LANGUAGE

&
COMMUNICATION
Language & Communication 27 (2007) 320–335
www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom

Recombinant selves in mass mediated spacetime

Asif Agha *

Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, 323 University Museum, 3260 South Street,
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6398, United States

Abstract

Bakhtin proposed that novelistic ‘‘chronotopes’’ (depictions of place-time-and-personhood)

implicitly frame readers’ acts of construing a novel’s plot and explicit content in ways that potentially
transform everyday chronotopes presupposed by readers. Generalizing from the case of novels (and
other genres of written discourse), this article develops an account of ‘‘cultural chronotopes,’’ namely
depictions of place-time-and-personhood to which social interactants orient when they engage each
other through discursive signs of any kind. Particular attention is given to a chronotope termed
‘‘mass mediated spacetime’’ and to a feature of subjectivity (the formation of ‘‘recombinant selves’’)
characteristic of the mass-mediated public sphere. The chronotopic phenomena explored in the seven
accompanying articles (this issue) are discussed in the light of these proposals.
Ó 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Keywords: Mass media; Subjectivity; Social relations; Chronotopes; Public sphere

In taking up the comparative study of chronotopic representations, the articles in this

collection show that entextualized projections of time cannot be isolated from those of
locale and personhood. Time is not a semiotic isolate. It is textually diagrammed and ideo-
logically grasped in relation to, and through the activities of, locatable selves. Since this
point is already implicit in Bakhtin’s account of the novelistic chronotope, making it expli-
cit is all the more important for the more general case of cultural chronotopes with which
these articles are concerned.

*
Tel.: +1 215 898 7461; fax: +1 215 898 7462.
E-mail address: asifagha@sas.upenn.edu

0271-5309/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2007.01.001
 A. Agha / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 320–335 321

A chronotope is a semiotic representation of time and place peopled by certain social

types. The case of the novelistic chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981) is the special case where
the representation is formulated by a literary text. By virtue of its mass circulation a nov-
elistic chronotope is also a mass mediated chronotope, but this too is a special case. Let us
consider the general case first.
Every chronotopic representation has two essential aspects. It links representations of
time to those of locale and personhood. And it is experienced within a participation frame-
work: The act of producing or construing a chronotopic representation itself has a chro-
notopic organization (of time, place and personhood) which may be transformed by that
act. The transformation may be more or less palpable, more or less significant, but it
always unfolds one participation framework at a time. In the case of mass mediated chro-
notopes, the number of participation frameworks in which the chronotope unfolds (and
hence the number of participants acquainted with its depictions) is sufficiently large that
the notion of a ‘mass’ of persons becomes sociologically relevant.

1. Forms of personhood and participation in the chronotope

Since the term chronotope combines etyma that denote time (chronos) and space
(topos) it is essential to see at the outset that Bakhtin’s conception of the chronotope
(even of the novelistic chronotope) involves more than depictions of time and space. A
chronotopic depiction formulates a sketch of personhood in time and place; and, the
sketch is enacted and construed within a participation framework (or, in the mass med-
iated cases, through diverse participation frameworks semiotically linked by its textual
form, as I now show.)
Bakhtin (1981) observes that ‘[a]lthough abstract thought can, of course, think time
and space as separate entities’ (p. 243), discursive textuality invariably unites them in
two concrete ways. First, a novelistic chronotope locates time within a larger unity: It
links depictions of time to those of space, and to a concrete ‘image of man’, an image
that is ‘always intrinsically chronotopic’ (p. 85). Bakhtin is quite clear that the concept
of chronotope applies to ‘other areas of culture’ (p. 84) as well, though he does not dis-
cuss them in great detail. Second, towards the end of his essay, Bakhtin explores (what
we now call) participation frameworks by linking the novelistic world to its interactional
text. He does this by considering relations between ‘the world of the author’ and ‘the
world of the listeners and readers’; these, he says, ‘are chronotopic as well’ (p. 252).
The novel mediates a connection between two participant roles, ‘author’ and ‘listener-
reader’; the novelistic chronotope connects the world of the author to the ‘chronotopic
situation’ of diverse listeners–readers due to the physical materiality of its textual
form—and, we might add, due to dependent features, such as its intersubjective perceiv-
ability (audibility, visibility), its physical reproducibility across media (vellum, paper,
speech), its convertibility into different experienceable formats (bound book, newspaper
serial, theatrical performance, radio broadcast, film), its historical transmissibility
through a series of recensions, its physical transportability (and thus sale and consump-
tion) across geographic locales—thus semiotically linking moments of experience in
diverse participation frameworks (unfolding consecutively or sequentially, near or far)
to each other in space and time.
Pressing this argument to its limit (to the question of ‘the boundaries of chronotopic
analysis’) Bakhtin concludes that all semiotic representations are chronotopic because they
322 A. Agha / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 320–335

occur in space and time (and, we might add, within participation frameworks). His reason-
ing is this: In order for ‘meanings’ to be experienced by persons a representation ‘must
take on the form of a sign that is audible and visible’ to participants. Insofar as represen-
tations have a ‘temporal-spatial expression’—that is, must occur as sign-tokens in space
and time in order to be experienced—they connect the chronotopes they depict to the
chronotopes in which they are experienced. Hence ‘every entry into the sphere of meanings
is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope’. This point remains elusive
unless we focus on the second feature of chronotopic representations noted above. The
gateway is a participation framework.
The participation framework of a representation may be small or large, depending on
semiotic medium and genre. In the case of dyadic conversation it consists of two people. In
the case of a TV broadcast, it often consists of millions of people who form its mass med-
iated audience; here the participation framework is geographically dispersed but semioti-
cally unified by the audience’s orientation to a common televisual message at the moment
of reception. Such moments can also be linked to each other through communicative
chains into processes which, through the inter-linkage of smaller scale semiotic encounters
and participation frameworks, yield larger scale sociohistorical trends (Agha, 2007, pp.
64–83).
The circulation of chronotopic representations through artifacts and genres has obvi-
ous social consequences. For instance, a chronotopic model of a period can come to be
accepted by many persons in that period, but resisted by others; or it may formulate an
official picture in some genres, yet count as raw material for humor in others. The dis-
pute between Darwinians and Creationists is a dispute about which competing chrono-
tope (‘evolutionary history’ or ‘biblical time’) better accounts for the place of parties
to this dispute within the Order of Things; each chronotope informs an official picture
of the world (linked to canonical texts and institutions) in one circle, and is an object
of derision (and sometimes rage) in the other. More generally, whether or not a chrono-
topic model is widely known, is felt to be legitimate, is uniformly accepted by those
acquainted with it, or whether it fractionates into positionally entrenched variants, the
process as a whole proceeds as a social process through modes and moments of partici-
patory access to the model itself (i.e., through semiotic activities that unfold within par-
ticipation frameworks) and through forms of alignment to that model (or variant) to
which participants orient in some modality of response (registering uptake, maintaining
its presuppositions, countering its features, proposing alternatives, etc.) through their
own semiotic activities. Chronotopic contrasts become most vivid when they are
voiced—as in the dispute between Darwinians and Creationists—as contrasts among
institutionalized forms of life.

2. Contrast, unity and ideology

The concept of chronotope is of vanishingly little interest when extracted from a frame of
contrast. And, it finds its most pressing utility in the problematics of cross-frame alignment
(discussed below). When extracted from a frame of contrast, a chronotope is a ‘possible
world’. But every utterance projects a deictically configured possible world (Agha, 2007,
pp. 37–54). It is the re-configuration of such projections into higher-level textual uni-
ties—and, in turn, their habituation and ideological codification into genres, practices,
‘fashions of speaking’ (Whorf, 1956; Silverstein, 2000), and the institutionalized forms of
 A. Agha / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 320–335 323

life to which these give rise—that provide the most sociologically salient frames of
contrast.1
The dominant frame of contrast in Bakhtin’s account is the contrast between known gen-
res of the novel.2 But he also contrasts novelistic chronotopes with the chronotopes of every-
day life. For instance, he argues that, through his literary treatment of the human body,
Rabelais seeks to disaggregate the ideological chronotopes of the medieval world (‘the feudal
and religious world view’, and, in particular, ‘those remnants of a transcendent world view
still present in it’) and to replace it, in the space of novelistic depiction, with ‘a new chrono-
tope for a new, whole and harmonious man’ (p. 168) by locating the human body in ‘a new
and unexpected matrix of objects and phenomena’ (p. 175) and, thus, by making available
new chronotopic formulations to readers in subsequent periods of European history.
Here the frame of contrast is not a contrast between novelistic chronotopes but a contrast
between chronotopes of the novel and those articulated through everyday representations,
whether these be the folkloristic chronotopes presupposed (by Rabelais and his readers) in
the historical period of novelistic writing, or the cultural chronotopes made available by the
novel and subsequently assimilated as forms of common sense (into non-hierarchical, non-
transcendent, post-religious outlooks) in later European history. It is this contrast between
everyday and novelistic chronotopes to which Bakhtin alludes in the opening sentence of
his essay—where he speaks of literature as ‘assimilating real historical time and space’ and also
of articulating ‘actual historical persons in such a time and space’ (p. 85)—and to which he
returns towards the end of the essay in passages like the following: ‘Out of the actual chrono-
topes of our world (which serve as the source of representation) emerge the reflected and cre-
ated chronotopes of the world represented in the work (in the text)’ (p. 253); and the latter, we
might add, once created, inform the ‘chronotopic situations’ of those exposed to the text, as
frames of reference for subsequent—often ideologically saturated—forms of life. This point
can, of course, be generalized beyond the novel to any form of entextualized representation.
Chronotopic depictions are formulated by a vast variety of text-patterns and genres in
events of discursive interaction. Although such depictions draw on ideas of place, time
and personhood that are presupposed by current participants, they contrast with them as
depictions, frequently transforming and re-ordering the presuppositions with which they
contrast. The difference is most frequently experienced by language users as figure-ground

1
That is, the level of lexemic deixis, while analytically necessary, is by no means analytically sufficient for
uncovering and explicating chronotopic formulations in text. For instance, an obvious reason that chronotopic
formulations link time to place and personhood is that temporal deictics routinely co-occur in utterances with
place and person deictics. Bakhtin himself focuses extensively on place, time and person deixis in his discussion of
the novelistic chronotope. However, more elaborate and coherent patterns of chronotopic formulation emerge
through other levels of textual organization, such as patterns of textuality through which event-episodes are
metrically configured into ‘plot’ and ‘story’ structures having distinctive types of recipient-design, and through
forms of ideological reanalysis (Bakhtin speaks of different novelistic genres as having distinct ‘ideologies’)
whereby metrically configured text patterns are linked to normative participation frameworks and given unified
generic meanings. In the case of cultural chronotopes more broadly (i.e., leaving the novel aside as a special case),
forms of deixis are re-configured into chronotopic formulations by both text-patterns and cultural ideologies, as I
show in my discussion of the articles by Davidson and Lempert below.
2
By appeal to this frame of contrast, Bakhtin distinguishes a number of major novelistic chronotopes,
contrasting them with each other by contrasting their temporal aspects (adventure time, everyday time,
biographic time), their spatialized landscapes (the alien world, the exotic), the principal sites and settings where
characters encounter each other (the road, the salon, the castle), and the forms of subjectivity with which they are
endowed (a changeless public persona, an inner private life, a biographically developmental self, etc.).
324 A. Agha / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 320–335

contrasts between sketches of place-time-and-personhood formulated by co-occurring text-

segments, as in the contrast between the sketch that a focal text-segment semiotically for-
mulates and that which it presupposes as already ‘in play’ from accompanying co(n)text,
and which, when ratified, it effectively transforms or replaces. Although such contrastive
variation may unfold with limitless complexity in a moment-to-moment sense, chronotopic
contrasts can also become metrically configured—like contrasts among ‘voices’ (Agha,
2005)—into cumulatively coherent entextualized forms, and, through modes of participa-
tory access to textual forms, can become widely known. Some widely known chronotopes
even acquire widely known standard names, and even become grounded in large-scale cul-
tural ideologies and sociopolitical formations in ways exemplified to varying degrees in the
accompanying articles, as in cases of chronotopic figures of tradition (Lempert), colonial-
ism (Glick), religion (Wirtz), politics (Riskedahl), and periodized forms of national history,
such as West German vs. East German ‘times’ (Davidson), all of which I discuss below.
Ideological formulations can also obscure the way a chronotope works. For instance, a
common ideological step is to suppose that a chronotopic representation is reducible to
one of its fragments—such as a fragment topically prominent in the representation—as,
for instance, when one says that history is about ‘time’. But historical representations
are not merely about time; they also depict places populated by people (inhabiting specific
social formations). They are chronotopic representations of events modeled in terms of
time, place, and personhood (though time is topically prominent when the representation
is called ‘history’). Moreover, historical accounts themselves occur as events in particular
times and places, and, as events, belong to certain chronotopes just as they model others.
The outlines of the chronotope to which a representation belongs may appear far less clear
to the historian than the one which it explicitly denotes—until revisionist history appears
on the scene and corrects ‘the historical record’ (the second chronotope) by locating prior
views of it as the mistakes of ‘an earlier age’ (the first chronotope). History always turns
out to be a relationship between chronotopes, though this is denied by the ahistorical gaze.
The concept of chronotope allows us to see that representations of time contribute to
social history—inform the social lives of those who perceive them—because they are socio-
logically inflected in two essential ways. They cannot be isolated from representations of
locale and personhood (and hence from aspects of personhood, such as models of subjec-
tivity and social relations). And their interpersonal relevance derives from the participa-
tion frameworks in which they are experienced, and through which they are maintained
or transformed—with corresponding differences of scales of relevance in small scale
(face-to-face) versus large scale (mass mediated) modes of semiosis.

3. Recombinant selves

Chronotopic representations enlarge the ‘historical present’ of their audiences by

creating chronotopic displacements and cross-chronotope alignments between persons
here-and-now and persons altogether elsewhere, transposing selves across discrete zones
of cultural spacetime through communicative practices that have immediate consequences
for how social actors in the public sphere are mobilized to think, feel and act.
This process is not without its ideological tensions and paradoxes. Communicative prac-
tices in the public sphere can equip people with a common sense of belonging (to a purpose, a
group, a course of conduct) but also with a common sense of their autonomy and freedom
from the process that forges this sense of belonging. For instance, the felt legitimacy of the
 A. Agha / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 320–335 325

idea of democracy lies not merely in the fact that democracy is the rule of the general will, but
in the presumption that the individual wills who form that general will are, individually and
severally, autonomous of each other; that they are capable of having opinions and making
choices that are both ‘autonomous’ and ‘free,’ that is, are independent of each other and
not themselves already formed by the invisible hand of some voice or institution tugging
and chipping away at their capacity to make choices and form opinions on their own.
What this view ignores permeates it with unrecognized ironies. It ignores the fact that in
any form of social organization—of whatever degree of complexity—the sense of belonging
to a community can only be acquired by individual selves through interpersonal communi-
cative practices. A sense of belonging to the order of Gemeinschaft is as little conceivable
without participation in the local communicative zones of town, church, and bazaar, as
the sense of belonging to Gesellschaft is without trans-local communicative technologies
such as the printing press and the newspaper. The deeper irony is that the sense of self that
gets incorporated through these forms of participation may well be a sense of the self as
autonomous of such acts of communication, so that everyone exposed to common repre-
sentations can end up with the same view of his or her radical uniqueness, and this ideolog-
ical stance can obscure the ways in which one’s sense of self is aligned to those of others.
At the other end lie views that reduce the diversity of forms of alignment to spectral
forms of mass mediated uniformity. For instance, many scholarly efforts to explore mass
mediated social processes—including Benedict Anderson’s (1983) often brilliant account
of the role of novels and newspapers in forging common points of reference for, and forms
of belonging within, large scale national communities—tend to isolate mass mediated
social encounters from the rest of social history in ways that privilege ‘top down’ moments
of mass communication and reception within social history, sometimes implying that such
moments automatically configure forms of social uniformity through common exposure to
the same message (Spitulnik, 1997).
We can sidestep this difficulty by seeing that mass mediated social processes are only
episodically mass mediated, that they unfold through semiotic encounters of diverse kinds,
only some of which are mass mediated.

4. Mass mediated moments and processes

A semiotic encounter is an encounter with signs. An interpersonal semiotic encounter is

one in which persons encounter each other by encountering signs (utterances, gestures, text-
artifacts) that connect them to each other (or mediate their connection with each other) in
some type of participation framework. Semiotic encounters are mass mediated when the
signs that connect persons to each other connect many persons to each other within unified
participation frameworks (through a common orientation to those signs)—though fre-
quently at varying degrees of separation from each other by other criteria, such as criteria
of physical co-presence, mutual awareness, and the like (Agha, 2007, pp. 9–13).3

3
It is worth noting that ‘mass mediation’ is a feature of semiotic encounters of a wider class than those involving
what we nowadays call ‘the mass media’. It is a feature of any semiotic encounter that involves a mass participation
framework, and thereby connects many persons to relatively invariant sign forms, a class that includes rituals
organized as mass ceremonies (Agha, 2007, pp. 68–69). Rituals may be organized by the use of electronic or print
technologies (Payne, 1989) or not involve any at all (Turner, 1967). This definition also allows us to re-think the social
significance of so-called ‘media rituals’ (Couldry, 2003) in a more revealing way, though I cannot pursue that issue
here.
326 A. Agha / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 320–335

A mass mediated social process is ‘mass mediated’ in only some of its moments. It is
mass mediated if one or more of the participation frameworks though which it unfolds
are organized as mass mediated semiotic encounters. For their participants, such moments
are invariably preceded and followed by encounters of other kinds. Both preceded and fol-
lowed. That is: On the one hand mass mediated encounters presuppose prior acquaintance
with cultural forms (e.g., having a spouse, being an employee) to which persons become
oriented in everyday encounters with each other through segments and trajectories of their
biographic lives in which mass media play no role. On the other hand, mass mediated rep-
resentations of such cultural forms (e.g., depictions of spousal relations, of office life) are
recycled and recontextualized in the course of such biographic lives in various non-mass-
mediated participation frameworks (e.g., conversations about or with spouses, conversa-
tions about or in places of work), and also in various semiotic practices that involve
extended trajectories of co-participation (e.g., staying married, keeping a job) in at least
some segments of which mass media play no role.
The study of mass mediated social processes is therefore not the study of mass mediated
semiotic encounters alone. It is necessarily a study of inter-linkages among semiotic
encounters of diverse kinds, some of which may be mass mediated, others merely invoke
mass mediated forms by presupposition, others which do neither, and others, which, while
they do neither, are later depicted in mass mediated forms.
Several of the accompanying articles explore mass mediated representations of social
phenomena that circulate within the societies of which they are representations. These rep-
resentations include figurements of social persons of many different kinds—historical
actors, abstract agents of colonial history, fictional characters, sketches of political subjec-
tivity—that become available to persons in semiotic encounters with mass mediated rep-
resentations, and play a critical role in encounters with others oriented to the same
representations. Mass media representations make the same representations available to
many persons by virtue of their ‘mass’ circulation. Insofar as they contain representations
of personhood they make sociohistorically distributed but semiotically analogous images
of self commonly available to many persons. Yet persons orient to these images through
different frames of participatory engagement, and align their own selves to them to differ-
ent degrees in semiotic behaviors (Agha, 2005, pp. 50–57). In these behaviors, such selves
may be drawn to each other by the usual ‘Laws of Attraction’ (to use the title of a recent
Hollywood film as an eponym for a mass-mediated social fact), but are also drawn apart
by Batesonian forms of schismogenesis. Such recombinant selves pervade the mass-med-
iated public sphere. Indeed, the fact that many persons are oriented to common views
of personhood on a large sociohistorical scale, including commonplace views of the
uniqueness of those who hold those views, is perhaps the central paradox of individuality
in mass-mediated dialogic spacetime.

5. Cross-frame alignments

Dianne Riskedahl’s paper illustrates forms of invited cross-frame alignment in Leba-

nese political rhetoric and their uptake by the general public. In a common view of polit-
ical power, to control the past is effectively to control the present and the future.
Controlling the past is of course only possible through representations of the past. And
when representations of the past are representations of persons, the question of how they
 A. Agha / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 320–335 327

influence the present depends on cross-frame interpersonal alignments between characters

and participants across represented and representing speech frames.
The political leaflet discussed by Diane Riskedahl formulates a set of explicit cross-frame
alignments accompanied by forms of chronotopic displacement. The first part of the leaflet
(lines 1–11) vocatively addresses its readers—through a stacked series of deictically config-
ured definite descriptions—as chronotopically configured social types, whether by empha-
sizing their placement in historical events (To those who resisted the 1982 Zionist invasion,
To those whose sons were kidnapped . . . during the Lebanese war, etc.) or in regions of demo-
graphic and social-categorial space (To the citizens of Beirut, To all Islamic societies, orga-
nizations and forces, etc.). These invocations formulate readers as belonging to a dialogic
chronotope—a narratological order of spatiotemporal depictions—which, insofar as a
reader can locate him- or herself in it (in one or more of these chronotopes), constitutes
him or her as addressee. The next segment (lines 13–21) formulates the event of read-
ing—and the entire ‘current’ historical moment that spreads radially out from it—as just
like the period of the war. The past has become the historical present: Then is Now. This
is followed (lines 23–47) by a stacked series of reported speech and action constructions that
describe the horrors of the war. The next segment (lines 49–65) reiterates the proposition
that Then is Now; these horrors have returned. The final segment (lines 67–73) is an exhor-
tation to its reader—now constituted as a fully elaborated chronotopic figure, one who
identifies with the past, and whose present is also just like the past—to participate in the
duty of confronting this Sharonist . . . band by participating in this massive mass protest.
The reader is now a chronotopically displaced person. And such persons are pliable.
In the context of war and long-term trauma in Beirut, these chronotopic figurements
are not merely restricted to political pamphlets. They walk across the land. The individual
respondents whom Riskedahl surveys define their own chronotopic self-placements in rela-
tion to these figures. The response that Riskedahl calls ‘Rejection’ is any discursive stance
that reactively maintains that Then is not Now; what she calls ‘Retaliation’ is the response
that Then is indeed Now, and that this fact itself requires further retaliation, perhaps mil-
itant retaliation. The third—and most common—stance, ‘Resignation’, is the view that
Then is alas Now. The one committed to this stance is wholly fatalistic about the present,
a fatalism expressed by physical reactions like shuddering, getting flustered, staring
vacantly and paralytically off into space. People in the present are chronotopically dis-
placed into a representation of the past that paralyzes them in the here-and-now. The grip
of these figurements on the public imagination is intense. People who descriptively invoke
particular ‘flashpoints’ of the war (back there and then) are willy-nilly felt to inhabit the
persona of ‘someone seeking to inflame the discussion’ (here-and-now). And politicians
and pamphleteers who invoke these alignments formulate themselves as powerful through
the very act by presenting themselves as persons ‘capable of averting the horror and main-
taining peace’. Such a climate of fear, which depends on chronotopic analogies, displace-
ments and alignments, creates an environment of paralysis, which—at the specifically
political level—is, in effect, an ‘environment of self-imposed censorship’. People fear to
speak of these things because they fear for their chronotopically displaced selves. The
strategies that underlie this form of political control, particularly forms of fear, paralysis
and self-censorship, are familiar to all of us—in this post-9/11 world—from the analogous
forms of chronotopic displacement used by the Bush administration, from whose paralyz-
ing grip we (collectively, as a nation) are only now, and only very slowly, beginning to
awake.
328 A. Agha / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 320–335

Deanna Davidson discusses a rather different type of cross-chronotope alignment, a

case where former East Germans deictically locate themselves with respect to a national
boundary (East vs. West Germany) that no longer exists, and a historical transition that
marks its erasure (post- vs. pre-unification) in order to challenge contemporary mass
media discourses about East and West. Davidson notes that, in Germany today, the for-
mer West and East German states are typically contrasted as ‘paradigms of good and evil
government’ by a mass media dominated by Western values. This moral economy is chal-
lenged by Easterners in a classic ‘counter-discourse’ of the type described by Hill et al.,
1998; where the formulations of a dominant discourse are challenged by groups that view
themselves as disadvantaged by it. Easterners regard themselves as now subject to the
regime of a new chronotope, ‘these so-called West times’, which they themselves reactively
(and negatively) characterize as a time of financial insecurity, superficiality, and alienation,
and which they contrast with a pre-unification chronotope, with which they positively
align, namely ‘GDR times’, a period of security, solidarity, ‘quality’ and political engage-
ment. These chronotopes are, at once, ways of talking about sociopolitical arrangements
and of forging forms of political alignment with them: for Easterners in these new ‘West
times’ democracy may open up freedoms to the citizen, but capitalism takes away workers’
rights to criticize employers, which Easterners enjoyed in former ‘GDR times’; whereas
‘now’ is a time of alienation, ‘then’ was a time of political engagement; whereas ‘now’ con-
sumer goods are plentiful, if cheaply made, ‘then’ was a time of higher quality in cultural
activities, amenities for children, and interpersonal solidarity.
Although deictic contrasts play a role in the formulation of these contrastive positions,
the positions in question are not formulated by contrasts among deictic forms (which are
invariant across the East/West boundary), but by registers of deixis (Agha, 2007, Chapter
6), namely contrastive patterns of deictic reference linked to specific conditions of appro-
priate use and normative participation frameworks.4 Davidson notes that this discourse is
‘not found in mainstream (that is, non-Eastern) public media’ and is ‘unlikely to be used
by a non-Easterner’. It is normatively appropriate to non-public settings, where it formu-
lates a chronotope of post-unification ‘social decline’ and of ‘colonization of the East by
the West’. It is a discourse of nostalgia that is ‘taboo’ in mainstream culture; the breach of
this taboo is considered ‘subversive in public spaces and national politics’. To participate
in this discourse is hence to locate oneself within a chronotopic boundary—a temporality
of decline, a non-public space, and membership in an oppositional minority—that differ-
entiates its speaker from the voice of the mainstream. In contrast, in order to participate in
the national public sphere, all Germans—including Easterners—normatively use the same
pattern of deictic reference to nation and history (which, in private settings, Easterners
may well call ‘Western’), one which formulates explicit deictic reference to a unified Ger-
man state and implicit moral alignment to the table of values (the superiority of West/cap-

4
Unlike registers of deferential deixis, where a single pronoun alternates between plural and singular
reference—across settings that are intimate/status-symmetric vs. formal/status-marked—to index contrasts of
deference (to interlocutor) and demeanor (of speaker), the cases Davidson discusses involve registers of
sociopolitical deixis where a single spatial or temporal deictic alternates between partitive and non-partitive
reference to chronotopic national and historical boundaries—across settings that are private/role-symmetric
(interlocutors both Easterners) versus public/role-asymmetric—to index contrasts of sociopolitical alignment
(with interlocutor) and forms of allegiance (of speaker) to political stances and positions within the order of the
nation-state.
 A. Agha / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 320–335 329

italism over East/socialism) formulated by its dominant mass-mediated discourses. To

participate in such a mainstream public discourse is, as Warner, 1993 notes, to distance
oneself from the ‘residue of unrecuperated particularity’ (1993, p. 241) characteristic of
the private, minoritized self, and to align oneself to membership in a ‘national public’, here
the public sphere of the unified German state. We can now also see that belonging to a
public sphere requires performing a figure of ‘public subjectivity’ whose felicity conditions
include fluency in a set of chronotopic conventions.
The above cases involve ‘political’ formations in the sense that the text patterns which
formulate the chronotopes are ideologically construed and captioned—indeed officially
‘topicalized’ (cf. the discussion of ‘history’ above)—by dominant metasemiotic discourses
as indexing facts of alignment to state-level political formations. Other forms of grouping
can, of course, also be configured through forms of cross-chronotope alignment, and cap-
tioned differently in the awareness of a public.
In the case discussed by Michael Lempert (this volume), text-patterns of reported
speech deixis differentiate two very different chronotopes of tradition in the discourses
of a diasporic community. Both involve distinct text-patterns of reported speech, and dis-
tinct ideological readings of them. Both cases involve uses of a single quotative clitic (a
marker of reported speech deixis) in Lhasa Tibetan. But how can ‘tradition’ get associated
with a quotative deictic?
As a segmental morpheme, the quotative form, s, merely differentiates a represented
speech utterance, X, from a representing utterance, Y, by marking the right-most bound-
ary of X—i.e., by forming the configuration [[X]-s Y]. It thereby distinguishes the
chronotopic frames of represented and representing speech. But it marks no further dis-
tinctions—involving other aspects of this chronotopic boundary, or anything concerning
tradition—at least by itself. For instance, all other reported speech distinctions—whether
the quote is direct/indirect speech, whether quoted speaker is known/unknown, whether
same/different from current animator—are inferred from co-textual semiotic cues.
The same holds for voicings of tradition. Thus, if the represented speech segment is
known to be a quote from a canonical religious text (and this is typically the case in
the speech genre of Geluk dialectical debate) then the participants in the debate frame
(challenger and defendant) are understood as re-animating the voice of religious tradi-
tion. Here, it is the recognizability of the quoted segment, X, as a fragment of a religious
text that semiotically cues the placement of animator in a chronotope of tradition. In the
dispute between challenger and defendant, this chronotopic formulation of self can be
used to gain advantage over interlocutor if the representing speech frame, Y, is zeroed
out entirely, and the voice of the animator thereby seen to merge with the voice of tra-
dition. The cumulative effect of all these cues is to align the animator with the principal,
understood as the religious text (or author, or textual tradition), and to formulate ani-
mator as knowledgeable about it. Since this chronotopic figure depends on multiple
cues, its elements are independently defeasible: If the representing speech frame is not
zeroed out the merger of animator with principal does not occur; if the quoted speech,
X, is not a fragment of a religious text, the principal is not the voice of religious tradi-
tion; if the quoted speech segment is uttered with imperfect command, the animator is
not formulated as knowledgeable.
The northern monks of Namgyal in Dharamsala exhibit precisely these demeanors—
which, when contrasted with the Geluk practices of the southern monasteries—are man-
ifest as positionally contrastive personae. Relative to the southern monks, northerners
330 A. Agha / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 320–335

exhibit apparently disfluent patterns of ‘overuse’ (where the quotative clitic frames speech
not from a religious text) and ‘flagging competence’ (where the usage suggests an imperfect
command of scripture). Lempert finds that the northern discursive practices, occurring as
they do in Dharamsala, a site of touristic activity, are linked to a frame of cultural objec-
tification; they tend to increase under the gaze of tourists and videocameras; and this
increase in relative disfluency appears to mark an ‘antiquing’ of the debate practice
(through an overuse of the voice of tradition), particularly given stereotypes of the monas-
tic field, where northern monks are more closely associated with the preservation of cul-
ture and heritage, and southerners with excellence in debate. Lempert notes that this is
a change-in-progress whose precise social domain and cultural meanings are as yet
unclear. What seems clear, however, is that northern and southern variants of the chrono-
tope of tradition appear contrastively to index the different participation frameworks in
which they are deployed. The chronotopic ‘voice of tradition’ manifests itself in the public
sphere of the monastic field in ways that reflect—and sharpen—the contrastive social posi-
tions of those who deploy it.

6. Voice and chronotope

For Bakhtin, the concepts of ‘voice’ (persona, characterological figure) and ‘chrono-
tope’ are intimately linked, not just because chronotopic depictions include depictions of
personhood, as noted above, but also for other reasons: Both link a frame of represen-
tation to a frame of performance; both are ‘dialogically’ configured, i.e., are diagrammed
by metrical contrasts among chunks of text; and both permit metasemiotic readings that
differentiate biographic-individual from social-collective realities (Agha, 2005). The
remaining papers focus on this relationship, namely the capacity of chronotopic con-
trasts to delineate and foreground figures of personhood (self, subjectivity) of varying
degrees of particularity and abstraction through placement within spatiotemporal
frames.
As Sabina Perrino (this volume) shows, the interpersonal trope that Wolof storytellers
call démarche participative (the act of transposing speech participants into the story frame)
enacts not merely the transposition of biographic individuals but also of social types of
persons across narrated and narrating frames. In her first example, it is Perrino as a bio-
graphical individual who is transposed to the story frame to ‘bear witness’ to the personal
experiences of Ndome, the storyteller—experiences that involve a harrowing ailment (diar-
rhea) recounted in intimate detail. But in the second example it is Perrino as an instance of
the stereotypic Italian smoker (a mass mediated social type of which she, as an Italian, is a
handy, co-present metonym; the fact that she personally doesn’t smoke is irrelevant) that is
transported into the narrative frame and, through a second transposition to ‘type’, is
sequentially assimilated to an even more generic figure, that of a ‘morally undisciplined
and depraved guest’. So it comes as no surprise that, in this second storytelling frame,
the narrated chronotope correspondingly illuminates not the realm of Ndome’s personal
experiences but the way in which traditional Wolof wisdom (with which Ndome is doubly
aligned, as both pedagogue-explicator and current animator) handles the always delicate
task of managing guest-host relations. Universal truths are—chronotopically—the affairs
of generic social types from whom facts of individuality must be effaced, even when—per-
haps especially when—they are fashioned from the raw materials of a current participation
framework. Personal truths become vivid through the opposite technique, the intensifica-
 A. Agha / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 320–335 331

tion of the self’s biographic individuality (even its most intimate experiences), as illustrated
by Perrino’s first example.
Encounters with chronotopes are encounters with characterological figures (or ‘voices’)
embedded within spatiotemporalized (if not always determinately ‘sociohistorical’) locales,
whether real or imagined, with which speech participants establish forms of alignment,
and thus acquire (or lose) delegated forms of positionality (particular or generic) in the
spatiotemporal world they inhabit.
For religious practitioners in Cuba (Kristina Wirtz, this volume), two speech registers,
Lucumi and Bozal, provide tightly contrastive and widely recognized chronotopic formu-
lations of persons in place and history, whether by contrasting the voices of orichas (Afri-
can deities) with those of muertos (spirits of the human dead); or the Yoruba traditions of
Africa with the experience of slavery in Cuba; or, as metonyms of two distinct religious
practices, the transcendent and esoteric sphere of Santerı́a religion with the subaltern
and syncretic practices of Muerteria spiritism.
The interpersonal effectiveness of these chronotopic invocations depends on the current
participation framework in which they are deployed. Such register-mediated contrasts dif-
ferentially inform ‘the everyday interactional chronotope of the ritual event’, infusing the
encounter between religious practitioners and their audiences with otherworldly figures—
voices of deceased bozal slaves, African deities, or laminated variants of the two—that
make remote experiences manifest in the here-and-now, locating participants contingently
present in the current encounter in determinate social relations with mythic/transcendent
or ancestral/historical persons. These cases mobilize and transform social relations in the
here-and-now through what Wirtz calls ‘enregistered memory’, i.e., by invoking register-
mediated voices that are memorable because they are stereotypically indexed by relatively
localizable speech forms.
Figurements of chronotopic forms of personhood can also be much more implicit,
involve much more extended chunks of text, where neither the denotation nor the stereo-
typic indexicality of localizable text-segments establishes their presence. The cases dis-
cussed by Douglas Glick and Peter Haney involve figurements of voice and chronotope
that work entirely through implicit metrical contrasts between extended stretches of dis-
course. Both involve mass-mediated frames, the performance of comedic or quasi-comedic
routines, and in both, the merger and displacement of historical and biographical selves
does much of the interpersonal work.
Eddie Izzard’s comedic routines (Glick, this volume) cover dangerous ground. A British
comedian who pokes fun at American colonialism before American audiences engages in a
task fraught with danger, not only because he is a foreigner, but also because his accent
marks him as audibly British, and therefore potentially aligns the current chronotope of
performer speaking to audience with that of (former) colonizer speaking to (formerly)
colonized.
Izzard therefore introduces the frame of colonial misdemeanor by first poking fun at
British colonialism in India, thus effectively distancing himself from having any stakes in
his British persona. He formulates British colonizers as irrational spoilt children who
speak in upper-class accents, and colonized Indians as justifiably angered adults who
speak in working-class (British) accents, thus aligning himself, in the performance
frame, against colonialism and with subaltern subjects and voices. This frame of fiction-
alized dialogue is then metrically filled with Puritan and Native American voices in the
next skit, where pilgrims arrive in America and, through a comparable chronotope of
332 A. Agha / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 320–335

colonialism—pre-democratic times, alien lands, encounters humorously filled with cross-

cultural ignorance, self-serving caprice, and immorality—amiably proceed ‘to rob the
Native Americans of their lands’. As Glick shows, the production of this chronotope
depends on metrical contrasts both within and across the two skits that Izzard
performs.5
By guiding the audience through a metrically structured series of chronotopic displace-
ments, Eddy Izzard’s performance replaces the initial role configuration with which it
begins (British comedian performing for an American audience) by aligning himself with,
and inviting the audience also to align with, a rather distinct performed figure, one to
which disdain for the colonial injustices of the past (and, by presupposition from the per-
formance frame, the upholding of present-day democratic values like liberty and freedom)
is more important than role alignment with mere, current, categories of national identity
like Briton or American. As Glick shows in some detail, this new role category (one who
upholds liberty and freedom, disdains colonialism) is orchestrated and sustained through a
series of skits in which Izzard artfully inhabits this role, and through which he ensures,
equally artfully, that the audience’s laughter depends on inhabiting it too. And this is as
it should be because audiences are also consumers, who must, before the evening ends,
get their money’s worth.
In contrast, Haney (this volume) shows that Rodolfo Garcia’s karaoke-like relajo per-
formances of Agustin Lara’s musical hits are the culmination of a communicative chain of
processes through which performed figures change and grow through time, and take com-
posite forms that end up, like a cabinet of curiosities, in the living room of the blissful con-
sumer, tampering with that bliss. Garcia uses three famous public sphere figures—Jorge
Negrete, the film star; Agustin Lara, the singer; and Maria Felix, another film star (she
was married to both Lara and Negrete, in turn)—to produce composite sketches of
romantic subjectivity, whose various multi-dimensional individualities have an ironic rela-
tionship to each other. In the relajo performance,6 these characters replay an incident in
Garcia’s own personal life, a biographic encounter with his ex-wife in which she intro-

5
For instance, in clip 2 (where the abstract dialogic partners are a Puritan and a Native American in Colonial
America), the joke’s text completely lacks any referential coherence whatsoever (it is, in fact, a jumbled scatter of
sentences)—unless a second interlocutor is supplied in clip 2 (on metrical analogy with clip 1), an interlocutor who
is allocated zero speaking turns, but whose stereotypic characteristics (as a Native American) are evident from the
utterances of the one who does speak (the Puritan) in clip 2; and whose relationship to the Puritan is metrically
configured as identical to that between the Indian and the Briton in clip 1 (namely, colonized to colonizer).
6
The relajo indexes a distinctive space of social relations in the chronotope of performance. As a category of
ethnopoetics, the term relajo has several related uses. It names (1) a speech register (‘a kind of jocular, insulting
and often obscene speech’) that contrasts with respeto (‘respect’-ful) speech; (2) a framework for distinguishing
social-characterological types (relajiente ‘practitioner of relajo’ vs. apretado ‘tense, tight person’); (3) a
communicative act linked to a distinctive participation framework (an act which ‘takes place in groups of three or
more people and mockingly negates some absolute value or moral imperative’); and (4) a discourse of autonomy
(‘the relajo gestures toward a freedom understood as a subject’s relation of authorship to his or her actions’). It
should be clear that to perform the relajo is to inhabit a specific framework of social relations to referents and
audiences. In Garcia’s rendition, this framework constitutes the performance frame through which a depicted
chronotope (of social relations among quasi-fictive characters) unfolds as humor for its audience. In this regard,
the chronotopic formulation is the very opposite of the case described by Wirtz, where the performance frame
employs registers of religious practice, and the performed chronotope is populated with beings that are
otherworldly yet real (deities and spirits) with whom animators and audiences are drawn into direct contact,
despite the fact that these beings inhabit transcendent or ancestral worlds.
 A. Agha / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 320–335 333

duced him to her companion by calling him her ‘husband’, causing offence to his masculine
dignity. All the characters of the relajo are doubled as composites, so that Maria Felix is a
stand-in for Garcia’s own ex-wife, Negrete for her companion, and Lara for himself.7
These figures have now moved up the scale of chronotopic abstraction into social types.
They start out first as concrete individuals in Garcia’s own private life; then become glitzy
film stars and entertainers, already at a remove from the facts of concrete, mundane exis-
tence; and are made over, finally, into social-characterological types. Such recombinant
types pervade mass media figurements of romantic love—the figure of the cuckold, the
overly possessive lover, the woman who inspires jealousy, and so on—that are familiar
to audiences not only from the chronotope of biography (as analogues of personal expe-
riences) but also in the chronotope of common culture (in shared participant orientations
to them, as in conversations about movies). Haney’s article reveals something of the
method by which the individual talent forges figures of subjectivity—from the raw mate-
rials of biographic and mass mediated experience—that, in turn, have mass appeal in the
sphere of modern artistic consumption. It also suggests that among the many reasons why
they have mass appeal for individual consumers is the fact that both the artist and the con-
sumer engage in common practices—of recycling and recontextualization of experiences—
across biographic and mass mediated spacetime. If mass media representations provide
their customers with a particular technology of living—a stock set of figures, stances
and emotions through which real lives are re-figured and lived—the relajo performance
is both an instance of that type of representation and an ironic metacommentary upon it.

7. Mass mediated spacetime among the chronotopes

If chronotopic boundaries are relevant to discourse participants they are also relevant
to those discourse participants who are social theorists. Different classes of social theory
define their object sphere (the space of social phenomena they seek to describe) by opening
up a chronotopic frame and drawing boundaries around it. What each enables us to do in
its sphere can easily disable us in others.8
As we begin to enter mass mediated spacetime (or, rather, orient ourselves to its exis-
tence; we—i.e., you and I—are already in it, as you read these lines), and consider the var-
ied forms of our living participation in it, certain sources of worry briskly begin to become

7
Their differential identities are established, maintained, and further specified through metrically structured
voicing effects: the first character, Joe/Jorge speaks in higher pitch than the second, Lara/Garcia; and the third
character, who has the highest pitched vocal timbre in Garcia’s rendition, is formulated as a woman; the woman
(the transposed double of an ex-wife and a film star) now plays the generic figure of female vanity who ‘enjoys
provoking two men to fight over her’; the first male is a pliant fool, the other is the aggressive apretado, the
uptight person, who upbraids the others on their failings.
8
The ‘speech event’ (of Jakobson and Hymes) is a chronotopic frame peopled by role categories like sender and
receiver (can you not see them, there, on that famous diagram?), whose boundary is a speaking turn. Goffman’s
‘interaction order’ overcomes this boundary by incorporating many speaking turns of sender and receiver but is
itself bounded as the period of their physical co-presence. The ‘speech community’ (Gumperz) is bounded by
members’ common orientation to norms of speech. The ‘commonwealth’ (of Hobbes) binds its citizens by social
contract, and by common orientation to law and convention, in a zone of relative safety against a counter-
chronotope, the ‘war of all against all,’ which threatens otherwise to well up within its walls. Similarly, many
other types of social theory draw chronotopic boundaries—class struggle vs. classless society (Marx), synchrony
vs. diachrony (Saussure)—that delimit classes of sociological phenomena in ways that draw the practical or
theoretical interests of readers into one or the other of these chronotopes.
334 A. Agha / Language & Communication 27 (2007) 320–335

apparent. The accompanying articles make plain that we—even as we align most avidly to
idea(l)s of autonomy and uniqueness—come to be ‘made up’ as persons, as a matter of
course, of role-fractions that are sedimented within us by semiotic encounters. Beneath
the surface of this glassy essence lie—as yet untheorized—forms of communicative process
through which messages flow back and forth, near and far, folding over the spacetime of
discrete individuality, making selves who have never met partial analogues of each other.
I have tried to show that mass mediated spacetime is not a place or a period but a form
of chronotopic organization of semiotic practices, distinctive in the ways in which it links
frames of representation to frames of participation.
That it involves frames of representation is obvious to our intuitions. No one denies
that mass mediated semiotic processes bring before us motley representations of times
and places and the characters who inhabit them, in both fictionalized and realistic genres
of depiction.
But the outlines of the frame of participation are not obvious to our intuitions. I have
argued that this is so for (at least) two reasons. First, because contemporary ideologies of
the self (such as ideals of autonomy and freedom) prevent a clear grasp of the ways in
which recombinant selves emerge through semiotic encounters, including mass mediated
ones, just as they obscure the forms of social relevance we can assign to their (putative)
emergence within contemporary institutional chronotopes (such as democracy and free
markets), which sponsor these intuitions. And, second, because the frame of participation
itself is not extractable from a contextualized social process in which semiotic encounters
of diverse kinds—encounters with signs, encounters with persons that are mediated by
signs, individual encounters with mass mediated representations (and their ‘civic’ implica-
tions), and (the semiotically special, though, nowadays, demographically widespread and
temporally ubiquitous case of) mass mediated encounters (where forms of mediation
themselves create ‘mass’ participation)—are all linked to each other through routine every-
day activities of diverse kinds on many different scales of personal, interpersonal and
sociological relevance.
Getting clearer about these issues is, I propose, the surest method of grasping the forms
of our participation in the contemporarily dominant chronotope of mass mediated
spacetime.

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