HISTORY AND PROCESS

1. TIMES AND CONSCIOUSNESS: LAYERED SIMULTANEITY

a. Simultaneity is a rule in discourse, not an exception (Woolard 1998a). The best

example is poetry: when we read a line of verse we perceive the rhythm, the meter, the
phonetics, the word-meanings, and so forth, and we perceive all of these simultaneously in
relation to the whole of the poem (see Jakobson 1960). Furthermore, recent linguistic
anthropological work has shown how linguistic/communicative form and social stratification
collapse into one meaning through processes of iconisation (Irvine and Gal 2000).
Historically older linguistic forms, for example, are often seen as archaic as well as upper
class (cf. Silverstein 2003a). All of this is simultaneity, and meaning emerges as the result of
creating semiotic simultaneity, but we shall have to qualify such processes. Consciousness,
hegemonies. The same motif, that of distinctions between meaningful practices that are open
to conscious elaboration and practices that are not but are rather reutilized, normalized,
performed without conscious planning, is shared by several other scholars.

Pierre Bourdieus concept of habitus (Bourdieu 1977, 1990) is designed to cover the
same set of phenomena: principles which generate and organize practices and
representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a
conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain
them (Bourdieu 1990: 53).

Undoubtedly, we shall find identical attempts at description in many accounts of

ideology in which Gramscis concept of hegemony is being invoked as something which
thoroughly saturates consciousness in such a way as to reduce ideology to the normal state
of affairs. Thus, Fairclough (1989) Strongly emphasises the common-sense aspect of
ideologies, and John B. Thompson (1990) would equally stress the naturalising tactics
involved in ideological circulation (see the discussion in chapter 7).

All of these authors identify ways in which unique, situated activities become
repositories of historical precedents; they all admit that such condensation processes -- long
history condensed in single human activities -- involve restrictions on the scope of what
participants can control so to speak. Part of what people do is conscious production; and
part of it is unconscious reproduction. History does strange things to our consciousness and
knowledge.
 On the development of the social sciences in the post-Second World War era in
Europe, and his work was seminal to the development of world systems analysis (Wallerstein
1983, 2001). His historical oeuvre focused on the so-called longue dure (the long term): the
slow, invisible transformations of systems and societies, which accounted for the limits of
the possible in human life (Braudel 1981: 27). But the longue dure could only be
distinguished by reference to other timescales.

Braudel distinguished between three such layered time-scales: slow time or structural
time (the longue dure); intermediate time,or conjectural time (the time of long cyclical
patterns, e.g. the time of particular political regimes or the cycle of growth and crisis in
capitalism); and the vnement, event-time. The latter was defined as the short time,
measured on individuals, everyday life, our illusions, our Understandings and awareness
(Braudel 1969: 45--46).

The different time-scales need to be seen as multiple and contradictory temporalities

resulting in this vivid, intimate and infinitely repeated opposition between the single moment
and the slow unfolding time (Braudel 1969: 43). Different aspects of reality, consequently,
could develop at different speeds. As an example, Braudel suggests that we imagine being
transported to the era of Voltaire.

Synchronicity, in other words, combines elements that are of a different order, but
tends to obscure these fundamental differences. This, I believe, is an important qualification
of intertextuality. Not everything, which is mobilised in processes of intertextuality, is of the
same order; we also have different levels and scales of intertextuality. There is, it seems to
me, a rather fundamental difference between intertextualities depending on whether or not
such intertextualities invoke historically charged categories of meanings, such as gender,
race, ethnic, or political-ideological categories such as bandit, freedom fighter, terrorist,
conservative, progressive, or radical -categories with a long history of politicized use.
And, consequently, it is important to bear in mind that such sensitive categories may change
in role and value over time due to dure developments Ginzburg argues that judges and
historians apply different categories of facts and truth to events and actions. The former
reduce complex historical developments to strict synchronicity, that of the legal-here-and-
now; the latter attempt to restore the different historical frames in which events occurred.
Consequently, whereas categories may appear straight forward from the perspective of the
judge guilty or innocent -- they may look contradictory and complicated to the historian,
who also has to keep track of the various recategorisations that occur through history.

To summarise the argument made so far: we have to conceive of discourse as subject

to layered simultaneity. It occurs in a real-time, synchronic event, but it is simultaneously
encapsulated in several layers of historicity, some of which are within the grasp of the
participants while others remain invisible but are nevertheless present. It is overdetermined,
so to speak, by sometimes conflicting influences from different levels of historical context.
The different layers are important: not everything in this form of overdetermination is of the
same order; there are important differences between the different levels and degrees of
historicity. As we have seen and shall see in more detail further on, people can speak from
various positions on these scales. The synchronicity of discourse is an illusion that masks the
densely layered historicity of discourse. It is therefore easy, but fallacious, to adopt
synchronicity as the level of analysis in discourse analysis, because we run the risk of
squeezing the analytically crucial differences between the layers of historicity in a
homogenised and synchronised event, thus having to make either--or decisions on aspects
of meaning that occur simultaneously, yet are of a different order.

2. CONTINUITIES, DISCONTINUITIES, AND SYNCHRONISATION

An awareness of layered simultaneity in texts turns discourse into a complex, historically

layered, and overdetermined object. The different layers of historicity to which people can
orient, and from which they can speak, create enormous amounts of tension between
continuity and discontinuity in meanings, between coherence and incoherence in discourses. I
have tried to capture these tensions in an imagery of different speeds between archives and
orders of indexicality, the former being wider in scope and higher in scale than the latter, and
both developing asymmetrically in such a way that there will be degrees of overlap while
they need not be coterminous at any time. Such tensions are often synchronised, seen as
differences within one single scale, and in this process of synchronization they may be often
translated in political positions articulated in language use.