Cliches

[Alexandre Enkerli]

Jim,

Thinking out loud again, but it's quite useful to me.

This one is another good reference to keep in mind. (It's actually
putting me back on track on some issues I had put on a back-burner...)

Musical improvisation and informal conversations have a lot in common,
even though music is often performance (heightened, marked) while
conversations are unmarked, report-level, «degré zéro». What Parry and
Lord didn't expand upon is that formulas have semiotic roles to play.
They're "salient signs," in the way I tend to think about them. Some
licks in Jazz improv (like some samples in Hip Hop) are easily
recognised by "those in the know" and fitting such a formula where it
doesn't seem to belong is seen as an important dimension of the
performer's proficiency.
Of course, an important difference between music and conversation in
this context (as mentioned by Feld and Fox and described by McLeod) is
that some form of repetition, if not redundancy, is expected in music.
Which is one of the reasons some analysts (say, Lévi-Strauss) see
Jakobson-style parallelism in poetic and other performative discourse
as equivalent to musicality.

I initially reacted to Ron's post on the first point: controversy over
"clichédness." As a French-speaker, it still puzzles me how negatively
"clichés" are viewed among U.S. English-speakers *when people start
evaluating performance* (again, the Word Nerds case was pretty
striking to me). In French, we do talk negatively about «lieux
communs», but they seem to cover broad thoughts, not phrases.
Maybe I'm simplifying too much at this point but it seems to me that a
major difference between the language ideologies with which I am
confronted has to do with "granularity." In one case, short phrases
(and even single lexemes, if not morphemes!) are evaluated negatively
when used. In the other one, "chunks" of text can be evaluated
negatively is they aren't brought as a new idea but the use of, say,
someone else's buzzphrases is evaluated positively by default,
especially if the original author ("coiner") is well-recognised by the
group. My favourite set of examples comes from chanson (folk-like
"message songs," often performed by singer-songwriters). Pretty much
like "popular culture references" in the U.S. (apparently, Family Guy
is full of them), the use of a line from a well-known chanson is often
marked as artful, even in seemingly non-performance contexts like
informal conversation. Similarly (to me), «calembour»-style puns are
positively perceived, as part of seemingly unmarked conversation.
Now, in praise-songs for Malian hunters, there's a whole game of
playing with different people's knowledge of the reference for
"clichés." Formulas are not just used as a way to save time while
thinking up masterful ideas, they're part of an arsenal with which
hunter-singers assess their power over hunters. Far from connoting
"unthinking and uncreative usage," use of formulas is assumed to carry
hidden meanings.



On 2/4/07, Jim Wilce <jim.wilce at nau.edu> wrote:
> Alexandre, although the "clichédness" would be a matter of controversy
> between performer and audience, or sometimes between performers, of
> course you are right to invoke musical analogies. I mention "melodic
> textuality," i.e. the repeatable, regularized qualities of melody that
> make laments not only discursively but musically recognizable in my 2005
> JLA article.
>
> 2005 Traditional Laments and Postmodern Regrets: The Circulation of
> Discourse in Metacultural Context. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
> 15(1):60-71.
> http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.60?prevSearch=%5Bauthor%3A+Wilce%5D
>
>
> Jim
>
> Alexandre Enkerli wrote:
> > Jim,
> > Thanks a lot for those ideas and references.
> > Important links made between language ideology, author status,
> > intertextuality, interdiscursivity, indexicality, philosophy of
> > language, power relationships, improvisation, tradition as
> > continuity...
> >
> > Equivalent ideas work extremely well in music, especially in
> > situations in which small, easy to remember units ("motifs," "licks,"
> > "quotes") are highly valued. While Jazz improvisation might be an
> > obvious case for such "musical clichés," is there really anything
> > preventing us from thinking about oral-formulaic theory in similar
> > terms?
> >
> > Most of these have become quite prominent in folkloristics, over the
> > years. Especially among those who follow the lines through performance
> > theory. What might be surprising to some is that such an approach is
> > quite compatible with Stith Thompson's notion of "motif" (as opposed
> > to "type") in fairy-tales.
> >
> > Stimulating ideas indeed.
> >
> > Thanks again!
> >
> > Alex
> >
> > On 2/4/07, Jim Wilce <jim.wilce at nau.edu> wrote:
> >> I tried to send this response to Ron Kephart yesterday. Here it is …
> >>
> >> Jim
> >>
> >> I think it's important to recognize here, as in all instances, the role
> >> of language ideologies, and also perhaps to introduce (or at least keep
> >> in mind since all of them might not go over equally well on air) notions
> >> like text, interdiscursive chains, and circulation.
> >>
> >> First, some sort of an ideology of language that views the individual as
> >> author of her utterance, and valorizes individual creativity/authorship
> >> over anything like conventionality. The connections of such an ideology
> >> to broader cultural patterns need not be mentioned here.
> >>
> >> Then, it seems perfectly obvious to me that what we call clichés are
> >> texts and circulate as such, having managed by some feat of
> >> entextualization to move beyond some initiatory event of use, some
> >> baptismal event, and to circulate with more or (increasingly) less
> >> conscious reference back to such an event. In cases where such baptismal
> >> events are mass mediated—and here we have idioms that come into popular
> >> use from, for example, films—users might feel that they add some sort of
> >> luster to their speech by indexically anchoring it to such origins
> >> (Savan 2005).
> >>
> >> Asif Agha's just-released book, Language and Social Relations, provides
> >> excellent background to such issues as interdiscursive chains. On the
> >> circulation of even smaller bits of "text" (as small as particular uses
> >> of "we," see Greg Urban's 2001 book, Metaculture).
> >>
> >> Savan, Leslie
> >> 2005 Popspeak. New York Times Magazine July 10, 2005 p. 16. (You can
> >> find a copy here:
> >> http://andeesworld.blogspot.com/2005/07/popspeak-by-leslie-savan.html)
> >>
> >> --
> >> Striving to teach and publish the best in linguistic anthropology--an
> >> ethnographic approach to the analysis of semiotic and discursive
> >> forms in relation to sociocultural processes
> >>
> >> Jim Wilce, Professor of Anthropology
> >> Editor, Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture
> >> Box 15200
> >> Northern Arizona University
> >> Flagstaff AZ 86011-5200
> >> Bldg. 98D, Room 101E
> >> 928-523-2729
> >> jim.wilce at nau.edu
> >> http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jmw22
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
>
> --
> Striving to teach and publish the best in linguistic anthropology--an ethnographic approach to the analysis of semiotic and discursive forms in relation to sociocultural processes
>
> Jim Wilce, Professor of Anthropology
> Editor, Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture
> Box 15200
> Northern Arizona University
> Flagstaff AZ 86011-5200
> Bldg. 98D, Room 101E
> 928-523-2729
> jim.wilce at nau.edu
> http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jmw22
>
>


-- 
Alexandre
http://enkerli.wordpress.com/