- Bauman and Briggs, “Poetics and Performance,” 76–78. This is one example of
how the “metapragmatic” level plays an important role in structuring communication. - As Silverstein notes, reading a written text is “a socioculturally contextualized
practice of entextualization, which demands its own ethnographic account.” Silverstein,
“Secret Life of Texts,” 81. To be interpreted by readers, the written text-artifact
stimulates an entextualization in an appropriate context; it is the mediating instru-
mentality of a communicative process for its perceiver, for example, a reader of an
alphanumeric printed page such as the one before you. To confuse the mediating
artifact and its mode of production (“inscription”) for a text and the sociosemiotic
processes that produce it perpetuates a particular fetishized substitution. (Silverstein
and Urban, “Natural History,” 2 n. 1)One reason this confusion is not useful is that it obscures the necessary processes of
contextualization that occur every time anyone encounters and seeks to make sense of a
written text. Instead, this conflation encourages a naïve “referentialist” ideology that views
writings as self-contained, as self-interpreting apart from human agency. Any resulting
analysis will lack precision in tracing the role of written texts in semiotic mediation—in
creating relationships among the human beings who are communicating with one another
by means of those writings. It will similarly elide distinctions among the varying kinds of
entextualizations that can emerge from the same written text, thereby losing the analyti-
cal capacity for sorting out how, when, where, and why these variations occur.
- In other words, what we would call “pragmatic” aspects of meaning. Note that
performance is only one modality through which written texts can be entextualized and
contextualized; they can obviously be rendered or interpreted in other formats as well. (And
I use “contextualized” here as a shorthand way of communicating the more involved pro-
cess through which “chunks” of discourse are created as texts [“entextualization”], removed
from one context [“decontextualized”] and used in another context [“recontextualized”].) - And of course, the teacher will not have the original written text-artifact in front
of him or her, nor will the students be referring to it; they will likely have a printed rendi-
tion of this classic written text (or an excerpt thereof) in their textbooks. In this narrow
technical sense, almost no one is reading the “identical” written text, unless they have
borrowed the same book from another interpreter. - By “index,” we mean that it carries significance because it points to its meaning
in context. See Peirce, Collected Papers. - Bauman and Briggs, “Poetics and Performance,” 32.
- Collins, “Socialization to Text,” 203; see also de Castelle and Luke, “Defining
‘Literacy’ ”; Olson, “From Utterance to Text.” - Collins, “Socialization to Text,” 204–206; see also Cook-Gumperz, “Schooling and
Literacy,” 16. - For an in-depth exposition of this dynamic generally, see Bauman and Briggs,
“Poetics and Performance,” 34–38. - Collins, “Socialization to Text,” 224.
- As noted in Chapter 2, the Socratic method has been the subject of controversy
from its inception. It emerged as part of a larger theory of the law that was introduced at
the Harvard Law School in 1870 by Christopher Columbus Langdell. (The story is replete
with symbols significant in the American cultural tradition.) Langdell’s method was mod-
eled on an ideal type of the question-and-answer style of Socratic dialogue, using case-
book readings from appellate cases as the foundation for discussion. After overcoming
some vociferous early opposition, this teaching method soon became the dominant mode
of teaching in American law schools. Stevens, Law School, 59–64. Langdell connected his
Notes to Pages 46–50 243