Ryan Schram's Anthrocyclopaedia

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====== Week 10—Communication as commodity production ======

===== Week 10—Communication as commodity production =====

**Main reading:** Jones (2021)

**Other reading:** Blum (2009); Gershon (2023); Gershon (2022)

We return to an earlier topic of communicative labor and explore the connections between discourse and capitalist economies.
 

## Language must be used—Speaking implies a speaker and addressee 

Let's return to some concepts we encountered early on. 

Every utterance takes place in a specific here and now, and will to some extent index that here and now. 

> An essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance is its quality of being directed to someone, its addressivity. As distinct from the signifying units of a language—words and sentences—that are impersonal, belonging to nobody and addressed to nobody, the utterance has both an author (and, consequently, expression, which we have already discussed) and an addressee. (Bakhtin 1987, 95)

 

> addressivity, the quality of turning to someone, is a constitutive feature of the utterance; without it the utterance does not and cannot exist. (Bakhtin 1987, 99)

When language is used, it brings into being the *I* of its speaker and the *you* of its addressee. 

All utterances have a degree of indexicality that depends on the here and now of its production, and this includes its *I* and *you*. 

This relationship is reversible. The speaker and addressee of an utterance come into being as subjects in being posited by an utterance (see Benveniste 1971a,b). 



## And yet a speaker always uses other people's discourse

And yet, as Bakhtin also writes: 

> [T]here are no “neutral” words and forms—words and forms that can belong to “no one”; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. (Bakhtin 1981, 293)

We come into being by speaking, but there are no words that belong to no one when we do. There is no such thing as "your own words"! Somebody better tell the Office of Academic Integrity!

## Important terms related to this topic

* Genre

* Voice, figure of personhood (Bakhtin 1981, Agha 2005)

* Participation framework (particularly, author, animator, principal; Goffman 1981, 144; cf. Irvine 1996) 




===== References =====

Agha, Asif. 2005. “Voice, Footing, Enregisterment.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1): 38–59. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.38.

Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 259–422. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press.

———. 2023. “Bullshit Genres: What to Watch for When Studying the New Actant ChatGPT and Its Siblings.” //Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society// 47 (3): 115–31. https://doi.org/10.30676/jfas.137824.
	
Benveniste, Emile. 1971a. “Subjectivity in Language.” In Problems in General Linguistics, translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek, 223–30. Miami Linguistics Series ; No. 8. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press.

———. 1971b. “The Nature of Pronouns.” In Problems in General Linguistics, translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek, 217–22. Miami Linguistics Series ; No. 8. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press.

Blum, Susan D. 2009. //My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture//. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7591/9780801458408/html.


Gershon, Ilana. 2022. “Genres Are the Drive Belts of the Job Market.” //Journal of Cultural Economy// 15 (6): 768–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2022.2087714.


———. 2023. “Bullshit Genres: What to Watch for When Studying the New Actant ChatGPT and Its Siblings.” //Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society// 47 (3): 115–31. https://doi.org/10.30676/jfas.137824.

Goffman, Erving. 1981. “Footing.” In Forms of Talk, 124–59. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. http://archive.org/details/formsoftalk00goff.
 
Irvine, Judith T. 1996. “Shadow Conversations: The Indeterminacy of Participant Roles.” In Natural Histories of Discourse, edited by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, 131–59. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://archive.org/details/naturalhistories0000unse_w1b3/page/130/mode/2up.

Jones, Deborah A. 2021. “Writing Without Fear—or Bylines: Freedom and Frustration Among US American Ghostwriters.” In //Work, Society, and the Ethical Self: Chimeras of Freedom in the Neoliberal Era//, edited by Chris Hann, 1st ed., 7:258–77. New York: Berghahn Books. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781800732261-014.



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