Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 153, December 2015

Chronotopic identities:

On the timespace organization of who we are

Jan Blommaert and Anna De Fina

Introduction: towards a nano-politics of identities1

Superdiversity offers scholars a broad range of opportunities to revise and rethink parts of

their conceptual vocabulary in attempts to arrive at more sensitive and accurate tools for

thought and analysis. The recognition of a reality that might, in some respects and to

some degree, have been always there but was never enregistered in theoretical and

methodological frameworks might, in fact, be seen as the most productive outcome of the

current debates on whether or not superdiversity is “new”. The perspective is indeed new,

but it also allows us to return to old issues armed with some fresh ideas (cf. Blommaert

2015a; Silverstein 2015; Arnaut 2016; Parkin 2016). In what follows, we intend to take

these ideas to issues of identity.

Reflections and theorizations on identity within sociolinguistics and discourse

analysis in the last two decades have moved more and more towards context-sensitive,

social constructionist understandings (see Bucholtz & Hall 2005, Benwell, B. and E.

Stokoe 2006 , De Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg 2006, De Fina 2011) Yet, even within

these new paradigms, identities are often still understood in dichotomous terms as either

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micro or macro, individual or social, local or global, etc., with hyphenations allowing for

a limited degree of complexity, and with language separated from specific identities by

“and” (e.g. papers in Preece 2016). In this chapter we explore the Bakhtinian notion of

chronotope as a source of inspiration for the development of an approach to identities that

avoids such simplifications by taking into account the complex interactions between

practices, iteration and creativity in social life. We shall elaborate on the following

central idea: it is possible to see and describe much of what is observed as contemporary

identity work as being chronotopically organized. Indeed, it is organized in, or at least

with reference to, specific timespace configurations which are nonrandom and

compelling as “contexts.”

We intend to illustrate how a view of identities as chronotopic can offer

invaluable insights into the complexities of identity issues in superdiverse social

environments, and how it fits within a renewed sociolinguistic paradigm that stresses

ethnographic, practice-based oriented approaches to communication and discourse, aimed

at the most minute aspects of identity practices operating as indexicals for large-scale,

“structuring” characteristics of social practice – a nano-politics of identity, so to speak

(cf. Parkin 2016; also Rampton 2006). We shall do this largely in a dialogue with some

classic sociological statements on these topics, as a way to show the advantages of our

mode of analysis over more sweeping and generalizing approaches.

Chronotopes and sociology

In their seminal study on the unequally accessible cultural capital of French university

students, Bourdieu and Passeron made the following remark: “Sans doute, les étudiants

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vivent et entendent vivre dans un temps et un espace originaux” [“Undoubtedly, students

live and expect to live in an original time and space”] (Bourdieu & Passeron 1964: 48).

The specific time they live in is measured by the academic year, with its semesters,

lecturing times and exam sessions. And the way they live it is relaxed, slightly anarchic

and down to themselves when it comes to organizing their days, weeks and months – “le

temps flottant de la vie universitaire” [“the fluid time of university life”] (id: 51). The

specific spaces include, of course, the university campus, its buildings, lecture halls and

staff offices; but also “des quartiers, des cafés, des chambres ‘d’étudiants’” [“’student’

neighborhoods, cafés and rooms”], cinemas, dance halls, libraries, theaters and so forth;

the Parisian Quartier Latin, of course, serves as a textbook example here (id.: 51).

It is no miracle, then, that a walk through the Quartier Latin during the academic

year would reveal a specific demographic pattern –a dense concentration of young people

who would be students and middle-aged men who would be senior academics – different

from, say, people shopping along the fashion stores on the Champs Elysées or taking the

commuter trains out of Paris at 5PM. According to Bourdieu and Passeron, due to these

specific timespace givens, students acquire a sense of shared experience which,

invariably, becomes an important part of their autobiographies later in life – “in my

student days”, “we met when we were students…” The specific timespace of student life

involves particular activities, discourses and interaction patterns, role relationships and

identity formation modes, particular ways of conduct and consumption, of taste

development and so forth, most of which are new, demand procedures of discovery and

learning, and involve the mobilization of existing cultural and social capital in the

(differential) process of acquiring new capital. References to similar timespace elements

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(a charismatic or dramatically incompetent lecturer, a particular café or a then popular

movie or piece of music) create a shared sense of cohort belonging with others, which co-

exists with pre-existing belongings to social groups and which enters into posterior forms

of belonging. In that sense, our student days do not compensate for or replace pre-

existing class memberships (which the book documents at length), and neither constitute

the sole bedrock for posterior identity formation. Rather, in Bourdieu & Passeron’s view,

“our student” identity represents a relatively superficial phenomenon, “[p]lus proche de

l’agrégat sans consistence que du groupe professionnel” [“closer to an aggregate without

consistency than to a professional group”] (56), let alone “un groupe social homogène,

indépendant et intégré” [a homogenous, autonomous and integrated social group”] (49),

which reproduces underlying (class) differences while constructing one new layer of

shared biographical experience. Thus, while students share almost identical experiences

and develop particular, and similar, identities during their days at the university, the

meanings and effects of these shared experiences will differ according to the more

fundamental social and cultural identity profiles they “brought along” to university life.

Probably without being aware of it, Bourdieu and Passeron provided us with one

of the most precise empirical descriptions of what Bakhtin called a “chronotope,” (a

notion that he applied to works of literature), which he defined as follows: “We will give

the name chronotope [literally ‘time space’], to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal

and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin 1981: 84-

85). Indeed, Bakhtin coined this term to point towards the inseparability of time and

space in human social action and to the effects of this inseparability on it. In his work he

identified the “literary artistic chronotope” where “spatial and temporal indicators are

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fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole”, such that the chronotope could be

seen as “a formally constitutive category of literature” (1981: 84). It is thanks to this

concept of chronotope that Bakhtin was able to address the co-occurrence of events from

different times and places in novels, the fact that shifts between chronotopes involved

shifts of an entire range of features and generated specific effects. He saw the interplay of

different chronotopes as an important aspect of the novel’s heteroglossia, part of the

different “verbal-ideological belief systems” that were in dialogue in a novel, because

every chronotope referred to socially shared, and differential, complexes of value

attributed to specific forms of identity, as expressed (in a novel for example) in the

description of the looks, behavior, actions and speech of certain characters, enacted in

specific timespace frames. Importantly, Bakhtin assumed also that chronotopes involve

specific forms of agency, identity: specific patterns of social behavior “belong”, so to

speak, to particular timespace configurations; and when they “fit” they respond to

existing frames of recognizable identity, while when they don’t they are “out of place”,

“out of order” or transgressive (see Blommaert 2015b for a discussion).

In a more contemporary and applied vocabulary, we would say that chronotopes

invoke orders of indexicality valid in a specific timespace frame (cf. Blommaert 2005:

73). Specific timespace configurations enable, allow and sanction specific modes of

behavior as positive, desired or compulsory (and disqualify deviations from that order in

negative terms), and this happens through the deployment and appraisal of

chronotopically relevant indexicals –indexicals that acquire a certain recognizable value

when deployed within a particular timespace configuration.

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 Through these lenses, one can for example, also read Goffman’s (1963) Behavior

in Public Spaces as a study of the orders of indexicality operating in public spaces and

not elsewhere, while his description of poker players in Encounters can be read as a study

of the orders of indexicality valid in places such as the poker rooms of Atlantic City or

Las Vegas (1963, 1961). Howard Becker’s (1963) Outsiders – jazz musicians and

marihuana users – also organize their behavior and the criteria for evaluating behavior

determining different degrees of membership in their “deviant” community, within the

clearly demarcated timespace configurations of the 1940s-1950s American-metropolitan

jazz clubs. Studies of doctor-patient interaction show that the latter are also typically set

in the highly specific, regimented and asymmetrical timespace configurations of medical

centers and consultation times therein (Cicourel 2002).2

In such timespace configurations, Goffman situated specific actors enacting

specific roles (poker players must be strangers and can never have met each other

elsewhere; they gather just to play poker and do that competently), specific, relatively

strict “rules of engagement” and normative assumptions (focus on the game, play the

game by its rules), as well as identity judgments (a “superb” poker player). Like Bourdieu

& Passeron, Becker and others, Goffman described the indexical organization of specific

chronotopes: the ways in which particular socially ratified behavior depends on

timespace configurations, or more broadly, the ways in which specific forms of identity

enactment are conditioned by the timespace configurations in which they occur. The

“gatherings” described in Behavior in Public Places are such timespace configurations,

and the specific modes of behavior Goffman describes and analyzes are the ones that “fit”

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those particular configurations. The careful description of such nonrandom chronotopic

connections, by the way, bears a well-known academic label: ethnography.

Chronotopes as identity frames

A shorthand term such as “chronotope” enables us to avoid an analytical separation of

behavior and context which is not matched by the experiences of people engaged in such

activities. In its most simple formulation, the idea we develop here is that the actual

practices performed in our identity work often demand specific timespace conditions as

shown by the fact that changes in timespace arrangements trigger complex and

sometimes massive shifts in roles, discourses, modes of interaction, dress, codes of

conduct and criteria for judgment of appropriate versus inappropriate behavior, and so

forth. We see this factor as a constraint on what is possible in the way of identity work –

a framing constraint not always accurately identified in studies on identity.

Let us take a rather simple example: a group of colleagues who share their 9-5

daytime in the same office; all of them have mutually known names and roles, often

hierarchically layered, and specific shared codes of conduct that govern their interactions

(the shortcut term for such codes is often “professionalism”). Men are dressed in suits

and neckties, ladies wear similar formal professional dress. The group, however, has

developed a weekly tradition of “happy hour”. Every Thursday after work, they jointly

leave the office and walk to a nearby pub for a drink or two. The moment they leave their

office building, men take off their neckties, and the tone, topics and genres of talk they

engage in with each other change dramatically – a Goffmanian frame shift of sorts.

“Professional” and job-focused talk may be exchanged for banter, small talk about family

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life, joke-cracking or flirting. And the roles and relationships change as well: the office

“boss” may no longer be the “coolest” person, and a very competent worker may turn

into a very incompetent drinker or joke-teller. We see the same people engaging in

entirely different social practices and relationships, embodying entirely different roles

and identities grafted onto or mobilized alongside existing ones (the boss in some way

remains the boss even during happy hour) – all of it due to a change in the timespace

configuration in which they move, which in turn changed the frame within which

behavior is produced, evaluated and understood. “Happy hour” behavior is intolerable

during office hours, and office behavior is intolerable in the pub (“no job talk!!”) –

timespace reordering involves a complete reordering of the normative codes of conduct

and redefines the space of what is possible and allowable in performing identity work.

Such phenomena, once we start looking for them, occur constantly. In fact, one may be

hard pressed to come up with modes of social conduct that are not conditioned by

nonrandom timespace arrangements. Our suggestion here is to take this kind of “context”

seriously – that is, that we need to address it in a systematic and meticulous way and see

what purchase it has. Doing so will increase the accuracy of our analyses of the dynamic

and changing nature of social life and of the groups that organize it.

At the most basic level, it is good to point out that the chronotopic nature of

specific forms of identity is part of common sense understandings about the way groups

and cultures function. Thus, chronotope-based constructs are already entrenched in our

everyday vocabularies. For example, when we speak of “youth culture”, we obviously

speak (be it with perplexing vagueness even in published work) about a complex of

recognizable cultural phenomena attributed to a specific period in human lives – “youth”

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– which is often also specific to a place or a region. For example, Talcott Parsons’ (1964:

155-182) discussion of American youth culture differs from that of French youth offered

at the same time by Bourdieu and Passeron. “Youth culture”, therefore, is always a

chronotopically conditioned object of study.

Identifying a phenomenon such as “youth culture” in terms of its chronotopic

conditions involves and explains certain things. It involves generalizability. If specific

forms of cultural practice mark specific periods of life, all such periods must have their

own forms of cultural practices. In other words, a chronotopic qualification such as

“youth culture” could (and perhaps must) be extended to any other form of cultural

practice describable as tied to and conditioned by specific timespace configurations. In

fact, there is nothing more special to “youth culture” than to, say, the culture of young

parents, or of mature professionals or of retired senior citizens. In each case we shall see

specific forms of practice and identity construction conditioned by the specific stage of

life of the ones who enact them, and usually also involving trajectories through specific

places (think of schools for teenagers or kindergarten for young parents). And just as

youth cultures typically set themselves apart by specific forms of jargon and slang (now

both in spoken and written forms), other age groups similarly display such discursive and

sociolinguistic characteristics.

Generalizability, in turn, implies fractality. There is no reason why chronotopic

cultural practices would be confined to the “big” stages of life only, because even within

narrower timespans we can see nonrandom co-occurrences of timespace configurations

and forms of cultural practice and identity enactment. Think of the timeframe of a week,

for instance, in which specific days would be reserved for “work” (involving specific

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trajectories through 5 time and space) and others for, say, religious services, family

meetings, shopping and leisure activities. The timeframe of a single day in such a week,

in turn, can be broken down into smaller chronotopic units, with activities such as

“breakfast”, “dropping kids off at school”, “going to work”, “being at work”, “returning

from work” and eventually “watching TV in bed” all marked by nonrandom collocations

of time, space and behavioral modes. The rules of macroscopic conduct also apply to

microscopic behavior. In the same way, while societies recognize particular chronotopic

arrangements as defining “big” groupings based on chronotopic conditions such as those

characterized by commonality of age or profession, participants in smaller or less

homogenous communities can identify other kinds of chronotopic arrangements as

relevant to group identities at different and progressively more micro levels, such as

schools, classrooms or peer groups.

These considerations explain why and how a chronotopic view of identities can be

used as a tool for better accounting for the complex identity work that goes on within

communities and to relate it more specifically to times, spaces and practices without

resorting to simplistic dichotomies between macro and micro contexts. This means that

we must surrender the perceived clarity of existing and widely used identity categories

and diacritics in ordet to gain analytical accuracy and precision.

Classroom chronotopes and superdiverse identity work

Let us illustrate the deep embedding of identities within, and sensitivity towards, time-

space arrangements, by means of elements of analysis taken from an ethnographic study

of a small community of practice. In so doing, we shall also sense the advantages of

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transcending the existing, prima facie obvious, identity categories and diacritics. The

community in question is a superdiverse 5th grade classroom in an inner city school (for a

description of the project see De Fina 2015 and chapter X, this volume) in Sicily. The

classroom comprised 18 children (10 boys and eight girls) aged ten or eleven. Origins

and mother tongues in the class varied as 7 boys and 4 girls were born in Sicily of Italian

parents, 5 were born abroad of foreign parents and 2 were born in Sicily of Tunisian

parents. Among the foreign born children, 3 girls were from Bangladesh, 1 was from Sri

Lanka and 1 boy was from Morocco. Among the Sicilian children, 1 girl was a special

needs student. The class had two regular teachers and one special needs teacher.

A traditional sociolinguistic approach to identities in this classroom would focus

on teacher-students identities as basic to communication and as driving the analysis of

interactions. However, a closer look at the daily practices of this community reveals how

central time-space configurations are to its actual social organization, as well as how such

time-space configurations affect relevant identity categories, roles and negotiations

regarding the practices performed by the group.

If we start by looking at temporal structure, we can easily see how chronotopes

define the scenarios and the conditions within which identity work takes place. Daily

lessons are regularly divided into activities that take up specific times (for example math

lessons and foreign language lessons have the same duration but happen on different

days) and require particular space configurations (desks aligned in certain ways, occupied

by students sitting in places assigned to them by the teachers, teachers sitting or standing

at the front center table or going around from desk to desk).

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 These time-space configurations are constitutive of what Goffman (1959: 106-160)

calls “front regions” – scenarios of interaction recognized as primary and official.

Because of the routine and ritualized nature of these activities and interactions,

expectations about roles and identities are rather fixed, since the rules of the game are

similar for students and teachers in different schools in different times and space. Thus,

for example, in terms of linguistic resources, the roles of student and teacher are strongly

connected with the use of Italian as the official language. Deviations from such rule lead

to the potential attribution to the deviant participant of identities that have negative

connotations (such as ‘bad’, ‘undisciplined’, or, as in the case we will see below,

‘ignorant’ student). An example of these kinds of chronotopic role-behavior expectations

can be found below. Note that utterances in Sicilian are transcribed in italics.

1. T1: ((to Antonio)) : Quand’è che ti sei andato a tagliare i capelli.

2. Antonio: Duminica.

3. T1: Du-mi-ni-ca,

4. (( voices)) @@@@@

5. T1: Du-minica!

6. Duminica@@@

7. ((voices)) @@@@

Translation

1. T1: ((to Antonio)) : When did you go to cut your hair.

2. Antonio: Sunday.

3. T1: Sun-day.

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 4. (( voices)) @@@@@

5. T1: Sun-day.

6. Sunday@@@

7. ((voices)) @@@@

In this fragment Antonio answers a question posed by the teacher in Italian (line 1) , with

an utterance in Sicilian dialect (line 2). The use of Sicilian instantly provokes a reaction

from the teacher, who imitates Antonio’s response twice (lines 3, 5 and 6) while at the

same inciting laughter from the rest of the class (lines 4 and 7) and producing laughter

herself (line 6). The teacher’s reaction is immediately understood as a challenge to

Antonio’s identity thanks to the fixed, well-established (and historically sedimented)

associations between official classroom discourse (which is expected within the time-

space frame given) and Italian and the related indexical significance of dialect in this

context. As a child who does not speak proper Italian is regarded as not fit for interaction

with a teacher, indexical associations of dialect with ignorance and lack of sophistication

immediately arise.

However, this community of practice engages in many different types of activities

and interactions whose recurrence in time and space also shape specific orders of

indexicality associated with them. These are represented, for example, by “back region”

activities. First, it must be noted that time-space configurations change completely in

“back” regions (such as those created in peer communication during lessons) with respect

to front space activities. For example, in back regions the timing of talk is affected by the

disruption of role hierarchy that is implicit in these interactions. Talk needs to be uttered

in spurts, at particular intervals of time (when teachers are not looking) and in whispers.

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Relevant space configurations for peer-to-peer talk, include closer proximity between two

interactants, single desks and neighboring desks as focal points rather than the front table

where the teacher speaks. In a sense, space is reconfigured even though no physical

displacement of objects is taking place. Simultaneously though, back regions may

become front regions when school activities change, as in the case of breaks when

students and teachers may move freely around the room, the position of desks can be

altered and certain particular desks may assume prominence as meeting places for the

different groups that organize peer interaction. When children are on break, for example,

the rules of the game also change completely and so do their inventories of relevant

identities and the indexical associations that arise from linguistic (and other kinds of)

behavior. Because behavior that has been cemented in back regions depends much more

on specific routines and practices established by individual communities, as researchers

we need to pay special attention to what happens there.

During back region exchanges and during all events in which peer to peer

interaction is predominant, the way uses of linguistic resources are interpreted in terms of

identity displays changes completely with respect to teacher-student interactions. For

example, in this class neither the use of dialect nor of Italian seemed to regularly invoke

specific indexicalities for all children. However, considering the sheer amount of speech

in dialect versus Italian, dialect seemed to divide children along gender lines, while the

type of uses of dialect also divided children along ethnic lines. So when males spoke in

Sicilian the choice may be relevant or not in terms of identity claims, while when foreign

born girls used Sicilian, inferences on their identity presentations always arose. In the

case of both males and females, again, the possible indexicalitites related to dialect use

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are closely linked with activities and time-space arrangements. In the case of boys, for

example, when they were in a “play” frame (with all the possible configurations in terms

of proxemics, behavior timing, etc), dialect may have been simply an unmarked choice,

but if they were in a “fight” frame (with associated time-space arrangements) dialect

became indexical of greater aggression and greater “manliness”.

Let us look at an example. In the following fragment, Manlio and Nino have been

involved in a fight during a back stage exchange.

1. Nino: Chista è a me’ matita stava disegnando io!

2. Manlio ((screaming)) Maestra ma fai dare la matita da Nino?

3. Maestra G! ci stava disegnando Carlo!

4. Nino: Mae non è quella è quella!

5. Taeacher: Tu l’hai finito il tuo disegno, TI SBRIGHI?

6. Nino: E Manlio finiscila! Tinni vai?

7. Manlio: Suca!

8. (…)

9. Manlo: A cu ci rici suca?

10. Nino: Suca a cu’ ci u rici a (…)

11. (…)

12. Nino: Puo’ ammuttari quanto vuoi tanto (…)

13. Manlio: Nino è ‘na munnizza!

Translation

1. Nino: This is my pencil I was drawing with it!

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 2. Manlio: ((screaming)) TEACHER CAN YOU TELL NINO TO GIVE ME

THAT PENCIL?

3. Teacher G.! Carlo was drawing with it!

4. Nino: Teacher it’s not that! It’s that!

5. Taeacher: You have finished your drawing, WILL YOU HURRY?

6. Nino: And Manlio stop it! Go away!

7. Manlio: Fuck you!

8. (…)

9. Manlo: Who did you say fuck to?

10. Nino: Who are you saying fuck you to (…)

11. (…)

12. Nino: You can push as much as you want (…)

13. Manlio: Nino is trash!

At the beginning Manlio and Nino were fighting over a pencil. As we see when Manlio

enters the front stage to address the teacher (whom he calls by her first name in line 3), he

switches from dialect into Italian and Nino does the same. As Nino gets back to his fight

with Manlio he starts in Italian but then continues in Sicilian when he goes from asking

Manlio to stop, to ordering him to go away. The fight escalates into insults (line 7-13)

which are all exchanged in Sicilian. Given the presence of many similar instances in the

recordings, it can be concluded that dialect is used in these cases to convey a “true man”

identity.

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 At the same time, the entire exchange will be seen as constituting a breach of

normal order in the front stage activity because children have broken rules that relate to

proper behavior, which involves the invasion of each other’s space (through the fight

over the pencil), of the teacher’s space (through screaming) and of the regular time frame

of the lesson as they have spoken when they are supposed to be silent. Thus, while they

can be cast as real men in their own sphere of action, they appear as troublesome

disturbers in the official sphere of front stage interaction.

The existence of front stage and back stage regions in this community points to

two important phenomena: the presence of reified and socially dominant chronotopes and

chronotopic identities (the typical/acceptable teacher or student identity) which is widely

recognized, and liminal ones (defined and developed in the back regions), but also to the

coexistence and interaction of these regions and identities within communities. A full

understanding of what goes on in the social processes observed here must consider all

these possible interactions as constitutive of the life of such community, since no single

“line” of regulated conduct suffices to explain these processes.

These examples illustrate how complex the relations are between identities and

contexts are but also how the conveying and negotiation of identities depends on

recognizable and iterative time-space-behavior configurations. Above, we pointed

towards the generalizability and fractality of chronotopic frames. We can add another

item at this point: their ability to interact. The macroscopic chronotopes intersect and co-

occur together with the microscopic ones and with several others in between, and the

different chronotopic frames need to be constantly balanced against each other. (As

observed above, the boss remains the boss during happy hour or the teacher may remain

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the teacher during breaks but they still needs to “fit” the happy hour or break frame.) And

to go back to our example of the chronotope of youth culture, when we take a long and

hard look at it in practice, we can see how it is composed of a large quantity of more

specific chronotopic arrangements. Students, for instance, can perform much of their

student practices from Monday till Friday in a university town, but perform their

practices of friendship, family life, love relationships, entertainment and local community

involvement during the weekend in their home town. Throughout the week, however,

both spaces are connected in intricate ways through various types of interactions, from

mentioning names “from elsewhere” during a conversation to phone texting and social

media contacts.

And this is dynamic as well: the freshman student will organize his/her life

differently from the senior and more experienced student, just as the junior professional

will act differently from the “old hands” (and note that the transition from newcomer to

old hand can happen very quickly – the literature on the experiences of frontline soldiers

in the Great War is replete with stories of “aging” overnight during their first battle). In

the same way, children from the classroom we discussed can enact old and new identities

in a bus that takes them to a school trip or in an entirely different space: a public

auditorium where a competition among schools takes place.

Chronotopes shed lights on various forms of cultural globalization in which local and

global resources are blended in complex packages of indexically super-rich stuff. Hip

Hop is a prime example, of course (Pennycook 2007, Westinen 2014), where the global

AAVE templates of the genre are mixed with deep sociolinguistic locality – often strictly

local dialects – and lyrics that bespeak the (chronotopic) condition of local youth-in-the-

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margins. Chronotopes, thus, also involve numerous scalar distinctions, and such scalar

distinctions can be seen as the features that enable relatively unproblematic co-

occurrences rather than conflictual ones. The appropriation of music and songs from

different parts of the globe into very local contexts is an important element of identity

work for youth in their play frames, while it would be read as an index of deviant

identities in the context of a Math lesson. As the singing of Hip-Hop songs can be used to

project coolness and wordliness among young people belonging to peer groups across

the globe, the singing of an American songs performed “sottovoce” in Sicilian dialect

during a lesson by a Moroccan boy can constitute a parallel act of affirmation of a wordly

and young persona.

Conclusions: Back to sociological theory

The chronotopic nature of cultural practices helps us getting a precise grip on a number

of other things as well, and this is where we need to return to our sociological classics. It

may help us rethink generations, anachronisms and obsolete cultural practices, for

instance.

Except for census sociology, generations are notoriously fuzzy and puzzling units

of sociocultural analysis. As Bourdieu and Passeron pointed out, the joint experience,

several years long, of being a student in the same university and program does not cancel

the power of reproduction of inequalities across “generations”. Thus upper-class and

working-class people may have attended the same schools, the same lectures and movie

or theater performances, and spent time in the same cafés and neighborhoods – none of

that would reshuffle the transgenerational cards of social class difference, for the same

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experiences have different meanings and effects depending on this slower process of

transmission and social dynamics. The “generation” of social class, therefore, is a slower

and longer one than that of, say, “intellectuals”, “engineers” or “jazz lovers”.

We would suggest that we can get a more precise grip on “generations” when we

consider what was said above: that at any point in time, we organize our lives within

interacting macroscopic and microscopic chronotopes. This means that at any point, our

cultural repertoires might contain obsolete elements that no longer “fit” into the social

order we now incorporate. Middle-aged people typically still have (and upon request, can

perform) a vocabulary of slang obscenities developed during adolescence and hugely

functional at that stage of life as symbolic capital for “cool” or “streetwise” peer group

identities, but for the deployment of which very little occasion can be found in life at

present. Similarly, many people still know small bits of mathematics jargon, of Latin and

Ancient Greek, learned in high school but never used again since the last day of school.

Such resources remain in the repertoire and can, perhaps, be invoked on nostalgic

storytelling occasions, but would have very little other function or value. As we move

through “generations”, the cultural stuff that defined the chronotopic arrangements of

earlier stages remains in our repertoire, but becomes obsolete.

In that sense, the coexistence and interaction of chronotopes in cultural practices

can also provide a basis for understanding sociocultural change. Entirely new phenomena

are often tackled by means of very old and obsolete cultural resources – they are often

managed by means of anachronisms, in other words. Thus, the key social identifier on

Facebook (something entirely new, see further) is “friends” – one of the oldest notions in

the vocabulary of social relations anywhere. The entirely new social community

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configuration of Facebook “friends” is thus anachronistically addressed and molded in

the terms of an entirely different social community configuration.

Change can also be detected in the emergence of new phenomena within fixed

chronotopic frames. As we discussed above, some models of social organization and

interaction become more fixed and dominant than others, especially if they are supported

by institutional structures of power. Thus good/bad student or teacher identities are based

on relatively stable chronotopically organized practices and behaviors. And yet, when we

analyze those practices with serious ethnographic precision we may see signs of change

and perturbation of the social order. Such changes may be signaled by the appearance of

new roles and new behaviors within well structured, traditional activities. For example,

Carnival celebrations in many European countries imply the dressing of children in

clothes that evoke traditional figures in their culture, the consumption of certain foods

and the development of certain activities. The arrival of girls in a Saree combined with

the performance of Bangra dances and the eating of ‘exotic’ foods in a Sicilian school

point to the possibility of change happening within the molds of established chronotopes.

At the same time, change can be conceptualized in different ways in different

social groupings at different scales. New events, processes and phenomena can be normal

for a younger generation and simultaneously abnormal for an older one, while it is the

older one that holds, in many social domains, the power to define, regulate and judge

these new things, and will typically do this by taking refuge in old, obsolete concepts or

discourses. Such anachronisms are often the stuff of public debate and social conflict, as

when the “Baby Boomers” are blamed for the creation of economic bubbles and

overspending, the “Woodstock generation” is getting crucified for their tolerance of soft

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drugs, or the soixante-huitards (those who were students during the May 1968 revolt) are

coming under attack for a lofty leftism or the “decay” of the moral order. It is this layered

(heteroglossic) co-presence of chronotopically organized practices, in a sometimes

unbalanced and anachronistic way, that may lead us towards the finer grain of social

order and social conflict.

What exactly is contested across generations? And how exactly does this

contestation operate? Those are questions we might begin to explore now. Similarly, an

awareness of the layered co-presence of such practices may enable us to get a more

precise understanding of the complex balance between “thick” and “light” communities

and forms of membership therein. In earlier work, we pointed towards the – in our view

increasing – importance of “light” communities on social media (i.e. communities not

formed by the “thick” bounds of nationality, ethnicity, gender, class and so forth but

rather by transient criteria of lifestyle, taste and political inclination; see Blommaert &

Varis 2015), where people gather and jointly act while focusing on objects, meanings and

practices.

Such “light” groups were never really privileged by sociology: the Durkheimian

and Parsonian tradition displayed a marked preference, precisely, for the mechanisms of

cohesion and integration that brought multiple disparate “light” communities together

into a “thick” community – the nation, the tribe, the region, the family, the religious

community etc. (cf Durkheim 1885; Parsons 1964; Lukes 1973). And we have seen

above how Bourdieu and Passeron disqualified students as an “aggregate without

consistency” which could surely not qualify as a “real” social group. Bourdieu and

Passeron argued that a serious sociological study of students, due to the ephemeral

22
character of this community, should not address the student community in isolation, for it

could never be seen as entirely autonomous with respect to the larger, deeper forces of

social class distinction (Bourdieu & Passeron 1964: 56). Thus, while students could be

studied as a group, they could not be studied as a group in itself; the “groupness” of

students must, rather, be constantly checked as to its features and characteristics against

the “thick” community structures upon which it was grafted.

We can considerably refine Bourdieu and Passeron’s relatively rudimentary base-

superstructure model by paying attention to the specific chronotopic organization of

behavior judged to be characteristic of specific groups. It would help us to see that the

“thick” structures, while perhaps determining, are not necessarily dominant in explaining

the social valuation of cultural practices typical of “light” communities, for the precise

mode of valuation will be an effect of the specific chronotopic arrangements we address.

The largest social space on earth these days is the virtual space. And it is entirely

new as a sociological and anthropological fact. We already mentioned how entirely new

social environments such as social media are often approached from within anachronistic

modes of social imagination; and the world of social analysis does not differ too much

from that of lay practices in this respect. We can only point towards the possibility of an

extraordinarily interesting line of research in the vein sketched here. There are specific

timespace challenges raised by online culture: contrary to the social imagination of

classical sociology and anthropology, the social practices developed online involve no

physical copresence but a copresence in a shared “virtual” space of unknown scale-

dimensions, involve often an unknown number of participants (also often of unknown

identities), combined with a stretchable time frame in which temporal copresence is not

23
absent but complemented by an almost unlimited archivability of online communicative

material. Thus, determining the specific chronotopic nature of cultural practices in a

virtual cultural sphere promises to be a stimulating and thought-provoking exercise.

Issues of scale – the internet is an immense social space – will call for ethnographic

precision in analysis, so as to avoid rapid but unfounded generalizations of the kind

“Facebook is a family of two billion people”. Using a far more refined research tool,

directed with great precision at the specific context-situatedness of any form of social

practice, must help us ditch such sociological (as well as political) illusions and replace

them with a more complex, but also far more accurate, image of what really goes on in

that colossal social space, what exactly contributes to modes of social organization there,

and how patterns of organization change over time.

Notes

1. This paper considerably revises, expands and elaborates an argument sketched in

earlier working paper (Blommaert 2015c; De Fina 2015), in turn building on

Blommaert & Varis (2015). We are grateful to Ben Rampton, Piia Varis, Ico

Maly, Jef Van der Aa, Max Spotti, Rob Moore, Sjaak Kroon and Jos Swanenberg

for numerous discussions on the topics covered in this paper.

2. Symbolic interactionism – a sociological discipline now nearly forgotten –

provides fertile material for “chronotopically” organized identity work, and

rereading some of these classic studies while building our argument was inspiring.

The hardcore ethnographic stance of symbolic interactions, as we can see, points

directly to the inevitable relevance of spacetime configurations for understanding

24
 social behavior. See Blumer (1969) for an influential discussion of symbolic

interactionism.

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