In this chapter, it is argued that subcultural values are not located in a group consciousness, existing prior to their behavioral re-enactment. Rather, subcultural values are both reproduced, as well as resisted, through re-citational processes. Children “learn to value” as they are taught to cite those material forms prioritized by agents of socialization. It is through these citational practices that social identities and values are interpellated by self and others. Individual identities are aligned with group identities and values through citational utterances, which configure—or “report on”—the words, images, and social objects of others in particular ways.
In today’s cultural economy, children are not only socialized into normative citational practices which reproduce particular subcultural values, but also into the metaphysical frame which assumes that value is “present” in cultural forms—a value which is to be “experienced” through an autonomous, Cartesian subjectivity. The material forms which children re-cite in contemporary U.S. culture are normatively configured to “represent” the presence of subcultural values and exchange value—as in the case of cultural commodities. This chapter describes how the “presence of subcultural values” is re-asserted through normative citational practices. The critique of this ideology regarding the presence of subcultural values is developed through Derrida and Butler’s notion of performative citationality, and appears in chapter six.
In his work, Jacques Derrida is critical of the type of subjectivity normatively constructed in the Western philosophical tradition. Western subjects are considered to be autonomous in their enlightened thoughts—thoughts considered logically prior to their representation in language. Derrida (1981; 1997) argued that this view of the subject rests on a philosophical model which favors speech over writing. Western philosophy has assumed an immediate connection between thought and spoken language—a “presence” of meaning (1997, 11–12). Derrida’s critique of Western notions of subjectivity and self-identity exposes this assumption, as he alternately shows the importance of writing in the very constitution of meaning, and in the constitution of the identity of subjects themselves.
In semiotic terms, Western metaphysics has considered signs as necessary to employ when the referent is absent (Derrida 1988). For example, when an actual dog is absent, the material word “dog” is used as a signifier to refer to the absent dog—as “signified.” The sign is thus normatively considered to be a “deferred presence” (1973, 138); in other words, used until the actual dog returns to our presence. As Derrida puts it, this metaphysical model “presupposes that the sign (which defers presence) is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers and in view of the deferred presence one intends to reappropriate” (138; italics in the original). The sign—as mere representation of the actual thing—is considered to be “secondary” and “provisional” (138; italics in the original), as opposed to the primacy or presence of the thing itself. At the same time, however, these “provisional” signifiers, when spoken, were still considered to be “closer” to thought than written signifiers. Derrida quotes Aristotle, who argued that “spoken words . . . are the symbols of mental experience . . . and written words are the symbols of spoken words” (Aristotle, in Derrida 1997, 11). In his reading of Aristotle, Derrida thus concludes that within such a metaphysical model, “the voice, producer of the first symbols, has a relationship of essential and immediate proximity with the mind” (1997, 11; italics in the original), whereas writing is seen to be lacking this “presence” of meaning.
Derrida (1997) develops his critique of “presence” and “identity”—including the presence and identity of autonomous subjects—by building upon Ferdinand de Saussure’s argument from his Course in General Linguistics (1974). In that work, Saussure showed that language and signification ultimately rest not on positive terms (i.e., the identification between signifier and signified), but on the differential relations between terms within a linguistic system. For Saussure, each signifier, and each signified, can derive its meaning only as it is set apart from, and differs from, all other signifiers and signifieds. In this view, the meaningful identity of a signifier comes not in its function of “representing” a particular signified, but rather emerges as it is distinguished from other signifiers within a linguistic system. The identity of meaningful elements is thus constituted only as a function of these differences.
Derrida argues that meaning—including the socially meaningful “identity” of things or people—can never be fully present either in the referent itself, in significations, or in the thoughts of subjects. Rather, meaning is always produced in a process of differentiation from what it is not; in other words, identity is socially constructed in a relationship with its “alterity.” This alterity, as the difference necessary for identity to emerge, remains “within” any constructed identity—abjected or subordinated by that meaningful identity, yet always haunting it.
For Derrida, no signification—even that occurring in privileged speech—can construct a positive and identifiable meaning outside of this process of differentiation. Indeed, it is writing, for Derrida, which enables repetition to occur—a necessity for “identifiable” meaning to be established at all. Words must be repeatable across contexts in order to be socially recognizable, and thereby meaningful. For Derrida, it is this possibility of the repetition of any linguistic “mark” which allows for the mark to be recognizable as the “same” across contexts, and to signify the same thing in differing contexts (1988, 7). Derrida argues that meaning in language can never be firmly linked, in an immediate “present,” to the intentionality or thoughts of the subject—inasmuch as words or other meaningful objects must be recognizable to other language users whether or not the subject is present. Rather, Derrida argues, language is fundamentally severed from its “original context,” and thus from the control of any subjective intentionality, as it “disseminates” across contexts (Derrida 1981).
Instead of following the Western metaphysical tradition of linking language, in the form of speech, to intentional human consciousness, Derrida argues that writing is the model which illustrates the nature of all language—even speech. The very nature of writing is that it becomes radically free of its original context and of authorial intent, as it circulates across contexts. Writing precisely must be able to function in the absence of the author and the addressee (Derrida 1988). This capability of writing to travel across contexts makes shared meaning possible within a culture.
However, this also suggests that because the circulation of language into future contexts can neither be foreseen nor controlled ahead of time, meaning can never be absolutely guaranteed. Rather, meaning is continually “deferred” into yet-to-be-determined future contexts, and thus is never quite “present.” This argument applies both to the “identity” or the meaning of particular words, as well as to the social identity of persons. In other words, social identity cannot be located in some kind of immediate present based on Cartesian self-reflection or intentionality. Rather, like any identity, social identity must be recognizable across situational contexts in order to be sustained—and thus is necessarily subject to further recontextualizations in the future.
At the same time, however, Derrida argues—as Samuel Weber puts it—that this process of repetition “introduces an element of heterogeneity, or otherness, into the constitution of the same” (1996, 138; italics in the original). For Derrida, each repetition of meaningful materiality is not only recognizable as the “same,” but simultaneously differs—temporally and spatially—from its last usage. What Derrida calls the “structure of iteration” (1988, 53) of the mark necessarily involves “both identity and difference” (53; italics in the original). While the meanings and identities of words, images, or gestures are sustained across contexts through repetition, they are never exactly the same, inasmuch as they occur in the singularity of situated contexts. Language thus involves the non-resolvable tension, or “aporia,” between that repeatability across contexts which enables its identity, and its singularity in situated use (Derrida 1988; see also Norris 1984, 49).
It is important to note, however, that Derrida does not simply invert the speech/writing hierarchy in his approach, thereby privileging writing and relegating speech to the subordinate position—a mere reversal of the normative metaphysical positioning (Norris 1987, 56; Gasché 1986, 210). In other words, he does not privilege the moment of difference in iterability over the moment of identity. Rather, language includes both dimensions—situated use and repeatability. For Derrida, there is an ongoing tension between these dimensions of language.
Given that the construction of any social identity—whether that of a word, a text, or a person—necessarily involves a differentiation from other identifiable meanings, Derrida goes on to argue that the process of identity construction involves the exclusion or suppression of alternative meanings. These excluded meanings, as the alterity of the constructed identity, are “marked” by their absence—the “trace” of the other in identity construction. Social identities, such as gender or race, are thus constructed in a hierarchical fashion—privileging some favored significations and suppressing others. Derrida’s critique of Western metaphysics thereby exposes the pretenses of any text—including essentialist discourses of race or gender—to the status of absolute truth or objective reality, given its own dependency on the very alterity it excludes. For Derrida, a “deconstructive” reading of any meaningful text involves revealing what is suppressed in the construction of that text’s “identity” (Derrida 1989, 72; Derrida 1981; Culler 1982, 86).
Derrida’s critique of Western metaphysics thus shows how the meaning of any materiality—including the materiality of language—is never quite “present.” This argument can also be specifically extended to the meaning of “value.” While it is normatively assumed that certain words or images reflect, or represent, the pre-existing values of a particular subculture—and are intentionally expressed by members of those groups—Derrida’s notion of iterability challenges this assumption. For any meaningful material form to be recognizable as signifying a particular value—including exchange value—it must be repeatable and re-citable across contexts. On the other hand, the “valuable” is also singular in situated use precisely because of spatial and temporal differences between situated contexts. In this sense, there is no “presence” of value; rather, the “meaning of value”—like all meaning—is continually deferred. This argument applies both to subcultural values such as religious or political values, as well as to the exchange value of material forms. Although the metaphysics of capitalism suggests that cultural commodities deliver the “value” promised by their advertisements, this value always remains a deferred promise.
Despite the possibility of this Derridean-inspired critique, the normative belief in the U.S. is that cultural commodities deliver, or present, valued experiences to Cartesian subjects. This ideological belief, in the “presence of exchange value,” has now become the basis of the contemporary cultural economy. Consumers assume that value is “present” in purchased commodities, as they position themselves relative to them. In other words, a process involving the citation of cultural commodities—taken to “represent” particular values and identities—has become an important dimension to the workings of today’s cultural economy. While Derrida’s work shows that the recontextualization, or re-citation, of material forms has the potential to alter their meaning and value, in normative practice the ideology of the presence of value persists.
As social actors re-cite the material forms which they consider to represent subcultural values, they re-enact that “meaning of value,” as well as interpellate a social identity from that material form. In this sense, we can speak of a “performativity of subcultural values,” where to re-cite any subcultural value is to re-perform it in new situational contexts. Exchange value is re-performed as well, in that material forms considered of economic worth “cross contexts”—to be re-cited by consumers in the construction of their social identities. Even while Derrida’s critique of presence shows that normative identities and values can be dislocated, normative citational practices typically re-cite the hegemonic frame of exchange value. While subcultural values or exchange value may not actually be “present” in cultural commodities, their normative material configurations encourage precisely this ideological interpellation, and rarely challenge its underlying metaphysical assumptions.
An important reason why the “presence of value” remains a hegemonic assumption in the contemporary U.S. cultural economy—despite the possibility of a Derridean critique of this presence—has to do with the particular version of subjectivity “sedimented” in the materiality of the social environment, and continually re-cited in normative practice. Social identities interpellated from the utterances of others—which simultaneously “enable” and “constrain” the utterances of self (Butler 1997, 16)—not only involve identity categories like gender, but also involve the very notion of the individualistic subject as found in the Cartesian metaphysical tradition. In other words, the concept of an experiencing, individual subject is itself interpellated from particular grammatical or syntactical forms, normatively re-produced in citational practices. If Derrida is correct that Western philosophy and Western cultures have favored a metaphysics of presence, then we can find this privilege re-cited within those everyday citational forms which are “grammatically enforced.”
Benjamin Lee and Greg Urban, in their introduction to Semiotics, Self, and Society, discuss some of the research regarding how “different cultures differentially encode understandings of what it means to be a self” (1989, 1). Cross-culturally, different linguistic forms are used to interpellate different kinds of “self,” and differing relations between self and other (3). Lee and Urban also point out that the work of Benjamin Lee (1989) shows that “the Cartesian system is essentially a product of the language structures that the reflection process necessarily employs” (Lee and Urban 1989, 4). In other words, the metaphysical assumptions in the West regarding presence and subjectivity, as well as regarding particular relations between self and other, are interpellated from particular syntactical forms. The individualistic, Cartesian subject is re-cited as utterances re-employ these linguistic forms.
We can also see from the anthropological literature that alternative conceptions of the self are supported by alternative linguistic forms, which differ from those prevalent in contemporary U.S. interactions. In his work on Northern Cheyenne culture in southeastern Montana, Terry Strauss has shown that for Cheyenne speakers, “By dint of being addressed, even the inanimate object becomes a person, another self with which the speaker himself is dialogically engaged” (1989, 55). We see here an alternative to the strict Cartesian separation of subject and object found in the English language. To be socialized into a culture using these citational practices means learning to interpellate a self which differs from the individualistic, “ego-centered” self of Western cultures.
Strauss identifies several linguistic features found in the Northern Cheyenne language which interpellate different cultural values from those of the dominant Western culture. According to Strauss, pronouns used in the Northern Cheyenne language support what Milton Singer and Charles Peirce have called “tuism”—that is, “a philosophical understanding in which primary emphasis is placed on the second person, or 'tu,' rather than the first person, or ego” (53). As Strauss points out, in the Cheyenne language, one cannot refer to “a mother” as abstractable from context; rather, “She has to be a particular someone’s mother” (65). However, the reference is less to an ego’s mother, but in “tuistic” fashion the reference is to “the one who mothers me” (65). In other words, the linguistic form puts more of an emphasis on the other rather than the ego. Interestingly, Strauss notes an affinity here with the theory of the Bakhtin Circle, which also stressed the importance of the other in self-constitution (53). Strauss goes on to show how the usage of grammatical forms shift as members of the community begin to adopt more modern styles of communicating—with an accompanying loss of the “tuistical self” (67). The point here is that differing conceptions of “self” are intimately interwoven with particular linguistic forms. Citational practices evoking the words of others, as materialized into linguistic forms, not only interpellate a particular “kind of self,” but a self which stands in particular relationships with others and their values (i.e., a self which accumulates “valuable individual experiences,” or a self which values family and community).
Strauss’s research also illustrates how the notion of “achievement” was traditionally interpreted within the Northern Cheyenne community, as a collective rather than an individual accomplishment—that is, within a web of supporting others (67). In contrast, Elinor Ochs (1997) has shown that “achievement” in the United States, as normatively constructed through language use, is a specifically individual accomplishment. She shows how linguistic forms, which differ cross-culturally, interpellate differing relationships between “self” and “mother”—with political implications regarding how “mothers” are valued or devalued in different cultures.
Ochs argues that language often does not index social identity directly, but rather as mediated through “certain pragmatic functions of language” (337). For example, Ochs notes that speaking in a soft tone or deferential way may index gender, but less directly than a pronoun such as “she” (340; 343). Similarly, Ochs shows how “baby talk” used by mothers in contemporary U.S. culture has implications for how the gendered category of “mother” is constructed and interpreted (351). As mothers use “baby talk” to report on what children mean, want, or have accomplished, the individual ego of the child emerges, and takes precedence over the mother’s own voice. Ochs notes that particular ways of praising a child’s accomplishments can “ignore or minimize the role of the mother in reaching a goal” (355). Such a deferential relationship of mother toward child, Ochs argues, leads to the devaluation of the contributions of mothers in the U.S. toward the achievements of their children, and to the cultural devaluation of “mothers” in general. In this study, we can see that as the material form of the mother’s “reporting” utterance enacts a social identity for another, it simultaneously enacts a social identity for herself.
In this research, we find that a particular kind of individual ego of the child is “cited into existence” by the mother; as Ochs shows, it is an autonomous and “achieving” ego. The resultant identity of this “individual” ego obscures the role of the other’s citational practices in its construction. In contrast, Ochs shows that in Samoan communities, praise is normatively responded to with an acknowledgment of the support and contributions of others (354). There, children are taught through language use to think of achievement as collaboratively, rather than individually, achieved.
This study by Ochs shows that a particular social identity is normatively interpellated from Western linguistic forms—that of an individualistic, accomplishing, and “experiencing” subject. This identity is interpellated from material utterances, which are then continually recontextualized into new situations. In the U.S., the normative framework for the interpretation of identity—continually re-interpellated from normative citational practices—is the metaphysical frame of Cartesian subjectivity and the “presence” of individual intentionality. The individual ego is thus cited into existence, and is continually re-cited through normative linguistic practices and particular syntactical configurations.
To be socialized into such an identity, through exposure to normative linguistic forms, is to learn that the individual self “accomplishes,” or behaviorally acquires, a set of “valued” experiences. Individuals who are aligned with particular subcultural groups are said to have particular values and experiences. In other words, cultural identity categories are normatively grafted with particular value genres—both associated with the “experiences” of the individualized Cartesian subject. For example, a social identity as a “religious person” is interpellated when a subject cites a sacred text; this individual is said to have religious experiences, hold religious values, and serve as a representative of a religious community.
In this sense, to be socialized into normative linguistic practices is to learn to assert the “presence of values,” as individually owned and experienced. Once “types of people” are categorized within particular social identities, aligning with normative value domains, their re-presentation in new situations is perceived as an incarnation of those values. In other words, a subject is recontextualized as a representative of a valuing community based on a previously earned reputation, and their “presence” is assumed to “re-site” the values of that subculture. In this ideological formulation, the assumption is that subjects, once acquiring a particular set of experiences and values, then transport those stable values into new situational contexts, and issue utterances which “reflect” those values. It is also assumed that the acquired experiences and values pre-exist any later situational expression of them.
Just as particular syntactical material forms can be used to interpellate a Cartesian identity which experiences “value” generally, so can commodified material forms interpellate a consuming or capitalist subject who is said to experience exchange value. The “capitalist subject,” as interpellated from cultural commodities which have been configured into those material forms which generate profit, is an individual who experiences the worth of those forms in their function of delivering subcultural values.
As opposed to alternative material forms which may signify differently, the commodified material forms of Western cultures—from which a Cartesian, individualistic subject is interpellated—also support the interpellation of a consuming, capitalist subject who experiences “exchange value.” Subjects in the contemporary cultural economy re-cite the discourse of exchange value whenever they position themselves relative to cultural commodities of economic worth, which are perceived as delivering valuable experiences. We thus find that in the contemporary cultural economy, the value of citational resources has come to be measured in terms of the “worth of the experience” they are said to provide to Cartesian subjects. In a discussion emphasizing the symbolic or cultural dimension of commodities in late capitalism, Dean MacCannell has noted that the “value” of today’s cultural commodities “is not determined by the amount of labor required for their production. Their value is a function of the quality and quantity of experience they promise (1976, 23; italics in the original).
As the contemporary subject goes to a ticketed event to participate in a collective experience, or places a television set in a home in a particular neighborhood in order to watch a mediated event, “value” is created through particular configurations of meaningful materiality—as “experienced” by the subject. The “citation” of the event occurs from a situated subject position. As in the case of seats at a baseball game, such “experiencing positions” are differentially valued. An important component of the contemporary U.S. economy, then, concerns the strategic placement of cultural commodities in space and time relative to the Cartesian subject. It should also be noted, as Karen Barad’s (2007) work suggests, that even the interpellation of particular spatial and temporal categories derives from material forms—here, as experiences closer or farther from the center of value as differentially positioned on a Cartesian grid.
As this temporal and spatial positioning is advertised, a valuable experience is promised. As we see clearly in the cases of the real estate market, or front row seating at an event, value has to do with the positioning of social “types” of subjects—as particular identity categories are interpellated from certain experiencing positions. Not only is the commodity assumed to be present in its value, but the viewer is “present” and socially positioned relative to differentially valued commodities.
In this sense, we might say that exchange value in the contemporary U.S. cultural economy involves the exchanging of “money for position,” relative to commodified material signs. “Citational agency” thus has to do with positioning one’s self, and one’s utterances, within the material network of signs. Subjects continually negotiate, and are negotiated into, “enabling” and “constraining” positions within the culture from which to experience meaningful material forms. While at any synchronic moment we can speak of a system of “sign values,” which locates subjects into a differential system of identity positions (see Baudrillard 1981; see also Kellner 1991, 21; 28), it is also true—in the language of citationality—that such a system must be continually re-cited and re-negotiated in everyday practice.
As Samuel Weber notes, Martin Heidegger (1977) argues that the modern, Cartesian subject views the world as a “picture,” in an attempt to secure self-identity (1996, 81). In this process, the Cartesian perspective on self-reflection is extended outward onto the world. Thus we find, as described in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1980), that European Renaissance paintings with “perspective” were valued as visual experiences for such an autonomous, individualistic subject. With the later emergence of capitalism, as John Guillory (1993) shows in his discussion of Howard Caygill’s Art of Judgement (1989), such upper-class experiences of art came to acquire an “aesthetic value”—as “truth” was considered by the upper classes to be more fully “present” in the visual experience of art, as opposed to commodities (Guillory 1993, 316–17). This kind of “Cartesian subjectivity” not only favored a particular spatial arrangement centered by the subject, as in the use of perspective in art, but—as Derrida shows—also the temporality of “presence.” Those objects which syntactically re-cited these spatial and temporal experiences of the Western subject came to be valued.
In a Bakhtinian sense, the dominant spatial and temporal orientations of a culture are often reproduced in evaluative utterances in the everyday interactions within that culture (Holquist 2004, 116). At times, Bakhtin extended his use of term “chronotope”—by which he meant the temporal and spatial assumptions within literary modes of narration—to “the relation between any text and its times” (113; italics in the original). The production and consumption of those meaningful material forms which reinforced the Cartesian “chronotope” became valued citational resources in the West. In other words, a particular form of visual experience comes to have a market value, as a citational resource for Cartesian subjects. Throughout Western history, we can find many cultural practices which reproduced the dominant chronotope of “presence,” as anchored in a Cartesian-based subjectivity.
If citational practices involve rhetorically positioning one’s responses relative to the words, images, and cultural artifacts of the other, then we can also consider how positioning one’s gaze relative to the bodies of others—the travel experience—can be considered as a type of citational practice. In Western history, the Cartesian model of subjectivity has been reinforced by citational practices involving particular types of class-based visual experiences, as accumulated through physical and mediated travel. For example, Judith Adler has noted the historical connection between travel and vision, as it reinforces a subjectivity based on a “subjugation of a world of ‘things’” (Adler, in Frow 1997, 91). As John Frow discusses, Adler’s work shows that the practice of sightseeing in Western cultures, by the nineteenth century, was developing into a “general economy of looking” for the wealthier traveler, which would eventually form “the basis of modern tourism” (92). As Frow notes, John Urry has described these sightseeing practices as the “tourist gaze” (92). In the case of the 1900 Paris World Exposition, however, the reverse was true: “exotic” peoples from around the world traveled to Europe to participate in exhibits where they would be “gazed at” (Williams 1991; see also Urry 1990, 152).
Several theorists have contributed in establishing a connection between the modern Western subject and a particular way of viewing. John Urry, citing the work of Marshall Berman, discusses how Haussmann’s construction of urban boulevards in late nineteenth century Paris permitted a particular type of gazing environment for subjects (1990, 136–37). As Mike Featherstone (1991) notes, Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin linked the experience of modernity to the detached point of view of the “flaneur,” who traveled through these emerging urban environments (72–73). As Urry puts it, “The strolling flâneur was a forerunner of the twentieth-century tourist” (138; italics in the original). Urry also credits Susan Sontag for linking the flâneur with modern photography (138).
In cities like Paris, the emerging retail stores at the turn of the twentieth century provided an exciting experience for gazing shoppers—where, as Rosalind Williams (1991) argues, the exoticism of the 1900 world exposition would continue in the “dream world” of modern consumerism. As Mike Featherstone (1991) has noted, for Walter Benjamin the Paris arcades were early iterations of modern department stores, or “temples in which goods were worshipped as fetishes” (73). In this sense, “commodity fetishism” might be understood as a certain form of citationality, where a gazing, modern consumer travels amidst “quasi-sacred” representations of alterity, experiencing their value. Featherstone cites the work of Susan Buck-Morss, who argues that for Benjamin and Baudelaire, this kind of gazing results in a perspective where “objects appear divorced from their context” (74).
In contemporary Western culture, time and place become abstractable and ahistorical, as experiences for the “present” subject. Thus a visit to a city like Paris, or a film about it, become citational experiences merely to be consumed. Television and film today assemble a dizzying array of images from past, present, and future. As Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reijen put it, with such new technologies seeing has become “a montage of different times” (1996, 73). The hegemonic “temporality of presence” frames these images, often gathered from different historical periods, into the “present moment”—and positions them relative to the “present” subject. The proliferation of images thus becomes a central theme in the characterization of contemporary culture as postmodern—with video, as Frederic Jameson (2001) argues, being the hegemonic medium of postmodern culture (69). Siegfried Kracauer has also argued, according to Eduardo Cadava, that “the history of the world is in danger of becoming a rapidly expanding collection of images . . . readily available in the eternal present made possible by the technical media” (Cadava 1997, xxvii)—thus echoing Heidegger’s notion of the “world as picture.”
It is through the citational and syntactical form of the “gaze” that the other is objectified, which in turn interpellates a particular kind of viewing and experiencing subject. In such a political economy, the “other” is often not allowed to continue to speak for themselves; rather, their words and images become valued, consumable “experiences” for consuming subjects. For Plissart and Derrida (1989), to take a photograph is to reproduce the gaze of the photographer. They suggest that this citational practice assigns the subject a viewing position with the “right of inspection,” holding the other as the object of the gaze. Today, we find this gaze re-enacted in the continued marketing of “primitive” or “exotic” artifacts (Torgovnick 1990), just as in previous world expositions.
The critique of the “male gaze,” as developed within feminist theory (Mulvey 1989), now extends to the photographic objectification of women on the Internet. Dworkin (1989) and MacKinnon (1987) have argued that males use this kind of dominating, objectifying gaze in order to establish and experience their own gender identity; in other words, a particular citational practice involving images is used to construct identities and values. In the language of citationality, masculine identity, and the values of a masculine subculture, are re-interpellated together as the male subject positions himself relative to the syntactically arranged materiality of the image. The words of the woman are silenced; instead, her image is entextualized for marketability within the institutionalized, citational practices of the pornography industry.
Western citational practices thus normatively function within the already-framed assumptions of the dominant chronotope—which assume an autonomous, pre-existing, and experiencing subject. In other words, the type of Cartesian “perspectivism” described above has become sedimented in the material forms of normative social environments and normative citational resources. Indeed, such forms have come to be technologically extended in contemporary U.S. culture.
As discussed earlier, the incorporation of the words of the other into one’s own utterances—as in the case of a direct quote—is a citational grafting of two contexts. The utterance of the subject grafts the two referential contexts of self and other; the quote marks indicating that the quoted text does not entirely belong to the referential context of the subject, but rather retains a continuing relationship to the referential context of the other. In the case of quotes, as well as for souvenirs taken during travel to the “sites of others,” the words and objects of the other are grafted into the citational utterances of the subject—even as they continue to signify the values and identities of others. Souvenirs provide a good example of how alterity is commodified and “quoted” into the referential context of self (Sherlock 1998).
In his discussion of tourism, Jonathan Culler (1981) has noted that to a tourist, a souvenir taken from a visit to Paris is not just an object to be used, but also represents “France” (127). Thus, as Dean MacCannell and Culler both suggest, tourists become semioticians (Culler 1981, 128), looking for representations which signify the values of others. Given this, the tourism industry attempts to construct a certain set of semiotic associations for “quoting” or citing by the traveler. Souvenirs play an integral part in this endeavor.
Souvenirs are often shaped into those material forms which interpellate an interpretive context of leisure and exoticism. When the traveler, upon return, grafts the souvenir into the referential context of home or work, the artifact “plays against” the routinized context of everyday life. Travel thus provides citational resources for subjects who wish, upon their return, to “double-voice” (Bakhtin 1984, 185) their home context with the connotations of an exotic alterity. In the contemporary U.S. economy, such a citational grafting of the referential contexts of self and other simultaneously cites the discourse of exchange value; that is, the souvenir is normatively perceived as “valuable” or worthwhile in representing an experience for the subject. Using Culler’s example, the souvenir not only grafts the referential context of the tourist to the Parisian context, but itself has an exchange value as a citational resource.
In a sense, souvenirs are taken by travelers as a means of documentation of their “liminal” travel experience—as the experience of that which is “out-of-the-ordinary” (see Urry 1990, 10). Journeying away from the referential context of self into that of the other, a souvenir may come to represent how far a traveler went into that “context of alterity” before returning to the safety and familiarity of the routine. This “exotic” citational practice, involving the “presence” of alterity, is taken to valorize the referential context of self. In a Derridean sense, the identity of the self is repeated “with a difference.”
This tension between the repeatability of self-identity, and its dislocation through the citation of the words and objects of the other, has itself acquired a certain marketability in the contemporary cultural economy. Material forms “representing” the values of others acquire an exchange value as citational resources, or commodified “souvenirs” of the other. Their materiality plays against the material forms already found in one’s home environment, which represent the “present” subcultural values of self. In other words, the presence of the values of alterity is played against the presence of the values of self, as interpellated from the syntactical arrangement of material forms.
Souvenirs acquired through travel enable a later re-citation of the context of alterity, as they become positioned in everyday home or work environments. Subjects not only change viewing positions through travel, but often return home with copies of this “sight” for later re-citation—in the form of photographs and other souvenirs. Just as music played in a car, or a celebrity poster placed in a teenager’s bedroom, the exotic souvenir taken from travel generates experiential value for the subject—through the material grafting of the words and objects of others into the referential context of self.
Tourism thus allows subjects to venture onto the lands of the “other,” yet in a controlled fashion. When the subject positions the exotic souvenir within the confines of the home context, the souvenir functions—to use Derrida’s term—as a “supplement” relative to the normative context of the subject’s everyday life. In other words, the souvenir is re-abjected as “exotic,” relative to the normative. Thus souvenirs are not just “representative” of the leisure experience, but simultaneously re-differentiate and re-constitute the home discourse, as its alterity. In other words, the taking of a souvenir materially re-enacts a prior differentiation—that difference which abjected the “exotic” other in the first place, as the referential identity context of the subject was constructed. In this sense, souvenirs specifically, and travel experiences generally, re-perform the subcultural boundaries between valuing categories.
As with any citational resource which grafts the referential contexts of self and others, the souvenir occupies an ambiguous place “between” contexts. A souvenir, like a quote, seems to have experiential worth to the subject as a material representation of the difference in valuing contexts—the re-enacted differences in values between self and other. In placing the souvenir in the home or office, the subject re-cites what the other values, inasmuch as it differs from the normative valuations of the subject’s everyday life. As discussed earlier, a material graft both brings together and differentiates contexts, as the utterances of the subject necessarily “take a stand” relative to the words and objects of others. This “journey into otherness” becomes a means of (re-)constituting one’s own social identity, as the subject re-abjects the words and the objects of the other. In contemporary U.S. culture, these words and images of the other are marketed as commodified citational resources.
This kind of “citational exoticism” allows tourists to experience the other from a safe distance through commodification (see Frow 1997, 100). Like the vicarious experience of alterity as delivered through the mass media (hooks 1992b), commercial tourism allows the self to explore the words or objects of the other in a controlled manner. A tension between desire and security thus informs the travel excursion. Discussing the research on transgression during carnivals and fairs, Mike Featherstone (1991) has similarly noted that “the other which is excluded as part of the identity formation process becomes the object of desire” (79).
As in de Certeau’s “scriptural economy” generally (1988), this kind of citational exoticism keeps the other in an abjected place for the Western viewer, thus reproducing the certainty and security of the Cartesian experience. As de Certeau has pointed out, the form by which the other is cited matters—utterances can be shaped in such a way so as to allow for the other to be cited, but simultaneously not be allowed to speak for themselves (155–56). For example, John Frow has commented on how exoticism perpetuates the unequal identities of the developed West, and its “underdeveloped” Other (101). It is at the material site/cite of the souvenir, or in the materiality of reported speech, where self and other “meet.” As commodity, the subject can gaze upon the souvenir, valued for its representation of alterity, without actually encountering that alterity—thus continually re-citing a scene of abjection in the construction of Western identity. In the taking of a souvenir, the “danger” of alterity to the identity of the subject is syntactically and politically managed.
In this sense, the commodified words of the other, taken into the everyday utterances of subjects, can be seen as souvenirs of a certain “experience of the other.” Lives of those from other subcultures, framed in commodity form precisely for the experience of consumers, provide a highly controlled encounter with alterity. Rather than a reciprocal dialogue, citational encounters with the commodified words of others become rankable consumptive “experiences” for subjects—as brief excursions from the normatively interpellated identities and the routinized citational practices of home subcultures. As Erving Goffman (1967) has shown in his work on “commercialized action” (262), contemporary movies or other mediated experiences offer a grafting of safety and danger, where a controlled (citational) “experience” retains a trace of vicarious adventure. In addition, today the travel experiences of others are increasingly being distributed back to subjects via emerging citational technologies, enabling a nearly continual vicarious experience of alterity. This process, involving the words and images of the other, also contributes to the re-production of the cultural economy, now heavily reliant upon such citational practices.
Tourism, heavily dependent upon the visual gaze, has thus become an important paradigm for understanding contemporary U.S. culture. According to Rojek and Urry (1997), it is ever more difficult to distinguish between the experience of tourism, and the experience of Western culture generally (3). Dean MacCannell (1976) also sees tourism as the best paradigm to understand the modern subject (1). An important reason for the relevance of the tourist paradigm for these theorists has to do with the increased commodification of visual experience in late capitalism—the modern subject “travels” across mediated, citable images as distributed through television, film, and now, the Internet (Sherlock 1999). The materiality of these commodities altercasts subjects into particular viewing or “gazing” positions (see Williamson 2005). Given that Internet use involves an encounter with the meaningful material forms produced by others, we can say that many online experiences have become a kind of mediated tourism designed for subjects to travel to—and consume the pleasures of—various sites/sights of the other.
In his work, John Thompson (1995) has argued that mediated experience is increasingly important in modernity for the construction of social identity (233). In his analysis of contemporary mediated experience, he notes that “Mediated experience is always recontextualized experience ;it is the experience of events which transpire in distant locales which are re-embedded, via the reception and appropriation of media products, in the practical contexts of daily life” (1995, 228; italics added). In a Derridean sense, the mediated experience allows the traveling subject to cross, or graft, contexts without the limits of spatial proximity. In this sense, advertising for a mediated “experience of the other” becomes the advertisement of another (valuing) context, which promises to valorize the referential context of self.
Images which come into the home from television, computers, mobile devices, and other emerging technologies increasingly provide the consumer with opportunities to graft contexts via mediated “travel.” Non-local images today provide a vast array of resources which individuals can cite as they construct a social identity. This situated identity of the subject becomes the site at which local and mediated contexts are grafted together, and simultaneously differentiated. This type of mediated travel allows for seemingly unlimited possibilities of new experiences, no longer limited by regional resources (see Thompson 1995, 207). These mediated symbolic resources are not necessarily consistent with each other, leading to—in Thompson’s words—“a discontinuous sequence of experiences which have varying degrees of relevance to the self” (230). Thus the “postmodern” self cites a montage of influences, and seeks an eclectic mix of new travel experiences. Many different aspects of identity are thus assembled from citational practices involving differing material signs—resulting in what Kenneth Gergen has termed the “saturated self” (1991).
These mediated experiences for the traveling subject are also often vicarious experiences—the second-hand “experience” of someone else’s experience. In the contemporary television, film, and Internet industries, the subject can stay in the safe and secured citational location of the home even while vicariously consuming the “commercialized action” happening to others on the screen (Goffman 1967, 262). For Goffman, the business of contemporary mass media is to offer the promise of vicarious, fulfilling experiences to consumers. The social world for the economically fortunate thus becomes divided into the “safe” citational positions of home or business, and the more exciting world of vicariously consumed experiences, where others on the screen are shown in more dangerous citational positions (262).
Clearly, today the Internet is, to use Goffman’s phrase, “where the action is” regarding the citational practices of self relative to cultural commodities. Not only do corporations position language-commodities and advertising on websites, but social networking and video-sharing sites have emerged where subjects can post their own content for the viewing pleasures of others. Any occurrence from everyday life can now be uploaded from self to others, making the “experiences” of any subject potentially marketable for the vicarious enjoyment of others—and vice versa. These sights/cites of the other are often ranked as experiences by viewers across the world, who express their approval or disapproval for that “sight.” Such feedback on citational practices shapes a sense of normative value, as well as shapes the direction of future citational practices. While not every uploaded strip of language generates profit in actuality, they potentially do—thus the increased marketability and “citability” of language (see Weber 2008).
The extent to which the Internet becomes commercialized is a matter of ongoing economic and political negotiation, although it is already clear that its syntactical form, as a citational technology, is compatible with an advanced capitalist economy. As in the case of television, advertisers are drawn to those Internet sites where consumers are most often traveling, gazing, and finding citational resources to use in the construction of social identity. What makes many websites valuable is that they precisely become a site for the advertising of other commodities, as well as for other websites. A link to a different website becomes an advertisement for another value context. In this way, the “value” of the online experience is continually deferred, as further mediated travel is continually required. Sites become recognized places of commercial value, not only because of the citational resources they provide to Internet travelers, but also—like television (see Jhally 1987, 72)—because of the audiences delivered to advertisers who promise the “presence of value” elsewhere.
We thus find an increasing technological ability for today’s subjects to look in on the “contexts of others,” and to continually cite/sight each other’s daily experiences. The travel experiences of others can now be posted to social media sites or texted to the subject, who can experience the words and images of others during their own daily travels. In contemporary U.S. culture, language—both as actual and potential commodity—is “traveling” to an unprecedented degree.
As discussed earlier, every utterance can be seen as a variant of “reported speech,” in that the utterances of self incorporate and recontextualize the “language of the other.” For Bauman and Briggs (1990), the “strip” of language which has been selected for recontextualization into the utterances of self can be referred to as a “text,” as distinguishable from the flow of everyday life—which they refer to as interactional “discourse.” They define “entextualization” as “the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit—a text—that can be lifted out of its interactional setting” (Bauman & Briggs 1990, 73, italics in the original). In this sense, we might say that a selected strip of language is an entextualization (or text) which has been readied for citation.
As Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (1996) note, these decontextualized strips are often thought to “represent” the culture of a social group (1-2)—whether in the writings of social scientists, or in the everyday communication practices within a community of users. This normative assumption coincides with Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of “presence,” where the material sign is thought to carry the intentionality or consciousness of an absent subject—here, a collective subject—across contexts. In the case of the entextualized cultural artifact, the assumption is that the artifact becomes an authentic material representation of the collective values of the group. In this normative perspective, these artifacts can then be recontextualized into the utterances of subjects, as well as into institutional settings like museums—as signs taken to re-“present” particular subcultural values. We have seen that in the case of tourism, souvenirs are taken by travelers precisely to re-cite the subcultural values of others into the referential context of self.
To be socialized into a culture is to learn the “significant” entextualizations which are normatively taken to represent key values of one’s own subcultural group, as well as learn which entextualizations assert alternative values—as associated with alterity. Social actors learn the meaning of material signifiers as they observe the normative reactions of others toward that material form—for George H. Mead (1969), a “role-taking” process. Culture thus becomes “reproducible” across contexts, and across generations, through learned citational practices relative to material forms. Children acquire social identities as they learn to prioritize, or cite, normatively valued social objects within a culture—including commodities (Sherlock 2004). Socialization involves both the learned recognition of normatively decontextualized meanings—repeatable and shareable across social contexts—as well as the learned ability to recontextualize these meanings in new and singular ways in evolving social situations. In recontextualization processes, subjects learn to strategically “cite” cultural texts in unique combinations in everyday life. Thus, we can analytically separate two aspects of socialization, although they are inseparable in practice. The first process involves learning the meanings of normative entextualizations, which are taken to represent community values. The second process involves the learning of recontextualization strategies which “bend” or shape these meanings in situated re-citational practices.
In addition, it must be kept in mind that, in a Bakhtinian sense, the (generic) context against which social utterances have meaning itself emerges through social interaction (MacCannell 1985, 984–85)—thus the recontextualization of utterances (texts) also involves the “recontextualization of contexts.” In other words, interpretive (valuing) contexts, as valuing “genres” interpellated from recognizable material forms, are also subject to Derrida’s rule of iterability. In their work, Bauman and Briggs argue that “context” is not to be understood as a exterior frame for discursive acts as pre-given by social norms or by social institutions, but rather is emergent from the situated negotiations of everyday life (1990, 68). Their point is not to deny the force or existence of social structural constraints on identity or action, but rather to recognize the emergent nature of context. In other words, while “valuing contexts” have normative meanings across situations, they emerge as hierarchically differentiated when negotiated through situated linguistic practice. In interaction strategy, participants in a situation cite others differently, shaping cultural meanings and values in politically strategic ways—thus evoking and grafting differing valuing contexts as they seek to influence others.
Briggs and Bauman, in their article “Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power” (1992), elaborate on Bakhtin’s notion of “genre” in a way useful to this discussion. Citing the work of William Hanks, they argue that while genres have traditionally been considered as literary categories—used to classify texts and their structural features—they might better be considered as “frames of reference” used in social interactions (141). In this sense, texts are both entextualized and recontextualized with reference to an interpellated valuing genre, as interpretive context. Employing this concept of genre, Briggs and Bauman show that entextualized forms can be used to evoke the authority of a cultural tradition (148). They show how the interpretation of an entextualized artifact is influenced by its association with a traditional valuing genre; thus, its recontextualization in interactional negotiations re-evokes that traditional valuing context. For Briggs and Bauman, genres “bear social, ideological, and political-economic connections” (147).
We can see that this argument applies to such valuing domains as ethnic, religious, or other subcultural values. As (re-cited) interpretive contexts, valuing genres are linked to particular collectivities (see 145). Various religious or other subcultural value genres are interpellated from the re-citation of texts and cultural artifacts—that is, from sedimented social practices. The re-citation of a cultural form interpellates the subject as a member in a “valuing community” (see 150)—which, in turn, serves as the interpretive frame for both the citational utterance, as well as for the social identity of the subject. In Althusser’s terms, interpellation retroactively creates the imagined collective subject, as well as the affiliated generic values that the utterance is then taken to represent (see also Weber 1991). Valuing contexts or genres are reproduced or resisted in various ways, as the subcultural texts “representing” such genres are recontextualized into new situations.
Anthropological work on entextualization and recontextualization processes in cultures other than the United States may lend some insights into contemporary U.S. socialization processes—as an outline of the general way through which individual identity is aligned with community values. For example, in his work on the performance of traditional nativity plays in Mexico, Richard Bauman (1996) shows that the “text” of the play—first as script, then as cards used by actors, then as “rehearsals,” and finally as “performance”—undergoes a series of recontextualizations. The script or text of the nativity play is continually re-cited along the way, continually re-evoking a religious context as the ground for its interpretation. Religious values and meanings are re-interpellated, as the script is re-cited in each of the sequential stages leading to the final performance—a re-citational ritual which continues a cultural “tradition.” In other words, the script, as entextualized subcultural artifact, is continually recontextualized and re-cited, leading to a continued re-interpellation of shared subcultural values and collective identity.
Citing the work of William F. Hanks, Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (1996) note that the generic “context”—evoked as ground to interpret a particular text—is also used across situations to interpret other artifacts (see 8). For example, the religious context which is interpellated from a nativity script can also be used as the interpretive backdrop for the interpretation of a statue or crucifix. In this way, the valuing genre is abstracted as a meaningful social category across its situated applications.
While it is true, as Bauman and Briggs point out, that generic contexts are situationally negotiated, it is also true that such re-citations are not entirely voluntary. In Butler’s sense, citational practices “representing” cultural traditions are normatively enforced; in the example above, children may be required by parents to attend the nativity play. The process of socialization into a culture involves learning to entextualize and recontextualize words and texts under threat of social sanction.
To be socialized into a culture thus involves learning citational practices, relative to those material artifacts which evoke normative and hierarchically arranged value genres. In normative socialization, one learns to align one’s individual identity with the identity and values of the larger community. In Bauman’s example, growing up in a religious community means that a child is expected to re-cite the nativity play in their utterances, and one’s social identity as “religious person” is interpellated from those citational practices. In this formulation, we have now come close to Durkheim’s (1965) view of how religion “works”: ritual behaviors are enacted relative to material “totems,” which are taken to represent the collective sense of the “sacred” (Turner, Beegghley, and Powers 2007, 304–5). In this sense, re-citational practices which incorporate communally valued entextualizations can be viewed as ritual behaviors.
As Silverstein and Urban have pointed out, within a culture some texts are more important or authoritative than others (1996, 12). Cultural traditions are preserved through re-citational rituals involving valued texts. Social identity, as an affiliation with particular valuing communities, is constructed by citational reference to such authoritative texts. In fact, such authoritative texts must be re-cited in order to continually maintain their privileged status (12–13).
In everyday life, social actors construct social identities with varying degrees of commitment to the normative rituals involving valorized cultural texts. Using Goffman’s (1961) terms, “role embracement” or “role distancing” may be interpellated given such varying levels of commitment to normative citational styles. As Igor Kopytoff (1986) has noted, in preindustrial communities there is a greater alignment of individual valuations with communal valuations than in modern cultures. In the language of citationality, there is less deviation of individual citational rituals from normative citational rituals—and less performative display of “role distance.” For example, in the case of the nativity play, Bauman identified the “different orientations on the part of participants toward the authoritativeness of the script” (1996, 304). In that study, almost all members of the community were anxious to “show their embracement” of the religious authority of the script and re-cite it faithfully—the lone exception being the “Hermitaño” character in the nativity play who served as a “carnivalesque and subversive” figure (Briggs and Bauman 1992, 152).
In their work, Briggs and Bauman have drawn attention to the inevitable “intertextual distance” or “gap” (1992, 149) between any situated re-citation of an authoritative text and its idealized meaning. How a text is cited by subjects determines whether this gap is “minimized” or “maximized” (149–150). Those citational strategies which minimize the gap encourage the interpellation of a strong group identity, shared values, and cultural “tradition.” The subject who aligns strongly with collective values thus uses those particular syntactical forms of “reporting speech,” or citing texts, which are most loyal to tradition—as in the case of a direct quoting of an authoritative text.
In contrast, a citational practice which uses individualizing strategies, such as “avoiding direct discourse” (151), has a consequence of maximizing the distance or gap between citational instance and value genre, and supports “claims of individual creativity and innovation” (149). Briggs and Bauman thus show that syntactical features of utterances generate more or less “distance” from imagined communities, and their associated values. The uses of meaningful syntactical forms to either embrace community values, or to express an individual sense of “role distance,” are learned through socialization.
In general, contemporary U.S. culture tolerates a great diversity of value genres—generally “maximizing the gap” between an individual’s values, and any one homogenous set of traditional values. However, we still find that normative citational practices have emerged to reproduce a dominant value genre in the United States—that of exchange value. The discourse of exchange value has become hegemonic, even given the differentiation and diversity of other subcultural value genres, precisely because of the commodification of language. Those material forms which index membership in diverse subcultures are themselves given a market value, which can be abstracted across valuing genres and subcultures. Citational resources can be given an exchange value by which to rank subcultural artifacts against each other, as well as to hierarchically rank subcultural groups themselves. Citational resources taken to “represent” the values of various subcultural groups are unequally distributed by social class—as “cultural capital” in a market economy (see Bourdieu 1984).
For example, following Bourdieu and citing research by Shirley Brice Heath, Briggs and Bauman (1992) identify social class differences learned in modern schools regarding techniques of referencing particular imagined communities. They show that middle-class children, in their acquisition of cultural capital through education, build a repertoire of citational references to a historical “literary community”—thereby interpellating their social identity as a literate member of such a community in ways that working-class children do not (161). In other words, the generic identity category of “educated person” is achieved through the acquisition of the ability to cite literary texts—a citational skill which is unequally distributed.
While Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) work convincingly argues that social institutions like education regulate access to, and differentially reward, particular citational practices, Judith Butler has shown that the identities of such institutions are themselves the result of re-citational practices (1997, 147). As Crawford and Ostrom (1995) have suggested, social institutions themselves can be considered as recurring patterns of social behavior, and studied using terms drawn from linguistics to identify the “grammar of institutions.” As discussed above, the syntactical practices of economic institutions materially shape the meanings and interpellated values of cultural commodities—and thus ultimately the identities of the consumers who cite them. In these utterances of economic institutions, commodities are entextualized into those material forms which maximize profit, and thereby re-evoke the hegemonic discourse of exchange value.
We thus find a link between the citational practices of institutions engaged in the production of cultural commodities, and the identity of individuals as consumers of citational resources. Just as upper-class students learn to cite their ways into literary communities and preferred educational statuses, other social actors learn to cite their way into other subcultural communities. Economic institutions are eager to provide citational resources to all. Both the hegemonic system of exchange value, as well as the unequal social positioning of actors within that system, are reproduced through the re-citation of cultural commodities.
In a diverse, modern culture like that of the United States, we find that individuals may engage in individualizing, role-distancing strategies relative to any one set of religious, ethnic, or political values. Conversely, modern individuals may “minimize the gap” between individual citational practices and those shared within a larger collectivity—whether a subculture or occupational bureaucracy. To be socialized into contemporary culture, then, is to learn citational practices which allow for individualized variations regarding the embracement of—as well as the distancing of self from—subcultural values and institutionally enforced regulations.
If “meaning” involves an awareness of normative action relative to material forms, as suggested by the work of George H. Mead (see Joas 1997, 153; 105), then socialization into normative meanings involves learning to re-cite social forms in appropriate ways. As discussed above, in socialization processes subjects are taught, on the one hand, to decontextualize and abstract normative meanings. On the other hand, subjects are taught to recontextualize and alter meanings in new situational contexts, in such a way as to negotiate a desired outcome within that unique situation. In this section, these two aspects of socialization will be illustrated through the consideration of two relevant studies.
As discussed earlier, Derrida argued that Western philosophy and culture have favored a metaphysics of “presence,” where meaning is assumed to be located in thought, and conveyed through language. In schools, students socialized into such a model would come to view texts as “containing” the meanings intended by authors. This meaning is assumed to be abstractable and stable across texts and contexts. In other words, students would learn to abstract dictionary-like definitions of words and generic features of texts, as well as to interpret such abstractions as “reflecting” or communicating the subjective intentionalities and values of authors. Techniques are thus predictably developed in Western schools in order to evaluate the ability of students to recognize “objective” meanings and values as “present” within texts (see Silverstein and Urban 1996, 9). In educational theory, the term “textualism” has been applied to such a model (Collins 1996, 204).
In a study of a Chicago grade school, James Collins (1996) notes that while readers with less-advanced skills focused on pronunciation exercises in the classroom, more “advanced” readers engaged in exercises designed to recognize literary themes. As Collins shows, both sets of exercises reinforced a textualist approach in differing ways. The “advanced” readers were taught to abstract “universal” literary themes from a particular text, while “less-advanced” readers were taught that their reading performances revealed a decontextualizable “ability to read”—an ability which could be “objectively” assessed independently of situational context (see also Mertz, 1996, 232).
Collins’s study shows that the “presence” of these varying student abilities—whether the ability to read, or the ability to recognize literary themes—is related to the assumed presence and stability of meaning in the text itself. While, as Derrida and Butler argue, re-citational practices have the potential to disrupt normative meanings, in this particular study we find that the citation of literary texts in these classrooms instead stabilized the universal meanings and literary themes assumed by the textualist model. In turn, the text—as a citational resource assumed to “contain” meaning—was used to stabilize the identities of students, and rank them according to ability.
Considering the hypothetical futures of the “advanced readers” in the Collins study, we can imagine how their citational performances—which re-cited the literary themes “present” in various texts—could lead to an interpellation of the student as a good scholar. This meaningful social identity, of course, could itself be carried across situations, from classroom-to-classroom. In other words, the ability to abstract and cite normative meanings, or literary genres, during a classroom interpretation of a text enables a claimed membership in a “literary community.” In the contrasting case of those students with lower-level reading skills, the lack of reading ability ultimately leads to a stigmatized social identity. This “abstractable” identity can also cross educational or employment contexts. In the case of either group of readers, we see that citational practices have implications for social identity.
As mentioned above, one aspect of socialization requires that youth engage in practices which display their ability to decontextualize, or abstract, meaning from particular cultural texts. Collins shows that this can involve either the abstraction of universal literary themes from texts, or the abstraction of a decontextualized ability to read. The other aspect of socialization involves the ability to recognize the political implications of the recontextualization of meaningful material forms, and to learn to differentially cite sources in unique situational negotiations.
Generally, social actors learn to cite socially relevant values in dialogue, linking their own utterances to prior speech acts. Citational practices contribute to an emergent interactive context, as actors recontextualize in what ways strips of prior discourse may be relevant to new situational negotiations. In other words, both material texts, as well as their implied (valuing) contexts, are strategically brought into new situated interactions.
As Elizabeth Mertz (1996) shows in a study of law school socialization in the United States, students learn to cite “precedent,” or previous instances of discourse. Mertz notes that this skill does not involve a reading of the “universal” meaning of particular texts, but rather a learned style of reading where only selected aspects of prior texts are “made relevant” to the negotiation of current legal cases. To be socialized as a lawyer is to learn to cite strategically, or to “bend” meanings—extracted from previous cases—toward new politically oriented outcomes. As Mertz puts it, attorneys “struggle to succeed in imposing a particular recontextualization of precedent” (230, italics added). Generalizing beyond the Mertz study, we can see that such an ability is also used in everyday interactions, as social actors strategically “report on,” or recontextualize, the words and images of others for particular purposes. This skill—recognizing how prior citational practices mean something new when recontextualized into a new situation—illustrates the Derridean point that meaning is not stable across contexts, but is necessarily altered in each situated use. Both students of law, and actors in everyday life, find that how and when a previously established meaning or value is cited is important to the outcome of the negotiation.
In the U.S. legal tradition, lower court decisions frame and limit the legal issues for the appellate courts—which is obviously not the case in everyday life. However, in a more general way we can say that the material forms of socially prior utterances necessarily shape the possibilities for their later recontextualizations in everyday life. In the syntactical arrangements of utterances and social objects, materiality is shaped into particular forms which influence—but do not determine—the ways in which these objects are likely to be recontextualized in later social interactions.
In both legal practice and in everyday life, the citation of “precedent,” or of previous utterances, can reshape the meaning and value of those prior communicative acts. In other words, the value of a prior case changes as it becomes a precedent for the case at hand (see 234). In a Derridean sense, the meaning and value of the previously materialized utterances are continually deferred, and open to possible recontextualization and redefinition in unknown future situations. It is not so much that the meaning and value of cases is stable across contexts; rather, the meaning and value of any material sign is re-negotiated through a grafting of that “precedent” into subsequent interactions.
In socialization, then, subjects learn how to choose those particular “precedents,” from the vast array of previously entextualized utterances of others, which are seen to be strategically relevant in everyday interactions within subcultural groups. For example, a particular team’s baseball cap may be strategically recontextualized into street gang interactions—from which membership in that subculture is interpellated. Repeated citations of this “precedent” may become a normative gang ritual, which alters the meaning and value of the baseball cap (relative to the larger culture). Such a citational practice, as Mertz puts it in reference to the citation of legal texts in the law school classroom, “directs attention to aspects of text that are ideologically significant” (231, italics added).
Even young gang members become quickly aware that the normative meaning of a baseball cap has been “recontextualized” in this situation, with implications for the interpellation of social identity for its wearer. If a particular baseball cap were to become an important, quasi-sacred object within a street gang, we can see that its “authority” comes not from its normative referential content (i.e., the meaning of the hat in the larger culture), but from the way it comes to “index” membership in the subcultural group (see Silverstein 1976) as it “plays against” the normative meanings of the larger culture. Similarly, in law school, students learn that only certain legal aspects of previous cases are relevant to the present case (Mertz 1996, 240).
In this section, using the two school studies, we have analytically separated two aspects of socialization—first, learning to decontextualize social meanings so as to transport them across situations, and second, learning to recontextualize social meanings as relevant to new situations. In everyday practice, of course, these learned skills are in fact closely intertwined, and continually used in conjunction with each other. This holds not only for the re-citation of particular texts, but also for the re-citation of an interpretive context or valuing genre itself—inasmuch as the meaning of a contextual genre has to be linked to prior usages. Street gang members may recontextualize baseball caps or several other “texts” in the ongoing re-citation of the valuing “context” of gang affiliation.
Socialization thus involves learning how normative relationships between self and others are constructed through the re-citation and recontextualization of meaningful materialities. Robert Preucel, in his book Archaeological Semiotics (2006), has noted that the field of archaeology has begun to relocate its problematic by supplementing the study of “material culture” with the study of “materiality” (4–5). He defines “materiality” as “the social constitution of self and society by means of the object world” (5). In his book, he also notes a corresponding movement within the field of semiotics toward situated practice (8). In considering this convergence of interests in archeology and semiotics, Preucel stresses the importance of the “contextualization” of material entities for their meaning (8). He also notes the contributions of “pragmatic anthropology” as it builds upon Peircean semiotics, especially the concept of “indexicality” (68). In this tradition, Preucel points out, “It is widely accepted that linguistic forms often serve as indexes of social groups” (78).
We can clearly see here an affiliation of this anthropological problematic with Butler‘s notion that citational practices “interpellate” the social identities of self and other, as well as align individual identities with those of larger reference groups. This convergence can also be aided through a Bakhtinian emphasis on the materiality of citational resources, as the site for the re-negotiation of cultural values. In other words, there is an increasing recognition in scholarly literature as to the importance of socialization processes where subjects learn how to both decontextualize, and recontextualize, meaningful material forms. As Silverstein and Urban have put it, “textuality and entextualization practices turn out to be about ‘identity’” (1996, 10).
Valuing contexts, as well as the social identities of actors, are negotiated in situational interactions. In other words, meaningful strips of language do not “index their contexts” once and for all, but rather context itself is continually renegotiated as social meanings are continually bent toward particular situational outcomes. Social actors, as John Gumperz (1997) has shown, learn to recognize “contextualization cues” used by others, in establishing and negotiating interactional context (231–32). Because social actors are simultaneously situated relative to multiple valuing contexts at the same time, participants in dialogue must continually re-prioritize or make relevant particular values—and communicate these strategic movements to each other (see also Duranti and Goodwin 1997, 5).
Thus subjects not only learn to re-cite or recontextualize texts within “pregiven” contexts (such as a classroom), but in turn re-establish the meaning and relevance of those contexts through the same citational practices. For example, to abstract a theme from a literary text in a classroom maneuver is to re-assert the educational context—as opposed to re-citing a prayer in a classroom which evokes an alternative religious context. Duranti and Goodwin have noted that “talk itself constitutes a main resource for the organization of context” (7–8). They cite the contributions of ethnomethodologists to this line of argument, given their recognition as to how social actors “negotiate or achieve a common context” (27). Duranti and Goodwin also cite the contribution of those conversation analysts who study how contexts shift in dialogue (30). In learning how to re-cite, then, subjects must learn to re-evoke normative contexts, in socially appropriate ways, when interacting with others. This not only includes the citation of situationally relevant words, but also the appropriate prioritization of those materialized props or social objects which evoke normative hierarchies of valuing contexts.
To be socialized into language use, then, involves learning how to use “contextualization cues” (Gumperz 1997, 231-32), and other normative conversational techniques (see Lucy 1993), which enable audiences to re-enact particular interpretive contexts through utterances. As the Bakhtin Circle has shown, the way in which the entextualized words of others are reported or cited involves the employment of particular syntactical forms. These forms interpellate the valuing contexts of self and others, which play against each other. As utterances incorporate the words of others in particular ways, normative valuing contexts are “re-cited.” The ability to appropriately re-cite cultural values is learned through socialization.
In his work, George H. Mead (1969) locates the meaning of the material objects and signs that we encounter in everyday life in the normative responses of others toward them—in a social commonality of response which the social actor learns to anticipate (73–74; Joas 1997, 105). Social actors are thus socialized into a culture of common meanings, both regarding the physical uses of material objects, as well as regarding their more abstract significations—as when a child is advised to color in a coloring book rather than in a sacred text.
As discussed above, in citing material signs into new situations, the meaning of that sign crosses situational contexts. Similarly, the meaning of “value” is abstracted across contexts, as those material signs which are normatively taken as representative of particular value domains are cited into new situations. Subjects learn how others cite particular cultural forms, and thus learn to recognize their normative value. In re-citing this value in their own utterances, subjects adopt normative citational styles relative to cultural value discourses. The process of “learning to value,” in accordance with community traditions, involves learning to recognize the value of normative forms, to produce such forms in normative citational styles, and to recontextualize valued forms into situated negotiations with others.
Subjects learn how to refer to meaningful materialities, and how to value them differentially. They learn to behave in culturally preferred ways relative to particular material forms; in David Graeber’s words, one way to think about value is “as the importance of actions” (2001, 49). Citational practice thus becomes the social mechanism whereby the normative value domains, such as religious, ethnic, or political values, are reproduced—these practices become socially sedimented ways of ritually acting toward valued cultural forms. Value domains are thus re-produced as a commonality of social response to material signs—and in reference to which, in Mead’s sense, social actors are able to anticipate the citational practices of others.
It is not only the materialized text which is taken to have value across situations, as a material representation of a collectively held cultural value, but the “valuing context” itself is re-assumed as the artifact is re-cited. These contexts are implied in the material form of the cultural artifact; indeed, meaningful materialities are usually produced precisely in order to evoke particular valuing contexts in future situations. For example, it is anticipated that the material form of a crucifix or a hymn will normatively signify a religious valuing domain. The value of the artifact, and the valuing (religious) context, reciprocally emerge in citational practices.
In this sense, within the representationalist framework still normative in U.S. culture, we can distinguish between two senses of “value”; first, the “functional value” of a text in more or less effectively representing the collectivity; and second, the collectively held “cultural value” which is said to pre-exist its material embodiment. Citational practices are normatively held to involve both the functional value of material citational resources, as well as the social values they signify.
As Mead argued, it is through “role taking” that we evaluate our impulses to act—themselves socially conditioned within the value order—in light of the anticipated value attributions of others. For Mead, like Bakhtin, this future-oriented nature of action always already involves values. The “social self” we present to others, in Mead’s words, “must be recognized by others to have the very values which we want to have belong to it” (1969, 204). In other words, subjects align their situated citational practices with the normative value discourses in such as a way that a recognizable type of “valuing identity” can be interpellated—as supposedly motivating those citations. In Mead’s (1969) terms, we anticipate the assessments which others will make of “me,” and their attributions of values to “me.” In Vološinov’s words, “Intonation can be thoroughly understood only when one is in touch with the assumed value judgments of the given social group,” as a “commonness of evaluations” (1976, 102).
Inasmuch as these social responses of others become organized or sedimented within a culture, we can speak of the normative valuations, or typifications, made by others regarding our utterances. Through the process of socialization, subjects become aware that in response to one’s own citational practices, others will attribute to them a socially recognizable identity, and attribute subcultural values to that identity. The acting subject thus negotiates their citational moves relative to normative identity categories, as well as relative to the subcultural “values” normatively attributed to those social identities. Children learn the social typifications which accompany their citational practices. They learn that certain “types of people” engage in certain types of social behaviors, and learn to attribute particular values to those people. In this sense, to “entextualize,” or syntactically incorporate, a value domain into an utterance already anticipates the “recontextualization” of the utterance by others.
As children learn language, they learn how to prioritize, or make relevant, certain behaviors or words in particular situations. Children learn what their parents think is important, as parents direct their attention toward particular material signs in situations. Children learn what words are to be re-cited in particular situations—thus learning to anticipate the priorities of others relative to the meaningful materiality of language. In family life, children learn to prioritize certain valued social objects in spatial arrangements in the home, as well as learn the temporality of priorities in everyday family interactions. Social actors learn to prioritize material signs in their own utterances by learning how significant others cite material signs, as well as how significant others interpellate value hierarchies and subcultural membership from those signs.
From a symbolic interactionist point of view, social actors are not simply socialized into the structure of a normative value system; rather values are re-constructed in everyday life through social interaction (see also Graeber 2001, xii). Vocabularies of normative values are strategically employed in specific social settings, as value is talked about, negotiated, and situationally re-enacted. As Herbert Blumer has noted, social interaction involves an interpretive process where meanings are emergent from within the situation, as opposed to “a mere automatic application of established meanings” (1969, 5). For example, family life can be considered as a “negotiated order”—a term associated with the work of Anselm Strauss (Hewitt and Shulman 2011, 164). Family members have to negotiate and prioritize citational practices—such as what television shows to watch, what type of electronic devices to purchase, or what events and “experiences” to enjoy. In this sense, family values are re-produced through citational practices.
In a diverse culture, value conflicts continually arise in everyday life, given the differing stances of individuals relative to the multiplicity of available value genres. An important aspect of interpersonal dialogue thus concerns the continual re-prioritization of values, and the negotiation of social relationships involving such values. For example, a parent may question a teen’s citational selection of a rock poster, as opposed to a religious object, for a bedroom wall. We can see that politically negotiated outcomes regarding the prioritization of valuing contexts, as well as the implications of such outcomes for social relationships, occur through the meaningful material signs cited in social interaction.
Values are therefore not only negotiated within the syntactical form of particular utterances, as in the case of reported speech. Rather, the entire material configuration of an interactive situation is the site of value negotiation. The materiality of any particular utterance plays against the materialized utterances of others in the situation, as well as against the normative meanings of the other social objects in that material configuration. The citational practices or behavioral moves occur within the entire materiality of the “social situation.”
The politics of value negotiation thus involves the strategic use of citational resources—such as the way that subjects report the words of others (see Vološinov 1986; Duranti and Goodwin 1997, 12). Bakhtin has used the term “double-voicing” to refer to the way that a speaker takes an evaluative stance relative to the words or voice of another within the speaker’s own utterance (Bakhtin 1984, 185; Wortham and Locher 1999). This concept can also be extended to refer to the way that a citational utterance “reports on” the normative materiality of social environments—as comprised of the words, objects, and images “of the other.” Value and identity negotiation between subcultures, with competing values, occurs through meaningful material forms themselves.
The citation of a “reference group” involves the assertion of one’s identity as a member of a collectivity. In such a citational practice, value differences within the referential subculture are glossed over in favor of a more unified typification of the supposedly shared values of that community. To borrow Benedict Anderson’s term from his study of nationalism, the referential subculture is an “imagined community” (1991). However, given the diversity of contemporary U.S. culture, the subject simultaneously cites multiple, competing, subcultural reference groups—forming a “web” of citational affiliations (see Simmel 1955), or a hybrid mix of “value subjectivities” for each individual. The prioritization of such references occurs via material utterances which, as Bakhtin shows, enact the “synchronization” (MacCannell 1985) of a differentiated and hierarchical system of values.
When the subject experiences the “presence” of value in the contemporary cultural economy, it is not merely as an individual. Rather, subjects construct individual experience through the value genres and identity categories which align them with particular reference groups. For example, a subject may experience everyday life as the type of person who would put “family above business,” or as someone who tries to keep “commercialism out of art.” In the course of a day, social actors participate in several valuing spheres, re-constructing experiential identities relative to many differing, and even conflicting, imagined valuing communities.
Thus each social identity, interpellated through citational practice, necessarily involves different ratios of competing values. Because cultural commodities enter into differing material constellations, the same mass-produced form in different situations may interpellate differentially ranked values and identities. The ongoing citational practices of subjects are thus guided by, to use Derrida’s term, a “logic of supplementarity” (1997, 215)—where some values are cited as dominant in identity construction, and other values are subordinated.
The very act of differentiating and prioritizing values divides the world of meaningful materiality into more or less “valuable” citational resources, which, in turn, interpellates a prioritizing subjectivity. This occurs on both individual and subcultural levels, as individuals cite their way into imagined communities with already-interpellated value hierarchies. Vikki Bell (1999), citing the work of Anne-Marie Fortier and of Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin, speaks of the “performativity of belonging,” where the re-citation of the norms of the group “makes material the belongings they purport to simply describe” (3).
For example, membership in a family is re-cited as individuals daily position themselves relative to social objects taken to represent that membership, as well as issue material utterances which re-enact the alignment of individual identity with that of the family. Bringing Eugene Rochberg-Halton’s (1986) study (discussed below) into the language of citationality, we can say that the home environment continually interpellates the family as a collective subject “possessing” a particular hierarchy of group values—given the way that material objects have been positioned and prioritized in the family’s citational practices. Family values are thus continually re-constructed through the ongoing placement of material social objects within the spaces of the home.
One’s individual experiences as a member of the family are constructed relative to this collective sense of family values. Thus, we may find that one family member becomes uncomfortable watching a particular television show in the living room with another family member, if the interpellated values of the show stand against those collective values. In other words, particular images or words from the television may, by entering into the normative material constellation from which the collective values are interpellated, create a kind of dissonance relative to normative group identity.
In this sense, politics involve the defense of the citational practices of one’s self, or one’s group, in order to maintain value distinctions. Just as, for Butler, gender is politically maintained through the enforced repetition of gendered citations, so are various value discourses and valuing communities institutionally maintained in the culture, through both the marketing of citational resources, as well as in the maintenance of the material environments in which citational practices occur. In the language of Pierre Bourdieu (1984), an institutionalized “linguistic market” emerges favoring particular kinds of cultural capital.
Using another example, we can see that the citation of particular values at a speaking engagement may index the speaker as a representative of the “kinds of values” supported by a sponsoring political community. Whether at a religious ceremony or political rally, a keynote speaker is taken to represent the pre-existing, collectively held values of the group. The positioning of the audience relative to the materiality of the speech—a citational practice—serves to ritually reinforce group solidarity. The alignment of the speaker’s values with those of the group occurs through the meaningful materiality of the speech itself, as well as through the speaker’s bodily “presence” at the event—another citational practice relative to that event.
In late capitalism, the citational resources used to interpellate group values are themselves commodifiable, in that they not only represent group values, but also are given an exchange value as to their ability to experientially deliver those values—that is, make the values “present.” Thus each speech and each speaker, or each guest on a television talk show, is actually—or potentially—given an exchange value as to their functional worth in “delivering” various religious, political, or family values. For example, the worth of a citational resource for an audience might be measured by the functionality of the political speech in winning votes, the perceived intensity of the religious experience at a revival, or simply the entertainment value of an attraction for a family on a vacation. The point is that the exchange value of the citational resource is itself measured in terms of its capacity to deliver the experience of other subcultural values.
In Against the Romance of Community, Miranda Joseph (2002) has argued that capitalism itself is dependent upon the notion of “community” (xxxii), in that group identities are differentiated through their differing types of consumption (22; 30). In this sense, Joseph speaks of consumption as a “performative production” of both individual and community identity—rather than as a passive “consumerism” (34). While the dominant ideology is that community or subcultural values are unaffected by, or even resistant to, the exchange value system (9), in fact “capitalism is the very medium in which community is enacted” (xxxii).
As language itself becomes increasingly commodified, exchanged in the market, and assigned a worth in the U.S. cultural economy, the subjects who attempt to cite alternative values are thus faced with a dilemma. Those utterances which seek to signify, for example, a “religious” or “family” experience—outside of, or even opposed to, exchange value—must necessarily employ language which itself can become commodifiable and assigned a market value. Thus, it has become increasingly difficult for subjects to cite alternative valuing communities and discourses, inasmuch as their citation requires material forms which themselves have an economic worth.
As an indication of this difficulty, we today find people asserting that highly paid “televangelists”—once taken to “represent” a religious community—might instead represent the corruption of religious values, precisely because of their marketability. Others might assert that their favorite music artists and songs have been tainted through their association with advertised products. Even live events invoking values perceived to be oppositional toward commercialization, such as a religious revival or punk rock concert, are increasingly viewed with cynicism as they are heavily advertised, promoted, and thereby associated with exchange value.
In addition, the “measure” of the depth of religious or aesthetic experience itself is often given in the quantifying language of exchange value (see Guillory 1993, 323). For example, someone considering purchasing a painting for the wall of a home might not only consider the potential increase which the artwork brings to the marketability of the home, but may also attempt to quantify a measure of the “aesthetic value” of “experiencing” the work for a certain length of time. Works providing greater aesthetic experiences may well be “worth” the purchase price. In this sense, the exchange value discourse of the larger culture has become an pervasive reference, or frame, which is normatively grafted onto the everyday performativity of other values.
As Haug has shown (1986), the attribution of value to material goods is increased, along with the purchase price, precisely because of the aesthetic language which advertisers graft onto commodities. For Haug, sellers use aesthetic techniques, such as photography or music, to create a mythology or aura around the product. For example, in automobile advertising cars may be aligned with social status or adventure, beyond their mere use as transportation. For Haug, the exaggeration of what the consumer will “experience” following the purchase of the product has reached the point where the “aesthetic” experiences promised by material goods have become entirely separated from their “real” use-values. Haug argues that these promised experiences increasingly constitute a greater proportion of the exchange value of the product (16–17). Ironically, the exchange value of a citational resource increases as advertising successfully makes appeals to other cultural values—such as “individualism,” “success,” or “sexuality.” The promise of the “presence” of other cultural values increases the exchange value of the cultural commodity.
In this way, a “valuing crisis” seems to have emerged for the contemporary subject, who experiences the difficulty of re-enacting subcultural values which somehow lie outside of the discourse of exchange value. Subjects find that the “presence” of any value is increasingly coterminous with the hegemonic “presence” of exchange value (see Guillory 1993, 323). The problem is that the signification of “non-economic” experiences and values cannot be separated from the commodifiable, material form of language in the cultural economy—from which exchange value is simultaneously interpellated. In this sense, any alternative values are always already “corrupted” because of the increased marketability of language itself.
In a Derridean sense, it is true that these alternative, “non-economic” value categories could never be, and have never been, pure types to begin with. However, in both popular perception and theoretical analysis, particular value categories have historically been regarded as separable domains. It is from within this traditional understanding that the contemporary subject now confronts a valuation crisis. While the market presents itself as simply a distributional mechanism—to deliver experiences aligning with the pre-existing values of subcultures and individuals—in so doing it necessarily disrupts the perceived “purity” of these alternative value categories.
Thus, to speak of the performativity of exchange value is to recognize that today, subjects cannot help but re-cite the exchange value frame—given the extent to which the culture has become commodified. In the contemporary cultural economy, virtually all utterances are potentially grafted with the hegemonic exchange value discourse. Not only do individuals re-cite the commodified words and images of others, but their own utterances may come to be marketable. The exchange value of language is thus potentially re-performed with every utterance—whether that utterance attempts to embrace, or attempts to resist, the enabling constraints of the cultural economy.
As mentioned, for Bakhtin the “synchronic” system of differentiated values between self and other is continually re-cited and re-negotiated through utterances. In the situated utterances of everyday life, individuals selectively cite material forms taken to represent various subcultural value discourses. Just as subcultural group identities are interpellated from citational practices which evoke competing value discourses or “genres” (Bakhtin 1984), so are individual identities “split” in various proportion between these culturally available value genres. One’s social identity can never be a pure example of a particular genre—it can only be constructed in relation to alterity, and differentiated from social identities which are taken to represent other value discourses.
Bakhtin uses the concept of “ratio” to emphasize, as in the case of reported speech, that the values of self and the values of others always combine in some proportion in any utterance, as well as in the inner speech of the self (Holquist 2004, 29). Citational utterances, both anticipated as well as actualized, thus enact a “graft of values,” or—to use Walter Benjamin’s term—construct a unique “constellation” (Buck-Morss 1979) of values in varying proportion to each other. Extending this argument, the grafting of values applies not only within utterances, but also between utterances. In other words, individual identity is continually interpellated from a social environment comprised of multiple material forms—relative to the many group identities taken to be represented by those forms.
As discussed above, the material grafting of the values of self to the values of others in utterances involves the bringing together of at least two contexts in order to be meaningful. A subject grafts or cites the material signs produced by others into new utterances, taking an evaluative position relative toward normative identities and values by referencing those material signs in particular ways. In written or verbal utterances, this “referencing” or citational practice involves the syntactical construction of the utterance, as well as its positioning in sequences of interactional dialogue. In the case of meaningful social objects, this referencing involves the spatial and temporal positioning of these meaningful material objects relative to the subject.
For example, Rochberg-Halton (1986), relying heavily on the semiotic work of Charles Peirce, as well as the work of George Herbert Mead, has studied the construction of symbolically ordered environments in private homes. Rochberg-Halton argues that a material possession can serve as a “role model” or “reference” for a subject, inasmuch as the object can indicate or represent “certain values of the culture” (149). Rochberg-Halton here follows George H. Mead, arguing that “inanimate objects could serve as elements of the generalized other” (149), as subjects “take the attitude” of particular objects. These objects are associated with particular roles (150), which are patterns of social behavior taken to represent particular cultural values. In this sense, relationships to others can be enacted through the positioning of social objects, taken as material signs of particular social values. In his research, Rochberg-Halton specifically focuses on the arrangement of meaningful material objects in the home, given the differing values of their owners.
As Bakhtin would argue, every meaningful object has a social history involving others. Just as the “words of the other” become part of our own speech, the “objects of the other” are also incorporated into the citational practices of the subject. As in the case of reported speech, meaningful social objects signifying the values of others are grafted into the referential context of one’s life, shaping one’s own “inner values” in various proportion. Just as, for Vološinov, “inner speech” relies on the same objective signs found in external or outer speech with others, Rochberg-Halton points out—referring to Cooley and Mead—that internal conversations with self involve the social objects or “signs” distributed in home environments (155). In Bakhtinian terms, different individuals enact different “ratios” in regard to cultural value discourses through the placement of material objects in the home. For example, some people may place those social objects which predominantly reference “religious values” in prominent locations in the home, as opposed to status symbols referencing “exchange value.”
While in the Rochberg-Halton study there were individual valuations which differed from the normative valuations of the larger culture, there were also shared behavioral practices patterned by sociological categories. For example, Rochberg-Halton points out that different family members valued items differently, especially across age categories (155–57). Specifically, Rochberg-Halton contrasts the “egocentric” placement practices of youth, who were very much concerned with their own emerging identities, with those of older adults (158). In Bakhtinian terms, these can be thought of as different hierarchical ratios involving differing value contexts—as indicated by the syntactical distribution of materialities within the home environment.
We can thus see how the spatial arrangements of social objects in a home might be seen as a citational practice of the subject, involving evaluative stances toward the “signs of the other”—as, for example, when a cherished photograph is placed in a prominent household location. After being stored for a time, such a photograph might be returned to the prominent location during a family gathering at a holiday—temporally situating the photograph to interpellate shared “family values.” The citational practices of subjects thus involve the social positioning of material signs both spatially and temporally, interpellating a particular type of social identity which prioritizes—and also is taken to “represent”—the values normatively associated with these signs.
In this sense, we might reconsider “reference groups”—a term used in social psychology to refer to an intentional alignment of the values of self with the pre-existing values of particular social groups—along the lines of citational practice. Rather than seeing the spatial and temporal distribution of material signs as “representing” a prior group consciousness, we might speak of a more performative “citational referencing” of subcultural values, through the material positioning of signs relative to the subject. “Reference groups” thus become groups to be interpellated and prioritized through citation—a process which simultaneously interpellates the group identity, as well as those particular values which the groups are normatively taken to represent.
Thus, it is not only verbal or written utterances which enact what Bakhtin refers to as the ratio, or proportion, of the “values of self” relative to “values of others.” Reading Rochberg-Halton’s study through the language of citationality, we can see more generally that the materiality of social environments—which subjects (and social institutions) both construct and cite—also continually re-prioritizes cultural value discourses. As in the case of reported speech, the subject takes a stand relative to normative value discourses through the positioning and arrangement of meaningful material objects into particular configurations or constellations—relative to the social and physical positioning of the subject. The spatial and temporal positioning of material social objects, relative to the subject, thus grafts together the referential contexts of self and others in unique valuing ratios.
Just as situated material utterances necessarily signify in unique ways, so do the material configurations of social objects; in fact, both are meaningful materialities with differing “modalities” (see Althusser 1971). However, the singularity of such a particular citational grafting of objects is, in turn, subject to the “rules” of iterability—that is, in order to be recognizable and meaningful, the “value constellation” must be repeatable across situations. Thus, for example, norms regarding interior decorating emerge publicly, even as individual “value ratios” can be constructed through idiosyncratic citational practices in private homes.
As Berger and Luckmann argued in The Social Construction of Reality (1967), the dominant definition of reality is often “reified” (89), or taken for granted by members of a culture. Socialization into the reified worldview occurs through language, which continually reinforces a particular view of the world through the references made to social “realities” by actors. For Berger and Luckmann, the self internalizes normative social meanings, and thus a “subjective reality” (129) emerges. In the language of citationality, children are socialized into normative citational practices as they internalize the usual responses of others to their utterances. They learn the temporal and spatial prioritizations of material signs in their homes, neighborhood, and culture as they see what others pay attention to and value. From these normative citational practices, normative social identities are interpellated.
In contemporary U.S. culture, children learn to pay attention to and cite those material signs which are (ideologically) assumed to embody the “presence” of exchange value. Growing up in households where purchase decisions are made within the confines of particular family budgets, children learn to measure the worth of experiences against each other. Of course, in household decisions several cultural discourses come into play; for example, the perceived importance of entertainment experiences may be weighed against religious experiences as the family distributes its time. Yet even here the standardized measure of exchange value intrudes, in the consideration given by parents as to how the quality of various childhood experiences weigh against the labor experiences which ultimately finance them. It is not just that citational utterances “matter” to families, in that their meaningful materialities imply particular cultural values. It is also that citational utterances “count”—in that the exchange value of the citational experiences are weighed against the measurable constraints of family budgets. Parents thus attempt to guide youth through the maze of cultural commodities within social class restrictions, balancing the entertainment value of youth subcultural activities against other value discourses.
As Arlie Hochschild (2003) has shown, subjects also learn the emotions socially appropriate to various situations. Children learn to re-cite the appropriate emotion when engaging in particular citational practices; for example, that a day spent watching auto racing on a big-screen television should make them happy and excited, or that listening to the lyrics of particular songs should make them feel ashamed. These emotions are constructed in line with cultural and family value discourses regarding the supposed “presence” or “lack” of value in specific citational practices. The commodified words and images of others—like the televised race or popular song—are measured against the standard of exchange value, to the extent that they do or do not deliver worthwhile experiences to the normative subject.
The interpellated worth of subjective experiences, as measured within a hierarchy of exchange value, has become an important backdrop to the social typing of others and the construction of social identity—especially given the cultural belief that persons with higher incomes have better lifestyle experiences. Others attribute personality features to those who engage in particular citational practices, and assign them membership in particular valuing communities. The solicitation of desired value attributions thus becomes a taken-for-granted “motive” of social behavior (see Mills 2003). It is taken as natural that normative subjects organize their lives to maximize and collect these culturally valued experiences—a “reified” assumption into which succeeding generations are socialized (see Berger and Luckmann 1967). Contemporary socialization practices teach that the words of particular others—especially media figures—are rankable, marketable, and a source of valuable experience for subjects.
The words of the other—as representative of particular identities and cultural values—are static. In Derrida’s sense, the normative meaning of a particular cultural form—such as a piece from a musician, or the words of a president—are abstractable from “original” context, and become citable in new contexts. Even while the living musician or president may be changing and evolving, their prior utterances become material forms with a sedimented historical meaning, and come to represent particular value domains. Thus, a subject can continually evoke famous media personalities as important influences in their own lives—even for decades—even though the cited other may have since become a very different person. As Thompson (1995) has noted, the relationship of “fans” with media celebrities is a one-sided, non-reciprocal relationship; in this sense, fans have their relationships with an entextualized form representing a valuing community, rather than with a person.
Following Goffman (1959), we can see that in the everyday presentation of self, citation practices are employed by the subject to prompt audiences to typify them within desirable identity categories. In addition, self-interpretation rests on the availability of desirable past experiences, or of past attributions by others, as evidence for particular self-categorizations. Thus subjects comb their own biographies and photo albums in order to construct their current identities, selectively citing valuable experiences of their past as evidence of their current status. Social actors also seek to anticipate and arrange valued experiences in the future, through the planned acquisition of fashionable citational resources. The normative contemporary subject thus attempts to build a “citational archive” of value, attempting to accumulate a lifetime of worthwhile, valued experiences to look back upon when assessing the “worth” of their life—as measured, again, in the language of exchange value. Each individualized subject thus emerges with a unique autobiography, or “constellation” of commodified citational experiences.
This chapter extended Butler’s thesis regarding the performativity of gender into a more general thesis regarding the performativity of value. While chapters four and five will specifically address the performativity of exchange value, this chapter addressed the performativity of subcultural values. The main argument presented was that individuals align their social identities with subcultural groups through citational practices, which re-cite the values normatively associated with those subcultural groups. As opposed to a representational perspective which assumes that subcultural values pre-exist their expression, the chapter suggests that a performative perspective better describes how values and subcultural identities are constructed through situated, material utterances.
Just as Butler extended the work of Derrida in her work, this chapter began by extending Derrida’s thesis regarding the metaphysics of “presence” in Western philosophy and culture into a thesis regarding the “presence” of subcultural values. Just as “presence” has been the dominant metaphysical assumption in the West, the assumed presence of subcultural values remains important for contemporary identity construction practices. The presence of subcultural values is today performatively re-enacted through the citation of cultural commodities, ideologically taken to “re-present” particular subcultural values.
The first section of the chapter concerned the socialization processes whereby this temporality of value (i.e., “presence”) is reproduced, as children are taught normative citational practices. Subcultural values are performatively re-enacted by children as they learn to re-cite those meaningful material forms which represent important cultural values. Children are taught that value is “present” in particular material forms, and that the citation of these forms reveals that particular values are present within their own “selves.” These practices can be seen as performative of subcultural values, in the sense that they actively reproduce these values—rather than simply representing them.
In addition to learning a particular temporality of value and how to re-cite it, children in Western cultures are also taught to use particular syntactical forms, which interpellate a particular type of subject. The notion of an individualistic, autonomous subject who “experiences” the value of social objects—a “Cartesian” subjectivity—is reinforced through utterances which materially re-enact these assumptions. Through citational practices, the individual Cartesian subject is aligned with the (Cartesian) subjectivity of a reference group, which is taken to collectively possess particular values.
The chapter next used the example of travel and tourism to show how the Cartesian version of subjectivity has been sustained throughout Western history, and continues into the present. Citational practices not only involve bringing the words of self and other together in syntactical formations, but also involve bringing the bodies of the subject into proximity with the bodies of the other—as in the case of travel. In Western history we find that a particular way of gazing at the other, in travel, has historically reinforced Cartesian subjectivity. The visual experience of a Cartesian subject involves the objectification of the other, as well as reinforces the subcultural boundaries between self and other. In “learning to travel,” subjects learn to cite others in normative, syntactical formations which re-enact hegemonic identities and values.
The taking of souvenirs during travel also re-differentiates the referential contexts of self and other. Considered as “quotes” from another subculture, the souvenir valorizes the home context of the traveler by incorporating the exotic images or objects of the other (Sherlock 1998). As citational practice, the other is brought into the utterance of self in a controlled fashion. The incorporation of commodified words and images of others into the citational experiences of the Western subject continues today through mediated travel, involving citational technologies such as television, film, and the Internet.
The second section of the chapter directly addressed the processes involved in the interpellation of subcultural affiliation. An affinity was shown between the work of linguistic anthropologists on the entextualization of material artifacts, and the theoretical framework of this book on citational practice. Children are socialized so as to both recognize those meaningful material forms which represent key cultural values, as well as to recontextualize those forms in strategic ways in everyday interaction. Individual identity is aligned with subcultural identity and subcultural values through the citation of normative material forms.
Thus, the chapter focused on the performativity of subcultural values, emphasizing how these values and subcultural identities are interpellated from the material utterances of individuals and social institutions. As noted in the conclusion of chapter two, we must distinguish between the type of performativity operant in today’s cultural economy—which rests on an ideology that subcultural values become actualized or “present” through citational utterances—and the version of performativity theory, supported by Derrida’s notion of iterability, which is critical of this ideology. While this chapter described the former processes, we will now quickly consider their critique. In chapter six, we will return to a more comprehensive critique of the “presence of value,” following our discussion of the performativity of exchange value in chapters four and five.
To return to the study of the nativity play discussed above, Bauman (1996) shows that despite the play being defined as an “authoritative” text—clearly representative of cultural tradition and religious values—each successive incarnation of the text was in fact altered as it was recontextualized. In a Derridean sense, while the repetition of any meaningful material form is necessary to maintain recognizability and meaning across iterations, each situated instantiation necessarily alters that meaning (and value). Thus, while the play was entextualized to “represent” religious values, each iteration necessarily altered both the repeated text, as well as the interpellated valuing context. The dislocation of the meaning of the entextualized artifact, as well as that of its interpellated contextual genre, also potentially unsettles the identity of social actors who cite the text in order to “experience its values.” In other words, as the value of the text, as well as the valuing context of religion, are unsettled—to a greater or lesser extent—through particular recontextualization practices, so is the interpellated identity of both the individual and collective subjects who are socially positioned relative to that citational resource.
Derrida’s version of citational performativity, based on the notion of iterability, argues that the meaning of any material sign can never be finally determined by intentionality (i.e., is never fully “present”). Rather, it is always deferrable and subject to later reinterpretations. From this perspective, social values—as meaningful—cannot be intentionally embodied into material signs, but rather are continually re-interpellated from them in situated negotiations. As such, they are always subject to reinterpretation in the future. The same argument also applies to the functional worth, or exchange value, of a material sign in representing a particular set of subcultural values. In this sense, the exchange value of meaningful material signs is never quite “present.” However, while such iterability keeps open the possibility for alternative temporalities to materialize, in contemporary U.S. culture the hegemonic temporality of the “presence” of value persists—given the proliferation of commodified citational resources whose materiality re-enacts this temporality when re-cited.
Just as Derrida developed a critique of the assumptions regarding “presence” in Western metaphysics, a parallel critique of the presence of value—as experienced through the citation of cultural commodities—can also be developed. We might turn to Martin Jay’s book Songs of Experience (2005) as a resource in the development of this critique of the Cartesian/capitalist experience of the presence of value. There, Jay criticizes the reduction of the category of “experience” to that of an individual, consuming (i.e., Cartesian) subject, pointing out that “phenomenologists, Critical Theorists, pragmatists, and poststructuralists alike” have all argued that experience—as a concept or category in philosophy—“cannot be reduced to what an isolated, contemplative, integrated subject has of an object that is entirely external to him or her” (403). John Guillory, citing the work of Joan Scott, as well that of Laclau and Mouffe, has also pointed out that a critique of the concept of “experience” in contemporary theory often accompanies a critique of “representation” (Guillory 1993, 10; 345–346n14).
Yet, while such a critique may have emerged in philosophy and social theory, it is precisely this reductive notion of “experience”—and its valorization—which prevails in cultural practices in late capitalism. Indeed, Jay points out that particular critical theorists—like Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, and some poststructuralists—have precisely seen “the commodification of experiences as one of the most prevalent tendencies of our age” (2005, 407). For Jay, and the philosophers he cites, this tendency toward commodification “is precisely the opposite of what many of the theorists in our survey have argued an experience should be, that is, something which can never be fully possessed by its owner” (407). Extending this critique of individual experience to that of “group experience,” as in the case of a valuing community, Jay goes on to argue that the idea of a group “ownership of an experience”—which he sees as operating in contemporary identity politics—“forgets” that “experience involves an encounter with otherness” (408).
For Jay, such an “encounter with otherness” necessarily dislocates the identity of the experiencing subject. If, in a Derridean sense, “experience” is a meaningful category across contexts, it must itself necessarily be altered in the repetition of that meaning. Thus, the re-citation of the words of others by the subject—words perceived as representing particular subcultural values—does not simply reproduce those values. Rather, the “experience” of value(s) cannot be entirely stable or present across contexts. Instead, as the words of others are incorporated into the utterances of subjects, the subcultural values which they are taken to represent are necessarily altered. In this sense, the “experience” of group values cannot remain a stable reproduction of an identifiable, and present, meaning across contexts. Rather, the “experience” of any value, including the exchange value of commodities, necessarily involves the alteration of that value—as well as an alteration of the identities of self and other as interpellated from that meaningful material form.
This chapter begins with a discussion of the politics of reported speech, and argues that an important dimension of power has to do with the ability to report on the words and images of others in particular ways. This insight is extended to describe how the economics of reported speech involves the marketing of the words and images of others in profitable ways. Language is commodified as economic institutions provide citational resources with which consumers construct their social identities. Inasmuch as the commodities which represent subcultural values also have an exchange value in the marketplace, the cultural economy is itself re-cited as consumers align their individual identities with subcultural identities and values. Citational resources are valued for both aligning, and distancing, one’s identity with normative value discourses.
As the words and images of others are marketed, they travel across contexts into the referential contexts of consumers. These cultural commodities are normatively perceived as valorizing the referential context of self. The chapter considers how capitalist and Cartesian subjectivities are both re-cited in this process, as the subject experiences the “presence” of subcultural values as represented by the cultural commodity. The temporality of “presence” is re-cited as past events are cited, as live events are valorized, and as future value is promised.
As the Bakhtin Circle argued, the utterances of the self necessarily mix one’s own values with those of the other, enacting relationships between self and others (Vološinov 1986). The syntactical form in which the words of the other are cited amounts to a political re-framing of the “values of the other,” with implications for these social relationships. The materiality of utterances is always already political, evoking and negotiating particular interpretive (valuing) contexts. In this sense, relationships of inequality between interactants can be materially re-enacted through citational practices, as the words, objects, and images of others are cited in particular ways. In this section, we consider the politics of how the words of the other are cited, or reported upon, within the utterance.
As subjects are socialized, they find a social hierarchy of approved and subordinated valuations already existing within the culture. The value claims of language become normalized into systems of cultural and subcultural discourse—genres which vary from informal subcultural vocabularies, to the more formal citational practices of law or science (Gardiner 1992, 81; Bakhtin 1986). As the Bakhtin Circle argues, culture is a site of these competing value systems or speech genres (Gardiner 1992, 73–74).
To say that these different, competing value genres are organized into a hierarchy suggests that, to use Derridean language, some discourses or meanings are dominant in any historical period, while others are devalued and considered as “supplemental” (Derrida 1981; 1997). Just as Bakhtin, Derrida, and Mead all argued that the self needs the other for its own constitution, it can similarly be argued that dominant speech genres need the subordinate speech genres for their very existence—what Derrida has called the “logic of the supplement” (1997, 215). However, dominant discourses tend to obscure their reliance on competing discourses; Bakhtin uses the term “monologism” to refer to a discourse which presents itself as the sole voice of “reality” or “truth” (Gardiner 1992, 26).
We can thus envision the relation between value discourses within a culture, as well as within a situated utterance, as a political question of “ratio” or “proportion” (Holquist 2004, 29). This ratio concerns the extent to which the syntactical configuration of an utterance or cultural text allows competing voices to be heard, and whether supplemental value discourses are acknowledged and respected as a legitimate part of the dominant discourse. The way that the citational practices of subjects in positions of power incorporate the “words of the other,” then, becomes an important political question.
In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1986), Vološinov goes into great detail considering how different cultures employ different syntactical techniques regarding reported speech, which directly relates to the consideration which self gives to the autonomy of the language of the other. For example, some languages tend to require that direct quotations be used to keep the “integrity and authenticity” (119) of reported speech. This “direct discourse” creates clear boundaries between the speech of self and that of the other, minimizing the extent to which the speech of the other undergoes “penetration by the author’s intentions” (119).
Direct discourse is subdivided by Vološinov into a “linear” or “pictorial style.” In the first case of direct, linear quoting, the words of the other are given such deference that the self is allowed virtually no “individualization” in reporting. However, in the pictorial style, the authorial self adds “its own intonation—humor, irony, love or hate, enthusiasm or scorn” (121) to the speech of the other that it reports. “Indirect discourse,” and the various mixes of direct and indirect discourse described by Vološinov, also involve both linear and pictorial styles when paraphrasing the words of another. Although the more linear styles of indirect discourse maintain a clear boundary between the words and perspective of self from those of others (130), the pictorial styles involve a greater dissolution of the “reporting” or “authorial” context—thus blurring the lines as to which are the words and values of the other in the subject’s utterance, and which are the words and values of the reporting subject. Generally, Vološinov argues, modern cultures tend toward the pictorial discourse styles, supporting their “relativistic individualism” (123)—although he notes that different styles are required in differing institutional contexts. In short, the syntactical forms of citationality are important political choices in shaping the values of the self relative to the values of the other, as materialized in utterances.
Thus, a major variable distinguishing the many different styles of reported speech outlined by Vološinov concerns the extent to which the values of either the speaker, or of the other, are “allowed” to enter into the reporting process. Vološinov also points out that the use of quotation marks around a particular phrase used by the other may express a distancing of the author from the remark, or draw its truthfulness into question (131). In other words, speakers have techniques at their disposal, especially in modern syntax, by which to express the extent of their agreement, or disagreement, with the values of others which they are citing or reporting.
Because we are born into a language which already reflects the values of others, our linguistic utterances are already social. They can be considered as a kind of reported speech, in that the subject uses words received from others which are already sedimented with implied values. For the Bakhtin Circle, the political question of the utterance concerns what stance the author takes in relation to these words. This stance involves not only the semantic “content” of the utterance, but also the syntactical style or form by which the subject reports on the values and words of the other (i.e., showing ironic distancing, enthusiastic approval, etc.). In his analysis, Vološinov has revealed the political nature of the relationship between the referential (valuing) system of the self, and that of the other—as enacted within the utterance of the reporting subject. The utterance thus involves a tension between the values of the self and the values of others (both co-present and generalized).
The politics of syntactical form, when reporting upon the words of others, has also been demonstrated by the work of Michel de Certeau (1988) and Miyako Inoue (2006). These works illustrate how a subject can assert dominance over the other through the way in which the words of the other are reported. As they point out, the act of “not allowing others to speak for themselves” is an act of domination. De Certeau and Inoue both argue that forms of citationality can reproduce inequalities between individuals and groups. They show that various citational forms, such as historical accounts or newscasts, “report” the speech and values of alterity in ways favoring the powerful. Clearly, this discussion of the syntactical forms of individual utterances can be extended to the “utterances” and citational practices of larger social institutions (see Crawford and Ostrom 1995).
In his work, de Certeau (1988) identifies speech as the traditional “folk” voice—a voice which was increasingly excluded from being heard as printing technologies were developed in the West (132). As opposed to preindustrial cultures based in oral traditions, the very ideas of modernity and progress align with writing, in what he calls a “scriptural economy” (134). For de Certeau, in Western history writing was a practice linked to power (134).
In his analysis, de Certeau emphasizes that the historical implementation of this scriptural economy reproduces a Cartesian model regarding the “presence” of the autonomous Western subject. This Cartesian subject, as de Certeau puts it, confronts other entities as if a blank page on which to inscribe their thoughts and will—thus “producing a text and producing society as a text” (134). This Cartesian model, de Certeau argues, emerges with the secularization of modernity, in that a religious “presence” no longer functions in the subject position—speaking the divine word to passive believers (137). With this loss, the modern “subject” moves into the active role abandoned by the “First Speaker” (138). The power derived from this authorial positioning in modernity, de Certeau argues, is scriptural, and results in the subordination of those who lack the ability to establish their “presence” through writing (139).
The subordinated voice of preindustrial culture is simultaneously turned into the “other,” or the alterity of modernity. Within the text of the modern scriptural economy, de Certeau points out, the “voice of the people” persists only as a voice from the past (132). However, the “return of the voice” of the excluded other takes a particular form—as reported speech. In other words, the excluded other is not allowed to speak for themselves; rather, the return of their voice is managed and controlled through the reporting techniques of the powerful. Like the scapegoated in the Greek polis (see Derrida 1981, 130), the “other” is strategically maintained within the community, but allowed only the semblance of participation. As Inoue (2006) puts it in her discussion of de Certeau, the “quotation” of the voice of the excluded other functions “as a textual strategy of containment and as the only means by which alterity—otherwise suppressed and excluded—can return to the text” (51).
The scriptural economy, which uses writing as a mechanism of extending its own domination, thus establishes the “voice of the people” as an exotic, outside force. It then attempts to reincorporate that excluded (and potentially dangerous element) in a controlled fashion. Yet from a Derridian perspective, instability exists within such a scriptural economy—even as it appears to expand its own powerful “presence.” As Derrida has shown, the very citability on which the scriptural economy depends—writing which crosses contexts—inserts an element of unpredictability into the system. Thus, it is important to distinguish, as Derrida does, between “writing” as a mechanism of domination in a particular historical period, and “writing” (or the “mark”) as a repeatable form which necessarily opens a possibility for the unsettling of stable identity (Derrida 1988). What Derrida means by “writing,” then, in no way corresponds to what de Certeau refers to as the “scriptural economy”; rather, it is the basis of its critique. Indeed, de Certeau himself states that he is in agreement with Derrida’s critique of presence (1988, 133).
In her work, Miyako Inoue (2006) extends this argument concerning the politics of citationality, as she discusses how the mass media in Japan have historically reported the speech of Japanese women. Drawing from the work of de Certeau, Vološinov, and Michel Foucault, Inoue shows that in the construction of modernity in Japan, many Japanese women were not allowed to speak for themselves; rather, mass media “reporting institutions” constructed a prototypical voice of the “modern” Japanese woman. Women were then pressured socially to incorporate the media’s favored citational practices into their own utterances. Here we see that certain reporting practices of the media had implications for the citational practices of individual subjects.
Specifically, Inoue shows that the traditionally degraded “schoolgirl” speech, routinely cited by males as irrational and frivolous prior to industrialization, re-emerged in Japanese modernity as the gendered voice of the consumer, cited in popular magazines and on television (6–9). Women, especially in rural Japan, who had never even heard this type of speech were forced to confront it as the “voice” of the urban, sophisticated woman—a process Inoue refers to as the “vicarious experience of women’s language” (21; italics in the original). The “modern” female in Japan, as consumer, was thus politically constructed using a particular form of reported speech. Thus, a syntactical, material form, and a “modern” type of citational agency, emerged together in Japan.
In Inoue’s analysis, we can clearly see the politics of citationality and reported speech. The institutionalized utterances of the dominant group managed, and controlled, the excluded other with metalanguage—that is, speech about speech. As Inoue shows, reported speech is a “powerful linguistic apparatus to conquer alterity and thus to consolidate the modern self” (50). Her research gives an example of how producers of television shows, or editors of a newspaper, are able to speak as “voices of authority,” re-incorporating—and thus re-framing—the speech of excluded others according to the dictates of the dominant group. Inoue argues that this maneuver disallows the excluded other from contextualizing their own utterances; as she puts it, “alterity, once cited, is deprived of its semiotic capacity to provide itself with metalanguage (an authoritative representation of what the cited voice means)” (53; italics in the original).
While no subject can control how their words will be recontextualized in the future, we can see that those excluded from access to media distributional networks will simultaneously be denied access to their own commodified words in future contexts—at least in terms of large-scale public discourse. If dominant others control their speech and meanings by “reporting it” in particular ways, then subjects whose words enter the media have no access to redirect its meaning in the public sphere. In other words, once language has been materially shaped into “institutional” forms, the ability to provide metalinguistic commentary on one’s own utterances—to provide context for its future interpretation—is restricted.
Techniques of reporting the speech of others can also be used by institutional authorities to politically construct and manage stigmatized social identity. The entextualized utterances of a subject can be reported upon as “evidence” of their dysfunction or deviant character—thereby interpellating a deviant social identity from particular decontextualized utterances. For example, Hugh Mehan (1996) has shown that the social construction of a “learning disabled child”—an extextualization which interpellates a particular social identity—results from a process where the metalinguistic framings of a psychologist are given a higher legitimacy than those of the teacher, parent, or child themselves. Citing several studies, Mehan speaks of the “‘politics of representation’” (253), which involves the political ability to frame the utterances of the child in reference to particular cultural discourses—in this case, the genre of “learning disability.” In this way, any ambiguous utterances of a student, which might conceivably interpellate differing and competing interpretive contexts, are politically considered to “represent” only the context favored by the psychological authority. The identity of the child, once it is abstracted from the situated citational practices which construct it, is then normatively considered as a “context-free” identity which crosses situations (272). In this sense, power involves normative control over citational practices, through the use of dominant syntactical forms.
Of course, the social construction of the identity of a student as “learning disabled” is not normatively seen as a strategy or outcome of interactional politics, but rather as an objective assessment of the condition of the child. Importantly, the appearance of objectivity is itself constructed through citational practices, such as citing research, or citing particular social authorities. Along these lines, Wortham and Locher (1999) have shown that political reporters use particular syntactical forms, or “embedded metapragmatic constructions” (109), to maintain the appearance of objectivity while in fact disguising the political functioning of their utterances.
We can see in both the Inoue and Mehan studies that institutionalized practices of “reporting speech” have political implications for the social identities, and thus the social opportunities, of those subjects whose words are grafted into the utterances of the powerful. These processes involve taking the “words of the other,” and framing them as representative of particular value or identity discourses. Applying the symbolic interactionist concept of “vocabularies of motive” (Mills 2003), Emerson and Messinger (1977) have shown that when everyday “troubles” are brought to “third-parties,” like ministers or psychiatrists, the vocabulary of these authorities come to frame the trouble in alignment with normative religious or psychiatric discourses. Thus, we see again that in the metalinguistic or reporting practices of social authorities, the social actor becomes a “case” in the citational practices of those who are authorized to apply particular value discourses (see Foucault 1994).
An important part of the “politics of citationality” thus concerns who is allowed to cite whose words in particular social locations, and who has access to the institutionalized mechanisms of citation within a political economy. To be socialized into positions of authority is precisely to learn to engage in institutionalized citational practices, which configure words into those syntactical formulations which mobilize preferred institutional discourses. To be socialized into the culture, more generally, is to learn to anticipate the consequences of engaging in deviant citational practices, as well as the consequences of becoming “subject” to the reporting practices of powerful observers.
In the last section we saw that an important dimension of power concerns the ability to cite or report upon the words of alterity in particular ways. We now turn our attention from the political to the economic institution. In this section, a parallel argument is made regarding the generation of exchange value. Producers shape their cultural commodities—as institutional utterances—into material, marketable forms. This process detaches the words and images of others from one referential context, and markets them to consumers in order to valorize a different referential context. The words and images of the self and others become mere commodities in the marketplace.
Following Karen Barad’s (2007) work, which elaborates on the quantum physics of Neils Bohr, we might say that within the cultural economy, the market becomes a kind of “measuring apparatus,” which coordinates the exchange value of linguistic-based commodities. In quantum physics, as Barad discusses, the particular measuring apparatus used in a scientific experiment performs a particular “cut” in materiality during the measurement process—such that the material world obtains ontological determinacy as a result of this cut (127–28). This insight can be extended to describe the way that the measure of the exchange value of citational resources, within a market, generates the apparent “presence” of both subcultural values and exchange value.
Because the materiality of language will be assessed as to its market worth in the cultural economy, it is shaped by economic institutions into particular syntactical forms. Those material forms which are anticipated to sell will be those which ultimately are produced and distributed. In this sense, they are readied for a favorable measurement by the market research which guides the formulation of their syntactical, material forms. In other words, those particular syntactical forms are produced which will most readily mobilize favorable measurements (i.e., those which are likely to become popular commodities). While the exchange value of the cultural commodity is normatively seen, from a representationalist perspective, to “objectively” measure the pre-existing worth of the commodity, in fact—as quantum physics suggests—it is emergent from the measuring process itself.
One of the reasons that this “performativity” of exchange value is obscured is because of the nature of the “capitalist cut.” This cut shapes material reality into those syntactical forms which simultaneously reinforce Cartesian and representationalist notions regarding subjects and objects (see 137–40). The performative nature of the economy is obscured when individual, Cartesian subjects are perceived to be “experiencing” the pre-existing value of autonomous objects—which in turn are taken to “represent” the values of various subcultures. Within the “phenomenon” created by the productive cut itself (140), exchange value is ideologically taken to be an “objective” measure of the extent to which other subcultural values—such as religiosity or ethnicity—are “present” in the measured material form. The exchange value apparatus is taken to measure the quality, or effectiveness, of cultural commodities in their function of representing these other, “non-economic” subcultural values—thus assigning one religious or political commodity a higher exchange value than another. The more expensive artifacts are often considered to be more “authentic” representations of particular subcultural values.
As capitalism emerged in the West, separate valuing domains, such as ethnic or religious values, proliferated in emerging urban areas as a result of the greater diversity of citational practices among urban residents. Joseph (2002) has argued that such differing valuing “communities” are in fact complicit with the development of capitalism, and necessary as identifiable consuming groups. These historical developments in the differentiation of valuing “markets” were a response to the emergence of industrial capitalism. In Barad’s (2007) sense, the proliferation of “agentially separate” valuing contexts were historically enabled by the “agential cut” (see 174–75; 140) of the value measuring apparatus. Once multiple valuing contexts have been established between separate, identifiable subcultural groups and individuals, the differing values of others can “enter into negotiations” with the values of self—in the syntactical form of citational utterances. Within the Cartesian assumptions sustained by the material framing of the commodity system, the value preferences of others are materially played off against the values of self.
As the words, objects, and images of others are consumed, the “agential cut” (174–75) of the exchange value apparatus is itself re-cited, and thus is materially extended. Having historically evolved as hegemonic over other values, the exchange value measuring system now acts as an “enabling constraint” (Butler 1997, 16) relative to citational practices in everyday life. In this process, commodified “words of others” have been reduced to consumptive experiences for Cartesian subjects—as the most marketable cultural commodities are moved into the referential contexts of consumers.
The distribution of these types of linguistic-based commodities becomes increasingly institutionalized, responding to consumer demand for certain kinds of consumptive experiences—in order to sustain certain kinds of social identities. Consumer identity construction is affected by the ways in which cultural commodities are materially shaped by the “reporting practices” of larger economic institutions. Just as particular syntactical forms of reported speech are important political maneuvers in the maintenance of power—as we have seen in the work of de Certeau and Inoue—marketable forms of reported speech are increasingly the basis of the U.S. cultural economy. In a sense, the entire cultural economy is based on the re-citation of those material forms which signify the “presence of value”—a kind of “re-citational” economy.
The very concept of exchange value, or marketability, suggests travel between contexts—that is, to be “exchanged” is to change contexts. The “abstracting” language of commodity exchange becomes a discourse which facilitates the travel of commodities between individuals, or between communities—who are assumed to have different values. In a Saussurean sense, exchange value reigns over a system of differentiated subcultural values, as these subcultural differences are commodified, marketed, and moved with unprecedented technological capability. Thus, the marketing of cultural commodities today necessarily involves the transport of words, objects, and images into new situational contexts, as citational resources for valuing subjects. To anticipate value, or to recognize “market-ability,” is to understand what a particular commodity would be worth in a different citational context, to a differently valuing subject.
As discussed earlier, Bauman and Briggs (1990) have used the term “entextualization” to refer to the ways in which language is selected and arranged in preparation for movement into another context; in today’s cultural economy, the materiality of language is well-prepared for marketability. To “market” something is to entextualize it for travel in such a form which makes it valuable in a new context. While in this book we will mainly discuss the grafting of commodities into new contexts, other research has shown that the grafting of referential contexts also occurs in advertising (see Williamson 2005; Goldman 1992; Goldman and Papson 1996).
From a marketing perspective, the experiential “worth” of a commodity has to do with its re-positioning by a consumer, relative to the ongoing construction of their social identity. This re-positioning occurs either through the movement of commodities, as in bringing televised images into the consumer’s home, or through the movement of the consumer relative to the commodity, as in attending events like music concerts. The value of the material commodity-sign is generated from its function in both combining and re-differentiating contexts—as the referential contexts of the Cartesian subject are played against the value contexts signified by the words and images of others. This graft of contexts simultaneously grafts with the hegemonic discourse of exchange value, as material forms are measured as to their functional worth in delivering the subcultural values of others to the subject.
Within the material conditions which frame the contemporary cultural economy, then, the exchange value of a commodity is perceived to be in its movement across situational contexts; that is, in the material re-grafting of contexts. Using a travel paradigm, objects gain or lose value as they circulate and are grafted into new social situations (see Appadurai 1986b). The perceived worth of a commodity has to do with the (re-)positioning of the material sign relative to the purchasing and experiencing subject. Such a Cartesian-based, experiencing subject is continually re-interpellated from the syntactical arrangement of the commodity form.
In the marketing of cultural meanings, popular brands or images generate profit through their movement into new situational contexts, where their alleged “presence” is said to add value. For example, much television programming in the United States has become a montage of celebrities “present-ing themselves” on each other’s shows. We also see product placement within shows, as well as one brand “sponsoring” the experience of another brand. All of these occurrences are examples of the commodified grafting of one context onto another.
A citational cross-referencing of the “value” of several commodities thus occurs, as when a soft drink company sponsors a movie, or vice versa. Television shows grafted into the home context, or music grafted into the car-driving context, are said to “add value” to the experiences of the subject. In this sense, drawing upon a term from Julia Kristeva, we can speak of the “intertextuality” (Allen 2006, 3) of the material forms generating exchange value. Cultural entrepreneurs are precisely in business to acquire an entextualized cultural form from one context, then transport it for grafting into another. Commodification is thus intimately involved with recontextualization, or the grafting of contexts in marketable material forms.
Like a quotation, the cultural commodity participates in at least two contexts simultaneously; while it moves into any new context, it continues to reference its “former” contexts. For example, a baseball program from a noteworthy game may become a showpiece for the home context, as it brings its ties to baseball history into the home. The contexts of home, baseball, and market worth are thus grafted into the one material sign, with interpellative implications for the social identity of the experiencing subject. In a sense, the object itself becomes a “marker” for another context (see Culler 1981, 132), “representing” the valuing context where it has been, and the travel experiences it has had. In her work, Annette Weiner argued that objects are valuable because of their histories (Graeber 2001, 34). Like a ticket stub or program from an event, the object testifies to the occasions at which it was “present.”
Cultural commodities, just as in the case of quotations generally, exist simultaneously in at least two contexts, with their materiality functioning to graft them. This materiality which grafts contexts is continually assessed in terms of its exchange value in providing experiences for the subject, and also as a resource in identity construction. Its exchange value has to do with the way it “represents” one context while it valorizes another—in other words, in the unique way one valuing context is played off against another.
Of course, the production of the materiality of commodified language is largely based on considerations of exchange value in the first place. What gets produced in the cultural economy is what sells—re-enacting normative patterns of citational practice and identity construction. Thus, the array of citational resources normatively available within the culture is always already affected by exchange value. The construction of social identity, and the utterances of subjects, become limited by available citational resources. In other words, given that social situations and interactions are shaped by the materiality of the social world, the commodification of language limits the types of social identities which can be interpellated in those situations. In Mead’s (1969) sense, the self is not only constructed through the exchange of language in social situations, but through commodified language with an exchange value.
As anthropologists like David Graeber (2001) have pointed out in regard to exchanges generally, and the Bakhtin Circle in regard to linguistic exchanges (see Vološinov 1986), exchange is not just about things, but about relationships between self and others. The normative grafting of exchange value with other valuing contexts affects social relationships. We find that the commodified words of particular others—such as those of a celebrity on a talk show, an actor in a movie, or a political commentator on a news show—are normatively considered by subjects to be “worth more” than the devalued, mundane conversations of everyday life. All language today—whether received face-to-face in everyday life, or as mediated through electronic technologies—becomes potentially measurable against a standard of exchange value. Other persons are interpellated as “exciting” or “interesting” inasmuch as their words are marketable. In short, the commodifiable words of others, in the material form of citational grafts, are reduced to experiences for modern and postmodern subjects.
For example, in Inoue’s (2006) study, we have seen that the once-ridiculed schoolgirl voice later became a linguistic commodity. Consumers were positioned in order to cite these “words of the other” in the process of constructing their own identities. This citational practice was a mechanism which both interpellated the subject as “modern,” and interpellated particular others—from magazines or television—as the celebrated providers of consumable and valuable experiences. In this process, these mediated “others” were reduced to the source of consumable material signs for the subject’s experience.
When interpretive contexts are grafted together, as interpellated from citational practices, they enter into a relationship with each other—differentiated, yet combined. For example, listening to music while driving a car brings together the meaningful materiality of the driving situation with the meaningful materiality of the music. The “experience” of the positioned subject is said to be enhanced through the consumption of the music-commodity, as the “values” represented by the music enter into the referential context of the driving subject. If the drive to work is normatively perceived to be a mundane and routinized “context,” the addition of the materialized music both valorizes it—and yet plays against it. The “work context” and the “leisure context” thus are simultaneously combined, and re-differentiated, as the materiality of the car, the music, and the subject are brought together in a situational configuration.
For Mead and Bakhtin, the human creation of meaning always involves bringing at least two referential contexts together (Joas 1997, 173; 182; Holquist 2004, 20–21). This implies that “value”—as meaningful—also requires at least two differentiated contexts, as interpellated from material forms. Thus, to cite the material “representative” of one context, in order to supplement another context, is an important basis for the construction of value. Of course, any two contexts could not exist separately in the first place unless previously differentiated through an initial process of exclusion. In a Derridean sense, the citational grafting of contexts involves a process whereby the alterity initially excluded from one of the referential contexts is re-presented into it.
One referential context is thus perceived to be enhanced or valorized by grafting “back in” that materiality which was left out of its initial construction—that is, its “alterity.” In both a Derridean and a Freudian sense, this amounts to a kind of “return of the repressed,” where the alterity which was abjected in the constructed identity of a particular valuing context “returns” to the subject. In the Derridean sense that the meaning of any identity is never quite “present,” we might say that “value,” as meaningful, is never quite present within any differentially constructed referential context. Indeed, it is precisely because value is never quite present in a particular context that the context can be valorized by the return of something which is lacking in it. This supposed “return” of alterity becomes a material, performative display of both the re-unification of, and the re-separation of, valuing contexts (i.e., a citational graft).
Valorization within the contemporary cultural economy thus has to do with the experience of a different valuing context, as it “adds value” to a supposedly initial or “original” context. The material form of the alterity, which is grafted into the existing material environment of the self, acquires an exchange value in its ability to deliver this “experience” of the other. In the example given above, it is precisely because the driving experience is not itself historically defined by music, that music is able to enhance the driving experience for subjects—thus developing a consumer demand for music in cars. In the formation of any referential identity, the alterity which is excluded from its construction simultaneously becomes a citational resource which has the potential to valorize it.
In this sense, it is the utterances of alterity, as citational resources for the subject, which enable the exchange value of cultural commodities. Differentiated valuing contexts come to be “represented” by differentiated social objects. Those objects excluded in the construction of any particular valuing context potentially return to valorize it when purchased as citational resources. It is the citational grafting behaviors of consumers in everyday life—both re-unifying, and re-differentiating, objects and contexts—which in fact re-enact or re-cite the cultural economy itself. In a Derridean sense, it is the process of “supplementarity”—where the “identity” of any value is achieved through the subordination of another (see Norris 1987, 34; Gasché 1986, 210)—which enables the valorization of the referential context of self by the words and images of the other. In short, the cultural economy is re-enacted as meaningful material commodities representing one valuing context are moved into another.
The citational practices used in contemporary U.S. culture interpellate a Cartesian subject, who prioritizes objects in the social environment to “experience.” These objects are understood, within such a framework, to embody the “presence of value.” In poststructuralist terms, the Cartesian subject (as an autonomous, experiencing individual), and the capitalist subject (as an individual with needs and desires satisfiable through commodities) converge—and are re-interpellated together via citational practices.
Cultural commodities, cited by consuming subjects, are taken as representations of thepresence of subcultural values—thus continuing the metaphysics and ideology of “presence.” From a poststructuralist perspective, then, the critique of the “presence of value” in the commodity cannot be achieved through a Marxist labor theory of (“embodied”) value. Rather, such a critique must show that the Cartesian type of “experiencing subject,” who confronts the value of commodities, is itself continually re-interpellated from citational practices. The “materialistic” side of such a poststructuralist critique is to show how the syntactical forms of the material environment itself—from which interpellations of subcultural values, exchange value, and consumer identities are made—are shaped by institutional utterances driven by political economy and profit considerations.
It should be noted that Marx himself described such an “experiencing” subject when describing the phenomenon of “commodity fetishism”—in which a subject falsely perceives value in the object itself, rather than in terms of the labor time invested in its production (Marx 1967). Amariglio and Callari (1993) suggest that Marx came up with his theory of “commodity fetishism” to answer the question of unequal trade. If the value of goods rely upon the labor time which contributed to their production, then it must be explained why “rational” subjects would trade goods representing unequal amounts of labor time (204; 207). Amariglio and Callari argue that the phenomenon of “commodity fetishism” answered the question for Marx, in that the exchange partners “falsely” perceived value based on the properties of objects—rather than in terms of labor time (207).
Marx had derived the concept of “labor time” itself when considering how it was possible that things with “radical contextuality,” (i.e., “use values”), could be exchanged between subjects (Keenan 1993, 162). For Marx (1967), the answer was that the system of exchange value “abstracted” from use value. This abstraction then becomes a “shared quality” by which unlike objects (e.g., coats and linens) could be exchanged (171)—inasmuch as the exchange value represents abstract human labor. But, as Keenan notes, given Marx’s contention that abstract human labor “is first possible only in a society where the commodity form is the general form of the labor-product” (Marx, in Keenan 1993, 171, Keenan’s emphasis), Marx’s argument becomes teleological (171). The commodity form enables the notion of abstract human labor, which in turn is the mechanism which facilitates the exchange of the commodity form.
According to Amariglio and Callari (1993), Marx also appealed to the concept of commodity fetishism in a different way—not to explain unequal exchange as the misrecognition of labor time, but rather as the result of “valuing differences” between autonomous individuals. For trade to occur, in this version of commodity fetishism, two parties must perceive the exchange as fair—that is, “as an exchange of equivalents” (204). In actuality, however, there is no “guarantee that these acts of trade involve equal magnitudes of labor time” (204)—in fact, Amariglio and Callari state that for Engels, “the exchange of unequal quantities of actual labor time is necessary” in capitalism (206n31, italics in the original). Amariglio and Callari argue that this version of commodity fetishism “summarizes the qualities of individuals that transform the unequal exchange of actual labor time into an exchange of equivalents” (204, italics added). In other words, for exchange to work—in both Marx’s theory, as well as in the larger commodity-based economy—what is needed is the notion of subjects who value differently.
Amariglio and Callari thus find within Marx’s writings the argument that certain “types of subjects” are required for exchange in capitalism to occur. These subjects must “conceptualize use values as objects, separate and distinct from themselves, which potentially have the ability to satisfy perceived needs” (208, italics in the original). In other words, a “Cartesian” subject is required. As Heidegger has argued, the Cartesian subject of Western philosophy and culture precisely constitutes a type of subject who is separate from the objects they “experience” and objectify (Weber 1996; see also Amariglio and Callari 1993, 209).
Amariglio and Callari thus read in Marx the importance of this objectification process in establishing the type of subjectivity necessary for the exchange process to occur (202; 209). Agents in exchange see themselves as individuals who have unique needs; thus it becomes “natural” that they would value objects differently. All that is then required is the market system by which to “measure” these differential cultural values and enact the trade. For Amariglio and Callari, this type of (Cartesian) individualism is a prerequisite for the capitalist exchange of unequal labor times (208; 216).
To summarize, as an alternative to the illusions of commodity fetishism (i.e., that value is inherently “present” within objects themselves), Marx chose to appeal to “the concept of socially necessary labor time” (216) in explaining the possibility of exchange between “rational subjects.” He also chose to appeal to the labor theory of value in explaining the “real source” of value and surplus value. Keenan, as discussed above, has shown some of the difficulties with this approach to explaining exchange (1993, 171). However, in their argument, Amariglio and Callari reveal that within the discourse of Marx another type of explanation emerges for the “perceived-as-equal” exchange of unequal labor times. This alternative explanation involves not the misrecognition of the real source of value, but rather the historical emergence in the West of the type of subject who constructs a particular self through objectification processes. We can recognize this move as a metaphysical positing of a “valuing consciousness” as prior to valuing practices. Whether Marx is “embracing” or “critically analyzing” this move might be disputed; the important point here concerns the compatibility of capitalism with a particular version of subjectivity—that of the individual, Cartesian subject who can experience the “value” of objects and the “values” which they are taken to represent.
Within such a discourse, it seems natural that objects are valued differently in different cultural or subcultural contexts (see Appadurai, 1986b). In other words, the worth of a social object may be interpreted differently given the differing subcultural values of various groups of collective subjects. Thus, from the perspective of one “valuing community,” objects may appear to be over- or under-valued in another. As William Pietz (1993) has noted, the term “fetishism” was used by Protestant traders to refer to the trading practices of Africans. The Europeans believed that endowing material objects with supernatural qualities was an “irrational” trading practice (see also Foster 1993, 253). The exchange value of objects had to be negotiated between subjects with differing cultural values; the term “fetishism”—in its more anthropological sense—emerged to identify a “primitive” as opposed to an “enlightened” method of valuation.
Trade between so-called “primitive peoples” and Europeans illustrates the importance of the Enlightenment in the valuation process of capitalism. As Foster (1993) discusses, from the perspective of European traders, “primitive” peoples would not “assess value rationally” (255). Such a rejection of this “irrational” fusing of the sacred into material objects was an important component of the trading practices of Westerners, and of their “enlightened” self-identity. As the Europeans acquired the objects, they were taken out of their “religious context,” and were re-evaluated as they crossed into an “enlightened” discourse—a process of recontextualization. The religious discourse of value came to occupy an abjected position within the enlightened discourse—as its alterity. The values of “primitive peoples” were interpreted as irrational, as were the social identities of the people themselves. As several commentators have pointed out, Western self-identity as “civilized” is constructed relative to its supposedly “primitive” or “savage” other (Taussig 1993; Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, 5; Pietz 1993, 139, 143).
For Pietz, then, the term “fetishism” refers to “a cross-culture situation formed by the ongoing encounter of the value codes of radically different social orders” (1985, 11). If it is necessary in capitalism that “unequal labor times” are to be perceived as “fairly” exchanged, it also seems “necessary” for the historical emergence of a term—like “fetishism”—to explain how and why objects are valued differently across individual and collective subjects. In the historical emergence of such “valuing identities,” we find the hierarchical construction of different kinds of valuing subjects—those Europeans who use “rational” valuations, and those peoples who use “irrational” valuations based in religion. Such cross-cultural explanations of exchange assume the “presence” of differing communal values.
Along with the Western philosophical subject and the modern capitalist economy, then, emerges the idea that it is natural for autonomous individual and collective subjects to differ in their (pre-existing) values. It becomes necessary to assert the existence of multiple, separable, valuing domains. It can then be explained how over its “travel career,” an object might gain or lose value depending upon which subjects are involved in the “valuing situation.” As in the Pietz example, there come to be assumptions regarding the differing pre-existing values in the exchanges between differing “valuing communities.” In this way, Georg Simmel’s explanation of value makes sense; as Turner, Beeghley, and Powers describe it, “exchanges will occur only if both parties perceive that the object given is less valuable than the one received” (2007, 246). A particular trade which may not seem rational in a strictly economic sense is still explainable given the differing cultural values of the parties involved. In this sense, it is the differentiation of “pre-existing” values between individuals and groups which “explains” the basis of capitalist exchange. In other words, the functioning of the capitalist economy comfortably coincides with the Cartesian subject—as do metaphysical assumptions regarding the “presence” of exchange value in commodities.
Thus, Derrida’s insight as to the privileging of “presence” in Cartesian self-identity and Western metaphysics can also be applied to economic valuation, and the assumed “presence of exchange value” in the capitalist marketplace. Today, the promotion of events such as fashion shows, film openings, and sporting events can be seen as claims of value—where the advertising marks the upcoming event with an anticipated presence of value. Commodities thus are present-ed as valuable relative to consumers from particular subcultural groups, who cite such material forms as they align their individual identities with those of the collectivity.
Following Derrida’s critique, we could say that the assumption that value is “present” within cultural commodities is the metaphysically based ideology of capitalism. It appears that value is present, and available for subjects to purchase and “experience.” In this sense, value can be seen as a claim of presence; in other words, the process of commodification involves the attributed “presence of exchange value.” In Bakhtinian terms, the utterances of subjects, in citing cultural commodities, are “double-voiced” with an exchange value discourse (Bakhtin 1984, 185).
Consumers in the U.S. today make sense of the world through the exchange value schema, often interpreting their experiences based on their perceived exchange value—the “worth” of experiences relative to each other. Entextualized commodities—such as events, social objects, and language itself—are taken to “re-present” particular social values, and in turn are valued in the market for the experiences they provide when cited by the subject. Thus the “ideology of representation” (Norris 1987, 54, italics in the original)—which Derrida finds in the construction of “presence” in Western philosophy—continues in, and is compatible with, the contemporary U.S. cultural economy. This dominant, metaphysical, temporality of presence has become essential to the marketing of “valuable” experiences.
This same application of the “logic of presence,” though simply inverted, can also be seen in those processes where value is said to be created through the “absence” of that which reduces it. In this case, the valued commodity is constructed through a process of exclusion; for example, the absence of something (i.e., crime) can make other things (i.e., real estate) more valuable. In the case of tourism, for example, sometimes value is generated by including particular visual cites/sites and experiences; sometimes, however, value is generated by excluding undesirable sights. In the latter case, the “touring” subject, seeking to incorporate only valued experiences in their excursion, participates in the re-citation of social boundaries, in order to exclude that which would compromise the security of their identity, and contaminate the quality of their experiences.
Continuing with the case of tourism, we can see that those luxury sites, where Western travelers vacation, are often physically secured against the “intrusion” of local peoples—who might disrupt the controlled experience and the supposed purity of the citational resource. Like security guards at a ticketed event, those who patrol the travel border sort out those who belong inside the valuable tourist site, and those to be left out. Often in exotic travel destinations outside of the U.S., the travelers are white, while the locals are not. Thus a racialized border is maintained—and “terror” is defined only from the perspective of white tourists, rather than from the perspective of the local population (see hooks 1992a). The citational resources provided to white tourists by the travel industry, perceived as generating “valuable experiences,” thus re-interpellate racialized social identities, as well as the normative social relationships between them.
In the case of virtual travel on the Internet, we can find a similar situation regarding identity protection against the “presence” of threats. Hackers, viruses, and predators have come to terrorize online experiences, and economic value accrues to the more secured domains and experiences. Thus, computer security and privacy protection have become important components of the contemporary online economy. In addition, the dissemination of language over the Internet threatens proprietary rights regarding valued linguistic commodities—that “presence” of economic value which copyright laws seek to protect (see Poster 2001). Important questions have thus emerged in the U.S. cultural economy concerning the “travels” of language online, especially regarding threats to the presence of exchange value in the online environment.
John Guillory, reviewing the work of Howard Caygill, has argued that the separation of “exchange value” from “aesthetic value” is a historical development, corresponding to the emergence of the market economy. This process also involved the separation of the work of art from the commodity, and the academic discipline of aesthetics from that of political economy (Guillory 1993, 303; 308; Caygill 1989). For Guillory and Caygill, the positing of aesthetic value is a result of the historic emergence of an exchange value discourse (Guillory 1993, 303).
In his book Cultural Capital, Guillory (1993) summarizes Caygill’s historical analysis of the modern correspondence of the “art of judgment” with exchange value discourse. Caygill argued that the emerging civil society in modern Europe—and its new moral philosophy—turned to the work of art as an attempt to regulate the also-emerging consumer society, and its potentially unrestrained desire for commodities (307). The new distinction between “art” and “commodity” suggested differences in moral values between the users of each, along class lines (308). In the language of citationality, we find here an interpellation of both class identity and moral values, from citational practices involving art or commodities. In other words, the materiality of art interpellated an upper-class identity grafted with the domain of moral values. In contrast, the materiality of the commodity was “consumed” by unrestrained, lower-class subjects.
Caygill shows that Adam Smith, in his earlier moral philosophy, had suggested that the market value of a commodity represented two things at once—the labor time necessary for the production of the commodity, as well as the amount of the “desire provoked in the consumer for the ‘use’ of that commodity” (Guillory 1993, 313). Here, money expressed both labor and desire, in “commensurate” amount or “proportion” (313). Caygill argues that because of the inadequacy of this formulation in explaining price (314), Adam Smith later moved toward dropping the consumption or “aesthetic” side altogether in his analysis of value, retaining only the “labor theory of value” famously taken up by Marx (315).
However, as Caygill points out, the consequence of such a separation of aesthetics from the analysis of exchange value is that it leaves a problem regarding the “aesthetic judgment” of the merits of a work of art, especially given that works of art continued—in Guillory’s words—“to be exchanged in the marketplace as commodities which are commensurable with other commodities” (316). Caygill and Guillory argue that it was in response to this issue that the notion of “aesthetic value” emerged historically. From this point on, “exchange value” explained the exchange of commodities based on labor. In contrast, the concept of “aesthetic value” was used to explain the exchange of art works based on artistic merit. However, as Guillory argues, exchange value remained as the hegemonic model for the comparison of works of art against each other; that is, the most artistic merit would be measured (and represented) by the highest price. Thus, with the emergence of the market economy, aesthetic judgment was henceforth issued “by analogy to exchange value” (317, italics in the original).
For Guillory, this illustrates the historical emergence of the hegemony of the discourse of exchange value over other “value domains” (323). In other words, this “universalization” of exchange value resulted in a kind of totalizing discourse, in reference to which calculative agents enacted transactions. Because diverse commodities are exchanged using money, they are made to be commensurate in a market—thus works of art, religious artifacts, or any material sign could be assigned a price and exchanged (323). In this sense, all subcultural value discourses are subordinate to the hegemony of exchange value. The judgment of the “worth” of any material sign is made in reference to its exchange value. Whether judging the merits of a painting, or judging which artifact is more sacred, merit is “represented” by money (see 322–23).
Thus, for Guillory, the “modern discourse of value” (323, italics in the original) extends the “measurement” of value to “all acts of judgment” (324). Considering the insights of quantum physics (see Barad 2007), we see that historically in the West the economic “measuring apparatus” shaped the production of social forms in a particular way—such that judgments about merit occurred relative to the constraining “logic” of the exchange value frame. In this way, exchange value became the universal measure of the presence of other subcultural values.
For example, inquiring into the origin of the exchange value of diamonds—as did Adam Smith—economists might theorize that a diamond ring commands a higher market price because it is rare in terms of supply and demand, or because it takes a lot of human labor to extract. However, considering Guillory’s argument, we might say that it is because a buyer has invested so much in “labor value” in order to earn enough money for the ring that it simultaneously comes to have an increased romantic value to the recipient. When a more expensive ring is given (relative to a worker’s wages), the ring itself—while not ceasing to have a certain “exchange value” in the market—also becomes a measure of the level of emotional commitment of the giver toward that relationship.
In the language of citationality, the ring itself simultaneously cites or grafts two value discourses together (i.e., those of exchange value and emotional commitment). This grafting has (interpellative) identity consequences for both the giver and recipient. Exchange value has grafted itself onto all other types of value in such a way that subcultural values can hardly be signified without a consideration of the worth of the material signifier in “re-presenting” those values. In this way, exchange value appears to be necessary for the construction of the meaningful “identity” of any other subcultural value domain—as well as the identity of any subcultural actor who cites their material representations.
As W.F. Haug has shown in Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (1986), in advanced capitalist culture all types of commodities are sold using advertising techniques which link particular products to an “aesthetic” related to other value domains. Thus, in the contemporary economy we find cars sold with ties to sexuality or jewelry with links to romance. Contemporary subjects come to take it as natural that love be grafted with the exchange value of jewelry. This graft between non-economic valuations—such as love—with exchange value has become so pervasive in contemporary culture that to a certain extent jewelry has changed the performance of “love” itself. For many, the commodity of jewelry must be cited if the value of “love” is to be normatively expressed, or properly dramatized. In other words, the performance of subcultural value domains are necessarily mediated through exchange value in order to be properly communicated. In this way, subcultural values become marketable. As the Frankfurt School has argued, in late capitalism all of culture is potentially subject to commodification (see Jay 1973).
In a performative frame, however, we must switch from the language of the Frankfurt School—which focused on reified consciousness—to the language of practice. For example, the giving of a diamond ring can be considered as a citational practice, where the materiality of the cultural artifact grafts the contexts of romance and exchange value. The ring, as a citational resource, interpellates particular social identities for both the giver and receiver. In this way, the citational practices of late capitalism interpellate “valued experiences,” measurable in exchange value, for subjects involved in even the most intimate of social interactions.
Bakhtin and Derrida both retained a tension in their work between the singularity of language in situated context, and the repeatability of language in multiple contexts. It is precisely the repeatable, abstractable “meaning” of language which enables its exchange value to be calculable, as a cultural commodity which can be quoted or cited into new contexts. As we will see in Werner Hamacher’s reading of Marx (1967), while the abstracted exchange value transcends the situated material use of the commodity, it is not entirely divorceable from that materiality. In this section, we will consider the exchange value of the language commodity, as a measure of its “worth” when grafted or cited into a new situational context.
In his reading of Derrida’s (1994) Specters of Marx, Hamacher (1999) notes that what Marx calls “commodity-language” (Marx, cited in Hamacher 1999, 170) is a language of “equivalence”—that is, all commodities can be exchanged for each other. This “exchangeability” means that a standard of exchange-value emerges as a universal measure, abstracted from the unique use-value of each material object. This abstraction, which occurs in the process of the exchange of commodities, means that the object loses its historicality, and instead enters into an abstract relationship with every other commodity—based on this mutual exchangeability (172).
Marx argues that money becomes the “transcendental of commodity-language” (174); in other words, the normative form in which exchange value will be measured. Of course, Marx (1967) argues that what is “really” exchanged is “labor-time,” abstracted from the actual historical labor of workers. However, for Marx, this fact—that labor is the source of all value—is hidden in the materiality of the object. As Hamacher notes, for Marx, “The object 'cloth' must be the veil over the actual cloth which is woven by historical social life” (176, italics in the original). In other words, for Marx the material object readied for exchange hides the historicality of the material object produced by workers. The universal “exchangeability”—once abstracted—re-incarnates itself into particular material forms, and in so doing, “efface[s] the singularity of everything it encompasses” (177).
Inasmuch as the commodification process obscures the historicality of the material form, its language is that of the “present”—the presence of exchange value (see 177). While this exchange value appears in the same materiality as that of everyday language, it denies the historicality of this materiality. In other words, the “exchangeability” of language—as a commodity—abstracts from the materiality of language, even as it inserts itself back into the situated materiality. In so doing, the past and future of the meaningful materiality are denied; the material sign presents itself only as a language claiming the “presence” of value. In a Marxist sense, the discourse of the exchange value of language, in its ideological function, seeks to obscure the historical dimension of language, and instead continually re-asserts its “abstract” exchange value.
As Derrida would argue, however—as implied in his criticism of Marx’s use/exchange value dichotomy (Derrida 1994; see also Sherlock 1997)—there can be no strong distinction between “commodified” and “non-commodified” language. For Derrida, the marketability of all language would always already be implicated in its material form. Any socially meaningful utterance is potentially “ready” for a market—especially now in the United States where the cultural economy has expanded, and where linguistic commodities can be quickly distributed over the Internet on a wide, and mobile, scale. Using a linguistic suffix favored by Walter Benjamin (Weber 2008), the “-ability” of any strip of language to be served up to a market always already involves the anticipated valuation—or abstract marketability—of the money-making potential of that linguistic strip. Perhaps instead of the “commodified” versus “non-commodified” distinction, the notion of a continuum might better characterize how some linguistic forms are more readied or entextualized for the market—while other linguistic forms (such as art) may not be shaped into a marketable format.
In other words, to “commodify” is to abstract, but the abstraction of exchange value is indicated from materiality. While any materiality can acquire a market value, the “difference” here concerns the extent to which the material form is readily conducive to a normative abstraction of exchange value, or whether its material form resists that normative interpellation. Normative citational practices involving cultural commodities not only signify particular subcultural values, but—using a term from Bakhtin—simultaneously “double-voice” or re-cite exchange value. On the other hand, non-normative citational practices—especially those involving less marketable (and more aesthetic) linguistic forms—may resist interpellations of exchange value.
It is the materiality of the cultural form which marks one cultural commodity as having more exchange value than another. In the case of televised auto racing, for example, one race may be marked or marketed as more important or valuable than another race. In other words, the citational practices of the subject—in bringing a particular linguistic commodity into the material environment of the home via television—involve not only the interpellation of a self-identity as one who enjoys racing, but also the interpellation of a self enjoying hierarchically valued “experiences” (i.e., “watching the Daytona 500” as differentiated from a lesser valued racing experience). In the language of citationality, the market in the cultural economy is a mechanism for the delivery of differentially valued citational resources, and the interpellated subjective experiences and identities normatively associated with them. The commodification of citational practice involves not only the referential dimension of language—in delivering a certain experience (i.e., “racing on television”) to a subject—but also involves its “value” in indexing (see Silverstein 1976), or interpellating, a particular type of social identity (i.e., a “racing fan”).
In the case of television, we find a citational technology which presents commodified language prioritized spatially to different regional audiences (i.e., sharing geographically patterned citational practices), as well as prioritized temporally (i.e., “prime time”). This commodified language is materially positioned in the home of the subject (i.e., the location of the television screen), in a constellation with the other social objects within the home. The commodified words and images on the screen are thus prioritized by the subject within the overall material arrangement of the home environment.
All of the material signs in the home compete for prioritization both spatially and temporally in the citational practices of the subject. The positioning of the constellation of commodities relative to the subject interpellates an experiencing identity, relative to that material form. In the language of the Cartesian assumptions built into contemporary commodity forms, what is marketed is the experience of the temporal and spatial positioning of the subject relative to the “presence” of valued material signs.
Just as citational practices can evoke a sense of the political or the religious in everyday interactions, so can they evoke a sense of the economic. We now turn to Erving Goffman’s work on the keying of frames. It will be argued in this section that the exchange value frame is keyed through syntactical, material forms. In this way, Goffman’s work on frame analysis—as the “organization of experience”—will be extended to a subject’s “experience” of the worth of the commodified words and images of others.
In Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1986), Goffman argues that frames are schemas for interpretation, and a “central element” of culture (27). Events and situations are interpreted within a frame, which allows for the organization of social action into meaningful typologies. In this work, Goffman is particularly interested in the keying of frames, where the normative meaning of activities is “transformed into something patterned on this activity but seen by the participants to be something quite else” (44). Common examples include actors performing on a stage or people “playing” at fighting, where the “reality” of the behavior becomes “something different.” In other words, in pretend-fighting, real fighting techniques may be mimicked or cited, yet keying switches the cultural frame from fighting to play (45). For Goffman, all types of “make-believe activities” (such as today’s vicarious video game experiences), or types of “dramatic scriptings” (such as today’s television shows), are examples of keyed experience (53). Clearly, such keyed experiences, generated by particular citational practices, have become a central aspect of the contemporary cultural economy.
For Goffman, to “key” experience is to transform its interpretation—from “real life” to an alternative frame where reality is “played upon.” In a sense, the transformation of language from something merely enabling communication, to a cultural commodity with a market worth, can be seen as a type of “keying” which transforms its interpretive context. In commodification, an everyday human activity—like a dialogue in social interaction—becomes keyed in such a way that a strip (10) of language is considered relative to an economic frame. Language uttered in one context becomes marketable and valuable for other contexts. In the contemporary cultural economy, the “experience of meaning” has been normatively keyed as something consumable—and measurable—for Cartesian subjects. In this sense, we might speak of “keying the exchange value frame.”
Thus, while actors can give convincing performances in everyday interactions, high-quality performances may be considered to have market value on a television show or website. Both “serious” language use, as well as its keyed parodies, are increasingly marketable as they now travel easily from everyday interactions to the Internet. Today, any citational utterance can be assessed as to its marketability.
When the exchange value frame is invoked relative to the subject, social identity is keyed in terms of the worth of its accumulated experiences. Exchange value is increasingly becoming the dominant frame for the construction of identity in late capitalism, especially as language is increasingly commodified. When commodified, the materiality of language is shaped in such a way so as to “key” the exchange value frame. Relative to this interpretive context, language becomes a citational resource which is normatively perceived to deliver worthwhile experiences to consuming subjects.
Thus, the “difference” between language which is, or is not, “commodified” is that the former has been keyed to the exchange value frame, and thus assessed in terms of its marketability in another context. Given the proliferation of distributional technologies in late capitalism, all language is subject to such keying and is thus marketable—although it is certainly true that some strips of language have been more heavily prepared or entextualized for marketability than other strips (i.e., “entertainment” versus “academic” commodities). The exchange value frame is re-mobilized whenever marketability is considered.
Syntactical forms which report the speech of others key various frames, through which the relationship between social identity categories is re-enacted and re-interpreted. Those syntactical forms which have become institutionalized in late capitalism are generally those which bring the most profit. Linguistic techniques used in reporting the words of others abide by “framing rules” (see Berger 1986, xvi) which key different valuing frames. In the U.S. cultural economy, the normative framing rule has become that virtually any social meaning is eligible for commodification, and available as a citational resource for the construction of social identity.
As Bennett Berger points out, framing rules not only limit the choices of social interactants, but also can perpetuate inequality (xvi). In this sense, the systematic keying of the exchange value frame in institutional utterances can limit the citational resources available for identity construction in everyday life, as well as maintain the unequal relationship between normative identities—as in the case of gender. In other words, framing rules can regulate the way that institutions (and their customers) cite the words of others, in order to maximize the exchange value of the keying practice itself.
The invocation of any frame involves “boundary markers,” which give cues as to what frame is to be employed in a situation (Goffman 1986, 251). Goffman shows that these boundary markers include both “temporal and spatial brackets” (252). In the case of the keying of exchange value, such markers would include the scheduling of a television show in “prime-time,” or starting it on the hour—ways of indicating the boundaries within which the “presence” of value is marked. Thus, although “reality television” supposedly includes slices of real life, it is the entextualization of that slice—its filming, editing, scheduling as a “show” with a title, and so forth—which key the exchange value frame through the use of bracketing techniques.
Interestingly, Goffman notes that when framing language, the “bracketing practices” used involve “the syntactical organization of sentences, where sequential placement, punctuation marks, and part of speech determine what one or more words are to be bracketed together and what syntactic role is to be performed by the constituent unit thus formed” (255; italics added). Here we can see that the preparation of language for marketing as a commodity, or for keying into an exchange value frame, involves a particular syntactical arrangement of the slice of language—as in the case of a news program which incorporates only short “sound bites” within the newscaster’s reporting of an event. The syntactical form becomes important to the marketing of the cultural commodity.
Thus, the keying of the exchange value frame can be readied ahead of an utterance, when the most “market-able” syntactical form is considered by producers. This process precisely involves the selection and preparation of language on the basis of its anticipated market value. In other words, the commodity form of language is syntactically organized to key the exchange value frame, in its later recontextualization and re-citation by consumers. Linguistic commodities are materially shaped in such a way so as to be re-cited as a valued experience for subjects. Just as television and computer viewers appear to enjoy the “gazing technology” itself—sometimes regardless of content (see Jhally 1987)—so generations of youth appear to enjoy particular syntactical formations, such as the rapid switching of images which today characterize the organization of action films, video game environments, or other fast-paced television programming. We thus find that the syntactical styles by which language is commodified themselves come to have a market value.
One of the consequences of this situation is that consumers learn to recognize those syntactical arrangements or signifying codes by which exchange value is normatively keyed, such as television conventions for shows and commercials. Of course, as Goffman shows, the recognition of basic techniques allows for the further keying of variations, as when unusual commercials or programs appear which seem to violate the expected conventions. In fact, just as avant garde playwrights or other artists “break frame”—Goffman cites Beckett, Brecht, Godard, the Dadaists, and John Cage as some examples—television producers find markets for the commodified performance of “frame-breaking,” as Goffman discusses in the case of televised wrestling (416). Even those aesthetic constructions which may initially challenge normative frameworks and identities can eventually acquire a market value as commodified experiences.
In citational practice, the words of others are grafted into the utterances of the subject, as strips of language received from others are recontextualized into new syntactical arrangements. This grafting of the words of self with the words of others simultaneously graft the differing valuing contexts which the words interpellate or imply. Multiple valuing contexts, grafted together from particular syntactical arrangements of meaningful materiality, are prioritized into particular value ratios. Social identity is interpellated from these valuing ratios, as “types of people” are aligned in various proportion with differing subcultural groups. These multiple valuing contexts are organized under the umbrella of the interpellated exchange value context. In other words, the interpretive context of exchange value is continually grafted onto citational practices interpellating family, religion, or subcultural memberships.
Just as Derrida’s work has taken up the question of the iterability of words—repeatable across contexts in order to be meaningful, yet singular in context—we can consider the iterability of valuing contexts across situations. In this sense we can speak of the iterability of the exchange value context or frame, where the meaning of exchange value is both socially recognizable across situations, and yet singular within a situation. Particular words, images, or events are given value or worth as representational instances of the exchange value category, and interpreted in reference to that contextual frame.
In this sense, the meaning of the exchange value context or generic category is repeated, as citational usages continually re-invoke the exchange value frame for their interpretation. While these citational practices are always situated, the meanings interpellated from them abstract from the local situation. In other words, the value domain of exchange value abstracts from situations, in measuring the worth of differing citational practices and their associated experiences—but is only invoked within socially situated citational practices. In this way, Derrida’s argument regarding the iterability of meaningful marks applies to interpretive frames and evaluative contexts themselves (see Derrida 1988, 65).
In the case of non-aesthetic configurations, material signs simultaneously signify multiple valuing contexts which are ranked in a hierarchy—one social value over another. Inasmuch as valuing contexts compete with each other for “interpretive dominance,” the politics (and ethics) of the entextualization and recontextualization of utterances concern these hierarchical arrangements. For example, politicians or religious leaders are not supposed to issue utterances which appear to put their own economic interests ahead of the interests of those persons they serve; rather, the values of the public good or spirituality are supposed to be the dominant contexts interpellated from their utterances. Given that any citational utterance, in its materiality, is simultaneously positioned relative to all other signs, we can see that citational practice involves a continual re-mixing of the competing value contexts available within the culture. Citational resources, normatively considered as “representing” different value contexts, are thus differentially valued for this function—and more or less marketable as political game pieces in such maneuvering.
The movement of particular words of others, into particular utterances of the subject, necessarily play one valuing context off against another. As discussed earlier, Goffman’s concept of “role distance” can be used to consider how any particular citational practice interpellates values which can “stand against” other values. Thus, any particular syntactical grafting of the words of self and others in an utterance can be assessed as to its “embracement of,” or “distancing from,” the multiple value contexts which are interpellated from the graft. The exchange value frame is interpellated not only as particular representations of values are embraced, but also as the subject uses citational resources to distance themselves from other valuing contexts. Exchange value is hegemonic in the way that all non-aesthetic citational resources can be given a worth, as they function to both affiliate subjects with particular valuing communities, and to simultaneously distance the subject from others.
Even non-normative citational practices, which seek to interpellate values which oppose the hegemony of exchange value, thus find themselves market-able in their role-distancing function. As Dick Hebdige (1996) discusses, “punk rock” citational styles, which seek to distance themselves from normative practices, are all too easily assimilated as a kind of fashion (130). As in the de Certeau examples discussed above, we find that the citational practices of “marginal” social groups are politically contained by being “reported upon.” The intended invocation of an alternative value context is lost as oppositional utterances are grafted or appropriated into a normative “reporting” syntax. In this way, the fashion world is able to cite these oppositional styles within its own utterances—a commodified form which mutes the political impact of these “words of the other.” Thus, those who seek to politically distance themselves from normative values find that their distancing practices, and preferred citational resources, can always be recontextualized and marketed in unwanted ways. The interpretive context they intend to evoke is not necessarily the predominant context which is interpellated when recontextualized.
Once entextualized into material form, a citational resource is available for anyone to recontextualize; of course, those who control mass distribution (citational) networks are able to more easily influence the continued framing of the entextualization—and thus the value contexts interpellated from the recontextualization. In Inoue’s example discussed above, the “voice” of the schoolgirls, when used to sell commodities, interpellated an exchange value context which was beyond the influence of the schoolgirls themselves (see Inoue 2006, 53). As Inoue notes, in the schoolyard the girls could report on their own previous utterances to clarify or alter their meanings; however, as their voices became a commodity, the schoolgirls could not politically compete with the syntactical reframing of their words in the mass media.
An important issue in the contemporary political economy thus concerns this ability to issue “metapragmatic commentaries” (56) on prior speech—that is, to re-frame the entextualized words of others (or self) in various ways in new situations. The speech of oppositional groups loses political force when reframed as a media commodity, given that the groups are no longer able to “provide context.” Even as groups politically struggle to control the “valuing contexts” which are interpellated from particular words, the words themselves come to have a market value. Those who struggle to resist the commodification of their words may instead find that their oppositional utterances have a certain marketability.
We can also see the hegemony of the exchange value frame in so-called “reality” television, where even the “direct” reporting of the experiences of others becomes framed as an entertainment commodity for subjects. The words and images of others become mediated, vicarious experiences for consumers. Today, the “experiences of others” are increasingly consumable in everyday life, given the unprecedented transmission capabilities of today’s citational technologies. Thus, in Mead’s (1969) terms, the human ability to “take the role of the other”—to “experience” the world through the referential positionality of others—has been systematically reframed as the consumable “experience” of another’s social positionality. Again, we find that the citational practices of the other are reducible to vicarious, mediated experiences for the pleasure of subjects—and assigned a “worth” as the exchange value frame is keyed.
The grafting of valuable citational resources into new social situations—the re-citing of exchange value—involves the interpellation of a subject as a representative of an imagined community of consumers. If all citational resources in the contemporary cultural economy are potentially commodifiable, and translatable into a discourse of economic worth, then all social identities interpellated from these resources involve the “consumption” of valued experience. This interpellated community of consumers shares the normative assumption that experiences are measurable in terms of economic worth, and that the lives of members of such a community can be evaluated as to the worth of their accumulated experiences. Thus, fashionable subjects normatively re-cite those citational forms which signify the presence of value, aligning their identities with a community of “like” consumers. In Baudrillard’s (1981) sense of a system of “sign values,” the interpellated identities of subjects are differentiated in terms of their social positioning relative to these material signs; that is, important people are taken to have more “valuable experiences.”
The act of consumption can be seen as a kind of citational practice, by which social objects, events, and experiences are purchased and used as symbolic resources to construct social identity and affiliated social values. In a summary of Colin Campbell’s work, Jonathan Friedman (1994) points out that for Campbell, the identity of the modern individual is constructed “in the very act of consumption” (21). In the language of citationality, the “consumption” of particular citational resources interpellates particular social identities and social values.
Expanding on the insights of Thorstein Veblen (1953), Pierre Bourdieu (1984) has shown how upper-class members, through consumption, create and maintain status distinctions relative to those lower in the stratification system. For example, Michael Silverstein (2003) shows that wine consumption and “wine talk” at social events is an indexical indication of social status (222). Thus Silverstein speaks of the “indexical value” of “identity-by-visible-consumption,” or the value of “the correctly-indexical ‘life style’” (227). Here, both the ability to actually taste distinctions in wine, as well as talk about these distinctions, become citational practices distinguishing class membership. Thus, to be “indexed” as fashionable comes from citing fashionable words, or having fashionable tastes in citational performances.
The fashionable subject thus learns to make fashionable citations, a phenomenon which—as Bourdieu and Veblen have shown—is closely associated with class. As Thorstein Veblen argued, fashionable dress involves both “conspicuous leisure” and “conspicuous consumption”—that is, the time to learn about the fashions and the money to purchase them (1953, 85). The voicing of “fashion” within the utterances of the subject therefore makes for an excellent status symbol. Of course, fashion is an intertextual phenomenon, in that one becomes fashionable oneself by citing fashionable others—designers, celebrities, and so forth. The intertextual citationality of value can also be seen when events are marked as sponsored by other cultural commodities—as when, for example, a television program is “brought to you by” a film company promoting their latest movie. In other words, not only does fashion signify the present (Miller 1987, 126), but the fashionable present is often itself sponsored—through a citational reference to the entity responsible for bringing such a valued experience to the consumer.
In the consideration of “brands,” as citational markers which indicate the presence of value, it may be worthwhile to revisit Derrida’s writings on the signature—normatively taken to indicate the “presence” of the subject. In Limited Inc (1988), Derrida argued that within the “metaphysics of presence,” the signature is taken to have an authenticity which guarantees the presence of the signatory, and thus the presence of their intentionality. In a similar way, the autograph of the famous person, or the brand name “signature” of a designer on a commodity, seems to guarantee the presence of its value. The “name of the other,” whether a brand or a proper name, is affixed to commodities to attest to the authenticity or the quality of the product—much like the marker which announces the value of tourist sites. Brands thus indicate the presence of the “fashionable” other, when re-cited by the subject.
We can find in the entertainment industry all sorts of commodities which seem to derive much of their value from the presence of the brand name or celebrity endorsement. As Haug pointed out in his Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (1986), advertising increases the exchange value of goods through an association with a particular “aesthetic,” or promise of a particular experience. The citation of the commodity links the identity of the subject with the aesthetic associated with the celebrity or brand—as well as with a particular subculture of users. As Haug argued, this aesthetic value may be nearly detached from the “use value” of the commodity; for example, the fact that a winter hat with a sports team logo may also be a warm hat is almost incidental to its price. The names of celebrities, sports stars, and even social institutions are used to conjure such aesthetic value when they mark or brand a product.
While, in a Marxist sense, commodities “do not bear the signature of their makers” (Jhally 1987, 50), they do bear the signatures of their endorsers. From a Marxist perspective, the value is generated from a kind of counterfeit signature —that of the endorser, rather than the laborer. Of course, in a Derridean sense, this signature—and its interpellated value—is also “counterfeit” in that it is never fully authentic as the mark of an originary “presence” (Derrida 1988; see also Derrida 1992).
It may also be interesting here, when discussing the inscription of endorsement marks or brand names onto the materiality of commodities, to return to Durkheim’s (1965) discussion of marks of the “sacred.” In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim argued that as clans engaged in ritual behavior directed toward the totemic representations of group consciousness, they were “worshiping” the group itself—that is, they experienced the “social.” In contemporary secular culture, we might say that fashionable cultural commodities have assumed this function—as quasi-sacred materialities taken to represent the “collective consciousness” of a valuing community concerned with the fashionably “present.” As subjects engage in normative citational rituals relative to the valued commodity, they reinforce the dominant cultural consciousness of consumerism.
As discussed above, Durkheim points out that in totemic religions, both the “totemic animal” (the animal serving as the totem of the group), and the “totemic representation” (emblems which included paintings, carvings, or tattoos representing the totemic animal), were considered to be sacred (165). In “elementary” religions, objects which bore the painting or carving of the totemic animal themselves were regarded as sacred, due “solely to the fact that they bear the totemic emblem” (147). For Durkheim, the totemic “mark” alone confers the quality of sacredness to the material object. Referring to a totem used by the Arunta, he notes that “the churinga are objects of wood and stone like all others; they are distinguished from profane things of the same sort by only one particularity: this is that the totemic mark is drawn or engraved upon them. So it is this mark and this alone which gives them their sacred character” (144). In fact, Durkheim points out that in these clans, “the images of totemic beings are more sacred than the beings [animals and plants] themselves” (156, italics in the original). These images or inscriptions have the power to transfer the sacred quality onto usually profane objects like wood and stone.
It is hard to miss the affinity of the practices which Durkheim describes with the contemporary function of today’s linguistic “markers”—such as brand names or celebrity endorsements. These “emblems” are taken to confer quasi-sacred “value” onto commodities. We can also see an affinity to advertising generally, which serves as a marker of value—as well as foreshadows the experience of that value. As in Durkheim’s examples, the presence of the “linguistic” emblem means that value is present; as Durkheim puts it, “It is the emblem that is sacred” (147).
Whether functioning as a brand name or in advertising, language confers a “quasi-sacred” quality to citational resources—in Durkheim’s sense that the totemic mark confers religious “value” to objects. Further, language has itself become the “sacred” commodity as distributed via mobile devices, computers, and televisions, and as marked by advertising (i.e., other language). In Durkheim’s terms, commodified language today both bears the “totemic mark,” and is itself the “totem.” It was Durkheim’s general argument that the ritualized practices of “elementary” forms of religion have persisted into modern cultures; perhaps the commodification of language itself in late capitalism is a good example of this process.
For Durkheim, subjects are socialized or integrated into the “collective consciousness” by learning ritual ways of acting toward material totems. Similarly, individuals today are socialized into the discourse of exchange value as they learn to re-cite that which manifests the “presence” of value—particular quasi-sacred material signs which effectively “represent” other subcultural values. Durkheim showed how the religious community distinguished between the sacred and the profane in their ritual actions directed toward material totems; today, individuals distinguish between commodified citational resources as more or less “valuable.” In this sense, it is the materiality of language, as cultural commodity, which is considered to be “quasi-sacred”—and it is through sedimented citational rituals that children are now taught to conflate “sacredness” with exchange value. The most fashionable citations are those which most intensely signify the presence of the “quasi-sacred” in the contemporary cultural economy.
In a diverse culture, social groups differ as to what material forms to valorize, and which to subordinate. Just as Derrida (1981) argued that the West has systematically favored the “presence” of speech over writing, we also find that certain forms of writing have been normatively favored over others. For example, while graffiti has come to be a citational practice favored among urban street gangs, this “mark of the other” has often been devalued as a form of writing within the larger culture. Just as Derrida (1981) shows that writing was feared as a contaminant to the Greek polis by Plato (77), graffiti is a kind of “feared writing,” and perceived as threatening to normative community identity in the United States (Sherlock 2000). While we have seen that the signatures of celebrities or athletes may confer exchange value to cultural commodities, we can see that the exclusion of the “signature of the other” can also be performative of exchange value—as in the relationship between the real estate market, gated communities, and graffiti. Exchange value can be generated both through the inclusion, as well as the exclusion, of particular “signatures” of the other.
The exchange value of a commodity is normatively perceived as its worth, when grafted into a new context, in delivering an experience to a consumer. Yet, from the perspective of a theory of citationality, the graft does not represent a new value in its “presence.” Rather, in a Saussurean sense, citational practices enact differences in relationships and values. Exchanges which recontextualize material signs thus, in addition to delivering experiences to a consumer, continually re-negotiate relationships between the differential values of self and those of others.
In the case of a teenager’s “oppositional” music, for example, it is the precisely the difference between the teen’s relationship with the youth subculture, as opposed to the family subculture, which is continuously re-enacted through the music. In other words, when the materiality of the music is brought into a graft or material configuration with the materiality of the home environment, the values of the imagined communities of youth and family subcultures are interpellated in their difference. The exchange value of the citational resource involves this re-enacted difference.
For Erving Goffman (1961), “role distance” involves one’s distaste for the role one is playing, and for the social identity implied by that role. Moving Goffman’s work into a performative framework, we can see that many material signs are valued precisely in that their re-citation distances the interpellated subject from social roles. For example, certain types of clothing may be valued as role-distancing resources to enact a gender parody. The gender parody is a citational practice which—as Butler (1999) points out—potentially dislocates normative gender roles and the values typically interpellated from them. Some citational resources are thus valued for their ability to signify an oppositional difference relative to normative value hierarchies.
Particular citational resources are marketed precisely in such a way as to allow consumers to express such role distance against normative roles and social relationships. In a commentary on Goffman, for example, Charles Lemert gives an example where “a teenage boy wears the shoes of M. Jordan as a way of keying up a sense of social status against the one with which he must live” (Lemert 2003, xxxix). Here we see how “keys” can be mobilized by a particular material form, as a resource for enacting role distance and “playing against the reality presented to us” (xxxix).
In an individualistic society, subjects often dramatize the ways in which their individual valuations differ from those of the larger culture (see Kopytoff 1986). In such performances, social actors may use deviant citational resources, as well as engage in citational practices which re-value or re-prioritize normative citational resources. For example, teenagers may move material signs of youth culture to prominent places in their lives, re-enacting the difference in value rankings which adults and youth give to the same commodities.
Marketers, in turn, are eager to sell goods which can be used as resources by individuals or subcultures who wish to display their unique styles of valuation—thus playing to the contemporary concern for displaying one’s individuality in a increasingly “rationalized” culture (see Weber 1968; Ritzer 2008) homogenized by exchange value. Thus, individual citational practices may enact values which take a stand against institutional citational practices, even as the resources which enable such practices themselves have an exchange value and contribute to the profits of those same institutions. In this sense, the production of individualized role-distancing resources, which may function to express one’s dissatisfaction with the economic structure and the dominant culture, is in fact integral to their reproduction.
The value ratios of individual identities come into play as subjects employ both normative and oppositional resources in their everyday citational practices. For example, some subjects are highly committed to traditional religious or family values in late capitalist culture, while others may simply manage the appearance of such (see Berger and Luckmann 1967, 172–73). We can see that each social identity becomes a unique constellation of adherence to, and distancing from, dominant value categories as interpellated from citational practices. As Bakhtin has pointed out, a person whose “inner speech” is in total conformity with a particular normative value discourse is not really an individual or “self” at all; yet a person who totally distances self from all “outer speech” lives in a private world unintelligible to others (Holquist 2004, 52).
In between these extremes are all types of combinations of, in Goffman’s terms, “role embracement” and “role distance” as indicated through citational practice. Relative to dominant social institutions—as Goffman puts it in Asylums—the individual can be seen “as a stance-taking entity, a something that takes up a position somewhere between identification with an organization and opposition to it” (Goffman, in Lemert and Branaman 2003, 90). In fact, any utterance simultaneously embraces one value domain, while distancing its implied social identity from another.
For example, as we see in the case of the ritual practices of juvenile gangs, the same citational practices which re-integrate members into the gang are precisely those which simultaneously express a distancing from the normative values of the larger culture. In addition, this oscillation between role-distancing and role-embracing occurs as subjects continually change roles in everyday life when interacting with different audiences, as they re-cite different identities in those situations. Any citational resource becomes valued for its functionality in both aligning, as well as distancing, a subject from differing value discourses. In contemporary postmodern culture, individual and group identity categories are rapidly shifting, with traditional categories such as gender and race perhaps one day becoming mere historical reference points—against which other identity stylizations take their distance.
The normative “exchange value discourse” is both a value discourse against which individuals seek role-distancing experiences, as well as the mechanism for the economic valuation of role-distancing resources themselves. The citation of non-normative values in role-distancing behavior thus does not really dislocate the exchange value discourse; rather, in a Derridean sense, role-distancing is necessarily tied to the normative value discourses against which it sets itself apart. Thus, in the economy of alienation, particular commodities come to have an exchange value precisely as “distancing” resources. In short, the resources employed in the citational practices of oppositional politics themselves come to have an exchange value, which ironically results in the reproduction of the political economy.
Commodities associated with particular subcultural values may be desirable to oppositional actors precisely in order to “play against” the system of exchange value. The meaning of such a commodity—as in the case of the rebellious youth’s t-shirt or music—oscillates between dominant and supplemental value discourses. Thus, even in the form of a commodity, material signs are able to “double-voice” particular religious, ethnic, or political values. The materiality of the commodity thus marks a site where differing valuing contexts are grafted together and differentiated, in various ratio. This is the site/cite where alternative value discourses are at once subordinated to the dominant discourse of exchange value, yet continue to play against it.
Because, in a Derridean sense, the supplemental or excluded alterity is always already contained within any meaningful identity, we can see that the citation of an oppositional resource is actually a re-citation of that which has already been abjected in the normative or dominant identity. For example, if a community excludes graffiti in the initial construction of its identity as a “safe” neighborhood, oppositional groups may precisely use graffiti as a political resource. This practice is thus a re-citation of that which was already abjected in the formation of the community’s identity. The re-citation of this “alterity of the other” has value as an oppositional resource, and functions as the basis of the role-distancing experiences of the oppositional subjects.
Thus, in the case of social class, upper-class members who attempt to exclude certain things from their “experiences” find that oppositional groups precisely re-cite those excluded forms as the basis of their resistance. To take another example, the performance of a gender parody appeals to those alternative conceptions of gender which have been abjected in the construction of gender categories in the first place. In this sense, efforts of the powerful to abject the values of the excluded simultaneously create citational resources for those who seek to oppose those dominant values—as well as generate a market value for such oppositional resources.
As in de Certeau’s example discussed earlier, powerful groups often seek to manage excluded others by using syntactical forms which “report” on them and for them—thus seeking to eliminate direct expressions of “role distance,” and direct challenges to dominant values. In other words, if powerful groups are successful, the oppressed will not be able to effectively re-cite that alterity which is excluded in the construction of the normative identity of the dominant group, and thus become unable to mobilize political opposition. Rather, that which is excluded is strategically, and syntactically, maintained and controlled within the citational practices and meaningful material forms produced by the dominant group.
Regarding race, for example, bell hooks (1992b) has shown that white audiences have historically supported a whole industry around the marketing of “blackness” in U.S. culture. Commodities “representing” black culture are distributed in the market and are vicariously experienced by persons who desire a type of “mass-mediated danger” (26). As she notes, “It is within the commercial realm of advertising that the drama of Otherness finds expression. Encounters with Otherness are clearly marked as more exciting, more intense, and more threatening. The lure is the combination of pleasure and danger” (26).
Rather than reciprocal dialogue, or the direct political negotiation of differences, the words of those excluded from the opportunity structure are instead commodified as “vicarious experiences” for consuming subjects. Through strategic syntactical maneuvers, oppositional potentialities are managed in advance, and normative identities and social relationships are maintained—which serves both the political and economic interests of dominant groups. These syntactical maneuvers can, in Goffman’s (1961) sense, be considered as a “screen” which allow only limited amounts of social resistance into the political economy, while maintaining its overall structure.
While some critics have charged that mass-mediated entertainment is a form of escapism from the troubles of everyday life, Erving Goffman—in his essay “Fun in Games” (1961)—has instead argued that an important dimension of “fun” is the particular amount of “outside reality” which is allowed into the “game.” Many corporate utterances in the entertainment industry are syntactically arranged to make the experience “fun” for consumers. These institutions entextualize their utterances into those syntactical forms which allow some alterity in, even while re-differentiating and reproducing dominant social values. In commodity form, the words and images of others are materially shaped in such a way as to maximize their exchange value—as they are marketed as citational resources for consumers. If the words or images “of the other” are to valorize the referential context of the contemporary subject, then their commodified words must re-cite the differences between self and other in an entertaining way.
For Goffman, the “transformation rules” (33) of a game determine how much, and in what ways, “outside reality” is made “relevant” to the play of the game. For example, as Goffman notes, gender may be made relevant to a bridge game, or social class made relevant to a party. Goffman argues that just the “right amount” of outside reality must be allowed into the game in order to maximize the fun. In other words, the rules of the game must act as a screen to keep out real world conflicts (33), even while allowing in enough real world tensions to keep the game interesting. For Goffman, the social inequalities of the real world must be “disguised” behind the screening rules of the game (73–79). We might directly apply Goffman’s insight to television sitcoms, where real world issues are confronted in an amusing, light-hearted way behind the television “screen.” Just as in the politicized syntax of reported speech, games “screen in” some social conflicts, while simultaneously managing the full force of their oppositional potential.
In this sense, the material form of the cultural commodity can be seen as a kind of screen. As a syntactical configuration, the real life words and images of others enter into the institutional utterance, yet their contextual relationship to various social issues is disguised. Goffman’s argument can be more generally extended to suggest that in the contemporary U.S. economy, culture is widely marketed precisely in order to allow consumers to “play against” the inequalities of the larger social structure (Sherlock 2005)—even as these oppositional resources themselves acquire a market value, and thus ultimately re-cite the exchange value frame. Entire sectors of the cultural economy now produce citational resources through which oppositional stances can be taken toward the political economy—not in order to directly confront real world inequalities, but in order to “experience” them in vicarious fashion. To be marketable, inequality must be transformed into “fun”—or at the very least, into an interesting “information commodity.”
While the value of citational resources involving social inequalities could be measured in terms of political value (i.e., in provoking social change), it is normatively measured in terms of exchange value—as providing marketable “experiences” for consuming audiences. Excluded others are thus “reported on” in the institutional utterances of the entertainment industry, for re-citation by consumers in everyday life. The delivery of vicarious experiences of the “other” has become a multi-million dollar business in the United States, dependent on consumers who want a bit of the experiences of socially excluded others—but not too much. Within a political economy structured to exclude certain others, some of the words and objects signifying alterity are “screened back” into the entertainment experiences of consumers—who purchase these cultural “souvenirs” in order to play within, and play against, that same political economy. The increasing growth of the entertainment industry attests to the amazing ability of the U.S. economy to re-incorporate cultural resistance to its own institutional structure.
Journalistic recaps, or retrospective accounts of valued events, are normatively considered as “supplemental” to the presence of the live event itself. These “after-the-fact” news accounts are devalued in the normative value hierarchy as a kind of lesser reproduction of a prior moment, for the benefit of those persons absent from the original citational experience. In a Derridean sense, this kind of after-the-fact “writing” is thus perceived to be a presence of an “absence” (1973; 1988)—a stand-in for the prior, and now absent, experience or event. A hierarchy of value is thus created which extends temporally from the “originary” event forward, as the passing of time devalues retrospective accounts.
In the contemporary U.S. cultural economy, the “originary events,” after they have occurred, are themselves ranked and filed in a kind of value archive. Archival technologies (see Derrida 1996) are developed for the housing of cultural commodities, for later recontextualization.This archive serves as a reference for the ranking of all kinds of “greatest moments” in history, which can be re-presented or re-cited as valorized experiences for consuming subjects. The normative subject, constructing a social identity in reference to a particular subculture, is expected to re-cite the institutionalized archives of that subculture in normative citational practices.
For example, we find that news or sports archival footage is retained by television networks to rebroadcast as memorable events from the past. Particular “moments” from certain historical events are valued as delivering decisive experiences to viewers. Archival-based rankings of events, images, and other commodified experiences flourish in the contemporary cultural economy and become commodities in themselves—such as “top-10 lists.” Similarly, there are often stories in the media which rank commodified experiences and events in various sectors of the economy, based on the prior experiences of others: top tourist destinations, best-selling books to read, best barbecue spots in the United States, and so forth. The highly regarded experiences of some can thus be re-cited by others—whether in person or as mediated experiences.
In addition, new achievements, as in the case of athletic accomplishments, are continually measured as to where that new achievement would rank against the historical value archive—in the greatest moments of that sport, that city, or even to that television network. Even as these important events first occur, attendees “experience” their anticipated “historical value,” knowing that they will likely later join the historical archive high in the value hierarchy—as in the case of personally attending an emerging no-hitter in baseball. The later retrospective ranking can thus be anticipated and enter into the event itself; attendees at live events are often aware of what kinds of moments will later be re-cited as newsworthy.
Finally, it may be interesting to here reconsider—along with the issue of value archives and the retrospective assignment of value—the problem of aesthetic value, or judgments about the worth of works of art. In discussing the complexity of the issue, Peter Bürger (1990) summarizes the limitations of the perspective that value inheres only in the artwork itself. He argues that to see value only in the work itself is an “ahistorical” approach, which neglects how the discourse of criticism shapes the reception, and thus the future production, of works of art (27). Following this line, the experiential “value” of cultural commodities might be considered less as “present” in events themselves, but rather as emergent with their retrospective accounts—which can in turn be anticipated by subjects.
In this sense, the discourse of media criticism, like advertising, is not to be considered as an activity which is merely supplemental to the value of the media commodity itself, but rather as integral to it. The events, and their later critical accounts, become grafted together in the social construction of valued experience. Thus, the future accounts of others—such as anticipated critical reviews—enter into the present experiences of event-going subjects. In this way, present citational practices are grafted together with the anticipated retrospective accounting of others. In addition, from a poststructuralist perspective, subjects construct the meaning and value of what they have experienced only after it occurs, in a new social and historical context. Thus, the value rankings of experiences and events are continually open to recontextualization, as social identity is continually reconstituted and recontextualized.
As discussed above, the ideology of “presence”—associated with speech in the Western philosophical tradition—continues today even in what de Certeau (1988) has called the “scriptural economy.” A hierarchy of value emerges which valorizes speech and presence, even as the citational mechanisms which distribute this speech are based on a model of writing—distribution across contexts. While continually shifting and transforming, the cultural economy places “presence” at the top of the value hierarchy, and lesser reproductions of this “live presence” lower in the hierarchy. In this ideological formulation, value is not only perceived as present, but present in a hierarchy.
This value hierarchy involves both temporal and spatial dimensions. Temporally, the live event, where fashionable experience and value have historically been considered to be most fully present, tops the hierarchy. Ticketed events such as fashion shows or sporting events are marked in advance by promoters, or in retrospect by critics, as experiences where value is or was present. To be in the presence of an artist or celebrity at a performance is to experience the greatest value. In other words, to position one’s self so as to cite the live event as it happens in “real time” enables the interpellation of a particular type of subject—one who experiences the full presence of value. The fashionable subjects able to afford the hottest ticket in town purchase the “presence of fashionable experience.” As Daniel Miller has remarked, “What makes an object fashionable . . . [is its] ability to signify the present” (1987, 126).
Following the live event, a “trickle down” effect occurs relative to the lesser distributional markets. For example, mass reproductions of the “original” event take their places lower in the value hierarchy. Though a recording of a live event is still somewhat of a valuable experience, its exchange value falls below that of actual attendance at the event. A temporal chain is thus established regarding the perceived value of the reproduced experience relative to the live event—today involving distributional technologies such as cable television rebroadcasts or DVD recordings. This hierarchy of value—often based on perceived temporal distance from the “origin” of value—continues all the way down to televised accounts of the event on the entertainment news, on talk shows, or in newspaper accounts of the event. These “late” experiences finally become affordable to most consumers, considered as poorer substitutes or supplements for those absent from the original event. As mass-mediated commodities have proliferated, the dichotomy of “live” or “real time” events—versus “after-the-fact” mediated events—has persisted as a basis of differentiating the value of commodified citational resources. In this sense, one’s class-based “habitus” (Bourdieu 1984) involves one’s temporal positioning relative to the normatively perceived origin of value.
While mass reproduction undermines the “aura” or authenticity of a unique work (Benjamin 1968), the corporations which distribute citational resources attempt to re-establish this aura of presence, even when no uniquely “original” phenomenon exists. In the case of movies, something like an “originary presence” is created via the film’s premiere on opening night (in Westwood or Hollywood)—attended by celebrities who bring their aura of presence to the event. In other words, their already-entextualized social identity as a “famous celebrity” is recontextualized at the event. The citational practices of the fans may include attending the event, as well as getting autographs which document the presence of attending celebrities.
Jody Berland (1992) has argued that we also have to understand entertainment and other “cultural technologies” in spatial terms (39). Valued experiences today occur in living rooms, sports bars, or via audio players in cars, and thus are spatially differentiated. For example, the purchase of experience at an event involves the claim that a subject was there, as evidenced by the ticket stub—an entextualized material sign which can later be cited as a “previously present” experience of the subject.
The spatial location of the material graft—where citational practice occurs—is thus an important component of its value. Audiences will normatively value live, public performances more in person rather than as mediated through television and experienced from home. Thus some places are considered more fashionable as citational resources, at certain times, than others. In terms of the “inequality of experience,” there is clearly an exclusivity regarding private access to particular citational spaces. An important aspect, then, of the contemporary U.S. cultural economy is when and where a subject incorporates the language of others into one’s own citational utterances. Alternately, when and where a person—whether a film star or an author—is cited (sighted) is an important component of their celebrity within the cultural economy.
These “citational experiences” not only become the basis of how others attribute status to social actors, but also of how subjects construct and interpret their own social identities. Subjects become the kinds of persons who attend certain kinds of events, or own certain kinds of citational resources. Fashionable persons have access to the experiences and significations which cut closest to the “present” moment of fashion—which enables them to incorporate these experiences into their social identities more quickly. Investors who are able to anticipate these valuations are able to get into the market at a fashionable time, and not show up too late—after the particular phenomenon has become routinized and devalued.
Having argued, however, that “live” events have topped the value hierarchy within the cultural economy, it also appears that mediated forms have become so pervasive that even “live” performances now seem to mimic them (Auslander 1999). Indeed, the very distinction between the historically dominant term of “liveness,” and the subordinate term of the “mediatized,” may itself be untenable. In his work Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999), Philip Auslander notes, for example, that the “live” rock concert—whether seen in person or on television—must now approximate the audio recordings or music videos to which fans have become accustomed (160).
The result, for Auslander, is the devaluation of live performance in contemporary culture. Not only do “live” performances now imitate mediatized performances, but even incorporate mediatization into the live event itself—as when an instant replay screen is used at a sporting event (7). Because of the “devaluation of live presence in mediatized culture” (37), Auslander argues against those theorists who suggest that live performance is an arena outside of the contemporary “economy of repetition,” or that live performance offers a privileged site for political resistance to mass reproduction (see Phelan 1996).
However, the cultural belief that live performance provides an “authenticity” which is lacking in mediatized reproductions—which Auslander sees as ideological (42)—still persists within contemporary Western culture. Despite his prediction for the continued devaluation of the live (see 59; 85; 162), he points out that the ideology of the presence of the live has persisted because live events have retained their “symbolic capital” (57); the status derived from one’s attendance or presence at the live performance. He notes that “live performances are still worth more symbolic capital within our culture than mediatized performances, even as live performance becomes more and more like mediatized performance” (59). In addition, Auslander argues that live performance still fulfills an important function in “authenticating” the mediatized reproductions—particularly in the case of those rock concerts which mimic the band’s music videos (79; 160).
Auslander’s central point is that the simple dichotomy between live and mediatized performances is no longer tenable, and that such an ideology is “itself a product of the age of mechanical reproduction” (83). In the Derridean terms of the “logic of the supplement”—and in accord with Auslander’s historical account—we might say that the “purity” of the live performance is reasserted when threatened by its mechanized and mediatized supplement—all the while failing to acknowledge its dependency on the supplement. Just as Derrida showed that speech could not be considered as prior to writing, but instead depended upon it (Derrida 1981; 1988; 1997), Auslander argues “in favor of a view that emphasizes the mutual dependence of the live and the mediatized and that challenges the traditional assumption that the live precedes the mediatized” (11).
Thus, considering Auslander’s argument, we can see that historically in the U.S. economy the “live” was, and perhaps to some extent still is, highest in the hierarchy of value. In this situation, even while the live in fact depends upon the supplement of the mediatized, and while the “live” and the “mediatized” are in fact mutually interdependent terms (Auslander, 53), the ideology of the presence of value in the live performance persists. Auslander himself wonders whether the “live” will remain the privileged term, suggesting that perhaps a cultural tipping point has recently been reached. Clearly, however, “live” performances still remain an important marketing tool within the industry as “semiotic markers of authenticity” (70), and thus as signifiers of the presence of value.
Thus, even as the contemporary cultural economy is based on the distribution of cultural commodities across contexts—based on the model of writing—the ideology of “live” speech or presence persists. As Auslander recognizes, the “live” performance still retains a certain symbolic capital as a more “authentic” citational experience. This ideology also persists despite that fact that, considering here the work of Richard Schechner (1985) on “restored behavior,” live performances are typically the result of careful polishing over several previous “rehearsals” (52)—acts of performative recitation.
The distributional network in the U.S. economy has thus developed in such a way so as to structure any citational resource into a hierarchical and rankable structure—whether temporally or spatially. Within such a hierarchical structure, it seems that there will always be a number-one song, a best-selling book, a most-popular television show, or a top-ranked travel destination indicating the “presence” of value. The distributional networks which generate citational resources have become institutionalized to such an extent that cultural commodities are predesigned (or entextualized) to fit these already-sedimented social forms. Jody Berland has noted, citing Kealy, that a three-minute pop song produced in the 1970s had to fit a format designed for car radios (Berland 1992, 39). In other words, the syntactical forms in which citational practice occurs in late capitalism have already been thoroughly shaped by market considerations. These linguistic, material forms both limit, and enable, the communicative utterances and the social identities of consumers interacting within such a cultural economy.
As discussed above, Derrida (1997; 1981) has argued that in Western philosophy, speech has been regarded as an original, authentic mode of communication, while writing has been regarded as a mere “supplement.” For Derrida, this “‘logic of supplementarity’” relegates the lesser term in a dichotomy to an auxiliary position (Norris 1987, 34). The supplement, like writing, is regarded as inferior, extra, and indeed a threat to the primary term. One term is thus established in a structure of dominance as a “primary presence,” through the abjection of the second. Derrida’s project of deconstruction was to show, however, that the subordinate, second term in a hierarchy was in fact necessary for the construction and maintenance of the identity of the dominant term all along. The supplement is shown to be crucial in the very constitution of the “original,” and not simply an after-the-fact “add-on.” Yet Derrida does not invert the hierarchy, but rather shows the mutual interdependence of the differential terms (Gasché 1986, 210).
Advertising, like retrospective accounts of events, is usually considered as supplemental to the more valuable entertainment commodity. For those who cannot afford advertising-free “sights”—for example, by purchasing a premium television channel or a recording technology designed to skip ads—advertising language must be endured as a distraction from the “language-commodity” itself. In the case of the Internet, “popup” ads, like television or radio commercials, are seen to contaminate the purity of the entertainment site/cite. The citational practices involving the experience of linguistic commodities are thus perceived to be devalued by advertising.
In The Codes of Advertising (1987), however, Sut Jhally has shown how advertising cannot be regarded as merely supplemental to a commodity’s value (see also Haug 1986; Culler 1981). His work shows that in the case of television, advertising and programming cannot be neatly separated, and sometimes the supplemental advertising even becomes the commodity or program. This ambiguity between advertising and commodity continues today; for example, some Internet websites are constructed as mostly containing links to other websites. In other words, the website “commodity” itself is comprised of links which function as advertisements for other “cites” by the traveling subject. In fact, most websites, as part of their own content, contain links to other sites/sights—the link functioning to graft the two web contexts together.
While considered only a “supplement,” advertising is in fact integral to the meaning and value of the commodity, as well as to the interpellation of the subject who experiences this value—and in some cases, the advertising becomes a commodity itself. In short, the strict distinction between ad and commodity becomes untenable, especially when considering that commodities can also be advertisements for, or signs of, themselves (see Culler 1981, 127; 137; see also MacCannell 1976, 22). It is not altogether clear whether subjects cite the advertising, the commodity, or both in their utterances.
While in the U.S. cultural economy value is said to be present in commodities, the advertising which precedes the cultural commodity also affects its meaning and value. As mentioned earlier, Haug (1986) has argued that advertising itself increases the price of commodities, as aesthetic language is linked to the commodity. Haug shows that contemporary commodities are marketed less in terms of their practical “use value,” and more in terms of an aesthetic or mythology created by the music or visual images used in the advertising. A more abstract type of value is promised, though never delivered—for example, that the consumption of the commodity will bring happiness or success.
Haug argues that this aesthetic style of advertising has come to constitute an increasingly greater share of the exchange value of objects in late capitalism; for example, more fashionable, heavily advertised clothing will bring a higher price even if it does not cost more to produce than other brands. He points out that this “aesthetic value” of the commodity becomes almost completely divorced from the technical properties of the object. It is this aesthetic dimension which becomes linked to interpellated social identity. For Haug, then, subjects increasingly “experience” the value of the commodity as mediated through advertising. The language of advertising “infuses value” as it is associated with particular commodities. The commodity comes to signify particular meanings and values, as its advertising creates links between the commodity and particular interpretive contexts. The social identity of the subject which is interpellated from the citation of commodities is also, in this sense, constructed via advertising (see Appadurai 1986b, 56).
Advertising “pre-interpellates” a (Cartesian) subject readied for a particular type of experience. Knowledge of commodities gleaned from advertising markers—like advance knowledge of tourist sites (see Frow 1997, 66–67)—thus shapes the experience of the commodity itself. In this sense, advertising serves as a “marker” for the value of a commodity—in a way similar to those tourist markers which indicate a tourism commodity (see MacCannell 1976, 110; Culler 1981, 132). For example, Jonathan Culler points out that the marker for a Civil War site guarantees the authenticity of that site—as distinguished from any other plot of land. We might say that this marker serves as something of a brand regarding the officially designated site—supposedly guaranteeing or advertising the presence of value in the commodity. We also see that the marker or advertisement is a kind of “entextualized promise”: that the commodity-site (cite) will deliver a valuable experience to the subject.
Culler argues that because “authenticity” is marketed in tourism, this authenticity of a site must be “marked” (133). In this sense, we might think of cultural commodities as sites for valued experiences, and advertising as markers for the authenticity of those commodities. Inasmuch as the marker can be purchased, as in the case of a brochure which advertises value elsewhere, what is actually purchased is a promise of value. In fact, the markers which guarantee the authenticity of the commodity sometimes become the actual destination of tourists—as when the Civil War marker is visited (139; see also MacCannell (1976, 113-15). Again, we find that both the marker and site—the advertisement and the commodity—together contribute to the “experience” of tourists, and cannot be neatly separated from each other.
As the citational practices of self involve the markers or representations of commodities—such as a movie or sports poster in a teenager’s room—the markers themselves can interpellate the experiencing subject. We might even say that a “quote” from another context—like a sports poster with a player’s image—simultaneously serves as an advertisement for that (value) context, as well as a commodity to be cited in identity-construction. Or, to use a different example, a subject engaged in the citational practice of wearing an Eiffel Tower t-shirt simultaneously advertises Parisian tourism (and the t-shirt manufacturer), as well as cites the signifying t-shirt commodity. In short, it is not clear at all where advertising ends and commodities begin.
Generalizing from the travel industry, we can see that events in the culture which are marked as valuable (or “mark-etable”) are experienced and valued as such. Just as a plot of land must be marked as historical, a television “site” must be marketed as a more valuable experience for viewers than sights from everyday life. The excitement generated over events and images which are assumed to be timely, fashionable, and present can, in this sense, be seen as a fetishism of the very experience of mark-etability. Today’s cultural commodities can hardly be experienced apart from the advertising which promises the presence of their value. The experience of the marker becomes the experience of the promise of value; that is, the marker anticipates value. In fact, many consumers have become as adept as producers and editors at recognizing what will become marketable, even in its nascent stages—whether the talent of emerging young basketball players, or the look of emerging fashion models. In this way, the future of value is folded into the temporality of presence.
The promise of value in advertising helps the subject organize future citational practices around an existing identity or construct an identity to which one aspires. In configuring the materiality of their social environment, consumers choose between what books to buy, which television shows to watch, and which websites to frequent. Advertising assists in the organization of one’s purchases, as subjects anticipate the value of particular resources and the construction of a particular identity. The advertising of cultural commodities thus enables subjects to rank and assemble particular role-embracing and role-distancing resources, which will play against each other at the site of a particular identity.
The semiotic dichotomy of “authentic/inauthentic” regarding tourist sites (see Culler 1981) can also be applied to the temporality of the U.S. cultural economy. As mentioned above, the fashionably “present” event is taken to be more authentic than its later reproductions, regarded as lesser supplements. The citational positioning of a subject at a gala event is normatively considered to be a more fashionable experience than watching its later, less authentic rebroadcast on television. This “fashionable time”—closest to authenticity—is assumed to be the temporal point where the anticipation generated by advertising crosses over to the experience of the presence of value. Those who participate at a temporal or spatial distance must rely on the fidelity of the streaming or reproducing equipment to get as close as possible to the original or authentic live event—a kind of second-hand citational practice.
Just as in the case of travel, the dichotomy of authentic/inauthentic is difficult to maintain in regard to any commodified experiences and events. This also underscores Guillory’s (1993) argument regarding the hegemony of exchange value relative to other value discourses. The attempt to find and mark subcultural artifacts of authentic ethnic or religious value—outside of the “taint of mark-etability”—always already becomes trapped in Culler’s “dilemma of authenticity” (1981, 137).
Regarding the “promise of value” in advertising, we might here consider Thomas Keenan’s (1993) reading of Marx’s comments in Capital on “‘the language of commodities’” (Marx, in Keenan 1993, 176). While Marx insists that commodities in exchange have no “materiality”—as they do in actual use—Marx argues in an example involving coats and linens that “One thing uses the other as the medium of its expression as value” (Keenan 1993, 175). For Keenan, this means that their exchange is “unavoidably a matter of signification” (175), in that one commodity “represents” the exchange value of another. Keenan thus argues that Marx is forced to make a “linguistic turn” (174).
The “materiality” of a coat in exchange is thus not in its use in the winter; rather, its materiality in exchange is that of language; in Keenan’s words, “material in the sense that language is material, not phenomenal or sensible” (177). While others, as in this book, might argue even more forcefully regarding the “materiality” of language, the point in this reading is that one commodity can be considered as the marker or advertisement for another commodity. By extension, every commodity in a differential valuation system can be taken as an advertisement for every other commodity—“promising” the delivery of value when that other commodity is cited by an experiencing subject. We can thus see that when language itself becomes a cultural commodity, it simultaneously becomes an advertisement for other language-based commodities.
For example, when a commodity like a popular soft drink is advertised at, or perhaps “sponsors,” a professional golf tournament, not only does the golf tournament attest to the value of the beverage, but in turn the golf tournament “gains value” by the mere presence of advertising—in that the tournament would be considered an “important-enough event” that major advertisers would be present. In this sense, the presence of advertising markers, even for a different commodity, are taken to confer value upon that event or experience. Thus, experiences are said to be valuable because of the “presence” of advertising itself. Commodities sponsor or advertise each other—each becoming the supplemental marker needed to construct the identity and value of the other.
We have seen that cultural commodities, in their material form, graft contexts in such a way that the referential context of the experiencing subject is perceived to be valorized with the represented context of the other—as in the case of the purchase of an Eiffel tower travel souvenir. When displayed in the home of a U.S. subject following a visit to France, the souvenir plays against the differing materialities of social objects in the home, which are taken to represent other values. In this way, the home context is valorized. The Cartesian subject experiences the graft of materialities, and interpellates a social identity which both combines and re-differentiates the valuing contexts.
However, we can see that the Eiffel tower souvenir statue, in addition to being a commodity which functions as a more or less authentic representation of French cultural values, can also function as an advertisement or marker for another cultural commodity—such as a trip to France. In its “commodity function,” the souvenir supposedly makes values present; however, in its advertising function, it promises value elsewhere. Both “functions” operate through the material grafting together of contexts; however, in a Derridean sense, what never quite arrives is the presence of the promised French cultural values.
This process of the “grafting” of contexts in advertising, in order to promise value, has been explored by Judith Williamson (2005), Goldman (1992), and Goldman and Papson (1996). For example, in her book Decoding Advertisements, Judith Williamson shows that the promised value of advertised perfume is enhanced when a famous movie actress is used in the advertisement. The meaning which the actress’s face connotes in the referential system of film is, in the advertisement, brought into the “perfume system.” Given that the actress connotes “glamour” in the social world of film (the “referent system”), the perfume acquires the connotation of “glamour” within the differential meaning system of perfumes. As the perfume and actress are materially linked in the advertising image, the connotation of “glamour” is transferred from one semiotic system to the other (2005, 25). The perfume’s position within its differential system is enhanced through this valorization of its meaning—its “enhanced” promise of value to the consumer. Williamson thus speaks of the “translation” of meaning from one referential system to another, which continually occurs in advertising. As Williamson notes, the value is merely promised in advertising, but is never present. As she puts it “There is no real present in advertising . . . in the actual present you are looking at the ad, anticipating but not enjoying” (154–5; see also Haug 1986).
Robert Goldman also emphasizes that ads recontextualize and graft meanings in order to promise value. In Reading Ads Socially (1992), he argues that “Advertisements photographically isolate meaningful moments, remove them from their lived context and place them in the ad framework where their meaning is recontextualized and thus changed” (5). Like Williamson, Goldman argues that this recontextualization of meaning enables the transfer of meaning from one semiotic system to another, in order to increase exchange value (5). Goldman stresses the material configuration of the words and images in advertisements which enable this transfer of meaning; advertisements thus “provide an arena in which to transfer and rearrange meanings” (38). Considering this literature on advertising, we can see that the grafting of contexts occurs not only when a commodity is actually purchased and moved into the referential context of the subject, but also in the advertisements which promise value. In other words, the “promise of value” is itself constructed through syntactically formed grafts of meaningful materiality.
In a Derridean sense, advertisements which promise the coming presence of value are performative—in that the promise, as speech act, is itself performative. Further, in his reading of Paul de Man, Derrida states that the very “act of language is that of a performative promise” (Derrida 1989, 95; italics in the original). As discussed above, a performative speech act purports to produce, rather than simply describe, social realities. In this sense, language purports to produce meaning; that is, language promises meaning. Language also promises value, inasmuch as—in a Bakhtinian sense—linguistic utterances necessarily enact (meaningful) values.
However, because of the inherent iterability of language, any intended meaning “behind” the issuance of a performative—such as an intended keeping of a promise—cannot be stable or secure on its way to eventual fulfillment (see Loxley 2008, 99–100; 109; Derrida 1988; Derrida 1989, 94–95). Meaning, and value, cannot be delivered and present-ed; rather, meaning and value—which are continually deferred—can only be performatively promised. In the specific example of a “promise,” we find a speech act which initiates the expectation of its eventual fulfillment, but this fulfillment cannot be guaranteed in advance—given its projection into an unknown future. The promise that a particular action will be forthcoming, or that advertised value will in fact be delivered, can never actually be fulfilled.
Thus advertising, as a performative promise of value, cannot actually guarantee that the commodity will deliver what is promised. As Williamson shows in an example regarding chocolates, advertising goes beyond a representational claim to make a performative one. Using her example, it is not just that the advertised chocolate “represents” happiness, but rather that chocolate can “create happiness” (2005, 36)—in a performative sense. In other words, advertisements performatively promise that commodities will performatively deliver (value)—a promise whose fulfillment, however, cannot be guaranteed. In fact, as Derrida shows, the promise cannot be fulfilled. Subject to the rule of iterability, the meaning or value of the cultural commodity—which has been promised—will never quite be present.
In a Derridean sense, the “performativity of value” is an aporia of capitalism. Like meaning itself, “value” is re-citable and repeatable across situations. It enables shared interaction relative to a shared material world, with real social consequences as the economy is re-performed. On the other hand, meaning and value are promised, but never quite present; they are necessarily altered in repeated instantiations. The promised experience of value is never quite present. New commodities are required precisely because former commodities cannot fulfill or deliver what was promised in their advertising (see Haug 1986). Summarizing the work of Laikwan Pang on brand performativity, Constantine Nakassis (2012) also notes that with brands the “ultimate signified”—that is, the brand’s promised aesthetic or brand “type” (627)—is “never quite reached,” because the anticipation of later iterations or “tokens” (627) of the brand serve to continually re-generate consumer desire, and thereby continually defer satisfaction (634–35).
The contemporary cultural economy in the United States continually re-enacts a promise of value. If in addition to the promise of advertising, it is true that every commodity is also an advertisement for itself—as well as for every other commodity—we see that what is circulating in the cultural economy is a promise of value. In a sense, we might say that exchange value “measures” the experiential worth of a performative promise of value, rather than what it is normatively taken to measure—the presence of value. In this sense, the exchange value of the cultural commodity—which is the supposed measure of the worth of the promised experience as delivered—is itself never quite secure.
The commodified promise of any subcultural value is potentially assigned an exchange value in the contemporary cultural economy—which is taken to indicate the experiential worth of that promise. Derrida’s notion that language itself enacts a performative promise has become increasingly apparent in today’s cultural economy. Language not only promises meaning, but it also promises “value.” However, at the same time that the meaningful experience of the commodity’s “promise” has become marketable with real economic consequences, it is simultaneously undermined by its own performative structure.
The very nature of commodification, involving the grafting of advertising and commodity, thus involves a promise to valorize the “present.” The value of mundane experience is thus seen as intensifiable when “double-voiced” with commodities. However, the valorization of some events and moments, as intense and valuable, necessarily leads to the de-valorization of other events and moments. The attempted purchase of that which enhances the everyday “context” simultaneously leads to the devaluation of everyday life as merely mundane. Thus, a kind of vicious cycle seems to fuel the relentless and continual drive in U.S. culture toward the next fashionable experience of “value.”
Using Goffman’s term, the “action of consumption” (1967, 197) consists in the consumer’s belief that the citation of cultural commodities will improve the experiences in their life, and valorize the referential context of the self. Consumers of commodities thus continually seek to re-subordinate or re-abject the mundane experiences of everyday life, in favor of more intense and valuable experiences. Given that the newest, most fashionably present commodities are perceived to be the mechanism by which the subject’s experiential situation can be improved, we might say that the contemporary consumer is addicted to the promise of valorized experience—which, however, is itself never quite delivered. At the same time, the re-citation of this promise materially re-enacts the very cultural economy which manufactures and distributes such promises.
The chapter began by showing that the form of reported speech involves a political stance toward the words of others. Subjects can agree with, or challenge, the words and values of others as they cite them into their own utterances. In addition, as the work of de Certeau and Inoue suggests, the appropriation of the words, images, and objects of the subordinated—into the utterances of the powerful—means that the subordinated lose control over the meanings and the destinations of those forms. An important dimension of politics thus concerns who speaks for whom, and how the words of others are represented in later interactions. Individuals and groups find that they can no longer control the trajectory of their own words and values as the powerful appropriate these words for their own purposes.
Not only do powerful individuals and institutions appropriate the words of others for political gain, but also to generate market value. Inasmuch as language itself has increasingly become a commodity in today’s cultural economy, the words, images, and cultural objects of some can be marketed for the economic gain of others. Access to the means of designing and distributing cultural commodities—of institutionally “reporting” speech—is an important factor in the contemporary political economy. Profit is generated as the language which represents the values of one subculture is marketed in a different subcultural context.
A particular type of subjectivity underlies this movement of cultural commodities across contexts in late capitalism—that of a Cartesian subject whose values are considered to pre-exist the commodities which represent them. If subcultural groups value differently, then it seems natural for them to exchange commodities which match those values. This logic of representationalism underlies not only the metaphysical assumptions regarding the “presence” of the Cartesian subject, but also the “presence of value” in capitalism. Within this ideology, consumers are able to re-enact their subcultural values, and display their social identities, via the purchase of commodities. Markets allow the movement of cultural commodities across contexts, to meet the identity construction needs of differing valuing communities. The exchange value of cultural commodities is measured in their ability to fulfill this representational function.
Language, in the broadest sense, becomes a cultural commodity as television shows, films, websites, or text messages are marketed and moved across subcultural contexts. These cultural forms are typically readied by commodity producers in order to generate exchange value, promising to provide an experience of worth to a Cartesian subject. Using Goffman’s term, the exchange value frame is “keyed” from the syntactical arrangement of the materiality of cultural commodities, readied by producers precisely for such keying. For Goffman, “frames” organize experience in particular ways. Today, the exchange value frame has become the hegemonic ordering mechanism, inasmuch as meaningful material forms are organized as to their ability to deliver valued experiences. When language becomes a commodity, it is no longer merely assessed relative to its functioning in an everyday communicative context, but rather is assessed according to its marketability.
Just as meaningful “texts” are subject to Derrida’s rule of iterability, so are the “contexts” in reference to which these texts are interpreted. The exchange value frame, as the interpretive context for the economic worth of cultural forms, must itself be repeatable across situations—that is, re-citable. This contextual frame of exchange value is re-cited as the commodified words, images, and social objects of others become citational resources for consumers. In this sense, the citational practices of consumers, as they construct identities in everyday life, are performative of exchange value.
For those who embrace normative identities and values, brands and celebrity endorsements are seen as a guarantee of the presence of exchange value. Just as Derrida’s (1988) work on the signature revealed its entanglement with the metaphysics of presence, we find today that the presence of the celebrity endorsement of a material form increases its exchange value. This contemporary phenomenon bears some resemblance to the rituals studied by Émile Durkheim (1965) in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. In that book, Durkheim shows that the totemic mark used in rituals conferred sacredness to material forms; today, brand names and celebrity signatures are seen as conveying a “quasi-sacred” quality to citational resources. It is through citational practices that subjects today conflate sacredness with exchange value.
On the other hand, those who use cultural forms to distance themselves from normative identities and values find that the citational resources used in resistant practices themselves have an exchange value, and thus their citation re-enacts the exchange value frame. Material forms which interpellate non-normative values and identities simultaneously re-cite the exchange value frame, even as they play against it. Their potentially oppositional force is muted when the materiality representing the oppositional subculture is “reported upon” in marketable forms. In this sense, the commodification of culture involves the proliferation of all kinds of social forms which promise to “play against” the normative social structure, even as they mostly reproduce it. Oppositional resources, including illicit drugs, are commodities sold with a promise of valorized experience for Cartesian-based subjects—that is, sold with the same promise as normative citational resources.
This temporality of presence becomes, in Bakhtin’s terms, the dominant “chronotope” in contemporary culture. Past and future are folded into an exchange value frame promising the presence of value. We can find this temporality of value, for example, in media stories which recount a valued event. These “after-the-fact” reports are considered as lesser supplements to the event itself. However, the anticipation of such retrospective accounts now enters into the experience of the event itself, as consumers attending events anticipate its later news coverage. In other words, the perceived worth of the event, in the present, is already influenced by the way it is likely to be later re-cited.
The ideology of this temporality of value persists in the continued valorization of the “live” event, even as events themselves have become increasingly mediatized. Philip Auslander (1999) argues that in fact, live events today often mimic their mediated forms, as in the case of a band’s live performance reproducing the sounds and images previously recorded on albums or videos. Auslander’s work deconstructs the opposition of “live” versus “mediated,” as he shows how the very notion of the “live” already depends on the supplemental term of the mediated. Despite his critique, the ideology of the “live” persists in late capitalism.
Regarding future events, advertising is also typically considered as “supplemental” to the actual commodity which follows. If advertising is normatively perceived as promising value, commodities are normatively perceived as delivering it. However, commodities and their advertising cannot be strictly separated. Sometimes the advertisement itself becomes the commodity, as in the example from tourism where travelers visit the “markers” of sites (Culler 1981). In the case of sponsorship, commodities can become advertisements for each other, as when a soft drink is affiliated with a movie or sporting event. In addition, the advertisement prepares consumers for the experience of commodities, and thus enters into the “event” of commodity delivery itself. If advertising is performative—in that it helps to bring about the exchange value it purports to merely describe—we might say that the performative “promise of value” found in language-based advertising has become an integral part of the measured “presence” of the exchange value of language-based commodities.
The chapter thus shows how the citational practices of consumers re-cite the system of exchange value. As consumers re-cite commodified forms—advertised with the promise to valorize experience—they re-generate demand for such forms in the marketplace, which increases their market value. This “performativity of exchange value” not only reproduces the cultural economy itself, but also reproduces the dominant temporality of “presence” operating in the economy. However, while advertising promises the presence of exchange value, it can never quite be delivered—given the iterability of the meaning of “value” itself. Thus, what actually is re-cited in the cultural economy is the continual promise of exchange value—as syntactically configured in commodity forms.
This chapter considers how assumptions from Western metaphysics regarding the “presence of exchange value” not only persist in today’s cultural economy, but are also projected into the future. Producers and investors attempt to both anticipate and shape future citational practices, as they research and market new cultural commodities and new citational technologies. Decisions on which cultural commodities to market, and in what way brands will be developed, rely on economic formulas which speculate on the future exchange value of language.
In order to shape the future citational practices of consumers, firms appropriate the subcultural values of consumers into the marketable, material utterances of the institution. As consumers re-cite these citational resources in identity construction practices, the exchange value system is itself re-cited. The co-production of value by consumers and firms thus becomes “co-performative” of the exchange value system. Inasmuch as measures guide this process, the measure itself becomes performative of the cultural economy (see Muniesa 2011; Adkins and Lury 2011; Moor and Lury 2011). Just as Michel Callon (2007) argued that the formulas devised by economists to describe economic functioning have themselves become performative of market conditions, we now find that the accounting and marketing formulas used by firms to calculate the future exchange value of language have also become performative of the cultural economy.
This chapter also considers the empirical research from a number of fields regarding the importance of consumption practices for social identity, and how consumers use commodities and brands to align themselves with subcultural groups. Firms incorporate subcultural values into the design of their brands, and consumers re-cite these brands in the process of identity construction (see Lury 2004; Arvidsson 2006; Nakassis 2012). As this research indicates, brands thus become performative of exchange value. Similarly, recent work in the sociology of tourism literature indicates that tourists themselves participate in the construction of the tourist experience. In this way, the citational practices of tourists also become performative of exchange value.
To look more closely at the relationship between Western philosophical assumptions regarding “presence,” and the workings of a cultural economy based on the “presence of exchange value,” we might consider both Heidegger's critique of Cartesian subjectivity, as well as Hegel's notion of universality. In his work, Samuel Weber (1996) analyzes how Heidegger linked Cartesian assumptions regarding subjectivity to modern technology, and how Walter Benjamin linked the universalizing tendencies of Hegelian metaphysics to capitalism (2008). It is worthwhile to consider these critiques, inasmuch as many assumptions from the Western metaphysical tradition have persisted into contemporary U.S. culture, and are re-cited in contemporary economic practices.
As Weber discusses, Martin Heidegger (1977) argued that one consequence of the emergence of Cartesian subjectivity in the West has been the attempt to control nature through technology (79). The Western subject seeks to dominate and control both the natural and social worlds, attempting to achieve Cartesian “self-security” through technology. Weber links television to Cartesian subjectivity, in that it extends the subject’s ability to “gaze” at the world (123). In Heideggerian terms, subjects attempt to fix the world as an objectified “picture,” which in turn would secure the Cartesian subject. Heidegger argues, however, that because the Cartesian subject can never achieve complete control over the social and natural worlds, the new technologies—which promise to deliver such control—necessarily fail, and thus continually re-generate anxiety (73–74). Ironically, as Weber argues, the modern subject returns again to technology to achieve control and alleviate these anxieties (69–70).
In the contemporary cultural economy, we find an almost addictive, obsessive-like quality in the use patterns of television or computer use. In a Derridean sense, the more that citational technologies—like television or the Internet—are used to try to re-establish the secure “presence” of the subject, the more their citational nature dislocates that identity. Thus, the contemporary subject is caught in a vicious circle, where the repetitive, technology-driven practices which promise to secure one’s identity are the very re-citational practices which unsettle it.
We need only look to the Internet to find the types of anxiety which proliferate in a technological environment capable of extending the abilities of humans many times over. There are hackers or viruses threatening to destroy the “archives of value” which technology has built. There are continuing threats to the privacy of users, given contemporary techniques of surveillance. The “secure” boundaries of the family are now threatened as children are exposed to online dangers in new ways. For all of these reasons and more, new security technologies are continually required—to assert control over the online environment, to secure the future, and to protect the online traveler from the dangers posed by the citational technology itself. An important aspect of the contemporary political economy thus concerns the high costs of providing technology-based security, or at least the illusions of such security, to online consumers.
In his reading of Walter Benjamin's texts on capitalism, Weber (2008) also shows the affinities of capitalism with Hegelian metaphysics. Hegel's model continually attempts to reincorporate the negation of present levels of human consciousness into a higher-order system; history becomes an unfolding of moments on the journey to the perfection of consciousness. In other words, for Hegel, the “future” is the culmination of a universal system which continually re-appropriates alterity (37).
Weber finds a similar logic in capitalism, in that its universalizing tendencies continually reincorporate or re-appropriate opposition into itself. Weber describes this as “a logic and economy of appropriation in which the realization of ‘value’ remains the dominant goal” (37). In this sense, exchange value becomes the “universal idea” toward which the future is always oriented. In the contemporary U.S. cultural economy, just as in the Hegelian system, the “play” of language is always re-appropriated into this universal idea. Language which resists, or plays against, the exchange value system comes to be re-incorporated into its frame. In a commentary on Walter Benjamin's “Capitalism as Religion,” Weber notes that in capitalism, the future becomes the (eternal) re-occurrence of the “presence” of value (see 274–75). It is not really a “future,” but rather the re-citation of the “present.”
We thus find that the Cartesian assumptions of Western metaphysics continue in the contemporary cultural economy. New citational technologies—from television to the latest mobile devices—not only re-cite the exchange value system, but also re-enact the Cartesian subject who “experiences” the value of autonomous objects. However, this same re-citation process, which supports the identities of these subjects and objects across contexts, simultaneously unsettles their identities—in accordance with the rule of iterability. Contemporary citational technologies, involving the commodification and marketing of language itself, continue to be caught up in the Cartesian and exchange value frames.
As John Kenneth Galbraith (1978) argued in regard to manufacturing, an important aspect of capitalism is planning for the future behavior of consumers. This remains true, even as the U.S. economy has transitioned toward the marketing of services and cultural commodities. In this effort, producers must anticipate new markets, and, as much as possible, control the future context in which value is constructed. Capitalists thus attempt to shape the exchange value of the future experiences of consumers, and anticipate the marketability of tomorrow’s commodities. In other words, producers try to anticipate future citational practices, and predict trends regarding the interpellation of future social identities.
What is needed for investments in the cultural economy is therefore an anticipation of the marketability of language; that is, an anticipation of the ways in which language will be syntactically grafted in future citational practices, in order to produce exchange value. This involves not only an anticipation of the value of the content, but also the syntactical form of future entextualizations. Particular syntactical forms, and their distributional networks, are set up for maximum profitability; for example, the nightly news is structured to allow for “sound bites” only. Material configurations for the delivery of citational resources are thus always already taking shape for investors.
Today's investors must consider consumer demand for particular forms of commodified language, which will be used in the citational practices of subjects in everyday life. Producers and investors attempt to control the markets of the future by not only shaping the types of commodities produced, and controlling the distribution forms by which citational resources are delivered, but also by encouraging the construction of certain types of social identities. Corporations conduct market research in order to build “knowledge of the consumer” into the product, attempting to influence future citational practices.
Copyright and trademark laws attempt to secure value through the authorized citation of objects, images, and experiences. These laws seek to control the recitation of cultural commodities in the marketplace; in this sense, owners and investors seek to copyright “experiences.” In the contemporary cultural economy, owners attempt to protect the dissemination of language—the travels of value and meaning—across contexts. Important legal questions today thus concern the control of the movement of language—such as the right to broadcast events, or the right to graft the words and images of celebrities into new contexts. Today, even “virtual properties” are bought and sold in the marketplace, and thus are protected as areas of investment. As new cultural forms emerge, investors busily anticipate the marketability of language in those formats; in other words, how to link the distribution of language to exchange value, and how to generate profit by calculating the future citation of cultural commodities.
Martin Jay, tracing the notion of “experience” in historical commentaries on U.S. culture, suggested that it may be “an exaggeration to claim that America has always had a culture fundamentally based on the valorization of experience” (2005, 268; italics added). It now seems, however, that the cultural economy is increasingly moving in precisely that direction—as cultural commodities are re-cited in order to intensify the “experience” of the words and images of others. If exchange value will be re-generated through the future experience of citational utterances, then the anticipation of—and the influencing of—those cultural trends will be highly profitable. Investing has become an exercise in the anticipation of the potential exchange value of language in future contexts, and marketing has become an attempt to deliver cultural commodities into those contexts.
In his essay, What Does It Mean to Say That Economics Is Performative?, Michel Callon (2007) asks whether the economic formulas developed by economists simply describe existing economic conditions, or, in a performative sense, influence those conditions—given their actual use in investment decisions. For Callon, material worlds emerge from economic formulas; the formulas then come to actually describe this economic “reality” (320). Callon sees the field of economics as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, where “As discourse it can change into a system of beliefs that infiltrate agents' minds and colonize them . . . Everyone ends up aligning himself or herself to the model and everyone's expectations are fulfilled by everyone else's behaviors” (323).
In Mead's sense, these formulas become emergent significant symbols, in reference to which social actors align their economic behaviors. After becoming an environment of shared meaning, economic actors are able to anticipate the behaviors of others; or, as Callon puts it, the formulas become a “coordination tool that allows mutual expectations” (322). For Mead, meaning is precisely located in behavioral expectations, which can be anticipated.
Having said this, however, Callon is careful to point out that his formulation of economic performativity is not reducible to a mere self-fulfilling prophecy which involves only beliefs (322). Rather, the interactions conducted on the basis of the shared assumptions provided by the formula have real material consequences—which, in Butler's sense, both enable and constrain future interactions. For example, Callon discusses how an economic formula concerning the electricity market, after reaching acceptance within the field, might eventually lead to the installation of electricity meters (331)—as well as increase the profitability of a company which manufactures this material form.
While Callon is especially interested in “economic performativity” as a contribution toward the general perspective of Actor-Network Theory, the concern with “economic” performativity in this book has to do with the way that exchange value is continually regenerated through the re-citation of material forms, in the identity construction process. From this point of view, the cultural economy is “re-performed” as shared consumer demand for normative citational resources results in their continued production. As shared behavioral expectations re-emerge in the culture regarding normative social identities, the demand for particular citational resources is re-generated.
Subcultural “formulas” shape contemporary identity construction processes, and the effective presentation of self. Corporations also enact their strategic formulas in order to produce and market citational resources relative to consumer demand. All of these “formulas”—used by economists, by marketers, and by consumers—are performative of the economy. Just as, in Callon’s sense, formulas regarding economic investments have particular material consequences—which both enable, and constrain, the behavior of actors—so do the marketing formulas according to which institutions produce and distribute citational resources, and the subcultural formulas which guide consumer identity construction.
In another work, Callon (1998a) has argued that a capitalist economy based on economic contracts favors a particular type of agency—that of “calculative agents” (4). For exchange to occur efficiently, calculative agents must agree on what factors should enter into the economic exchange, and what factors are considered to be irrelevant. In economic theory, Callon notes, the notion of “externality” refers to “out-of-frame” factors which social actors precisely “do not take into account in their calculations when entering into a market transaction” (16). For example, in the case of buying and selling a car, the presumed ownership of a title is clearly within the frame of calculation, whereas individual responsibility for global warming typically falls outside of the contractual frame. Thus, when a social actor decides to list a car for sale, they can usually expect that potential car buyers will discuss the transfer of title, rather than the issue of climate change.
Callon's discussion shows how a cultural economy based on exchange value necessitates an agency based on calculation—consistent with the Cartesian and capitalist subjectivity normative to U.S. culture. This process involves shared calculations, or shared anticipations of how the other will “frame” economic contracts, and what will be perceived as relevant to them. For Callon, this process involves not only, in Mead's terms, the ability to “role-take,” but also involves a whole set of meaningful materialities in order to “perform” the economy.
In addition, marketers “re-perform” the economy as they syntactically frame the materiality of their advertisements and their branded products in particular ways. Callon argues that marketing “has contributed powerfully to the setting up and deployment of the framing devices of calculative agencies” (26). In other words, when potential car buyers are shown an advertisement, the syntactically-configured material form of the advertisement precisely does not encourage concern for global warming. Callon cites the work of Nicholas Thomas, who has argued that an important aspect of the exchange value of commodities is their “alienation” from prior context (19). In this example, it becomes apparent that the successful selling of a car involves “decontextualizing” the car from the “context” of fossil fuel consumption, and recontextualizing the car solely in terms more desirable attributes. The marketing frame defines “relevancy” within that frame.
Earlier, it was discussed how commodities valorize the context into which they are quoted, which simultaneously valorizes the “experience” for the (Cartesian) subject who confronts that material form. As cultural commodities are cited into new contexts, only certain aspects of their material form are taken as relevant to the new context, whereas other aspects are considered to be “external” or irrelevant. The valorization of context involves only the valued features. Marketers are quick to advertise only those aspects of the commodity which they expect will valorize the consumer's experience.
Recalling Goffman's argument in his article “Fun in Games” (1961), we can see that advertisers frame the materiality of their ads in such a way as to exaggerate the anticipated “fun” of their commodities—and exclude undesirable connotations. Normative marketing techniques enact a system of behavioral expectations into which consumers are socialized. As Callon's (1998a) work shows, it is through marketing that certain values of subcultures can be associated with “certain characteristics of products” (26–27). Once this association is promised in advertising, then consumers in everyday life can meaningfully re-cite the commodity as “representative” of those subcultural values. In short, as Callon puts it, “marketing tools perform the economy” (27).
Interestingly, Callon cites Goffman's work on frames, and recognizes how an exchange value frame limits social interactions. The interactants must frame a particular interaction as an economic one if it is to be performed properly; as mentioned, they must agree on what is relevant to, and what is external to, the economic contract (1998b, 250). Whereas actors may attempt to create a “closed interactional space” (251), where they can effectively role-take the economic actions of others, Callon notes that unexpected “overflows” beyond the boundaries of the frame often occur because “agents are simultaneously involved in other worlds from which they can never be wholly detached” (253). In other words, economic actors interacting on the basis of exchange value cannot entirely divorce themselves from other social values when involved in interactions. While capitalist subjects may attempt to make contracts within a “closed interactional space” which excludes unexpected and threatening surprises, even in the economic “game” some outside reality enters in. Even the most calculative of agents in economic transactions cannot prevent an “overflow” of alternative social values.
Of course, one of the greatest external dangers to calculable economic contracts is unknown future risks. Lee and LiPuma (2002) have argued that new finance instruments, such as the Black-Scholes equations used to price derivatives in options trading, are precisely used in order to control future risk—and even make money from the volatility which risk usually imposes. Lee and LiPuma argue that in the current situation of “post-Fordist finance capital” (203), the use of currency derivatives “can reduce risk by locking in a fixed exchange rate over a specific time period” (206). The action of controlling risk, through the use of derivatives and the purchasing of options, can be seen as a type of citational utterance by investors—which positions the investing subject relative to future market conditions.
This type of investment utterance is based on a certain type of calculative anticipation—that of generating capital through a favorable positioning of the subject in regard to the future. As Lee and LiPuma put it, “options allow investors to create profitable positions that rely only on the volatility of the underlying security; for example, by using options strategies such as straddles or strangles, one can make money whether the stock goes up, down, or nowhere in price” (204). As such, it is an attempt to close off the risk of the future. In Callon's sense of economic performativity, we can see that the formulas used to price derivatives can be considered as citational utterances of economists which, when further “cited” by investors, actively shape economic conditions.
If, hypothetically, the underlying security involved in these transactions was to involve a language-based cultural commodity—as is increasingly the case in the post-industrial economy—we can see that exchange value is being anticipated, and re-created, through the taking of an economic position relative to the future materiality of language. In such calculations, the future exchange value of language is stabilized, closed, and not subject to overflow. Here, “anticipation” becomes a calculative and strategic part of the process of controlling the future, for the purpose of maximizing profit.
Inasmuch as Callon's work on performativity is correct, competing algorithms not only predict the future worth of financial assets, but also performatively shape the material environment within which identity construction will occur. Investors and product designers “bet” on particular economic equations, thereby enabling a certain type of cultural economy to unfold. When today's trading practices are accelerated by computer programs, “futures” may be quickly decided as algorithms regarding various financial scenarios compete with, and react to, each other—a kind of “futures market” for language.
Investors thus attempt to control the future positioning of material signs, and the shaping of future material environments. Today, technology is used to construct global networks for the dissemination of language into the future, as both entertainment and information commodities. For example, global satellites are able to graft tomorrow’s language-commodities into local contexts around the world. Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), in an early analysis of this phenomenon, discussed the importance of the political economy of distribution networks for the commodification of culture, noting, “The gigantic fact that the speech penetrates everywhere replaces its content . . . The symphony becomes a reward for listening to the radio” (159; 161). Today, investments are made into the mechanisms by which language will be marketed and moved into a variety of contexts, as citational resources for the construction of social identities and social relationships worldwide.
Shaping future citational environments, in an economy based on exchange value, also means the marketing of a particular temporality—that of “presence.” The chronotope of presence severely limits the possibility of a future—in that a future predefined, and marketed as merely a time and place for the recurrence of “presence,” is never really a future. In terms of spatiality, we see that places themselves are marketed as citational resources for the positioning of fashionable subjects. Thus “New York” or “Paris” become merely branded spaces where certain types of experiences are said to occur, and thus become spaces typified for, and advertised to, global tourists.
Investors thus seek to shape the meaningful material environments of the future—strategically placing images, social objects and the materiality of linguistic commodities in such a way as to maximize the presence of exchange value. The metaphysical assumptions supporting Cartesian subjectivity, favoring “presence,” are thereby materially re-enacted. Given that the utterances of today's economic institutions shape the meaningful material environments of the future, we can see that the politics of the future necessarily involves the material placement or grafting of language into future contexts. In this type of situation, access to the means of positioning language becomes an important political and economic concern.
In his work in economic sociology, Luis Araujo (2007) largely agrees with Michel Callon that in economic exchanges, a “frame” is created which screens out particular real-life concerns. Callon shows that whereas social objects have their own unique biographies as they travel from one situated context to another, “at the moment an entity, product or service is made tradeable,” there is “a stabilization of characteristics” (213)—such that the commodity can be priced and exchanged. In other words, many interesting aspects regarding the biographies of things, such as the situational contexts in which they were formerly embedded, come to be screened out of the frame as irrelevant to the economic transaction (213–14). In this sense, the citation of the exchange value of a particular entity involves the mobilization of a frame, which abstracts from the situated nature of everyday life. Inasmuch as markets provide this type of framing—which allows exchange to take place despite the many contingencies involved in the real-life biographies of both persons and objects—they can be viewed as contributing to the “performativity” of exchange value.
Araujo wants to mediate between two positions in the economic sociology literature regarding the nature of markets. While Callon, according to Araujo, correctly shows that markets—as structures or social institutions—enable the type of abstraction or “disentanglement” from the contingencies of everyday life as required by economic transactions, he is concerned that Callon's model abandons the “consumption identities” which consumers bring to those exchanges (213–14). Araujo notes that Daniel Miller is critical of Callon on this point, as Miller emphasizes that subjects are precisely motivated to participate in exchange given their lifestyles and “entanglements” in various social contexts (213–14). For Araujo, there is a “paradoxical nature of market exchange” which, on the one hand, “allows it to be framed as an instantaneous act, as Callon . . . argues.” On the other hand, market exchange is “a recurrent activity that is deeply entangled in processes of production and consumption, as Miller . . . counterposes” (223).
While this book agrees with Araujo that market exchange simultaneously abstracts from—yet remains entangled with—the lifeworld of social actors, it does so from a slightly different perspective than that developed by Araujo. It is the position of this book that exchange value has become a hegemonic measure of the presence of all other subcultural values, and in this way remains “entangled” with those subcultural values—even while grafting a universalizing exchange value frame onto the material forms taken to represent those subcultural values. As discussed earlier, an important assumption enabling trade in the capitalist marketplace is that individuals and groups come to the market with pre-existing subcultural values, which differ from those of others. It is taken as “natural,” given the unique Cartesian identities of individuals and groups, that they value differently, and are thus willing to make “unequal” exchanges (in terms of labor time) in the capitalist marketplace.
Social actors are able to make exchanges, despite the differences in their lifeworld entanglements, precisely because exchange value functions as a common measure of the presence of all other subcultural values. It is not so much that the market makes these other subcultural values entirely “irrelevant” to the interaction, but rather that exchange value allows their relevance to the particular lifeworlds of interactants to be temporarily suspended during the exchange process itself. These lifeworld concerns can be set aside precisely because of the fact that the economic measure “represents” the presence of any other subcultural value. Because of the universality of the measure, the particular subcultural value—whose presence the commodity is taken to “represent”—becomes irrelevant to the framing of the economic transaction. Thus all social actors, regardless of subcultural affiliations, can participate in the same marketplace.
In this sense, it is the measure of exchange value which enables economic transactions to occur across individuals and groups with varying subcultural affiliations. However, as discussed above, Callon's work shows that economic formulas designed to measure this exchange value do not merely describe the pre-existing worth of cultural entities, but also—influencing the decisions of investors—bring that economic value into being. The measure itself becomes performative of the exchange value it purports to objectively “report upon.” The measure itself, as a material utterance of economists or accountants, has performative effects (see also Barad 2007).
This issue of the performativity of measurement, and the contemporary valuation of financial assets, has been taken up by Fabian Muniesa. Muniesa (2011) suggests that the work of John Dewey on valuation remains important today, in order to move past two dichotomous perceptions regarding the source of the value of entities. Rather than suggesting that value is either an inherent feature of objects, or merely a matter of belief, Dewey asserted that “valuation” should be considered as a social action (24). Muniesa sees this as important in the contemporary valuation of the worth of assets in corporations.
Muniesa suggests that financial valuation has a performative dimension, in that this act itself becomes the basis of further economic decisions (27-28). In corporate finance, estimates must be made about the likelihood of future earnings when investment decisions are considered. In other words, assets of companies are not only evaluated as to their present worth, but are acquired by other companies—or financed by banks—given an anticipation of their future value. In this sense, valuation measures drive investment decisions, and thus become “performative” of the economy which unfolds as a result of those decisions.
In their review of Muniesa's article, Lisa Adkins and Celia Lury (2011) state that Muniesa “not only compels us to think of value as an activity rather than a thing, but also shows how this activity is itself a source of (economic) value” (8). In other words, the process of measuring value is a behavioral practice which itself re-cites the exchange value “frame.” As Muniesa puts it, “Valuation is about considering a reality while provoking it. It implies the virtual act of 'obtaining value', as is made clear in the very notion of capitalization” (32). Muniesa goes on to characterize the situation in the U.S. economy, following the financial crisis beginning in the late 2000's, as a “crisis in the representation of value” (33)—as valuation processes are “exposed” as “a form of performance” (33). For example, citing the research of Karen Ho, Muniesa particularly calls attention to the “performative staging of ‘shareholder value’” (33) in investment banking decisions.
In their work, Liz Moor and Celia Lury (2011) discuss the contemporary valuation of brands, and how this valuation process enters into the strategic development of the brand—a performative dimension. In addition, relevant to the thesis of this book, they show how dimensions of the lifeworld of consumers are incorporated into the brand, and become monetized as part of its worth (443). In other words, the development and the valuation of the brand involves translating the subcultural values of consumers into financial assets for the corporation. This performativity of brand valuation has become important to global corporations, as the worth of their brands provide an increasing share of their total worth.
Moor and Lury argue that most firms use an “income-based approach” to evaluate brands, which is a measure estimating “likely future earnings that can be attributed to the brand” (442). Discussing the work of Eve Chiapello, Moor and Lury point out that the use of this accounting model “can be understood as an instance of the performativity of economics” (442). The model puts into practice the assumption that “value is forward-looking—value in potentia, one might say—and that, crudely put, a brand's value can only be understood through an estimation of its own potential (in the future) rather than through comparison with other brands (in the present)” (442). As the firm chooses between products to develop under the brand name, various calculations can reveal the most profitable course of action. Citing the work of Salinas and Ambler, Moor and Lury thus point out that the accounting measure, by helping to develop the brand, guides the firm into the future (443).
These corporate calculations regarding future earnings involve the lifestyle preferences of consumers, who “co-participate” in the process of brand development. Firms use market research measures to sort out which aspects of the social worlds of consumers will be incorporated into the brand, and ultimately sold back to them. Moor and Lury note that in the process of measuring brand equity, firms are particularly interested in how “consumer relationships” contribute to market value (450–1). It is thus through their measure that subcultural values today enter into the dynamics of brand development. The measure of the value of the brand is not only performative of the brand's future expansion (451), but in turn, we can see that such a measure also becomes indirectly performative relative to social identities—as consumers later re-cite these brands in the process of identity construction.
Judith Butler's formulation of performativity has been criticized as a discursive-based “post-Marxism” which neglects the continuing importance of social class, the exploitation of labor, and the material aspects of social inequality—thus betraying Althusser's emphasis on the “material existence” (Althusser 1971, 166–67) of ideology. For example, Geoff Boucher (2008) has argued that discursive approaches to identity construction and identity politics—including that of Butler, LaClau and Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek—amount to a new “idealism,” unfortunately divorced from political economy. He argues that in the work of Ernesto Laclau, the focus on new social identity movements comes at the expense of class struggle (55). In regard to Butler, Boucher argues that she “neglects the all-important institutional context of the speech act” (157). In contrast, Boucher favors the structuralist Marxism of regulation theory as informed by Althusser, to which he appeals in order to “radicalise postmarxian discourse theories toward a postmodern Marxism” (4).
On the other hand, Boucher does approve of particular insights from what has been termed “poststructuralist Marxism.” For example, he finds value in Laclau and Mouffe's work in that it sees “social relations as inherently dialogical”—citing its affinity with the work of the Bakhtin Circle (94). Boucher also argues that while in his view the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe is “indifferent to the constraints of social grammar and institutional syntax” (98), he suggests that when more appropriately conceived within regulation theory, their work on linguistic practices can be more closely linked to political economy (236).
In other words, Boucher is interested in how discourse is regulated “syntactically” by what Althusser calls an “ideological apparatus”—that is, a social institution. Boucher also agrees with the theoretical position that “discursive practice implies a limited agent, restricted by the materiality of social relations” (94). In doing so, he emphasizes the importance of the “problem of structuration,” or the ways that social institutions, which limit social interactions and identity formations, themselves evolve (15). This position clearly shares some affinity to Butler's notion of “enabling constraint” (1997, 16)—which draws from Spivak (see Butler 1993, 122)—as well as Butler's work on how the persistence of institutions relies on re-citational practices.
These areas in particular—the syntax of institutional utterances, the limits which meaningful materiality places on individual utterances, and a focus on the re-citation or continual re-structuration of the social world—would seem to be areas of overlap between the positions of Butler and Boucher. This book argues that what is needed to bridge their positions is what Bakhtin's approach provides; namely, an insistence on the materiality of language and the syntax of utterances. This insight can be extended to include the “utterances” of those social institutions which simultaneously cite, yet syntactically control, the language of individuals. In short, what is needed is a theory of social performativity and citationality which can account for both institutional and individual utterances—while retaining the possibility of recontextualization and material social change.
Within those corporations which produce cultural commodities, employees receive differential wages and salaries based on the perceived worth of their citational practices relative to the profitability of the organization. For example, middle-level managers cite corporate policies and marketing strategies in their bureaucratic utterances; other employees like illustrators, writers, or website designers engage in different citational practices which actually construct the marketable cultural commodities. Employees speak or “cite” in accordance with what is required by their institutional position, as motivated by individual wage and institutional profit considerations.
Media conglomerates also sign or contract with “outside” artists whose music or books will receive mass distribution through the institution. In all, differential amounts are paid to differentially positioned associates of the corporation based on their perceived contributions to the profitability of that economic institution. For their part, the stockholders or private owners of the means of cultural production attempt to gauge the marketability of language, as they try to invest in those corporations whose “institutional utterances” are syntactically arranged in ways which will bring the most profit. Thus, corporations which produce cultural commodities in the contemporary United States economy re-enact social class differences, as they differentially reward the “citational labor” of owners and workers. As will be discussed below, firms have historically been slow to reward the appropriated labor of consumers who “co-create” value, expecially in online environments (see Cova and Dalli 2009).
We can see that preparation for employment or investment in such an economic environment involves learning the exchange value of language—how to produce marketable citational grafts, or how to invest efficiently in such an language-based economy. In this sense, workers and owners do not “speak for themselves”; rather, they are socialized to speak in the voice of exchange value. As Bourdieu (1984) describes in his notion of a “habitus,” the knowledge of how to speak in the “voice of exchange value” is differentially distributed across social classes. Thus, both in the construction of fashionable social identity on the “consumption side,” as well as in the preparation for occupational positions on the “production side,” the meaningful materiality of a class-based habitus “matters.” Subjects are socialized to take their position within the exchange value system.
By considering the materiality of language in terms of both individual and institutional utterances, this book attempts to ensure that the theory of citationality does not necessarily lead to an idealism which neglects social class. Whether or not theorists like Butler, Laclau and Mouffe, or Žižek are indeed guilty of developing a “discursive-based” approach which downplays the importance of political economy, Boucher's insistence on the continued relevance of class to contemporary identity formation is a point well-taken. Boucher's main argument concerns the continuing relevance of the unequal distribution of economic resources, and of class-based opportunities, for the analysis of contemporary identity formation. This book attempts to retain the importance of these economic factors within the theory of citationality, through an insistence that language-based citational utterances are material. In a Derridean sense, it is precisely the “materiality” of words and images which enable them to be recognizable and meaningful across situational contexts.
In his work, Althusser (1971) famously suggested that ideology has a “material existence” (166–67) as grounded in social practices—as opposed to being only a false consciousness (see also Boucher 2008, 89). At the same time, Althusser recognized that there are varying types of “materialities” (Althusser 1971, 166). Meaningful materiality takes many differing forms, as Barbara Bolt points out in her discussion of Bruno Latour's notions of “mobility” and “immutability” (Bolt 2004, 24). As indicated earlier, “materiality” can be considered as whatever can be given meaning through its repetition across situational context; in other words, that which has an iterable form which can be divorced from the intentionality of the author. This book, informed by the work of Butler and by the Derridean theory of citationality, has emphasized the materiality of all meaningful utterances—consistent with the work of the Bakhtin Circle.
Increasingly in the contemporary U.S. economy, language is the commodity. Language is marketed in material, syntactical formations by institutions—such as a media network producing a television show or a website. Access to the distributional system is unequal, and generally only the utterances of institutions—such as a news network—receive mass distribution. In this sense, institutional utterances become a normative, hegemonic constraint on social interaction and identity construction in contemporary U.S. culture. This is because corporations produce the material, citational resources used by individuals in everyday life—thus continually re-shaping the materiality of the social world in light of profit considerations.
The theory of performativity developed by Judith Butler, drawing upon Derrida's notion of citationality, benefits by being read with a strong emphasis on the materiality of utterances—an emphasis which the Bakhtin Circle provides. Whether or not Boucher is correct in his claim regarding “postmarxism's tendency to reduce politics and economics to ideological struggles” (16), he has stressed an important point regarding the future direction of poststructuralist theorizing. It is essential, as he claims, to recognize the continuing importance of political economy in shaping “subject-positions” (58)—as Butler's work on gender also suggests. Citational utterances are always situated in a particular social position—and necessarily take an evaluative stance toward class-based material environments.
In Butler's sense, the meaningful materiality of the everyday social environment is an enabling constraint, largely shaped through institutional utterances which re-cite inequalities, which control alterity, and which commodify the words and images of others. Citational resources, produced and distributed by institutions, are used by individual subjects to respond to those utterances of institutions—albeit in new syntactical configurations. Individual utterances re-cite institutional utterances to a greater or lesser degree, and thus more or less reproduce normative identities and values. In this way, the citational practices of individuals either increase, or lessen, overall demand for particular cultural commodities, which in turn relates back to the profit of those investors and owners who enable the institutional utterances. The performativity of exchange value thus involves the re-citation of institutional utterances, in the material form of cultural commodities.
This discussion of the materiality of individual and institutional utterances draws attention to the very nature of materiality itself. Slater (2003) has challenged the traditional distinction in social theory between the “physicality” of objects and the supposed “immateriality” of signs (95). Rather, his emphasis is on the “processes of materialisation” by which entities are stabilized, or destabilized (96). Slater argues that materiality is stabilized through social networks, rather than through the properties of goods (101). Appealing to the “semiotic concept of découpage” (101; italics in the original), he suggests that “the idea of a stable object—like that of a stable signifier—involves making a cut or incision in the world, cutting out a set of relations and oppositions that are in reality continuous, and could be divided up quite differently” (101).
In fact, Slater sees the social construction of materiality as increasingly important in contemporary economic processes. He argues that advertisers and marketers plan for how an entity will be re-materialized or re-designed in the marketplace (101). Slater argues that firms themselves have begun to recognize the tentative nature of materialization, which enables them to configure entities in new ways in a changing economy (103). In this effort, “a firm attempts to materialise a given product in a given way by intervening in all the social processes through which things come to be given things,” which Slater lists as “design, packaging, perceptions, consumer practices, media environments, [and] retail spaces” (107).
Slater points out that the marketing of experiences like events requires “purpose-built, materially bounded spaces” (110), and also requires certain types of materialization in order to be “transactable,” such as the printing of tickets (110). Here we might also recall that for Derrida, “meaning”—and by extension, the meaning of “value”—must have a repeatability across situations. This “materiality” across situational contexts can be thought of as that which enables its economic transactability, apart from the intentionality of any particular subject. Thus, exchange value requires a certain amount, and certain kind, of materialization for transactability. A “transactable” materiality must recognizably frame interactions as (measurably) economic ones, and provide the interpretive context against which—in a performative sense—economic transactions will “work.”
Slater cites the work of Callon and Gadry to note that the semiotic “cut”—enabling “a particular set of socio-technical effects”—is what renders the event or object “transactable” (110). Of course, it becomes transactable precisely in order to generate exchange value, as measured by various economic formulas and statistics. This suggests an interesting parallel to the work of Karen Barad (2007). As Barad has noted, experiments in quantum physics show that the measuring apparatus performs a particular “cut” in the material world, which results in particular ontological properties of phenomena (127-28). In other words, the measuring apparatus is itself performative of the value it measures—an insight which, as mentioned earlier, is becoming increasingly prevalent when it comes to the valuation of brands.
Barad has suggested that Judith Butler's formulation regarding performative citationality—while groundbreaking—does not go far enough in emphasizing the materiality of meaningful forms. In her book Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), Barad argues that what is needed in a theory of performativity is not merely an appreciation of the process of “iterative citationality,” but rather that of the “iterative intra-activity” of configurations of matter (208; see also Kirby 2011, 96). Barad's provocative work, drawing on insights from quantum physics, can help situate and expand the argument as developed in this book, especially regarding the status of “materiality” in a theory of the performativity of value.
For example, while Barad's work focuses on what she calls the “entanglements” of meaning and matter (2007, 33), this book focuses on what might be called the “entanglements” of value and matter, taking seriously the contention that language—especially as a cultural commodity—has a meaningful materiality that both limits and opens the possibilities for social agency. It should be noted, however, that the argument in the present book—which addresses patterns of human behavior mainly from the perspective of social psychology—admittedly does not directly engage an issue central for Barad and others working on “posthumanist” materialisms—namely, the very re-production of the human/nonhuman distinction and the question of “non-human agency” (see Barad 2007; Kirby 2011; Latour 1993). Having said this, it might be interesting to re-consider how some of Barad's insights might be brought into further dialogue with the argument advanced in this book.
As mentioned, Barad notes that within the quantum physics of Neils Bohr, the particular measuring apparatus used in a scientific experiment performs a particular “cut” in materiality during the measurement process, thus creating a “phenomena” (140)—a material configuration which includes both the object measured, as well as the measuring apparatus itself. Importantly, Bohr and Barad argue that it is this cut which gives the material world its ontological status (127–28). Barad notes that experiments in quantum physics reveal that a Newtonian/Cartesian world emerges only when a particular measuring apparatus “cuts” the material world in a particular way (97). When materiality is measured differently, a different “reality” emerges. For example, quantum experiments on both light and matter have shown that their “determinate” properties, as wave or particle, depend upon the type of measuring apparatus used (19). Considering the implications of Bohr’s work, Barad uses the term “agential separability” to refer to the determinate “entities” which emerge as part of the phenomenon, following the cut of the measuring apparatus—entities whose “ontological presence” is contingent upon the measurement process (174–75).
Expanding on some of the insights from Barad's interpretation of Bohr relative to the problematic of this book, we might say that the “measuring apparatus” in the United States is the system of economic formulas, stock values, retail pricing mechanisms, and so forth used to assess the “worth” of language-based commodities. The “exchange value” of the cultural commodity is what is measured. The exchange value measurement, while in fact emergent from the measuring process itself, is normatively interpreted as a “representation” of the extent to which other subcultural values are “present” in the measured material form—such as religiosity or “authentic” ethnic traditions. Social actors in everyday life go on to re-cite the measured exchange value through citational practices involving the commodity—as in the case of status symbols (see Veblen 1953; Bourdieu 1984). Material forms continually re-evoke exchange value, as they are continually re-cited as being able to deliver valued experiences. Measured exchange value is taken to indicate the quality of those “experiences.”
Such a “phenomena” was not put into place once and for all at a particular point in Western history; rather, it is continually re-enacted through the everyday citational practices of social actors. When “exchange value” is “objectively” measured in the market—through such measures as stock values or retail prices—what is more precisely “measured” is consumer behavior relative to meaningful materiality. As consumers “cite” cultural commodities through trips to websites, or watching movies, the exchange value of those language-based commodities increases—as consumer demand shapes market worth. The “agential cut” of the economy enables everyday utterances to re-cite normative values and identities through the use of cultural commodities as citational resources—which also have an exchange value.
Importantly, from the performative point of view as developed by Barad—interpreting Bohr—these values do not exist as ontologically separate, determinate, pre-existing entities, but instead are contingent upon the “cut” performed, and re-performed, by the economic “measuring apparatus.” In other words, the very notion that commodities “cross” pre-existing and determinate contexts, and “add value” to new contexts, only emerges from within a representationalist perspective. From a performative point of view, valuing “contexts” persist as normative only through the re-enactment of the agential cut of the economic apparatus itself.
Combining insights from both Butler and Barad's versions of performativity, then, we might say that the “exchange value” of linguistic utterances, which re-cite the words of others in particular syntactical formations, is part of the “phenomena” enabled by the capitalist cultural economy. Perhaps a strong emphasis on the materiality of linguistic-based commodities helps make Butler's theory of performativity, based on a process of “iterative” citationality, a bit more compatible with Barad's theory of performativity—based on what she calls the “iterative (re)materialization of the relations of production” (Barad 2007, 35).
As Butler has shown, such “cuts” in, or syntactical configurations of, materiality also enact “enabling constraints” regarding social identities such as gender. Turning to social psychology and considering Mead's notion of meaning—that meaning refers to normative patterns of behavior relative to the materiality of symbolic forms (see Joas 1997, 105)—we can see that agential cuts not only enable the interpellation of “values” or “identities” in a conceptual sense, but rather enable or restrict particular types of behaviors. In this sense, “value” refers to preferred behavior patterns (Graeber 2001, 49)—“normative” behavior at the group level, as well as anticipatable behaviors at the individual level (Mead 1969).
Agential cuts which differentiate value domains arrange them into a hierarchy, enabling some preferred behaviors while restricting others. In this sense, the economic apparatus measures normative consumer behavior toward materiality (i.e., their citational practices), and gives it a mark of exchange value which indicates these patterns. At the same time, the re-citation of this exchange value—as materialized—both restricts and enables future citational practices. In addition, as discussed above, anticipated consumer behavior guides actual production, and thus the availability of citational resources. In Richard Schechner's sense of “restored behavior” (1985, 35–36), consumers re-perform actions which focus groups have already rehearsed, which marketers have already advertised, and which accountants have already anticipated.
To think of the economic apparatus as measuring patterns of citational behaviors helps to counter the normative or ideological interpretation of what “exchange value” measures—that is, the “presence” of the value of cultural commodities. In actuality, the value promised in advertising is never quite present in commodities. Indeed, in a Derridean sense, meaning and value are never quite “present,” as they are necessarily altered in repeated re-citations. Inasmuch as exchange value purports to measure the worth of the cultural commodity in delivering a particular experience, the measurement itself is never quite secure. In other words, the normative meaning of the measurement is itself never quite present—both in the sense that the pre-existing “value” it supposedly measures is not quite present, as well as in the sense that the re-citation of “exchange value” necessarily alters its meaning across contexts. We might even say that the measurement of “exchange value” does not indicate its presence in a meaningful material form, but rather the appeal of that materiality's promise of value.
We might thus consider that the cultural economy in the United States can be seen as a kind of “measuring apparatus,” which measures and assigns an exchange value to language. The “exchange value” of any particular strip of language reflects patterns of consumer behavior relative to that meaningful materiality—in the sense that the number of viewers of a particular television show, or the number of hits on a website, affects the cost of advertising in that location and thus the “worth” of that cultural commodity. Barad's work helps to emphasize the importance of considering the materiality of language within a theory of performative citationality, as applied to the performativity of exchange value in the U.S. cultural economy.
As Judith Butler has shown in her discussion of gender performativity, citational practices are issued from a social positionality which is largely assigned by others. Citational practices are not only limited in this political sense, but also, as we can see from the work of Veblen (1953) and Bourdieu (1984), in an economic sense. Citational resources are unequally distributed—limiting the expensive, fashionable citations of cultural commodities to the wealthier classes.
As Pierre Bourdieu has shown, access to those performative resources which have value in particular “linguistic markets” is restricted (1993, 79). For Bourdieu, upper classes shape and defend “a market for their own linguistic products” (80). This occurs especially through schools, which legitimize upper-class linguistic styles through academic credentials—which can in turn be marketed in the economy. As Bourdieu puts it in an example, “the people who are currently trying to defend their value as possessors of Latin are obliged to defend the existence of the market in Latin, which means, in particular, the reproduction, through the school system, of the consumers of Latin” (81).
In other words, the “values” of privileged subjects are defended in the linguistic market through the regulation of citational practices. Particular citational practices come to have a market value as “indexes” of skilled persons (see Silverstein 1976). A hierarchy of citational practices and valuations becomes institutionalized as a result of this “linguistic domination” (Bourdieu 1993, 82). Bourdieu has shown that in this way, communication styles or citational practices vary by social class, and are integral to the social reproduction of inequality.
Using Bourdieu's term, we can say that the meaningful identity of an upper-class “habitus” is constructed through the abjection of alternative values and identities. Those who learn to speak in the voice of exchange value are precisely not citing less-marketable cultural values. Access to desired social identities is secured through class-based temporal and spatial access to citational resources. This access to the means of cultural production (see Guillory 1993) occurs through social positionality relative to institutionalized syntactical practices, which re-generate exchange value as well as upper-class identities.
Butler has argued that re-citational or recontextualization practices have the potential to dislocate normative meanings and identities. On the one hand, it seems that the writings of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Baudrillard on cultural capital and “sign value,” respectively, underestimate this potential by sliding into a near-deterministic position regarding social reproduction (see Butler 1997, 147; Kellner 1991, 21; 28). For Butler, drawing from Derrida, the very fact that the “system” or “structure” must be re-produced or re-cited in order to be maintained opens the possibility for its alteration.
On the other hand, the political difficulty still persists that a widespread positioning of non-normative and potentially politically resistant material signs requires access to an institutionalized network of citational resource distribution. As seen from Bourdieu's work, schools often reproduce precisely those citational practices which reinforce the class standing of the wealthy; at the same time, the mass media distribution of language in the U.S. is almost entirely driven by profit considerations. In other words, the resistant citational practices described by Butler may occur only locally, with little impact on the overall linguistic market—that is, on the political economy of “cultural capitalism.” In this sense, despite the possibility of resistance, the probability of economic reproduction continues.
In addition, Bourdieu (1984) argues that communication styles characteristic of a class-based habitus become largely “unconscious” or “automatic” to users, in that they are incorporated into the physical body as behavioral preferences. From this point of view, citational practices come to have market value precisely in that they are used as the basis of identity-construction within class-based subcultures, into which children are routinely socialized. In Bourdieu's sense, the citational resources available and “preferred” within each class—through consumer demand and normative citational practice—come to reproduce the hierarchy of valuations which systematically favor upper-class styles. Citational styles said to be “preferred” in lower-class subcultures have little educational or economic currency; for Bourdieu, this becomes the cultural basis for the social reproduction of inequality. Thus, we find that when working-class youth apply for office jobs they may “cite all the wrong things”—in other words, their cultural capital is limited in ways that fail to meet normative expectations for language use at that institutional site (see MacLeod 1995).
For Pierre Bourdieu (1991), the French educational system reproduces the official “linguistic market,” which is used to value the worth of utterances—as cultural capital (67). Bourdieu's work on France particularly focused on the nexus between education and the state; for Bourdieu, “It is in the process of state formation that the conditions are created for the constitution of a unified linguistic market, dominated by the official language” (45). While Bourdieu recognizes that non-official styles thrive in particular subcultures, he notes that the dominant market ultimately is linked with power. Because of this, during subcultural usage the dominant linguistic market is only “provisionally suspended” (71). When speakers return to more formal markets, their informal styles are “annihilated” (71).
In the contemporary U.S. cultural economy, social actors not only find that their utterances are evaluated in the formal education system, but also are more or less marketable within the mass media. Remembering the work of Daniel Bell (1976) concerning “cultural contradictions” within capitalism, we find that citational styles are valued differentially in the business world, in education, and in the social world of the mass media. In fact, as discussed above relative to the work of Goffman, a linguistic market can thrive where citational resources precisely derive their value as role-distancing resources. Utterances have differential worth in competing linguistic markets, and in a sense, play one market against another. Cultural commodities advertised within the popular media market may serve as resources which distance subjects from their roles in work and schools. Indeed, it is probably because social actors lack citational resources in one linguistic market that they may prefer to participate in another. In turn, those performers who excel at particular oppositional styles, relative to educational or occupational roles, may be financially rewarded when their words and images are appropriated into institutional utterances for the mass media market.
Just as in Bourdieu's France, it is true that in the United States more transgressive citational styles may be of little value in the employment or education “linguistic markets.” In the U.S., however, it will be interesting to see in what ways the proliferation of language-based commodities in the mass media affects the linguistic markets of business or education. For example, many firms in the “culture industry” in the U.S. economy precisely market citational resources through the popular media market, drawing from popular culture. These businesses often seek to employ persons already immersed in—that is, who speak in the language of—contemporary subcultural styles. In regards to education, Guillory (1993) has pointed out that some subcultural groups, who have traditionally been excluded from the literary canon, have successfully won representation in the educational curriculum—even while sometimes voicing opposition to normative identities and values.
The increasing commodification of language in the U.S. may thus lead to the merging of historically separate “linguistic markets.” In other words, while Bourdieu's work in France focuses on the state/education hegemony over subcultural styles, in the U.S. the cultural commodities distributed through the mass media may have the potential to challenge the more official or literary communications of business or education. However, social change—as a result of the media dissemination of cultural commodities—is often minimal. The economics of “reporting the speech” of the dominated mostly results in the continued commodification of oppositional language. As discussed above, the words and images “of the other” can be syntactically controlled within the utterances of institutions, and robbed of their political impact. Words and images produced by the dominated classes can be appropriated into the syntactical utterances of corporations, and marketed as commodities whose entextualized material form belies their oppositional intent. On the other hand, the appropriation of the words and images of others always has the potential to challenge normative identities and values.
We can find some global examples regarding how reporting the speech of others can lead to a reformulation of subcultural values and identities. In his work, Alastair Pennycook (2003) discusses some of the issues involved when English is used in performances by rap and hip-hop artists globally. This appropriation of English occurs as youth, in countries where English is not the native language, challenge normative identities—which Pennycook refers to as the “performative aspect of identity refashioning” (529). Citing Mitchell, Pennycook thus draws attention to how global citational resources can be used in practices which challenge local identities (525). Building on this literature, Park and Wee (2008) explore “how the language of the Other can be appropriated to serve as a resource for the formation of identities” (242–43). Consistent with the thesis of this book, the work of Park and Wee suggests that the words and images of the other can be recontextualized into a subject's own utterances in identity construction practices.
Drawing on Bourdieu's work, Park and Wee argue that the words and images generated from “autonomous,” or localized, linguistic markets may be used as subversive resources to challenge the identities and values representing the more “unified,” official linguistic markets of the government and educational institutions (247). However, this resistance seems to have currency only within the boundaries of the autonomous market; as Park and Wee put it, “the more autonomous a market, the greater the potential for resignification” (247). They go on to suggest that Butler's work on recontextualization—and the subversive potential of the performative—may best describe autonomous markets, while Bourdieu's work recognizes the more limited opportunities for resistance in unified markets. As they put it, “Recognizing the existence of multiple markets thus helps to resolve the different understandings of performativity that we find in Bourdieu and Butler” (247). The political question regarding Bourdieu’s work on linguistic markets concerns the extent to which the “refashioning” of identity in smaller, subcultural markets can ultimately lead to a dislocation of normative values and identities in other linguistic markets. Regarding the cultural economy in the U.S., we might also consider how developments in the mass media might affect the hegemonic discourse of the more general exchange value system.
David Hesmondhalgh (2006) argues that Bourdieu mainly considers cultural production in terms of small-scale artistic production—a “field” which Bourdieu finds to be largely autonomous from that of political economy (214). Because of this, Hesmondhalgh argues that Bourdieu undertheorizes large-scale and commercial cultural production, and thus is unable to recognize how developments in the mass media might alter the field of political economy. In an analysis of Bourdieu, Judith Butler also inquires as to whether “the field itself might be altered by the habitus” (2000,117; italics in the original)—a question which Bourdieu’s analysis seems to close off (117–118). For Butler, the field itself may be contested through unauthorized or transgressive re-citations (124–25). Both Butler and Hesmondhalgh are thus concerned that Bourdieu's formulation of the unified field of political economy makes it immune to alteration—for example, by interactions in other linguistic markets (see Butler 2000, 117–18). As this book has suggested, citational resources acquire exchange value not within an individual frame or field, but as they play against or valorize a differentiated field into which they are cited.
Butler goes on to point out that for Bourdieu the linguistic “market” (field) is taken as a “preexisting context,” in which subjects are differentially “positioned” (119). For Butler, re-citational practices might alter the field or linguistic market itself, and thus “the way in which social positions are themselves constructed through a more tacit operation of performativity” (122). Whereas for Austin and Bourdieu, performatives “work” inasmuch as they are issued by authorized speakers in authorized situations, Butler argues that oppositional utterances may in fact lead to changes in the nature of authority itself. Butler thus asks “whether the improper use of the performative can succeed in producing the effect of authority where there is no recourse to a prior authorization; indeed, whether the misappropriation or expropriation of the performative might not be the very occasion for the exposure of prevailing forms of authority and the exclusions by which they proceed?” (123–24).
Utterances may be more or less oppositional, given the material configurations of the various linguistic markets into which they are inserted. It may be true, as Park and Wee suggest, that the extent to which unauthorized speakers can resist normative identities and values depends on the autonomy of the market, and becomes more difficult in unified markets (2008, 247). Indeed, Bourdieu has forcefully shown how unified markets can perpetuate inequality through the differential ranking of linguistic utterances. On the other hand, as Butler suggests, re-citational practices may lead to changes in authorizing institutions and “fields” themselves (Butler 2000, 124)—perhaps even in unified markets. In this sense, citational practices with currency in autonomous, subcultural markets may also have currency as role-distancing resources in more unified markets—and effectively challenge the hegemony of the “universal” exchange value frame. Perhaps one linguistic market may be successfully played off against another. Even today's commodities—as institutional utterances materially designed to generate exchange value—may enter into unknown, material configurations in the future with unexpected political effect.
In the introduction to her study of consumer culture, Celia Lury (1996) cites sociological work, including that of Lunt and Livingstone, as well as that of Anthony Giddens, which indicates the importance of consumer culture to individual identity formation. In addition, several empirical research studies in fields such as marketing, consumer research, sociology of the economy, and anthropology have also shown the importance of consumption in social identity construction. In this section, we will see how marketers try to turn the performativity of subcultural values into the performativity of exchange value. As consumers seek to incorporate particular meanings and values into their lives, through the citation of those cultural commodities taken to represent such meanings and values, marketers hurry to bring such citational resources to market.
Grant McCracken (1986), citing work by Marshall Sahlins, as well as by Douglas and Isherwood, notes that consumer goods are valued by consumers not only for their technical properties and instrumental use value, but also for their symbolic dimensions (71). In particular, McCracken notes that the differing materialities of commodities lead to differing attributions of identity categories (73). Citing Austin's work, as well as that of Stanley Tambiah, McCracken sees consumer objects as “performative” of the cultural meanings that they signify (73).
In his survey of the empirical research on the relationship between material possessions and identity, Russell Belk (1988) concluded that “Evidence supporting the general premise that possessions contribute to sense of self is found in a broad array of investigations” (160). For Belk, one of the reasons possessions are valued by self is that they align one’s identity with subcultures of family and friends. He notes that because we belong to several subcultural groups which we value to varying degree, the perceived value of the consumer objects we purchase also varies. For Belk, “the individual has a hierarchical arrangement of levels of self, because we exist not only as individuals, but also as collectivities. We often define family, group, subculture, nation, and human selves through various consumption objects” (152). Using Belk's term, commodities “extend” the self into meaningful materialities, as they align individual identity with subcultural group identity.
Marsha Richins (1994) has found a relationship between the meaning of a possession and its value (505), which is linked to the process of identity construction. Citing work by Rochberg-Halton and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Richins discusses the importance of “repeated interaction” (i.e., re-citations) with the possession by subjects as a source of “private meaning” and value (506). Richins is particularly interested in the gap between the market worth of the object as commodity, and the personal attribution of value given by individuals after purchase. As she notes, for some people “economic value is not the most important form of value” (505), as in the case of possessions bearing sentimental memories. This finding by Richins could be interpreted as showing that while exchange value has not yet become completely hegomonic over other types of value, it does continually draw upon the memories and emotions of subcultural lifeworlds for its sustenance. The finding could also indicate the continuing importance of role distancing practices in a culture dominated by exchange value.
The research also underscores Derrida's point that while “exchange value” has to be abstractable and stable across situations in order to remain meaningful, it also is altered and negotiated within individual contexts. Richins suggests that it may be precisely because of identification with intermediary subcultures that individual, private attributions of value and meaning come to differ significantly with their “public” meanings. She notes that “For individuals with strong reference group identification, acquisition and use behaviors and the private meanings of goods may be influenced more by the shared meanings of reference group members than by the meanings held by society at large” (518).
These individual and subcultural meanings—and values—are increasingly being incorporated by businesses into the design and advertising of commodities. Citing their earlier work, Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004) have introduced the term “co-creation of value” into the marketing literature, to indicate the contemporary trend whereby “The meaning of value and the process of value creation are rapidly shifting from a product- and firm-centric view to personalized consumer experiences . . . active consumers are increasingly co-creating value with the firm” (5). Whereas in the past, value creation was considered the sole purview of the producer, today's consumers have “their own views of how value should be created for them” (6). Prahalad and Ramaswamy thus suggest that marketers should become more sensitive to the subcultural values of social actors, in order to co-create products in tune with consumer life experiences.
Using the example of video games, Prahalad and Ramaswamy show that the co-creation of value involves the production of environments in which consumer experiences will occur (10). While the firm provides the “space” in which the experiences will unfold, the end-user actively creates the “experiences” (11). Thus, as Prahalad and Ramaswamy indicate, today firms consult with consumers in the design of “value co-creation space” (11). Considering this research by Prahalad and Ramaswamy on the co-creation of value, we might say that the appropriation of subcultural meanings and values by marketers results in the performativity of exchange value.
So far, we have seen that empirical research indicates the importance of consumption to the construction of identity. It also shows that individual identity is aligned with that of the group, via valued materialities. Marketers have increasingly recognized how their products become integrated into consumer lifestyles, and have begun to involve consumers in the production and design of goods and services. However, in his work, Douglas Holt (1997) has questioned some of the assumptions and limitations of these trends in both business and in marketing research. In particular, he attempts to make a “poststructuralist turn” in marketing research, and critiques some of the representationalist assumptions of prior research in the field.
When it comes to consumer “lifestyle,” Holt wants to adopt an approach which neither assumes that “lifestyles are behavioral expressions of personality traits,” nor that “lifestyles are structured by quantititative differences in universal values across groups” (327). In addition, he argues that meaning is neither an inherent or essential feature of objects (328), nor equally accessible in the same way to all members of a particular social group (328; 333). Holt's approach is to focus on the ways in which consumers differ in how they incorporate commodities into their own lifestyles. For this reason, Holt suggests that even if consumers purchase the same good, they may not do so for the same reasons, nor give the object the same meaning.
Marketing research will therefore be misleading, Holt argues, if it assumes that consumption patterns reveal pre-existing sets of values or meanings in objects, or that an object has a singular meaning which represents the values of a collectivity (326). Rather, consistent with the approach of this book, Holt suggests that “Since consumption objects are polysemic, they are more aptly considered resources that facilitate and constrain consumers' meaning construction rather than fully realized meanings that consumers acquire” (344). Holt argues that a poststructuralist approach—which he applies in his study to interview analysis—overcomes this flaw, and argues instead for the grounding of meaning in consumer practices. Recognizing that individuals belong to several groups simultaneously, he concludes that consumption practices must also be hybrid and “conflicted” (341).
In certain ways, Holt’s poststructuralist argument aligns with the approach of this book, and its focus on citational practice. For example, in his study he notes that for some working-class informants, employment at the local university was a source of pride (337). In other words, their everyday citational practices involving the university became important in the construction of their social identity, aligning them with a subcultural group perceived to be prestigious. Holt's research leads him to conclude that it is through “consumption practices” that identity differences, or “symbolic boundaries,” between groups are maintained (343). In the language of citationality, the citation of cultural commodities leads to the re-interpellation of subcultural group identities, in reference to which individual identity is aligned. Some subcultural affiliations are embraced, while subjects distance themselves from others. Holt, then, locates consumer values not in pre-existing “lifestyle” groupings, but rather in imagined group affiliations which are re-cited through consumption practices.
Holt points out that consumer practices can “transform” collectivities (344), an argument which is consistent with Butler's notion of how citational practices can dislocate normative identities. He also notes the instability of the meaning of “cultural objects,” which he attributes to their simultaneous membership in more than one “semiotic system”—resulting in a multiplicity of semiotic associations for any particular social form (329). Again translating Holt into the language of citationality, this suggests that the meaning and value of any social object depends on its positioning within the unique assembly of citational resources which shape the overall material environments of consumers—as one interpellated value context is played off against others. As Holt puts it, the “meanings of a particular cultural object for a particular individual in a particular context are produced typically through negotiation between or syncretic combination of available discourses” (329). While Holt does not follow these poststructuralist moves with an extended Derridean critique of the presence of value (see 328; n2)—nor use the word “performative”—his work is helpful as a description of the functioning of current economy, as well as an effective critique of representationalism in the marketing literature.
We have thus seen in this section that one central thesis of this book—that consumers cite cultural commodities in order to construct their social identities—seems supported by empirical evidence across several literatures. Researchers have taken up the notion of performativity, and many marketing researchers are shifting away from the representationalist model which has historically prevailed in that field. Even though some of the empirical research today still uses the language of representationalism, while some adopts the language of performativity, we can generally conclude that there is much evidence for a central thesis of this book—that social actors use commodities in the construction of their social identities, as well as to align individual identity with that of social groups.
As might be expected, given that much of the literature presented in this section has been drawn from business and marketing, rather than critical social theory, it does not generally develop a critique of the model of the “presence of value”—even if it does increasingly adopt the language of performativity theory. Given this limitation, the literature implicitly re-cites some of the same assumptions shared by social actors in the cultural economy regarding the “presence of value”—and in this way itself re-cites the system of exchange value. Having said this, the marketing and business literature is helpful in providing a description, if not a critique, of the way in which the performativity of exchange value occurs in the contemporary U.S. economy. Translating these studies into the language of citationality, it can be argued that both subcultural values, and exchange value, are re-performed through the citing of the words, images, and objects “of the other.” In the next section, we will continue looking at the empirical literature related to the performativity of exchange value, through the specific mediation of brands.
In the formation of their social identities through the citation of cultural commodities, social actors do not so much cite particular commodities, as cite the social meanings indicated by those commodities. Brands have become important carriers of cultural meanings, and are carefully managed by firms across the entire range of their products. This section presents a literature review of some selected empirical and theoretical literature in consumer research, marketing, anthropology, and sociology regarding brands to provide interdisciplinary research in support of a central thesis of this book—that the performativity of exchange value in the contemporary U.S. cultural economy occurs as social actors re-cite cultural commodities. Branded commodities are cited in the identity construction process, as subjects align their individual identities with those of subcultures and their affiliated values. As the research indicates, brands have become central to the continual re-production of the cultural economy.
In her consumer research, Susan Fournier has studied how consumers develop “relationships” with particular brands (1998, 368). Fournier's research indicates that consumers not only develop relationships with products for their technical use-values (351), but also for their lifestyle or symbolic features; as she puts it, “the meanings they add into their lives” (361). Fournier argues that within the field of marketing there has been an increasing recognition of the “relationships” that consumers develop toward particular brands (343–44). For Fournier, this relationship is not merely between the consumer and an inanimate, branded product, but rather between the consumer and the entire network of people involved in marketing the good. Social actors in this production network make decisions and engage in actions “enacted on behalf of the brand” (345). Fournier sees the relationship between this network of actors and the consumer as important for consumer identity.
Fournier’s research shows that brands indicate “cultural categories” (367), and are used by consumers to align their individual identities with subcultural identities and values. Other studies have suggested the same. Citing the work of Holt, as well as that of Elliott and Wattanasuwan, Borgerson's (2005) review of the consumer research literature indicates that field's concern with how brands are used as resources in identity construction (439). Another thread in the field of consumer research, focusing on what has been called a “brand community,” suggests that social identity is accomplished through active participation with others in the consumption of a particular brand.
For Muniz, Jr. and O'Guinn (2001), the nature of “community” has changed, especially with the proliferation of the mass media in Western cultures. Instead of being formed in shared geographical space, they argue—citing Anderson and others—that today community has become more of an “imagined community” (413; 419; 426). This includes what they call “brand communities.” Muniz, Jr. and O'Guinn point out that brand communities differ from what others—noting Schouten and McAlexander's research on Harley-Davidson riders—have called a “subculture of consumption.” Muniz, Jr. and O’Guinn suggest that brand communities differ in that they are not marginalized socially, are always defined relative to a commercialized product, and typically embrace the ideology of commercialization (414–5).
Muniz, Jr. and O'Guinn see the development of brand communities in a positive way, in that they enable consumers to remain “connected to other consumers through the benefit of community” (427). They suggest that marketers attempt to develop brand communities as part of “relationship marketing,” and point out that the formation of such communities increases the economic value of the brand (427). In this research, we again find that consumers “cite” brands as they construct identities relative to subcultural groups—even if the boundaries and identities of subcultural groupings are shifting in postmodern culture.
Schau and Muniz, Jr. (2002) extend the concept of brand communities to the Internet, and particularly focus on the ways that brand communities are incorporated into self-presentation strategies in cyberspace. They find that individuals differ in the extent to which they immerse themselves in various brand communities online. Consumers use the brand differently in various self-presentation strategies, leading to variations in how individual online identity aligns with that of the larger brand community.
Celia Lury (2004) has shown the increasing importance of brands in the contemporary economies of the United Kingdom and the United States. Her work demonstrates that just as the production and design of individual products increasingly incorporate consumer information and input, so does the development of brands. Lury notes that the brand becomes an “interface” (7), which allows for the “exchange of information between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’” (74).
Citing the work of Callon and Cochoy, Lury finds marketing to be a “performative discipline” (17), in that it actively shapes markets through the appropriation of subcultural values and practices into brand design (18). Marketers work to anticipate the future practices of consumers, and incorporate these projections into the development of the brand (39). In this way, marketers appropriate emerging subcultural trends into the brand. In turn, brands shape future economic transactions as they are marketed back to consumers—a process which Lury refers to as the “performativity of the interface of the brand” (51).
Like Lury, Adam Arvidsson (2006) argues that brands generate value for firms through the appropriation of subcultural values, including—citing Hebdige—the resistant “styles” of oppositional groups (68–69). As he notes, “Brands . . . rely on the productivity of consumers not only for the realization, but for the actual co-production of the values that they promise” (35). Consumer behavior within social groups is both anticipated, and shaped, in ways that will generate value for the firm. He notes that brand managers are in the business of “controlling, pre-structuring and monitoring what people do with brands, so that what these practices do adds to its value” (82).
Arvidsson cites the consumer research literature which indicates the importance of brands for contemporary identity construction (5). Consistent with a central thesis of this book, he argues that “brands are primarily to be understood as resources for the construction of a self and its social moorings” (82). For Arvidsson, one of the ways in which this is accomplished today is that brands provide an environment within which consumers co-create value, as they co-create social identities within branded contexts. Arvidsson notes that in contemporary Western cultures, traditional subcultural boundaries may be changing, and that brands now provide a reference for individual identity formation. As he puts it, “Like older forms of community, sustained by tradition, class or local culture, brands provide a context . . . that enables a person to become a subject” (83; see also 132; 76). Brands thus become performative of economic value, as they function to align individual identity with a branded “identity context.” Citing Lury, and Lury and Shields, he argues that brands become a “context for life” (13), or a “predetermined frame of action” (8).
The work of Arvidsson and others suggest that branded “commodities” today are best thought of as environments or spaces within which consumers generate value, rather than as individualized citational resources. As Arvidsson puts it, “Content thus becomes environmental, rather than representational” (96). In other words, while firms do still generate cultural commodities which are cited by consumers, they also increasing design the branded spaces within which citationality occurs—especially on the Internet (96). Also, as mentioned, Arvidsson suggests that these spaces become a kind of identity context themselves, replacing subcultures as the reference against which individual identity is aligned.
For Cova and Dalli (2009), the “co-creation” of value on the Internet, to date, has not been an equal partnership, in that consumers have rarely been compensated for their participation in the process (316; 335n2). In addition, citing the work of Franke and Piller, Cova and Dalli point out that “the more consumers are involved in co-production and design, the more they are willing to pay for the products” (327). Citing their earlier research, Cova and Dalli thus speak of the “‘double exploitation of working consumers’” (as cited in Cova and Dalli 2009, 327). They are thus opposed to those versions of “co-creation” theory which portray “an idyllic marketscape with consumers and producers living in harmony” (334), and instead focus on how consumer subcultural practices—increasingly online—become translated into market value for companies.
Extending this argument more specifically to brands, Hugh Willmott (2010) provides examples which suggest that the largely unpaid contributions of consumers toward the development of global brands have become “an increasingly significant source of privately appropriated wealth” (522). Willmott notes that in “internet-based businesses” in the contemporary economy, organizations especially rely on “feedback on goods and sellers that contributes to the appeal, and thus to the brand equity, of those companies” (525). In those cases where consumers upload words and images to websites, they contribute to the value of those sites—but are often not financially rewarded by firms for their labor (518).
For Willmott, consumer contributions build “brand equity,” which firms then “monetize” (519) into “brand value” (527). Willmott points out that the “intangible” assets of firms, like brands, “now far outstrip traditional accounting assets as a percentage of market value” (529). While such firms are certainly instrumental in developing the spaces or environments within which the consumer contributes, they heavily rely on the contributions of end users to develop those spaces in innovative ways. As Willmott notes, both “brand communities,” and “brand managers,” are together involved in building brand equity, which is then monetized by the firm and returned to shareholders (521). For Willmott, it is the process of “brandization” which enables the appropriated labor of consumers to be “converted into privately appropriated wealth” (534). Again we find, in the language of citationality, that today's firms not only provide the citational resources which consumers use in identity construction, but also provide the branded spaces within which that citationality occurs.
In an interesting development regarding digital gaming, Herman, Coombe, and Kaye (2006) discuss how one company allowed players in an online multi-player game to acquire intellectual property rights for their co-creation activities in the game (184–85). They suggest that this allowance by the company, regarding the “performativity of intellectual property” (186; italics in the original) was meant to generate “goodwill” toward the brand. The company hoped that this goodwill would translate into “customer loyalty,” and thus continued use of the branded environment by players (186). In other words, the goodwill generated by such a strategy “enables corporations to claim as economic value consumers’ affective relation to the corporation” (186)—a kind of performativity of exchange value via an emotional affiliation with the brand. Thus, while the producer of the digital product no longer appropriated consumer labor directly, they hoped for the “performativity of exchange value” more indirectly—through the mediation of “goodwill.” In doing so, firms clearly hope to avoid negative perceptions from participants who “consider their activities within the virtual space of the game as creative work, not simply leisurely play” (188).
In the anthropology literature, Constantine V. Nakassis (2012) also explores the relationships between consumers and brands, incorporating the language of citationality into his approach. Nakassis recognizes the importance of the brand for the performativity of market value, and the ways in which this process is tied to identity construction. He notes that since the 1960s, businesses have recognized that the “value” of the commodity is increasingly located in the brand, rather than in the labor involved in its production (629). Citing the work of Robert Foster, of Adam Arvidsson, and of Terry Hanby, Nakassis points out that consumers develop relationships with brands, and use brands in the construction of the self.
Nakassis develops the concept of “brand citationality” (627), where to cite a particular branded commodity, or “brand token,” is to evoke the general aesthetic or meaning which marketing practices have associated with the brand—its “brand type” (628). For Nakassis, it is this re-citational practice which “is central to the brand's coherence and intelligibility, and to its ability to generate surplus meaning and value” (629). Consistent with the argument in this book, Nakassis points out that the brand's performativity relies on its citation by consumers. As he notes, “The brand is citational, and this makes it able to be performative” (625). Nakassis's contribution thus reveals how the citation of brands by consumers is performative of markets, and thus of market value.
Discussing the work of Michel Callon, and Celia Lury, on “market performativity,” he agrees that today's firms interact with consumers to co-create value, and suggests that the brand has become integral to this communication process. Nakassis cites Lury's research on the brand as an “interface” between consumer and firm, noting that for Lury the “brand is performative in the sense that it structures consumer-producer relationships and thus the market through its ‘interface’” (634). Referring to these “feedback loops” between consumers and firms, as mediated through brands, Nakassis speaks of the “citational performativity” of brands (634). The meanings entextualized into brands, themselves drawn from the lifeworlds of consumers, are reincorporated back into the lives of consumers and given new meanings and values (629). As consumers thus recontextualize the meaning and value of the brands in new ways, firms try to research and reincorporate these emergent developments into the brand itself.
Considering the research and theory described in this section, we can clearly see the reciprocal relationship between individual utterances, and institutional utterances, as they relate to brands. Firms “re-cite” the subcultural values of consumers, and consumers “re-cite” the brands which are taken to represent those values—in an ongoing dialogue within a linguistic market. The purchase of branded citational resources by consumers, used in the process of identity construction within particular localized linguistic markets, re-cites the larger cultural economy based on the universal measure of the exchange value of language.
Several contemporary theorists in the sociology of tourism—some working in the United Kingdom and others in the United States—have together developed a critique of the notion that tourists are simply the passive receivers of an inauthentic culture marketed by the tourist industry—as delivered within highly regulated and self-enclosed spaces. This literature instead emphasizes that tourists are active participants in the phenomenon of tourism, and help shape the sites and spaces in which tourism occurs. If indeed the paradigm of tourism bears some affinity to everyday life in late capitalism, as discussed above, the implications of such notions regarding the “performativity of value” in tourism are worth considering.
We have seen that in the contemporary literature on marketing there is an increased recognition that consumers are co-creators of value. Similarly, tourism researchers are starting to move away from the notion that tourists “gaze” (see Urry 1990) at pre-packaged sites, toward the idea that tourists participate in the co-production of the value of their tourist experience. For example, David Crouch (2002) has argued, citing Selwyn, that the discipline needs to move beyond a paradigm which has historically “prioritised vision as detached,” thus “over-emphasising the object of the gaze and the decentralised observer” (207). Similarly, in their edited collection, Simon Coleman and Mike Crang (2002) found that contributions went “beyond the visual to performance” (11). In research regarding family photography at tourist sites, Jonas Larsen (2005) notes that “Tourist places are produced places, and tourists are coproducers of such places” (422).
Larsen's research in northern Europe, which presumably holds for the United States as well, reveals that not only is contemporary tourism itself performed, but also individual and group identity is performed at tourism sites. Larsen's article Performativity of Tourist Photography argues that family photos taken at the ruins of a medieval castle are quite carefully staged to idealize family relations in the photograph (2005, 424; 430). Individual identities are thus aligned with the “happy” family, as represented by the photo. As Larsen notes, “Places are not only or even primarily visited for their immanent attributes but are also, and more centrally, woven into the webs of stories and narratives people produce when they sustain and construct their social identities” (425–26). Larsen points out that for some, the tourist site can become “a backdrop for family staging” (429).
We thus increasingly see the language of performativity being incorporated into the tourism literature, to describe the active practices through which tourism itself is constructed—as well as the social identities of tourists. Part of the reaction against the passive “gaze” of visitors toward a site has been to instead emphasize that performativity is an embodied experience, involving more than just visuality (Coleman and Crang 2002, 10). For example, in developing their concept of “performative authenticity,” Britta Timm Knudsen and Anne Marit Waade (2010) discuss how “the gaze, the place and the imagined audience play an important role, but the concept of performativity covers more than visual signs, gaze and imaginations. Performativity also includes a tactile body, movements, actions and emotions” (12).
As an embodied experience, Knudsen and Waade go on to suggest that “authenticity” is performative; that is, it is neither a condition of a cultural object, nor of the gazing subject (10–11), but rather “something which people can do and a feeling which is experienced” (1; italics in the original). They use the term “performative authenticity” to refer to the ways that tourists, in the “new affective economy” of Sweden (5), are “re-investing in authenticity as a way of intensifying experience, while the local tourist managers and authorities are re-investing in authenticity to brand their city or region” (5). For Knudsen and Waade, authenticity in tourism now involves the intensification of bodily experience, as “a feeling you can experience in relation to place” (5).
This version of “performative authenticity,” as an embodied and emotional tourist experience, might be effectively contrasted with another discourse regarding authenticity in the sociology of tourism—the loss of cultural authenticity in staged tourist venues. This discourse was historically influenced by Dean MacCannell's (1976) classic book The Tourist (Coleman and Crang 2002, 4; see also Chaney 2002). In that book, MacCannell characterized the modern tourist as searching for an authentic alternative to the “staged authenticity” (MacCannell, quoted in Urry 1990, 9) of the experiences marketed by the tourism industry (Urry 1990, 9–10; Larsen 2005, 419).
In his work, Crang (2006) takes a different approach regarding the relationship between tourism and the authenticity of tourist experience. He points out that the debate surrounding this issue actually rests on an often-unquestioned assumption; namely, that place itself is stationary, stable, and thus representative of the local cultures to a greater or lesser extent (48–49; see also Coleman and Crang 2002, 4–5). Quoting Celia Lury, Crang links this issue regarding the authenticity of place to “a presumption of not only a unity of place and culture, but also of the immobility of both in relation to a fixed cartographically coordinated space” (Lury, quoted in Crang 2006, 54). From this point of view, tourists are seen as disrupting the “authenticity” of the local space and culture (Crang 2006, 54–55).
In contrast, Coleman and Crang (2002) advocate for “a sense of performativity of place rather than just performance in place” (10), noting that places are “fluid and created through performance” (1). In this sense, the “performativity of place” refers to the idea that the spaces of tourism should not be thought of as stable and self-enclosed sites whose tourist value pre-exists visitors, but rather as spaces brought into being with behavioral practices. In a similar way, David Crouch (2002) has noted that tourist space should not be considered as “inert,” but rather a result of an “embodied practice” (208) on the part of the tourist.
Coleman and Crang (2002) also note that the traditional tourism model—that of tourists traveling from one autonomous, local space to another—itself is dependent on “a buried notion of self-presence” (10). This comment by Coleman and Crang raises an important issue regarding the recent body of work on the “performativity” of tourism, as well as on the performativity of authenticity and place. On the one hand, this recent literature rightly shows the limits of past theories and research regarding the “visual gaze” of tourists, and regarding tourist spaces as self-enclosed and fixed spaces. As we see, some in the field have been moving toward the notion of an embodied performativity, through which tourists actively construct tourist spaces, and actively bring about their own physiological experiences. On the other hand, an oft-unquestioned assumption—regarding the “presence of value” in the tourism experience—is reproduced in the literature, which thereby re-cites the ideology at the heart of the contemporary cultural economy. This issue can also be framed as the difference between two differing notions of performativity, as discussed earlier.
One notion of performativity in tourism studies assumes that the “co-creation” of tourist experience, by the embodied performer, actually involves the presence of valued experiences. This notion of performativity follows Austin's sense of the performative utterance—which actually brings about a social reality rather than simply describing one. In this version of performativity, tourist sites—including virtual ones—actually deliver valued experiences as visitors co-create valued spaces.
The second notion of performativity, which draws upon the citational aspects of performativity as developed by Derrida and Butler, would argue instead that the meaning and value of tourist experiences are never quite present. Inasmuch as researchers in this field adopt the first version of “embodied performativity”—that the tourist actively participates in making value present—they are subject to this Derridean critique. From the point of view of a performativity theory which draws upon Butler or Derrida, the active engagement of tourists re-enacts the promise of value, as opposed to the co-creation of an experience whose value becomes “present.”
Regarding the issue of embodied “experience,” it may be worthwhile to recall Howard Becker's work (1963) regarding the interpretation of the physiological changes induced in the body during a drug experience. Becker, from a symbolic interactionist perspective, showed that purportedly “individual” physiological sensations were actually subject to social—and thus shared—interpretations. In a similar way, tourism-related interpretations of intensified bodily experiences—if they are to be anticipated or communicated socially—must be repeatable. As marketable and meaningful experiences, those tourist events which are designed to engage the body and induce physiological changes must also be measurably valuable. In this sense, the valorization of “embodied” or “authentic” experience, as a tourist phenomenon occurring in meaningful material environments, must be socially organized—into shared cultural categories through which individual physiological experiences are interpreted. However, as Derrida has shown, the meaning and value of such experiences are not “present” across iterations—given the singularity of each re-enactment.
In his version of the performativity of tourist spaces, Tim Edensor (2000; 2001)—like Judith Butler—emphasizes that tourist performances are re-enactments of prior performances. As reiterations which necessarily differ across situational contexts, a possibility is opened for resistance on the part of tourists to the normative identities and normative values associated with the typical tourism experience. On the one hand, Edensor argues, it is true that the tourist industry materially organizes the space in an attempt to regulate, and standardize, each performance given by visitors (2000, 326; see also 2001, 71). Citing the work of Judith Adler, Edensor notes how each tourist is guided in advance to repeat normative performances, through the use of “programmes, brochures, accounts and guidebooks” (2001, 71). On the other hand, despite the efforts of the tourist industry, each performance necessarily differs as a situated and singular act; as Edensor puts it, “performance is an interactive and contingent process” (72). Because of this, there is the potential for a tourist performance to disrupt the regulatory expectations of the tourist managers (75–77).
Because the production of tourism necessarily relies on the repeated behaviors of active participants, there is always a possibility for disruptive practice. Like that of Butler, Edensor's version of performativity theory suggests that the very nature of tourism—the repetition of visits to particular “sites/cites”—involves potentially disruptive elements. Regarding the repetition of normative tourist spaces and experiences, Edensor notes that “this (re)production is never assured, for despite the prevalence of codes and norms, tourist conventions can be destabilized by rebellious performances” (60). In fact, Edensor challenges a binary logic which would characterize iterations are either normative or disruptive (78), noting instead that the variety of performances available to tourists can be “ambivalent and contradictory” (78).
Edensor points out that it is often the case that the prescriptions of the tourism industry are followed “unreflexively” (62). When challenged, however, not only are normative tourist practices and experiences potentially disrupted, but so are the social identities normatively associated with tourism. As Edensor recognizes, “tourist performance maps out individual and group identities” (71). Given that these identity categories are in fact re-cited through tourist practices, there is the possibility that resistant or subversive practices can dislocate them.
Edensor thus argues that despite the best efforts of the tourist industry, with several powerful media technologies at their disposal, there is always the “potential for innovative performance” (79). Edensor (2000) has also shown that performances given at a tourist site can vary on a number of differing factors, including the nature of the tourist space, the amount of regulation imposed by the management of the tourist site, and the varying abilities of tourists to give normative or unexpected performances (325-27). Given this variation in “performative processes,” he argues that the “symbolic values of sites” are always in the process of being “ceaselessly reconstitute[d]” (326). These insights regarding tourism have a general affinity with a thesis of this book—that re-citational, performative practices on the part of consumers have the potential to dislocate normative values and identities.
In addition to Edensor, other theorists have emphasized the potential of tourist practices to disrupt the normative meanings and identities within the industry. Cohen and Cohen (2012), for example, in their review of recent tourism research, reach a similar conclusion regarding the potential of the performative to dislocate norms and values. As they put it, citing the work of Obrador, Pons, and Carter, “performatives do not only (re)produce social entities, they can also critically counter hegemonically imposed public sites or attractions, especially through acts of resistance” (2184). Citing Minca’s research, Claudio Minca and Tim Oakes (2006) also note that “while the performativity of tourist 'places' seeks to make them unreflexive stages where subject-object binaries are maintained and where particular experiences are regularized and commodified, that performativity always renders this process of order and control incomplete and vulnerable to disruption” (11). By extension—and relevant to the thesis of this book—such resistant practices found in the tourist industry can also disrupt the market or exchange value of the tourist “experience.”
In addition, Edensor suggests that much of what we are discussing in the specific example of tourism—namely, the power of the performative to disrupt normative identities and values—also applies more generally to everyday life in post-industrial cultures like the United States or United Kingdom. Edensor points out that for John Urry, “we are tourists much of the time whether we like it or not” (61), as contemporary culture “obscures the distinction between tourism and the everyday” (61). If, as Edensor argues, performative practice is potentially disruptive of the regulatory norms of tourism, and everyday life is becoming less distinguishable from tourism, then we re-arrive—through Edensor's work—at Judith Butler's point regarding how re-citation practices in everyday life can disrupt normative identities and values. Precisely because, as Edensor puts it, “the everyday is . . . the realm of repetition” (61), the re-citation of cultural commodities and commodified experiences always involves the potential for resistant and disruptive performances.
In considering how the concept of performativity has been, and can be, taken up within the sociology of tourism, we have seen that one discourse regarding the performative practices of tourists suggests that tourists themselves co-produce the “presence of value” at tourist sites. This discourse seems to align with that typically found in the contemporary marketing literature, which suggests that consumers co-produce the “value” of goods and experiences in the contemporary post-industrial economy. On the other hand, an alternative version of performativity theory as applied to tourism—drawing upon the theory of citationality from Derrida and Butler—suggests that the normative meanings and values typically claimed by the tourist industry are never quite present. This argument—that the performativity of tourist places and identities may dislocate the presence of value in tourism—is especially interesting to consider relative to Eve Meltzer's (2002) work on how tourist space and location is performed relative to absent places.
In the article Performing Place: A Hyperbolic Drugstore in Wall, South Dakota, Meltzer describes the advertising efforts of a drugstore in South Dakota which—going back to 1931—has involved placing “hundreds of thousands” of roadsigns in nearby states, as well as in several other countries (162). Meltzer takes an interest in how the value of this tourist phenomenon—as a cultural experience—has been constructed. Meltzer suggests that the fame of the drugstore as a cultural phenomenon has been achieved not so much through the delivery of goods or experiences in a particular spatial and temporal location, but is “present” only inasmuch as it is semiotically constructed relative to other places. In other words, the drugstore's “being there” (165) is not solely about being fixed in time and space, but its “location” is better thought of as a performance which dramatizes its position relative to somewhere else (166). Meltzer, citing the work of Christian Metz and Jacques Lacan, notes that all signification involves the “presence of an absent referent” (166). In this example, the drugstore becomes “present” as a world-wide phenomenon inasmuch as it is advertised from “unlikely locations such as Pakistan . . . , Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Germany, among others” (162).
Relevant to this book, we can see that the “exchange value” of the drugstore “brand” has been constructed by being situated relative to other places—its experiential value has been promised by advertising from other locations. In Derridean terms, its value is not quite present, but rather is continually deferred—that is, its value as a brand is continually promised but not actually delivered. Meltzer points out that if tourists are not to be disappointed upon actually arriving in the geographical location, they must instead find value from participating in the “hyperbolic” experience of advertising itself—the semiotic, rather than cartographical, “space.” Meltzer clearly shows that its value has been constructed from its outside—from another, differentiated “context” such as Pakistan or Germany. The tourist experience is thus derived relative to the context of the other, with which it is grafted in the materiality of the advertisement—in other words, the alterity from which it is advertised. Meltzer thus shows that the value of the cultural experience is actually never really present in a particular cartographical location.
In the same sense, cultural commodities do not derive their value from what they deliver when purchased and experienced by consumers in a particular spatial-temporal location; rather, consumers participate in the semiotic space opened in the distance between the commodity and its advertisement. It is the advertising, located in a different context, which promises that the commodity will valorize the referential context of self upon “arrival.” We again, in Meltzer’s work, see a critique of “place” as a self-enclosed site for the delivery of valued experience. As Coleman and Crang put it in a commentary on this article, “Place is, as it were, disseminated through these signs” (2002, 15).
In his work, Crang (2006) attempts to deconstruct the notion of “presence” in tourism studies—both the presence of the tourist, and that of the site (63). He notes that “the tourist seeks to travel to be present at a place, but as we examine those places we find they are shot through by absences where distant others, removed in space and time, haunt the sites” (49). If neither the tourist nor the visited site can be considered as entirely present, and are indeed constituted through a relationship with absence, then—by extension—the value of the tourist experience is never quite delivered. Hypothetically, then, if Wall Street traders were to assess the value of the drugstore’s brand, for the purpose of assessing the market value of the company—we can see that the value being measured is not quite “present.” While the measurement purports to measure the presence of value in the market, this effort actually involves trying to quantify the allure of a promise—the semiotic claims to value which tourists chase from sign to sign.
Investors and managers attempt to extend the temporality of the “presence” of exchange value toward the future citational practices of consumers. In order to maximize the exchange value of language in the future, they attempt to anticipate, and to shape, how identity will be constructed. This process involves not only anticipating the marketability of language—as a citational resource—but also performatively bringing about particular citational practices. Callon (2007) has argued that economic investors are guided in this effort by formulas developed by economists. He suggests that the work of economists—by influencing investments and product development decisions—become performative of the economy itself. Future projections regarding anticipated value, as measured through the application of economic formulas, can drive product and brand design, as well as marketing and investment decisions. In this sense, the economic measure becomes performative of the economy itself.
As firms attempt to invest in the marketability of language in the future, and bring about exchange value through the design of particular citational resources, consumer input is solicited. Several studies have shown that marketers increasingly appropriate from the subcultural lifeworlds of consumers in the design of their products and brands. Consumers thus “co-create” value with firms (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004), and assist in producing the citational resources which will be used in identity construction practices. As consumer lifeworlds expand on and alter traditional identity categories—in today's postmodern culture—firms incorporate and accelerate these changes with cutting-edge citational resources. In addition, corporations and consumers not only co-create individual citational resources, but also co-create value using branded environments within which consumer citational practices can unfold—as in the case of the Internet gaming industry.
Social identity and affiliated values are not only interpellated from the material forms of individual utterances, but from constellations of meaningful materialities. In the advertising and business literature, the term “consumption constellation” has emerged to refer to a group of products which are typically associated with a particular social identity (Englis and Solomon 1996, 185; see also Englis and Solomon 1995). A “cluster” (Englis and Solomon 1996, 185) of products together allow individuals to align their identities with those of particular subcultures.
For Englis and Solomon, marketers and managers should understand the ways in which products are perceived to be “complementary” (185) with each other, and, as a grouping, be affiliated with various “types” of people and social roles. Their recommendation (187–89) is that firms might, for example, design advertisements, sponsor events, solicit celebrity endorsements, find product placements, or engage in collaborative marketing efforts in order to achieve a consistency of desired “symbolic associations” (189) with particular products. The concept of “consumption constellations” is thus useful in describing the ideological processes involved in the contemporary U.S. economy, particularly as it affects consumer identity construction processes.
In chapter six, however, the alternative notion of “aesthetic constellations” of materiality will be used to develop the critique of the contemporary cultural economy—as opposed to its mere description. The term “constellation” has been used in the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, who attempted to show how both art, and art criticism, could dislocate normative meanings. In the next chapter, their argument is extended from the aesthetic dislocation of meaning, to the potential dislocation of value—as it is brought into a framework of performative citationality. This version of performativity theory differs from that emerging within marketing and business, in that the emphasis on citationality opens a space for the critique of the “presence” of exchange value. In other words, while “consumption constellations” may generally re-cite the normative frame of exchange value, the recontextualization of cultural commodities into “aesthetic constellations” may have the potential to disrupt it.
In chapter six, then, it will be argued that in the case of aesthetically configured material forms, the interpellation of both valuing contexts and social identities becomes ambiguous. When value contexts are disrupted, subjects cannot be clearly aligned with any imagined valuing community. In the experience of “aesthetic negativity” (Menke 1998, xi), no interpretive context can be interpellated which clarifies the value of either the citational resource, or the identity and values of the subject. While it is true that such aesthetic re-configurations cannot be controlled in advance by subjects, it is also true that certain citational resources are more or less conducive toward “breaking” the normative valuing frames which are interpellated from them. Such aesthetically configured citational resources thus make the interpellation of the exchange value frame problematic.