48 Similarity
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 is a 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).”^17 Thus, in
addition to maintaining some decontextualized general meanings that are more
readily detached from specific historical contexts, ongoing recontextualizations of