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characteristics, and within certain text types (e.g. parodies, critical reviews, reports), intertextuality may be more prominent as the text producer must consult the prior text continually and actively. Intertextuality here becomes a cognitive condition in the production and reception of actual texts. Its link with the evolution of genres is one which favours continuity within text types, rather than seeing the development of genres or text types as also originating in hybridity and creative assemblage of conventions and sayables with diverse ancestry (in Kristeva’s work, intertextualities are multi-directional in pointing to antecedences across received fields of social activity or societal domains). Finally, with de Beaugrande and Dressler’s generalized use of the term, explicit indications that a text’s state of intertextuality is instrumental to an understanding of its positioning vis-à-vis the social and the historical-in-discourse have also largely disappeared from view. Their evolution of text types is a functionallymotivated history of forms, not one of ideologically-disposed sayables. Ironically, in the course of their reception of the term ‘intertextuality’, Kristeva (1968) is literally moved to a footnote. Hers is said to be “a narrower use” of the term (1981: 13).
3. Dialogism and heteroglossia in a social-diachronic theory of discourse
If Kristeva is to be accredited for having coined a term and developed a concept which stresses the accumulative, partly self-disguising and transformative nature of discourse throughout history, and, by doing so, situates the literary irreplacibly among the more mundane discourses that populate our lifeworlds, then she is also to be acclaimed for guiding us to the discovery of the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle. With the growing popularity of the term and concept of ‘intertextuality’ came also the growing importance of a set of other concepts which accompanied Bakhtin’s belated admittance to the halls of social scientific fame: ‘dialogism’, ‘heteroglossia’, ‘double-voicedness’, ‘polyphony’, ‘the carnivalesque’.3
With critical discourse analysis, language research ‘restored’ the link with Kristeva, but much more than that, it embraced the writings of Bakhtin (and Vološinov) – with considerable debt to mediation by M. Foucault. Fairclough (1992b: 193–194) sees intertextuality as quintessential to a discourse analysis which seeks “to map systematic analyses of spoken or written text onto systematic analyses of social contexts”. He develops the argument in detail in a review article which focuses on recent studies published in a leading discourse analytical journal. For Fairclough, textual analysis subsumes two complementary types of analysis: linguistic analysis (used here in an extended, functional sense, in which content/meaning-dichotomies have been dissolved) and intertextual analysis. Three imperatives follow: (i) Intertextual analysis shows how texts draw upon
. Bakhtin (1986) uses the term ‘trans-linguistic’ but never used the term ‘intertextuality’.
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orders of discourse, the particular configuration of conventionalized practices which text producers and consumers have available in particular circumstances. (ii) Intertextual analysis draws attention to how texts depend upon society and history in the form of the resources made available within an order of discourse. Here Fairclough echoes Bakhtin in viewing genres as ‘the drive belts from the history of society to the history of language’. (iii) Intertextual analysis also draws attention to how texts transform the social and historical resources, how texts mix and ‘re-accentuate’ genres (discourses, narratives, registers).
Earlier, in Fairclough (1992a), the author introduced a distinction between ‘manifest intertextuality’ (when specific other texts are drawn upon in a text) and ‘constitutive intertextuality’ (how a discourse type is constituted through a combination of elements of orders of discourse; Fairclough renames this type as ‘inter-discursivity’). This distinction results from a certain ambiguity in Kristeva’s writings (indeed, one must pose the question at what level exactly does one situate “les différents énoncés que notre analyse retrouve a posteriori dans les différents discours antérieurs ou synchronique” which Kristeva (1968: 313) talks about). The distinction also echoes different uses of ‘dialogism’ in Bakhtin’s own writing – as the concept occurs a number of times to signify different but related phenomena at different levels of generalization. The first lead (that of manifest intertextuality) surfaces within linguistic enquiry in analyses of ‘local’ utterance-based phenomena such as irony, presupposition, appraisal, reported speech, etc. as intertextual or double-voiced4 in nature, whereas the second lead (constitutive intertextuality) points in the direction of an impersonal history of generic constitution with different degrees of ‘naturalization’ (which keep intertextual traces from view). One may be tempted to conclude that the second variant is better attuned to Kristeva’s definition of the text. It is also the one which, as I discuss in greater detail below, returns in critical discourse analysis as instrumental to an understanding of the dynamics between hegemonic struggle, crises in sociocultural values and forms of social linguistic creativity at the level of genre conventions. However, a one-sided concern with constitutive intertextuality comes with a risk of underestimating the heuristic condition that the dynamics of discursive heterogeneity is studied through actual instances of discourse and that, as Fairclough notes, texts “differ in the extent to which their heterogeneous elements are integrated, and so in the extent to which their heterogeneity is evident on the surface of the text” (1992a: 104). Additionally, the erasure of the traces of hic et nunc assemblage is
. The synonymous use of the term ‘polyphony’ is a post-Bakhtinian extrapolation. As Björklund (2000: 9–10) points out in detail, Bakhtin borrowed the term ‘polyphony’ from Dostoevsky to refer to a particular type of dialogism found in some novels when character voices are on an equal footing with the authorial voice. As in music, polyphony is an effect of entirety.
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intrinsic to certain social processes and to history, more generally, as ‘visibly creative mixings’ become ‘established traditions’ and institutions have an active interest in maintaining perceptions of stability in practice.
Lemke (1995: 23), in my view, observes correctly that the dialogic conception of the utterance “for Bakhtin is a bridge between the linguistic and social, the eventmeaning and the larger social systems in which that event has its meaning for us”. Bakhtin does not give up the idea of signification (meaning-making) as understood against the background of language,5 only he saw (and stressed) diversity in language in such a way that it renders a homogeneous version of it as a grammatical abstraction which one can only arrive at by suppressing the occurrence of a multitude of ‘bounded verbal-ideological belief-systems’ which fill it (‘codes’ in Kristeva’s diction). It is this heteroglossia (raznorechie, translated literally: ‘varied-speechness’) which necessitates a continual analytical return to the level of dialogic relationships between actual utterances and, not surprisingly, the uptake of Bakhtin’s work has been characterized by constant slippage from ‘hetoroglossia’ as a societal state of being to ‘heteroglossia’ being used to refer to the heterogeneic make-up of a specific piece of text or discourse. Bakhtin lists as examples of heteroglossia the co-occurrence of:
social class dialects, languages of special groups, professional jargons (…), genre languages, the languages of generations and age groups, of the authorities, of literary and political movements, historical epochs, etc. (Bakhtin 1981: 262–3)
Heteroglossic relationship are ultimately sociological relationships in that they are about
specific points of view on the world (…) each characterised by its own objects, meanings and values. As such they may all be juxtaposed to one another, mutually supplement one another, contradict one another, and be interrelated dialogically.
(Bakhtin 1981: 291–2)
It is this kind of fusion of the social and the linguistic which informs Kristeva’s definition of the idéologème as the intertextual function.
que l’on peut lire “matérialisée” aux différents niveaux de la structure de chaque texte,
et qui s’étend tout au long de son trajet en lui donnant ses coordonnées historiques |
et |
|
sociales. |
(Kristeva 1968: 313–314) |
|
. Similarly, Kristeva continues to see langue as the explanatory backdrop but redefines it in the course of her formulation. For her, the question how a communicative occurrence inserts itself into history cannot be dealt with in isolation from its constitutive effect on langue. The two views are by no means identical: inasmuch as Bakhtin rejects the Saussurean linguistic project, Kristeva’s formulation of intertextuality counts as a reformulation of it.
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It takes just a small step now to see how for Fairclough argues the importance of linking up intertextuality and hegemony:
The combination of hegemony theory with intertextuality is particularly fruitful. Not only can one chart the possibilities and limitations for intertextual processes within particular hegemonies and states of hegemonic struggle, one can also conceptualise intertextual processes and processes of contesting and restructuring orders of discourse as processes of hegemonic struggle in the sphere of discourse, which have effects upon, as well as being affected by, hegemonic struggle in the wider sense.
(Fairclough 1992a: 103)
Two points deserve mention here. My first point is explanatory. Fairclough’s specific appropriation of Bakhtin is one in which the state of play of heteroglossia (in a specific social, cultural, historical, institutional context) is viewed as ordered hierarchically in what he calls ‘orders of discourse’ (these may be local, institutional, domain-based, or more widely societal, cultural) and, in Bakhtinian fashion, orders of discourse are necessarily social orderings. This picture informs for instance explanations of ‘commodification’, ‘conversationalization’, etc. in terms of the permeability of domain -specific orders of discourse by practices and discourse conventions which originate in other domains (one example is: public authorities who resort to advertisements on hoarding posters to bring home essentially bureaucratic messages, say, to combat tax fraud; another example is the widespread adoption of informal conversational modes of communication in the workplace which accomponies transitions to post-Fordist models of economic production). In this view, ‘hybridization’ helps explain language users’ ‘creative’ responses to crises in social outlooks. My second point is that the addition of hegemony theory, while underscoring the sociological (Bakhtin) or ideological (Kristeva) nature of heteroglossia, seeks to lend a systematizing framework to the analysis and weighting of ‘competing voices’ and their social outlooks: for instance, does conversationalization lead to more democratic working relationships or is it just an apparency which seeks to enhance worker motivation but leaves power relationships untouched because it banks on the managerial group’s capacity to adjust their speech strategically? One of the interesting questions indeed now is how far a (singular, unitary?) hegemonic framework of social analysis will actually take us in charting out the possibilities and limitations of intertextual processes.6
. Part of the attraction is no doubt that the application of the concepts of ‘intertextuality’ or ‘heteroglossia’ can be repeated at various levels of analyis. This is also true for the concept of ‘orders of discourse’. This repeatability comes with a risk of vagueness.