Text as Process Just as research on language structure has led to an emphasis on the crucial role of context and language use in organizing how language in general conveys meaning (see Chapter 2), studies of the ways written texts carry meaning in human societ- ies have similarly demonstrated the importance of contextual analysis to under- standing the significance of these texts. However, following initial work that simply emphasized the importance of context to textual interpretation, recent work is “in the midst ofa radical reformulation wherein ‘text,’ ‘context,’ and the distinc- tion between them are being redefined.”‘ As part of this reformulation, researchers like Bauman, Briggs, and Silverstein have questioned a clear-cut division between text and context, casting doubt on the utility of such a reified and static concept- ualization. Rather, building from a new framework centered on language prag- matics, scholars analyzing written and other texts now focus on processes, analyzing “contextualization” of texts rather than “context,” “entextualization” (the process by which texts are created) rather than “text.”> The action discussed under the rubric of entextualization isa first step in the process by which text is recontextualized; it is simply “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. A text, then, from this van- tage point, is discourse rendered decontextualizable.”® It follows that the word “text” in this sense can refer to units derived from spoken as well as written dis- course, as with a myth that is passed down through oral tradition. Silverstein dis- tinguishes between the “text-artifact, such as a graphic array on the printed page” (i.e., the physical object),’ and the varieties of more abstract text connected with these text-artifacts, for example, the “denotational text” (roughly, what this stretch of discourse “means” in a denotational or semantic sense), which can be differen- tiated from the “interactional text” (again roughly, what this stretch of discourse “means” as an instance of social interaction: what it “does” socially).* In this book, I generally distinguish the text-artifacts of legal cases by referring to them as “writ- ten texts,” as opposed to discussions of text or textuality, or of the “meaning of texts” in a more abstract sense. This new approach to the study of textuality allows researchers to examine the dynamic process through which interpreters invoke features of texts in creating and shaping their contexts of use. Here text does not exist entirely apart from context, as something that is then acted upon by contextual factors; rather, features of the text influence and form a part of interpretive context. This new approach problematizes the creation of texts as detachable chunks of discourse, asking about the process by which speakers segment discourse into texts that can then be removed from one context (decontextualized) and put into another (recontextualized). Note, as well, that the move to examine process also highlights human agency to a greater degree, reminding us always that texts are created and recreated through people’s actions and interpretations. @ scanned with OKEN ScannerOne need only think of the process by which legal texts become precedents to understand this approach. An important aspect of the authority of the legal opin- ions issued by U.S. courts is their appeal to prior cases as precedents. Thus, a judge writing a new legal opinion will commonly draw on previous cases; each citation or quoteis essentially a claim that this new decision rests on previously established principles and law.’ It would be possible to understand the text of a case that is invoked as precedent as a statically conceived entity that exists apart from context— a chunk of case law easily extracted and placed in various settings. This kind of static model might indeed proceed to consider the role of context, but it would begin by assuming the unit of analysis—the precedent—as prefigured, defined apart from its contexts. Even if the meaning of that static text is thought to de- pend on some aspects of context—typically the “original” context of its writing— the precedent would nonetheless be thought to exist apart from any subsequent invocation. Instead, the new reformulation emerging from linguistic studies would understand the creation and use of precedent as a complex interactive process wherein our very perception of the original text as a precedent depends on a segmentation of some part of the precedential text that removes it from its setting in the prior case and recontextualizes it in a subsequent legal case. It is in a very real sense not a precedent until it is reconstituted as such. In this creative process, the precedential text as it is now conceptualized is in one sense recre- ated and reconfigured." At the same time, aspects of the precedential text (includ- ing features of the prior context it is deemed to carry with it) now shape the new textual context in which the prior text is being invoked. There is a blurring of the line between text and context. Interestingly, legal actors’ self-understanding of this process vacillates between a fairly naive conception (in which the new opinion is really just taking a set precedent from the older case) and one that accepts the idea that invocation of precedent involves an inevitable transformation at some level." The linguistic anthropological framework, as we have seen, also points to the centrality of ideology, of metalevel understandings of what it is we are doing when we use spoken language (see Chapter 2). This is no less the case when the language in question involves written texts. Here as well, researchers have come to see the ideologies of text and language at work in particular settings as crucial to the ii terpretive process." The ideas that speakers and readers have about spoken and written language are not neutral, and they shape how that language is understood and used. Through analyses of the use of written and oral texts across societies, scholars have isolated a core ideology that has governed much of Western think- ing about textuality, an approach that could be characterized as a “referentialist” or “textualist” ideology. This ideology, which is explored below in greater depth, views written texts as in a sense self-contained, as carrying determinate meaning that inheres in the written words themselves. What is central about texts, in this view, is their referential or semantic content, and that content or meaning exists within the writing, the written text. Anthropological linguists and sociolinguists have demonstrated, however, that when written texts are mobilized for human use, they necessarily depend on and create context in order to have meaning." This has drawn increased scholarly at- tention to the way written texts connect with their contexts of use, as, for example, @ scanned with OKEN Scannerwhen the written script of a play is performed. In performances, it becomes quite clear that the meaning of written text is conveyed not only through the semantic content of the words, but also through myriad linguistic features connecting the text to contexts" (frequently to prior contexts as well as to the current one). These features can be as subtle as a shift in intonation patterns or as an attitude conveyed through facial expressions. We can all think of examples in which the “same” word can carry quite divergent meanings in different recontextualizations; thus, it be- comes vital to examine the different social functions that the “same” text might be serving. To make the point more vivid, let us take as an example several possible read- ings of a seemingly identical written text—in semantic terms, the same words. Imagine, for example, a high school teacher intoning with reverence to his class in 2006 the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” Here the performance of an important written political text in the United States conveys a meaning that is only partially dependent on the abstract meaning or content of the words.'5 Who, for example, is the “we” here? What does the use of the present tense “hold” and “are” mean when repeated in this way in this time? The meaning of the written text in this context depends in part on the role of the speaker (teacher), the situational context (a classroom), the purpose of the speak- ing (didactic, and in a sense political), and on many verbal cues indicating that the utterance is to be taken seriously—not to mention many other aspects of the con- text as well. It also depends on a relationship between this context and prior con- texts—minimally, the context in which the original version of this political text was written, but also the ongoing contexts that contributed (through history and in the audience's lives) to its current cultural valence. Implicit in the way that the context of the first writing is invoked (or indexed), there may be a profound mes- sage about a perceived continuity between the original authors and the current readers, an assumed mingled identity in the word “we.”"* (There are likely also many other assumptions invoked here about the relationships among text and various contexts: for example, about the relationship between elites and all of “the people,” and about the use of written text to embody timeless political ideals.) Through his performance of the text, the teacher may be viewed as attempting to impart core values of the polity to which he and his students belong. Imagine now the identical words being repeated by a professor of history whose great-grandparents were slaves and who has just described to her graduate students aspects of slaves’ lives on plantations in the southern United States; picture her repeating these words with angry irony, perhaps, or as an impassioned plea. Do the words mean the same thing as when they were uttered in our first example? Now who is the “we,” and what does the phrase “all men” mean? What are the messages about the authority of the original authors, about inclusion or mingled identity, about atemporal ideals embodied in political texts, about the just or noble character of the polity, about democracy? In one sense, we could say that the words say the same thing in both of these contexts, that a reduced core meaning is arguably conveyed in both cases. The words may in each case be understood to express a core aspiration for the American pol- ity, and that aspiration could be roughly summarized as a democratic one: that all @ scanned with OKEN Scannermembers of the polity should be regarded as equal, accorded the same level of re- spect, treated with the dignity owed all others. This could be viewed as a “residual” semantic or referential meaning, a portable meaning that is carried from context to context with this phrase. (We can locate this kind of residual meaning even in the most context-dependent words, words such as “this” and “that,” for example. The word “this” standing alone conveys little to us without more knowledge of the context in which it was uttered, and yet we know that it probably referred to an object that was closer to the speaker than any object introduced by the word “that.” This sense of reference to something closer rather than farther isa residual seman- tic, or context-independent meaning that is part of our interpretation of the word “this” wherever it is used, despite its heavily indexical or pragmatic character. However, to understand the meaning of any particular use of the word “this,” we need to know a great deal more about the context in which it is being used.) In similar fashion, we can point to a core semantic meaning carried by the phrase “all men are created equal.” However, this residual acontextual meaning does little to elucidate the full-blown import of the words as spoken in the two contexts described above, and focusing on this context-independent meaning would leave us with little understanding of what each utterance actually “meant” to its speaker or audience. A textualist or referentialist ideology would focus our at- tention on such residual, decontextualized aspects of meaning, to the exclusion of the more contextually dependent aspects of meaning. However, anthropological lin- guists and sociolinguists have convincingly demonstrated that such an approach cannot accurately map how language conveys meaning; language is always relying on both semantic (decontextual) and pragmatic (contextual) features to accomplish this. Thus, it is necessary to combine attention to the meanings that are carried across contexts through use of written texts with attention to the fact that textual meaning is always dependent on context. This requires that we take account of the continual process of extraction and recontextualization of the meaning of those written texts, a process wherein what appears to be the same text changes and takes on somewhat different meaning by virtue of new connections with novel contexts (i.e., through heavily pragmatic or contextual aspects of meaning). This view of textuality and written texts leads us to ask not only about the sta- bility of written language across contexts, but also about how chunks of text become extractable from their foundation in a particular written version, decontextualized and recontextualized, in a highly social and somewhat destabilizing process. Through what kind of process can judges extract phrases and portions of previous case texts? Can they pick any old words out; can they transpose or alter the words; do all sets of words from previous cases carry similar weight? And what is the overall ideology of texts, writing, and language that gives any weight at all to some extracted chunk of verbiage derived from a text written at a previous time under different circumstances by certain judges? At the same time as they have argued for studying the detachabil- ity of texts from previous contexts, however, language scholars like Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs have also stressed that we should pay attention to the material that “the recontextualized text bring(s) with it from its earlier context(s).”"’ Thus, in addition to maintaining some decontextualized general meanings that are more readily detached from specific historical contexts, ongoing recontextualizations of @ scanned with OKEN Scannerwritten texts may also continue to rely on aspects of their previous contexts of origin and use for the more specific, context-dependent meanings they convey in subse- quent contexts. In reusing the phrase “all men are created equal,” for example, some subsequent authors might intend to invoke features of the social context in which these words were originally written. Rather than expressing a general aspiration for the polity, they might say, perhaps this phrase should be taken as stating quite specifically that only men (and not women) are created equal. How and whether aspects of previous or current contexts should form part of the meaning of texts when they are recontextualized through subsequent use is obviously a highly ideo- logical matter, as anyone following the debates over so-called original intent and the U.S. Constitution can attest. Thus, our analysis of the processes by which texts are reused and reconfigured in new contexts inevitably brings us to a fuller con- sideration of ideologies of language and text. Ideologies of Text Chapter 2 introduced the idea that ongoing spoken linguistic interactions are shaped by ideologies of language (i.e., the ideas that speakers hold about how lan- guage works). My sense that what is happening is a conversation (or an argument, ora lecture) affects how I behave in a linguistic interaction, and this sense, in turn, is based on ideas about what a conversation is, what it is we are doing when we interact through language, and so forth. Subtle norms of communication, often operating somewhat reflexively rather than consciously for speakers, are everywhere at work when we convey meaning through spoken language, and these norms are deeply imbricated in the sociocultural systems in which speakers live. Linguistic ideology plays a formative role with written language as well, as we noted in pointing to the centrality ofa referentialist or textualist ideology in West- ern society. One domain in which the importance of this kind of ideology becomes particularly obvious is that of schooling, a setting in which children receive their formative training in reading written texts. Studies of the initial years of soi a tion in U.S. educational institutions have identified a shared textualist ideology that underlies the dominant orientation imparted to schoolchildren." In U.S. class- rooms, teachers approach the meaning of written texts as fixed and transparent, as universally available. Furthermore, early schooling in many U.S. schools employs a conception of literacy as technique, under which interpretation of written texts is a skill to be publicly displayed and evaluated in a context-independent, quanti- fiable (i.e., measurable by grades) fashion.'” Not only the written texts that are read, but even the performances of those texts in class come with their own entextualization preordained, for the institutional context of the schoolroom puts a premium on the extractability of text and performance from context. The goal of the recontextualization of written texts in reading class performances is precisely the decontextualization of the performance in an individual-focused assessment of ability or skill. The key official function of the recontextualizing performance is to demonstrate mastery of this underlying skill. This institutional framing of stu- dents’ recontextualizing performances is an exercise of social power with profound consequences.?? @ scanned with OKEN Scanner