Deixis

My reaction to the Brooke article was similar to Aaron's in that I questioned the explanation of deixis itself, although my "objection" to it, if it can be called an objection, was on narrower grounds: I felt that the temporal--and to a lesser degree the spatial--was being foregrounded, when in fact one could pay just as much attention to the agency and power relations created and maintained through deixis.

In linguistics, following Buhler, we speak of deixis as a process whereby utterances rely on context to give them meaning--it's the way in which the reference of certain elements in an utterance is determined in relation to not just a particular time or place, but also to a specific speaker and addressee. The origo is the context from which the reference is made—it is the viewpoint expressed by one interlocutor that must be understood by another interlocutor in order for the latter to interpret the utterance. In most deictic systems, the origo identifies with the current speaker (for example, the “I” in a first-person statement).

What interests me in terms of the Brooke piece is how the discussion of deixis with regard to networks constituted by centrifugal and centripetal movement and flux (in what I thought was similar to Latour's argument that the social is constantly being reassembled) is what role power might play--or, alternately, might be resisted--in such systems. The discussion of deixis immediately reminded me of a part of what eventually became one of the writing samples for my application to the MA program here: I used the concept of deixis to discuss how it can inform the transition from modernism to postmodernism. The relationship between the Occident and the Orient before World War II, for example, can arguably be situated in terms of deixis, where the origo, then, is analogous to the centre, to the Occident. As Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and others have mapped for us, the Occident spoke to the Orient, it lectured it, narrated it, implicated it in its subjugation. Place deixis is implicit in this analogy as well. Place deixis marks the spatial location relative to the location of the speaker: “over there” implies a distance away from the speaker. Before World War II, the Orient was “over there” from the Occident.

Following the war, however, these deictic relationships came into crisis. The origo was no longer located solely in the Occident. Previously oppressed voices were now heard and emerged from multiple points in space simultaneously, breaking down the deictic binary. Similarly, “over there” was no longer a one-to-one opposition either: place was complicated as the Orient broke down into separate independent nations and cultures in the post-colonial period, while simultaneously globalization disturbed their lines of demarcation. East and West had been replaced by a multititude of locations. The dichotomies of us and them, of black and white, of masculine and feminine were no longer tenable. Both the end of empire and the move toward globalization problematized the relations of the East and West as they existed up through the modern period. The centre indeed could no longer hold. (The emerging voices that arose out this deictic crisis brought forth a second problem: power relations had been disturbed and there was now a crisis of authority or, as I call it, the crisis of interpellation--but this is for another time).