2011 AAA CFP: Performative Economies

[James Slotta]

If anyone is interested in participating in a session we are organizing on "Performative Economies" (see abstract below) for the 2011 AAA meetings in Montreal, please send us an abstract of 250 words or less no later than April 6.  

Luke Fleming (fleminlo at eckerd.edu)
James Slotta (jslotta at uchicago.edu)


Performative Economies

The existence of performative economies, as components of political ones, has long been recognized in work on the maintenance and propagation of register values associated with “prestige” speech, where the naturalized performative “power” of prestige varieties is backed by restrictions on usage of, and socialization to, particularly prestigious forms (cf. Bourdieuvian ‘distinction’). Such interdiscursive limits on the circulation of particular speech forms also informs the performative effects of a range of other, less prestigious, speech types as well. The performative productiveness of obscenities and insults (e.g., in constituting joking relationships) is often underwritten by the avoidance of such speech in other interactional contexts (e.g., with affines). Similarly, the enregistered avoidance of stigmatized ethnic-, regional- and gender-indexing speech variants can underwrite their performative effectiveness in other contexts, where negative evaluations may be transformed into positive values. Such performative economies are not simply a function of ideological typification and reflexive evaluation, though such processes are clearly crucial. Rather, the use of terms like “avoidance” and “prestige” to label speech registers indicates that the performative efficacy of speech often relies on relationships among speech genres and across interactional types. In seeking traces of one speech event in another, this panel solicits papers which theorize how the performative effects of language use in one context are underwritten by similar or contrastive usages (with potentially different performative effects) in other ones.

The panel seeks to contribute to a properly anthropological theorizing of performativity. Linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists have effectively countered the view that the performative efficacy of speech as social action lies only in the referential and predicational properties of neatly localizable expressions, of canonical explicit performatives like “promise”, “baptise”, and “christen”, for instance.  Through attention to non-referential indexicality (e.g., speech registers, politeness strategies, etc.) and the way in which social acts are figurated in the patterning of discourse, they have expanded the scope of analysis far beyond the analysis of “how to do things with words.” The result has been a significant expansion not only in the units and levels of discourse we study but in the range of social acts recognized as performatively constitutive of social identities, roles, relations, and speech event types. And yet despite this enlarged and enriched perspective on language use as a form of social action, performative effects are often presented as arbitrarily related to the linguistic forms that produce them through the lens of ideology-laden reflexive framings. The goal of this panel is to investigate how the performative values of speech are motivated not only by ideological codification but also through relationships between register types, among other kinds of interdiscursive relations. We welcome papers which explore how the performative effects of speech forms, styles, and registers are informed by — emerge from and are transformed by — interdiscursive economies and by such intertextual relations to speech in other contexts.