has the advantage over representationalist theories in being able to better describe the current functioning of the U.S. cultural economy, it also reproduces the ideology of the “presence of value” which has become hegemonic to the culture.
The second version of performativity is that based on Derrida’s notions of citationality and iterability, as developed by Judith Butler. This version emphasizes the ongoing re-citation of identities, norms, and values across contexts, showing that meanings and identities can never be fully “present” across situated contexts—precisely because of the temporal and spatial singularity of each iteration, and each context. This version of citational performativity, based on Derrida’s notion of iterability, undermines the ideology that a state of affairs is fully “present” as a result of its performative enactment.
In this book, chapters three, four, and five—seeking to describe the contemporary U.S. cultural economy—argue that the first model of performativity theory not only is compatible with the contemporary functioning of the U.S. cultural economy, but has in some ways become integrated into it. For example, the marketing literature has increasingly referred to the “co-creation” of value by consumers—in a performative sense—where both companies and consumers together design products which make value present (see Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004). This model—even while differing from a representationalist perspective—nonetheless re-assumes the “presence” of values, which are performatively enacted. The description of the contemporary economy in chapters three, four, and five attempts to show in what ways this “performativity of value” operates. In particular, it is argued that language itself has become an important commodity with its own exchange value, increasingly used as a citational resource in the construction of contemporary social identity.
Chapter six, however, attempts to develop a critique of the performatively enacted “presence of value” in the contemporary economy, and completes the turn toward the “citationality version” of performativity theory as developed by Derrida and Butler—what Butler has termed “performativity as citationality” (1993, 12; 21). Rather than simply describing how the contemporary economy is normatively re-performed, this chapter seeks to show how its future cannot be secured—in that the meaning of all values, including exchange value, is always deferred and never quite “present.” This more critical version of performativity theory, in chapter six, is aligned with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, particularly the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Thus while section II of the book, containing chapters three, four, and five, seeks to describe the “performativity” of value in the contemporary U.S. cultural economy, section III appeals to a model of performative citationality, based on Derrida’s notion of iterability, in order to develop its critique.