Tilburg University
Chronotopes, scales and complexity in the study of language in society
Blommaert, J.M.E.
Publication date:
2015
Document Version
Peer reviewed version
Link to publication in Tilburg University Research Portal
Citation for published version (APA):
Blommaert, J. M. E. (2015).
Chronotopes, scales and complexity in the study of language in society
. (Tilburg
Papers in Culture Studies; No. 121). https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/upload/b95222c6-7887-4df9-9c71-
0763d66414fc_TPCS_121_Blommaert.pdf
General rights
Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners
and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.
• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.
• You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain
• You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal
Take down policy
If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately
and investigate your claim.
Download date: 09. aug.. 2022
Paper
Chronotopes, scales and complexity
in the study of language in society
by
Jan Blommaert
©
(Tilburg University)
j.blommaert@tilburguniversity.edu
January 2015
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/
1
Annual Review of Anthropology 2015, DRAFT
Chronotopes, scales and complexity
in the study of language in society
Jan Blommaert
Abstract:
Recent developments in the study of language in society have moved the field
increasingly away from linear models towards complex models. The complexity of
timespace as an aspect of what is called “context” is of key importance in this
development, and this article engages with two possibly useful concepts in view of this:
chronotope and scale. Chronotope can be seen as invokable chunks of history organizing
the indexical order of discourse; scale, in turn can be seen as the scope of
communicability of such invocations. Thus, whenever we see chronotopes, we see them
mediated by scales. The cultural stuff of chronotopes is conditioned by the sociolinguistic
conditions of scale. This nuanced approach to timescale contextualization offers new
directions for complexity-oriented research in our fields.
Keywords: Context, sociolinguistics, history, complexity, chronotope, scale
1. Introduction
The conceptual work that I wish to document in this essay must be seen as part of a bigger
effort in linguistic anthropology and adjacent sciences to arrive at more precise and realistic
accounts of an object of study which, by exactly such attempts, is bound to remain unstable
and subject to perpetual upgrading and reformulation. In the most general sense, the issue is
2
one of adequate contextualization of language signs in an attempt to understand their meaning
effects; but as we shall see, precisely this attempt towards adequate contextualization creates
objects that are no longer linguistic in the strict disciplinary sense of the term, but more
generally semiotic, complex objects.
The particular axis of contextualization I shall discuss here is that of “timespace” – the literal
translation of the term “chronotope” designed by Bakhtin in the 1930s (Bakhtin 1981: 84;
Bemong & Borghart 2010: 4-5). Chronotope refers to the intrinsic blending of space and time
in any event in the real world, and was developed by Bakhtin, as we shall see, as an
instrument for developing a fundamentally historical semiotics.
1
As such, and in spite of the
daunting Greekness of the term, it has had an impact on scholarship. The same cannot be said
(yet) of the second concept I shall discuss, “scale” – developed initially to point towards the
non-unified, layered and stratified nature of meaningful signs and their patterns of circulation.
A small amount of work has been done using scale as a conceptual tool, often studies of
globalization.
In what follows, I shall first set the discussion in a broader issue: that of “context” and
contextualization; I shall then introduce chronotopes and scales as potentially useful concepts,
after which I shall merge them with the issue of contextualization and show how timespace
complexity can (and does) enrich work in our fields of study.
2. Complicating context
Notions such as scale and chronotope help us overcome two persisting problems in the study
of language in society. These problems persist in spite of decades of work offering solutions
1
Brandao (2006) discusses the Einsteinian lineage of Bakhtin’s chronotope; Holquist (2010) reviews its
philosophical foundations. Since I shall focus on how Bakhtin’s work can speak to contemporary theoretical and
analytic concerns in linguistic anthropology, I consider these issues beyond the scope of this essay.
3
to them; such solutions, however, are usually relegated to the realm of advanced scholarship,
while the problems are part of most “basic” approaches to issues in our fields.
The first problem is that studies of language in society tend to apply a simple untheorized
distinction in the “levels of context” included in analysis: the micro versus macro distinction.
Discourse analysis of spoken interaction, or the sociolinguistic analysis of individual variables
in speech would typify micro-analysis, while ideologically oriented critical discourse analysis
and studies of language policy and language attitudes would typify the latter. A rough gloss
could be: while “micro” approaches examine how people affect language, “macro”
approaches would focus on how language affects people. The second problem, closely related
to this, is the dominance of one-dimensional models of meaning (cf. Silverstein 1992: 57).
There is a widespread assumption that language in actual social use must yield one
“meaning”, both as a locally emerging behavioral effect pushing participants in a conversation
from one turn into the other and from opening to closing, and as a local denotational correlate
of correct and intentional morphosyntactic work by a “speaker”. This second problem
presupposes a vast amount of shared resources among language users, including agreements
about the conventions governing their deployment.
Note in passing that I used the term “local” here: in our common analytic vocabulary, “micro”
stands for “local” and “macro” stands for “translocal” – spatial metaphors defining a
particular scope of context. And “local”, in addition, also often occurs as a synonym for
synchronic: the things that happen here-and-now in a particular speech event. Space and time
are interchangeable features in the way we talk about analysis; I shall have occasion, of
course, to return to this point.
There is a mountain of literature criticizing the “micro-macro” distinction, very often
targeting the inadequacies of “micro” approaches, which, as I said, persist in spite of such