Bauman Foundations in Performance 2011

Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/5, 2011: 707–720

Commentary:Foundations in performance

Richard BaumanIndiana University

In this article, I outline the principal conceptions of performancethat have guided language-oriented work on performance, where theycome from, and how they relate to or diverge from one another. Iconsider first the undeveloped potential for performance-oriented work invariationist sociolinguistics, and then turn to performance as virtuosicdisplay, as developed principally in linguistic anthropology, performance astheatricality, with special attention to the analysis of the interaction order,and cultural performance as a marked, heightened event that affords a richlyreflexive vantage point on culture. I conclude with a discussion of mediatedperformance and the productiveness of the concept of remediation in bridgingthe gap between co-present performance and mediated performance.

KEYWORDS: Interaction order, performance, remediation, theatri-cality, virtuosic display

The expansion of performance as an analytical focus in sociolinguistics has beengaining momentum in recent years, but this special issue of the field’s flagshipjournal would seem to mark a full breakthrough into performance, and it is avery welcome development indeed. As sociolinguists turn to performance, theyencounter a conceptual field of considerable complexity. The term ‘performance’and its grammatical variants and compound forms cover a lot of ground, andthe terrain is far from clearly marked. Understandably, then, a number of thesociolinguistic pioneers who have ventured out into the territory have devotedsome effort to mapping its contours and charting the landmarks posted by earlierexplorers from adjacent disciplines (Bell and Gibson this issue; Coupland 2007:146–176; Thornborrow and Coates 2005; Threadgold 2005). At this stage,some of the principal points of reference are relatively easily recognizable, othersless so. As a career-long sojourner in the field, perhaps I can help to clarifywhat are the principal conceptions of performance that have guided language-oriented work on performance, where they come from, and how they relate to ordiverge from one another (see also Bauman 1987; Bauman and Briggs 1990). Ishould state at the outset, though, that none of these approaches are mutuallyincompatible and, in the hands of various practitioners, they often combine quitefreely.

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PERFORMANCE AND VARIATIONIST SOCIOLINGUISTICS

It is significant that the turn to performance in sociolinguistics, in these pagesas elsewhere, is often heralded as a critical corrective to dominant tendenciesin the field that would exclude on principled grounds the highly crafted, self-conscious, and reflexive ways of speaking that are at the forefront in the study ofperformance. Allan Bell and Andy Gibson, in their introduction to this issue(p. 553), argue that ‘Performed language provides a window on the worldof the creative and the self-conscious, the kind of language excluded fromsociolinguistic work which targets “natural, unselfconscious speech”’ (see alsoCoupland 2007: 4–5, 25; Schilling-Estes 1998: 53–54).

Interestingly, the potential for what is now cast as a critical breakawaytoward performance was present from the beginning in the very work thatseems to preclude it. Here is William Labov, the godfather of variationistsociolinguistics and the authority most often cited for the insistence on ‘natural’or ‘unselfconscious’ speech, commenting on one of the texts in his foundationalstudy of narrative structure: ‘This is one of three fight stories told by Larry whichmatch in verbal skill his outstanding performance in argument, ritual insults,and other speech events of the black vernacular culture’ (Labov 1972a: 356). Inits focus on ‘verbal skill,’ Labov’s evaluation of Larry’s ‘performance’ highlightsprecisely that quality of virtuosity that lies at the center of one of the productiveconceptions of performance in linguistic anthropology.

The problem, I would suggest, lies in the widely accepted principle that ‘the datamost important for linguistic theory’ derive from the style that Labov identifiesas ‘the vernacular,’ in which ‘the minimum attention is paid to speech’ (Labov1972b: 112–113; see also Labov 1984). The implication is that self-conscious,reflexive speech is by its very nature compromised for productive linguisticanalysis. Labov identifies the vernacular style to which he accords pride of placefor linguistic theory as ‘casual speech,’ speech ‘found under casual conditions inevery-day life,’ characterizing it also as ‘spontaneous and free.’ He defines ‘casualspeech, in a narrow sense,’ as ‘the every-day speech used in informal situations,where no attention is directed to language’ (Labov 1966: 100; italics in theoriginal). ‘Spontaneous speech,’ also acceptable for linguistic purposes, ‘refers toa pattern used in excited, emotionally charged speech when the constraints [i.e.the self-consciousness] of a formal situation are overridden’ (Labov 1966: 100).

But wait. Explicitly included in Labov’s corpus of data for his study of the socialstratification of English in New York City are the ways of speaking that occur insituational contexts of children’s play (Labov’s context A4), such as jump-roperhymes and counting out rhymes, which are certainly vehicles for the display ofverbal virtuosity, subject to evaluation for the skill and efficacy with which theyare performed (Labov 1966: 105–107). Included also are stories told in contextsin which the narrator is recounting an experience in which he or she was in‘danger of death’ (Labov’s context A5; Labov 1966: 107–109). Here is Labov’sdescription of Mrs. Rose B., ‘one of the most gifted story tellers and naturally

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expressive speakers in the sample’ (Labov 1966: 108): ‘The many examplesof spontaneous narrations which she provided show a remarkable commandof pitch, volume and tempo for expressive purposes’ (1966: 108). ‘Command’implies nothing less than attention to language, the reflexive manipulation ofthe formal features of the act of expression in such a way that they call attentionto themselves – in other words, poetics. And ‘gifted’ indicates that Mrs. Rose B.’scommand is very good – an evaluative acknowledgment of her virtuosity as aperformer.

What Labov has chiefly in mind, however, in dismissing self-conscious,reflexive language, is not so much poetics, but what he sees as the irregularlyorganized speech (but cf. Schilling-Estes 1998: 59–64) that speakers producein ‘formal’ contexts, such as elicitation sessions, interviews, and systematicobservation, in which the direct focus of attention is on social and regionaldialect, that is, on the stratified repertoire of linguistic varieties – includingstandard – that index groups or collectivities of speakers and that carry especiallysalient ideological valences. Moreover, what is of concern to Labov, as to othervariationist sociolinguists, is most centrally the phonological and grammaticalfeatures and patterns of these dialects, notwithstanding his early explorationsof genre (e.g. ritual insults, personal experience narratives; Labov 1972a: 297–396). The problem is that as the variationist paradigm became more routinizedand restricted in its aims and methods, performance – in which the reflexive focusis the formal organization of the entextualized act of expression rather than theword or sentence – was tainted by its own order of reflexive attention to speechand drawn off the board. But now, happily, it is back – and welcome.

PERFORMANCE AS VIRTUOSIC DISPLAY

In the various lines of inquiry devoted to language in society that beganto coalesce in the 1960s, performance first claimed a significant role as aconceptual organizing principle in the ethnography of speaking. In its mostgeneral sense, performance was a cover term for discursive practice, or whatHarold Garfinkel termed ‘speaking praxis,’1 an agent-centered perspective on thesituated use of linguistic means in the conduct of social life. In the Introductionto Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, Joel Sherzer and I identifiedperformance as the unifying thread that tied together the contributions tothe work: ‘We conceive of performance in terms of the interplay betweenresources and individual competence, within the context of particular situations.Performances thus have an emergent quality, structured by the situated andcreative exercise of competence’ (Bauman and Sherzer 1989[1974]: 7). Theframing of this programmatic formulation reflects what was then a core concernof the ethnography of speaking: to provide a critical corrective to the conceptionof performance then current in transformational-generative linguistics, in whichperformance was essentially marginalized as the inevitably imperfect realization


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of competence in ‘natural speech,’ seen as deviant, encumbered by such‘grammatically irrelevant’ factors as distractions, memory restrictions, errors,shifts of attention and interest, and the like (Chomsky 1965: 3–4). The counter-argument from linguistic anthropology received its fullest expression in a seriesof vigorous critiques by Dell Hymes (1971, 1972, 1973; see also Briggs 1988). Inone succinct formulation, Hymes insists that ‘The concern is with performance,not as something mechanical or inferior, as in some linguistic discussion, butwith performance as something creative, realized, achieved, even transcendentof the ordinary course of events’ (Hymes 1975: 13).

In its emphasis on performance as creative achievement, Hymes’s proposaladumbrates a second, more marked sense of performance that began to coalescein linguistic anthropology concurrently with the broad notion of performanceas practice. The quotation just above is taken from Hymes’ foundationalessay, ‘Breakthrough Into Performance,’ originally published in a collectionof essays exploring the fruitfulness of performance-oriented perspectives infolklore, and indexes the prominence of folklorists in the development of thisline of inquiry in the ethnography of speaking more generally. For thosefolklorists motivated by the long-standing interest within their field in oralpoetics, whether under the rubric of ‘oral literature,’ ‘verbal art,’ ‘folk literature,’or any other, part of the attraction of performance as a concept lay in itsimplication of artfulness, virtuosity, affecting power, and the intensification andenhancement of experience. Accordingly, some folklorists who were energizedby the intellectual program of the ethnography of speaking turned their effortstoward articulating a conception of verbal performance as a special, artful wayof speaking. My own contribution to this effort, first published in the sameyear as Hymes’ ‘Breakthrough . . .’ (Bauman 1975) and later incorporated ina more extended version of the earlier essay (Bauman 1977), continues tobuild on the reconceptualization of the competence-performance dyad withinthe ethnography of speaking, incorporating also Goffman’s (1974) notion offraming:

Performance involves on the part of the performer an assumption of accountabilityto an audience for the way in which communication is carried out, above andbeyond its referential content. From the point of view of the audience, the actof expression on the part of the performer is . . . marked as subject to evaluationfor the way it is done, for the relative skill and effectiveness of the performer’sdisplay of competence. Additionally, it is marked as available for the enhancementof experience, through the present enjoyment of the intrinsic qualities of the act ofexpression itself. Performance thus calls forth special attention to and heightenedawareness of the act of expression and gives license to the audience to regard theact of expression and the performer with special intensity. (Bauman 1975: 293)

In the parlance of more contemporary sociolinguistics, performance is an act ofstance-taking (Jaffe 2009). That is, the performer, by invoking the performanceframe, takes up a particular reflexive position, or alignment, to his or her actof expression, the assumption of responsibility for a display of communicative



skill and efficacy. Each community will have its own metapragmatic orientingframeworks by which an individual may signal to an audience, ‘This isperformance. I’m on! I invite you to watch and listen closely and I willimpress you, entertain you, move you. I invite you as well to judge justhow skillful, effective, and moving a display I can accomplish.’ The specificinventories of communicative means that may serve as keys to performance ina given community are to be discovered ethnographically, not assumed a priori.While keys to performance may include non-linguistic means, such as mimeticgestures or the management of gaze, it is the formal constituents and patternsof textual organization, including special registers, initial particles, formulaicspeech, grammatical parallelism, direct discourse, metrical patterns, intonationcontours, timbre, breath pauses, and so on, that have drawn the preponderanceof attention as metapragmatic indices of performance in linguistic anthropologyand folklore. The investigation of the formal organization of performance hasstimulated a number of related lines of inquiry of which three are worthy ofmention here.

The first is genre. Genre, in fact, was another point of convergence betweenfolklorists and linguistic anthropologists engaged in the development of theethnography of speaking (Hymes 1972). From at least the time of the BrothersGrimm, the notion of genre played a central – if under-theorized – role as aclassificatory principle in philologically oriented folkloristics, but it emerged as akey concept in the ethnography of speaking as a vantage point on style, textuality,performance, and culturally founded ways of speaking more generally. With afurther stimulus from the work of the Bakhtin Circle, genre has come to beunderstood in linguistic anthropology as a metapragmatic orienting schemafor entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Briggs and Bauman 1992;Hanks 1987; Silverstein and Urban 1996), that is, the production, reception, andcirculation of particular orders of texts and for the production of intertextuality.

A second major offshoot of the attentiveness to form in performance isethnopoetics (Blommaert 2006; Hymes 1981; Sherzer and Woodbury 1987;Tedlock 1983). This line of inquiry has maintained a dual thrust. On the onehand, practitioners seek to discover and analyze the poetics of performance –principally performed narrative – with special attention to units of measure andtheir organization in texts by such means as initial particles, breath pauses,syntactic structures, intonation contours, and the like – the very means thatfigure so prominently among the world’s cultures as keys to performance.A further, allied concern of ethnopoetics is to translate and transcribe oralperformances in such a way as to make their poetic organization apparent onthe printed page, both in the service of analysis and the aesthetic enhancementof literary experience.

This last motivation, of course, is dependent on the capacity of performanceitself for the intensification of experience through the manipulation of significantform. The poetic organization of performance sets up patterns of expectationand fulfillment in an audience that serves as a powerful means of eliciting their


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participatory involvement (Burke 1968 [1931]: 124, 140–141). As the audienceis caught up in the formal regimentation of the performance, gets into thegroove, as it were, the affecting power of the performance is heightened andthe experience of engagement is enriched.

The engagement of an audience, of course, reminds us that stancetaking isa reciprocal process. By entering into performance, the performer inevitablyinvokes the complementary stance of audience member, inviting co-participantsto assume an alignment to the performance that demands an evaluativeresponse and perhaps more, such as verbal acknowledgment, commentary,encouragement, or ratification, in what amounts to co-construction of theperformance (Duranti and Brenneis 1986). The standards and terms ofevaluation will vary from community to community, person to person, situationto situation. They may be explicit (‘That’s a good one!’), or implicit (e.g. responsivelaughter) in the responses of audience members. Performance is in this respectheavily stance-saturated: in its fullest manifestations, it makes positioning allbut obligatory. I say ‘in its fullest sense’ and ‘all but obligatory,’ though,because performance is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. Like any otherframe, performance is labile, susceptible to being re-keyed, alternatively reported,demonstrated, imitated, rehearsed, relayed, translated, quoted, or summarized asopposed to performed (Bauman 2004: 128–158; Goffman 1974: 40–82; Hymes1975; Sherzer 1983: 18–20).

PERFORMANCE AND THE INTERACTION ORDER

While Erving Goffman had a significant influence on conceptions of performancein the ethnography of speaking, his contribution to a complementary perspectiveon performance was still more central. I refer to his enormously influential workon the social construction of the self as a presentational process akin to theconstruction and enactment of a theatrical role (Goffman 1959). Insofar asGoffman’s approach to the situated fashioning of identity in interaction had ashaping influence on the analysis of social interaction more generally, he isacknowledged as a key figure in the development of multiple lines of inquiryinto language in social interaction in anthropology, sociology, and linguistics.It is worth recognizing in this light, though, that Goffman’s performance-oriented framework derives not from any of the language disciplines, but fromthe venerable and widespread root metaphor of life as theater. Like all rootmetaphors, life as theater has many possible grounds, and Goffman, in commonwith all who employ the trope, is selective in the grounds on which he builds. Mostimportantly, he argues against essentialist or innatist conceptions of identity,insisting instead that social identity is a collaboratively crafted construction,produced and reproduced for presentation, recognition, and ratification beforean audience, with part of the production process conducted backstage, as itwere, before it is enacted frontstage, in full view. If virtuosic performance turnsa reflexive eye – and ear – to the intrinsic qualities of the act of expression, the



performative construction of identity foregrounds the reflexive capacity of theself to treat itself as an object.

While Goffman’s dramaturgical approach continues to be cited widely asperhaps the most influential treatment in the social disciplines of identity ascrafted in performance, it is worth remarking that the notion of performanceas artful, virtuosic display, discussed in the preceding section, has gainedground in recent years as a vantage point on the situated and emergentfashioning of identity in interaction. Schilling-Estes’s analysis of the performativedisplay of Ocracoke English by a local fisherman is a case in point (Schilling-Estes 1998; see also Pagliai and Farr 2000). This line of inquiry has alsobecome a component of a number of theoretical articles of impressive scopeand sophistication by Mary Bucholtz, a contributor to this issue, and KiraHall (Bucholtz and Hall 2004a, 2004b, 2005). In addition to drawingon concepts from the literature on virtuosic verbal performance, Bucholtzand Hall also integrate into their broadly synthetic approach J. L. Austin’s(1962) speech act theory of performativity, which is not about display ortheatricality, but more closely allied to conceptions of performance as situatedpractice.

In my view, the contributions to this issue suggest that the investigationof performance and identity is an especially fruitful area of sociolinguisticinquiry, one that promises to enhance the study of language in performancemore generally. Virtually all of the articles in the issue offer detailed, nuancedanalyses of the use of linguistic – especially phonological – features in thereflexive exploration and creative manipulation of the indexical relationshipsbetween language and social identity. Ethnographers of speaking have tendedto focus their attention on other orders of speech style, namely, genre andregister (in the sense of speech styles that index recurrent situations of use),but sociolinguists have taken the lead in investigating linguistic varieties thatindex social categories: gender, ethnicity, occupation, class, subculture, region,age, etc. The sociolinguistic turn from style to stylization, in which identity is thecreative and emergent product of discursive practice, is especially well suited tothe study of performance.

To return to Goffman, though, it is noteworthy that his dramaturgicalapproach to the performed self was explicitly metaphorical, and that he takesdown the scaffolding of the theater at the end of the work in which he isat greatest pains to construct it (Goffman 1959: 254–255). Strikingly, whileGoffman resorted again and again to metaphors built upon formalized symbolicenactments – including ritual and game as well as theater – he didn’t getaround to analyzing actual performances and the role of talk within themuntil relatively late in his career, in Frame Analysis (1974) and Forms of Talk(1981).

Chapter 5 of Frame Analysis marks the shift explicitly. Noting that ‘thelanguage of the theater has become deeply embedded in the sociology fromwhich this study derives,’ Goffman suggests that it would be useful to examine


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the stage directly. The definition of performance that Goffman puts forward,then, is still stage-oriented:

A performance, in the restricted sense in which I shall now use the term, is thatarrangement which transforms an individual into a stage performer, the latter, inturn, being an object that can be looked at in the round and at length withoutoffense, and looked to for engaging behavior, by persons in an ‘audience’ role.(Goffman 1974: 124)

Additionally, there is a spatial separation between the staging area andthe area occupied by the audience. In focusing thus on staged performance,Goffman acknowledges that his perspective differs from that of Hymes, for whomthe notion is not restricted to the stage, but extends to any communicativebehavior for which an individual assumes responsibility to others, subject toevaluation (Goffman 1974: 124 n.). In terms of Goffman’s own frameworkfor the comprehension of what he termed the ‘interaction order,’ the domainof co-presence, we might say that for Hymes, as for the majority of linguisticanthropologists who address performance, the locus of attention beginsin focused encounters (and what the editors of this issue call ‘everydayperformance’) and extends outward in scale to platform events and celebrativesocial occasions, whereas for Goffman, the dramaturgical metaphor coversfocused encounters and real performance only becomes relevant in platformevents and beyond (Goffman 1983). Indeed, Goffman’s turn to performance,in his ‘restricted sense,’ is very much a part of his extended effort to elucidatethe interaction order more generally. Performance, in his sense of the term,moves him beyond the more elementary forms of the interaction order – contactand focused encounters – to spatially, temporally, and organizationally morecomplex events. More on this in a moment.

In addition to the concept of framing, the most significant contribution ofGoffman’s later works to the analysis of performance in the language-orienteddisciplines is his decompostional approach to production and reception inthe participation frameworks of face-to-face interaction (Goffman 1974: 516–540, 1981: 124–157). Recognizing that dyadic speaker-hearer or performer-audience models are grossly inadequate to the task of sorting out how participantsare aligned to communicative events, Goffman’s parsing of the productionformat of an utterance into principal, author, and animator, and of receptionframeworks into ratified and unratified participants on the one hand, furtherdecomposed into addressed recipient, overhearer, eavesdropper, bystander on theother, has provided a very useful heuristic for performance. Although Goffman’sapproach has been subjected to further elaboration (e.g. Levinson 1988) andcritical refinement (e.g. Irvine 1996), his basic insights have been especiallyproductive in the analysis of performance forms and practices, such as thoserecognized as ‘traditional,’ that involve iterations and relays of earlier utterances(whether or not they are performances) and expectations of future ones (Bauman2004: 128–158).



CULTURAL PERFORMANCES

Goffman’s characterization of platform events and celebrative social occasions(Goffman 1981: 165, 168, 1983: 6–7) converges with another prominent line ofperformance-oriented analysis in the social disciplines, namely, the study of whatMilton Singer calls ‘cultural performances’ (Singer 1955, 1958). Recall that forGoffman, the platform format is that order of interaction ‘in which an activityis set before an audience,’ which maintains an essentially spectatorial stance,holding the performer(s) as ‘the single focus of visual and cognitive attention.’That is, what Goffman foregrounds in viewing platform events (e.g. lectures,plays, concerts) as performances is not histrionic behavior, but the spatial ecologyof the interaction and the management of gaze and attention. The celebrativesocial occasion involves ‘the foregathering of individuals admitted on a controlledbasis, the whole occurring under the auspices of, and in honor of, some jointlyappreciated circumstances’ (Goffman 1983: 7). Such occasions (e.g. festivals,fairs, spectacles, annual meetings of scholarly societies) characteristically involvea scheduled, coordinated, programmed phase structure, one or more boundedspaces of activity which allow both for a multiplicity of engagements andthe drawing together of participants into more unified central or officialactivity, perhaps a highlighted platform performance, with the production andcoordination of the overall event in the hands of cultural specialists. ‘The affairas a whole is looked forward to and back upon as a unitary reportable event’(Goffman 1983: 7).

For Goffman, the classification and characterization of platform events andcelebrative social occasions is in the service of defining the boundaries ofthe interaction order. The overriding question is the ecology, organization,participatory alignments, and management of face-to-face interaction, that is,what people do when they are co-present to each other. Goffman’s fullest outlineof the full scope of the interaction order occurs, alas, in the last article he wrote,only months before – and in full anticipation of – his premature death. But, whileGoffman never got around to full exploration of the complexities of platformevents and celebrative social occasions, the kind of events he included underthose rubrics were the direct object of a complementary perspective, focused notprimarily on language or social organization, but on culture. This approach isrooted in the Durkheimian tradition which looks to cultural performances ashighly reflexive display events – cultural forms about culture – in which thedeepest meanings and values of a culture are embodied, enacted, and placedon display before an audience. Thus materialized and placed on view, theseenactments allow not only for the contemplation of received and authoritativetruths, but for experimentation, critique, even subversion. Accordingly, culturalperformances, in this line of inquiry, afford the anthropologist, theologian,sociologist, or historian a privileged vantage point on culture, an illuminatingpoint of entry into how participants see themselves as they are and as they mightbe.


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It is this approach to cultural performance, mediated through my summaryof its principal foci and concerns (Bauman 1992), that provides the basis for themost comprehensive framework that has guided recent work on performance insociolinguistics, including a number of articles in this issue. Nikolas Couplandand his colleagues have reoriented what had been primarily a performance-centered vantage point on culture toward the analysis of performance ascommunication, thus rendering it more compatible than the anthropologicalnotion of cultural performance with linguistic lines of analysis (Coupland2007: 146–176; Coupland, Garrett and Williams 2005). Specifically, Couplandapproaches performance in terms of communicative focusing, that is, the reflexiveforegrounding of form, meaning, situation, performer, audience, achievement(both in terms of efficacy and skill), and repertoire. Interestingly, this set of focicorresponds closely to key elements of Jakobson’s classic model (Jakobson 1960),in the line of the Prague School, for the analysis of a communicative event,in which form focusing corresponds to Jakobson’s poetic function, meaningfocusing to referential function, performer focusing to conative function, andrelational focusing to conative function. Coupland’s achievement focusingadds the element of evaluation, a core consideration in the conception ofperformance identified with Bauman and Hymes, while repertoire focusingalerts us both to the dynamic tension between the presupposed and emergentelements in performance and to the importance of intertexuality in the domainof performance.

MEDIATED PERFORMANCE

As suggested at various points in the foregoing discussion, culturalperformances – Goffman’s celebrative social occasions – bring us to the limitsof the interaction order. And as all of the foregoing should make clear, it is thisdomain of co-presence, of immediacy, that has been the predominant focus ofperformance-oriented scholars in the language disciplines. Beyond the sphere ofimmediacy, of course, lies mediated communication – the media. To be sure,Goffman himself, the doyen of the interaction order, extended his purviewinto mediated communication in his exploration of ‘Radio Talk’ (1981: 197–327). Goffman touches in that essay on the evaluation of competence, andespecially of incompetence, in the performance (he does use the term) of radioannouncers, a focus that at least adumbrates the concerns of performance-oriented analysis. Likewise, several of the contributors to this issue lay agroundwork for performance-centered analysis in earlier work on language inmedia. A decade ago, Coupland identified the ‘stylistic creativity’ of the Cardiffradio personality, Frank Hennessy, as ‘performance’ (2001: 208–209), andAllan Bell’s exploratory framework for the study of audiences and audiencedesign, based on his investigation of radio news, was a pioneering efforttoward that vital, if otherwise underexamined, component of the performancerelationship (Bell 1984, 2001).



This theme issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics, however, in which all thearticles deal with mediated communication, represents a benchmark in the studyof media performance. The phonological aspects of dialect still loom large inthese pages, as one might expect in the work of sociolinguists, but as the guesteditors point out in the introduction, there is a lot more here as well, withattention to genre, enregisterment, the non-verbal correlates of linguistic styles,intertextuality, audiences, the affordances of media technologies and more,all of which point in highly productive directions for future research in thesociolinguistics of performance. One has only to compare, say, the articles in thisissue dealing with popular music with earlier sociolinguistic efforts, like PeterTrudgill’s often-cited study of British pop-song pronunciation (Trudgill 1983),which manages to ignore both mediation and performance, to recognize thegreater sophistication and richness of current work that takes both into account.As these methodologically innovative articles make clear, the burgeoning ofdigital media technologies and protocols for web archiving make possible theconstruction of performance corpora that facilitate the detailed analysis ofsuch processes as enregisterment, intertextuality, and historical change inperformance forms and styles.

One potentially fruitful direction for future research, I might suggest inclosing, would be to bridge the gap between immediate and mediatedperformance by exploring what has come to be called remediation (Bolter andGrusin 1999), investigating the continuities and transformations attendantupon the adaptation of performance forms that participants are accustomed toexperiencing in copresent contexts to technologies of communicative mediation.The advent of new communicative technologies, as users learn what these toolscan do and how to use them, affords especially illuminating insights into theprocess of remediation (Bauman 2010; Bauman and Feaster 2005), but theinteraction order never goes away, and every media technology will involvesome remediation. Judging by the insights offered by the articles in this issue,and bearing in mind the general strengths of the field, the sociolinguistics ofperformance would seem especially well equipped to illuminate this ubiquitousand accelerating aspect of social life.

NOTE

1. Garfinkel employed the term in oral comments at the 23rd Annual Round TableMeeting on Linguistics and Language Studies, Georgetown University, Washington,D.C., 1972.


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Address correspondence to:

Richard BaumanDepartment of Folklore and Ethnomusicology

Indiana University504 N Fess

Bloomington, IndianaIN 47405

U.S.A.

[email protected]


Documents

Bauman Foundations in Performance 2011