Idiolect and person-indexing registers

Modern linguistic science has long located itself within, and oscillated between, a metaphysics of individual and society. The neogrammarian nominalist Hermann Paul ([1880] Reference Paul1880), for example, argued against the vision of language of the comparative philology of his time, for which language was akin to an organism moving through evolutionary history. Instead, he asserted that the only reality of language was the speaking individual at a moment, a linguistic monad constantly transacting with other such monads, dynamically changing moment to moment, ever in flux, never self-same. Language, for Paul, was a kind of fiction, an average or aggregate that was, at best, an analytic convenience for the linguist who, after all, Paul noted, can’t study every single event of speech in relation to every other such event across historical time.

Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale ([Reference Saussure1916] 1986) critiqued this nominalism by stipulating a realist basis for linguistic science, what he called, with a technical sense, langue. As a sui generis synchronic reality, langue for Saussure was not simply the addition or average of the speech of every individual; rather, it is that virtual, homogeneous normativity immanent to every utterance as its condition of well-formedness and meaningfulness across some community of speakers. The individual and their speech, on this conception, thus become part of that heterogeneous mass of activity known as parole, what needs to be set aside so as to render clear what enlivens it, what is common to it: the linguistic system.

This epistemic enclosure opened a chasm—between the individual and society, token and type, parole and langue, event and code—which various approaches to language have since tried to bridge. Bloomfieldian structuralism reconciled this problem of in-principle unlimited variation (Bloomfield Reference Bloomfield1933, 45)—for ultimately, at issue for Paul, Saussure, Bloomfield, and others was the intrinsic variability of the instance against the stipulative homogeneity of code—through the socio-geographic scaling of linguistic systematicity. Denotational codes—aka “languages”—used by speech communities were at the encompassing apex, a common core against which (social) variation could be mapped; “within” a language were its dialects: geographical variants of a language, the systems shared by speakers within a particular “region” or by a group therein. Dialects, in turn, could be more or less encompassing of other socio-geographic units: … > region > sub-region > town > neighborhood > household …. As Bloch (Reference Bloch1948) suggested, at the most atomic level would be the idiolect, the linguistic “system” of the individual speaker, the lower bound of both systemic variation and sociological composition.Footnote ³ In a stroke, the problem of variation was controlled while abstraction and systematicity were maintained, since the atomic individual that was posited manifested a “system” beyond which any variation was excluded from scientific study. So far, so Aristotelian and Durkheimian.

Sapir ([Reference Sapir and Mandelbaum1927] 1949, [Reference Sapir and Mandelbaum1938] 1949), for his part, highlighted the problem of the individual while integrating it within the sociocultural reality that mediated it. More alive to the contingencies of communication in the historical emergence and dynamism of cultural and linguistic norms, Sapir argued for a dialectical relationship between the individual and the social, responding to the strong realism of an “impersonal” structuralist view of language and culture by reintroducing a measure of nominalist particularism (Sapir [Reference Sapir and Mandelbaum1938] 1949, 575). Sapir suggested that individuals emerge into clarity only and always against a social background from which they may differ,Footnote ⁴ even as the individual was also always the very germ for the emergence of social norms themselves: “the individual has his method of handling those particular patterns of society, giving them just enough of a twist to make them ‘his’ and no one else’s” ([Reference Sapir and Mandelbaum1927] 1949, 534). Personality, thus, individualizes culture, even as the sociocultural is emergent from individuals.Footnote ⁵

For both Bloomfield and Sapir, however, there is a tendency to a kind of positivism in that both take the language system (at whatever level they locate it) as something describable by the linguist purely from an etic point of view, where the differentia between idiolects or dialects or voices or languages is something objective and aperspectival, discoverable because difference is “in” the phenomenon in itself. For a Bloomfieldian linguistics, certainly, that speakers themselves may make such distinctions—and recognize idiolectal difference—was not a central theoretical or methodological point. And while Sapir, like Hymes and others after him (Friedrich and Redfield Reference Friedrich and Redfield1978), rightly asked after the “social meaning of such differences” (Hymes Reference Hymes, Fillmore, Kempler and Wang1979, 36), the assumption remains that social meaning can be made of such differences and attributed to individuals because, by self-evident presumption, individuals are unique; that is, individuals and the variability they manifest (against some norm) are taken by these authors as pre-given. In short, all such views take for granted the nature of the social unit, and horizon, against which variation is to be mapped: namely, the individual and the social collectivity to which they belong.

Jakobson (Reference Jakobson1953, 15), recognizing such problematic assumptions, rejected the notion of idiolect as a “perverse fiction”, for language—and the individual—never occur in isolation but always in dialogic events of communication which involve more than one speech-event participant (even when only involving one person). As Jakobson (Reference Jakobson1953, 15) writes: “There is no such thing as private property in language: everything is socialized.” In a similar vein, variationist sociolinguistics, from its inception in Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog’s landmark 1968 paper, eschewed the notion of individual language, rejecting the way linguistic science pits variation against structural homogeneity. Instead, they argued that language must be rethought not as self-same code but as a structure of differentiation and variability within some speech community. Here, the individual is displaced, with sociodemographic categories (age, class, gender, region) or situational correlates mapping onto distributions of token-instances around some structural legisign (i.e., a “variable”, typically phonetico-phonological, though the principle can be extended to any structural-functional category; Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog Reference Weinreich, Labov, Herzog, Lehmann and Malkiel1968, 167). As such, it is not individuals that vary and differ from a homogeneous standard code; rather, the code itself is a matrix of differential realization (“variables”) organized by, and plottable in relation to, stable social categories (Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog Reference Weinreich, Labov, Herzog, Lehmann and Malkiel1968, 169–83). Hence, Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (Reference Weinreich, Labov, Herzog, Lehmann and Malkiel1968, 188) conclude their influential paper: “Because the variable structures contained in language are determined by social functions, idiolects do not provide the basis for self-contained or internally consistent grammars.” Idiolect begone!

Yet despite the fact that “as the awareness of the complexity of linguistic behavior grew, the domain of the idiolect shrank—eventually to the vanishing point” (Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog Reference Weinreich, Labov, Herzog, Lehmann and Malkiel1968, 160), the linguistic individual, rugged and self-possessed, has persisted. Johnstone (Reference Johnstone1996, Reference Johnstone2000), for example, has pushed back against the tendency in sociolinguistics and other fields to deterministically reduce the linguistic behavior of individuals back to social categories. If, following Weinreich et al., variation is a resource, Johnstone has insisted that it is a resource used by individual speakers in strategic, and often idiosyncratic, ways; in particular, to “express” their individual selves. Here, the individual is—reappears as—the bearer of a unique signature of linguistic behavior.Footnote ⁶

The linguistic individual also persists in so-called third-wave variationism. Penelope Eckert’s (Reference Eckert2000) ground-breaking work, for example, has pushed beyond Labovian sociologism by instead correlating variables to local categories of emic significance within the speech community: in her Belten High project, for example, variables are correlated to local types of personhood (jocks, burnouts), their intensive qualities (burnedoutedness, jockiness), social practices (cruising, school-activities), and—in a logic that recalls Paul and Bloomfield—to social networks of interacting individuals (2000, 171–98). At core nodes of the latter, we find specific individuals, so-called “linguistic icons” or “iconic individuals”. Here, a sociolinguistic interest in style—a variety of speaking linked to particular social stereotypy (see below on register)—is scaled down to the linguistic individual. If “style is the man [sic]” (Friedrich and Redfield Reference Friedrich and Redfield1978, 284), the linguistic icons that Eckert describes are individuals whose usage—flagrant, stylized, and extreme—serves as a local model for meaning making, indeed, is a site for the emanation of vanguard linguistic practice (viz. variables) for wider networks of speakers and thus for historical linguistic change. Here, recalling Paul, the individual is situated at the center of (socio)linguistic process, not simply because their usage is unique but because, through a certain social cultivation of personal identity within a sociological landscape, their idiosyncratic usages performatively create (and change) social meanings for other individuals, and thus classes of persons.

As this quick sketch suggests, much scholarly work on language has assumed the pre-givenness of the individual speaker—who variously serves as the basic carrier and reality of a language system (Paul), the lowest level of systematized variation (Bloch), the agent whose self is inferred/expressed through speech (Sapir, Johnstone), or from whom emanate local values (Eckert)—in relationship to an order of social normativity that exceeds them or perhaps even constitutes them in their individuality (as in post-structuralists’ vaporizations of the individual as a figment of discourse).

The question that interests this article, by contrast, is one that lurks in but has not received clear expression in the above accounts. It is a question not of the objective uniqueness or singularity—the individuality—of the individual in “their” speech but the way in which sign activity indexically invokes an individuated entity (including but not exclusively a person) as its conventionalized object. These two issues are distinct, though conflated in the literature discussed above. This conflation is itself a function of a collapse between two kinds of perspectives on the individual: between a speaker’s-eye view—where the question is what are the linguistic signs that reveal the individual (e.g., by which we judge an individual as having some kind of personality; Sapir), by which they express their selves (Johnstone) or their identity (Eckert)—and a sign’s-eye view (Silverstein 2004)—where the question is under what conditions do certain signs point-to (what they project as) an individual and for whom? Note that the latter view shifts the question from the linguist assuming the individual—and then looking for objective behavioral correlates that confirm/“discover” the individuality of that individual—to the question of the individual as a local model for “hearing” variation, that is, the individual not as an analytic (and ontic) etic construct but as part of our object of analysis, an emic construct.Footnote ⁷

Rather than ask after the individual “in” language (be this as the enunciating subject or the idiolectal speaker) or wash our hands of the very question (like Saussure, Jakobson, or Weinreich et al.), we might ask how speech is constructed—through a semiotic process (maybe even through a project)—as the speech of an individual, where both sides of the correlation, individual and signs of them, are not treated as pregiven but, rather, given or made through semiosis. In other words, we might ask after the enregisterment of persons and other individuables, not as the study of idiolects (the “lect” of an individual) but as the study of person-indexing registers.

Persona-indexing and person-indexing registers

Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology have used the term (speech) register to denote “ways of speaking”, capturing the ideological sense of language users that varieties of language present “different ways of saying the same thing”, where “the same thing” denotes referential or propositional content and “different ways” indicates some pragmatic (social) difference. For Halliday ([Reference Halliday and Fishman1964] 1968), a register, thus, comprises a repertoire of forms (phonological, lexical, phraseological, morphosyntactic) that vary with and indicate situational or occupational aspects of their use, such as the language of medicine, scientific practice, the law, and so on.Footnote ⁸ Such repertoire forms of a speech register thus carry a non-referential indexicality (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Basso and Selby1976a); they are indexical because they point to some aspect of their context of use, and non-referential because—while they may ride on the referential function of language—they do not (seemingly) alter the propositionality of the utterance (i.e., they “say the same thing”).

Over the last several decades, linguistic anthropologists have critically rethought this notion of register. Asif Agha (Reference Agha2007), in particular, has pointed out that a repertoire view of register is insufficient insofar as it fails to account for the fact that registers are always duplex. Register phenomena always involve a meta-semiotic model—a linguistic ideology (Gal and Irvine Reference Gal and Irvine2019)—that construes speech and therein imbues it with indexical value. As Agha points out, the linguist must, of necessity, rely on such a model (often starting from speakers’ own ethnometapragmatic vocabulary: “legalese”, “baby talk”, “Pittsburghese”, “Received Pronunciation”) to identify what the relevant formal contrasts (and thus repertoire forms) are that index such pragmatic values. Which is to say, the linguist—like all users of language—does not directly encounter variation or difference as such; indeed, the sea of differences that manifest across experienceable sinsigns is far vaster than—in principle, always in excess of—what we hear and ascribe social meanings to. Recall that it is this fact—the monstrous, bottomless differentia in the materiality of speech—that itself drove the Bloomfieldian approach to explain away the problem of variation through recourse to the notion of the idiolect (assumption H2: “Ultimately no two speakers, and indeed no two utterances, have the same dialect”; Bloomfield Reference Bloomfield1926, 162).

From the contemporary linguistic anthropologist’s point of view, then, a register is a cultural model of enactable pragmatic (non-referential indexical) values through which variation in speech is heard and voiced. More specifically, we should say that registers are metapragmatic functions (Silverstein Reference Silverstein and Lucy1993) that have scope over the textual coherence of discourse, that is, that mediate processes of entextualization (Bauman and Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990). The notion of entextualization weds Jakobson’s ([Reference Jakobson and Sebeok1958] 1960) “poetic” or “aesthetic function” ([Reference Jakobson, Pomorska and Rudy1935] 1987)—where the qualia of speech emergently give rise to (iconic) figurations of various kinds (i.e., image-texts; Nakassis Reference Nakassis2019)—with Halliday and Haasan’s (Reference Halliday and Haasan1976) concerns about textual cohesion and information (symbolic) structure (i.e., denotational texts) by extending both: namely, by noting that not simply in qualia or in semantic meaning (i.e., as image-texts or denotational texts), the unfolding of a message (or a “text”) also involves coherence of pragmatic (or indexical) signs qua interactional texts. A register, on this view, mediates or regiments the process of entextualization by construing co-occurrence relations as (poetically) fitting or not fitting with each other vis-à-vis their non-referential indexical values (i.e., as interactional texts); more specifically, as being appropriate to or entailing of some set of metapragmatic stereotypes that are congruent with each other in their context of occurrence—that is, as being “in” register or not (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2023).

We can preliminarily characterize such a model semiotically as involving two kinds of indexicality, each with a different value and metapragmatic calibration type (Silverstein Reference Silverstein and Lucy1993, Reference Silverstein2021; Nakassis Reference Nakassis2020): (1) On the hand, register tokens indexically invoke stereotypic aspects of various sorts, pointing to cultural conceptions of different aspects of the speech event, such as situational or institutional (occupational) dimensions (“torts” is a register token that stereotypically invokes legal institutions; “ain’t” informal social contexts; “dahntahn” Pittsburgher identity, etc.). As cultural concepts of speech, or metapragmatic stereotypes, such indexical values are nomically calibrated, that is, the sign form metapragmatically characterizes its indexical object (here, the stereotype) in a way that stands in no particular time–space relationship to the event of its happening (it is a kind of cultural “essence”). (2) On the other hand, register tokens presence such nomically calibrated stereotypes in the event of their use; they enact (or enunciate) them by pointing to an indexical target in the very event of their happening (e.g., to speaker, hearer, etc.). Such an indexical relation is reflexively calibrated, where the sign points to some dimension of the enunciated speech event and characterizes it in the light of the first indexicality (the cultural stereotype). (As a shifter-like indexicality, every such indexical value can, of course, be shifted—or reportively calibrated—to some other event structure. In such citational uses, the deployment of the register is put in quotational brackets and its indexicalities shifted-out to another event that is not the event of enunciation—hence, it is non-reflexive—but is in a time–space relationship of continuity with it—hence, it is non-nomic.)

Agha (Reference Agha2007) notes that pre-eminent among the cultural stereotypes of speech registers are the figures of personhood that come to be enregistered to them. (Such figures, or personae, we can see as social types that organize and unify the various stereotypes and characterological qualities that the register also indexically invokes.) Given that such registers often index social personae, I call these kinds of speech registers persona-indexing registers. And since such personae are social types—indeed, cultural models of personhood—their enregisterment involves processes of typification. We can notice that ethnometapragmatic vocabulary to speak of registers in this aspect relies on common nouns of various types (i.e., nomically calibrated, non-shifter semantic expressions; in particular, status terms) that denote the personae in question, as often reflected in the names of registers themselves: “sportscasters talk”, “women’s language”, “youth slang”, “thieves’ cant”, and so on.

Such personae are often projected onto actors recruited to some role within the speech event, typically but not exclusively speaker. Hence, to use sportscasters talk is to characterize oneself as (like) a sportscaster, Japanese “women’s language” as (like) a normatively sanctioned woman (Inoue Reference Inoue2006); by contrast, to use baby talk is to characterize one’s addressee as (like) a baby (voicing the other by speaking “like” them), while to use mother-in-law language is to characterize speaker’s relationship to bystander as a relation of affinity. Hence, when I deploy tokens of a register like sportscasters talk, it is I who is indexically characterized by the stereotype (denotable by the status term “sportscaster”), and when you do so, you are so characterized, and so on (similarly, with addressee- and bystander-focal registers, whose object shifts across participation frameworks). As a reflexively calibrated indexical relation, such usages involve a shiftable relationship, with the reflexively calibrated target “shifting” across usages.

In sum, registers coordinate two indexical grounds, shifting-out to invoke a (nomically calibrated) social type of subjectivity (denotable by a common noun) while shifting-in to enunciate that social type in a (reflexively calibrated) instance of discourse in a shifter-like way (Fontanille [Reference Fontanille1998] 2006).Footnote ⁹ Regarding the latter, here we recall Benveniste’s (Reference Benveniste1971) suggestion that the subject is enunciated through personal pronouns and related deictic forms that allow a speaker to appropriate langue in an act of discourse, but generalize this away from the overly reductive question of a form class (personal pronouns and other deictics) to a general semiotic function (or achieved dimension of semiosis).

By contrast to persona-indexing registers—which have as one of their objects social types of personae—person-indexing registers, as we’ve defined them, comprise repertoires of signs whose enregistered (conventional) non-referential indexicality invokes an individuated existent as an individual (a social “token”, we might say).Footnote ¹⁰ While for a linguistic anthropology of speech (persona-indexing) registers, the question has largely been about how entextualized voices become conventionalized—wherein any individual speaker, or speech event, is understood as drawing on multiple voices (the individual as a symphony of the voices of others)—here the question is slightly different; namely, the question is how an individuated entity (e.g., a person) can serve as the indexical object of some enregistered repertoire of forms.

Yet does this notion commit us, in matter of fact, to the sin of assuming the individual (in language)? Certainly, in many cases (such as in modern Western societies), the indexical objects of such registers are biographical individuals. Yet, as I noted above, the range of person-indexing registers exceeds the question of biographical individuals.Footnote ¹¹ As such, the notion of a person-indexing register is not committed to the fundamental ontic reality of the individual as some kind of social atom; rather, the question is what are the individuables in some cultural cosmology such that they can be subject to processes of person-indexing enregisterment? (One test for this, as I discuss below, is whether such entities can be given a proper name.) The individual, thus, is an ethnographic object whose conceptualization varies in different times and places. In other contexts, we may not find Western possessive individualism, yet enregistered individuables we certainly will. From this perspective, the individual is not the precondition of person-indexing enregisterment but its outcome. Such enregisterment, in other words, is a process of semiotic individuation.

But why, again, is this not just an idiolect? To reiterate: by contrast to an idiolect, a person-indexing register is a cultural model that “hears” speech variation—under conditions of entextualization—as indexing some individual. The issue is not what are the unique idiosyncratic uses of an individual speaker but rather whether, and which, differences are construed by some sociologically significant social domain as meaningful vis-à-vis the individual, that is, how and when do elements of speech come to carry within them an indexicality that points to individual speakers in their individuality as their indexical objects?Footnote ¹²

Emphasizing this distinction is important for a number of reasons. Not only, as we noted above, can the individual not be taken as ideologically neutral or pre-given, long a truism and true lesson of anthropology and allied disciplines (e.g., Mauss [Reference Mauss, Carrithers, Collins and Lukes1938] 1985; MacPherson Reference MacPherson1962; Foucault [Reference Foucault and Faubion1969] 1998; Marriott [Reference Marriott and Kapferer1972] 1976; Strathern Reference Strathern1988; Stasch Reference Stasch2002), but even if we could assume the individual, not all variation at the level of the individual is meaningful for hearers as characteristic of them. Moreover, much of what is taken as proper to them, as indexicable of them, is not—in fact, in principle will not be—unique to them. One can always cite and imitate, appropriate, or steal person-indexing forms. Acts of parody, like acts of identity theft, turn on this fact. (This is, in fact, one test of semiotic individuality: when using the form, does it still residually hold an indexical tether to some individual in their individuality? Such citations, in other words, both confirm and constitute individuality.) Hence, to take a very simple example (suggested to me by Jack Sidnell), rather than ask after the unique linguistic system of Elvis Presley, our concern is with the social fact of the existence of a repertoire of forms that, for some social domain, can be used to indexically invoke Elvis as a recognizable individual: namely, the “Elvis voice” with its signature (shibboleth) phrases, “Thank you, thank you very much”, to say nothing of particular hair styles, clothing styles, the snarl of the lip, the tilt of the head, the gyration of the hips, his musical repertoire, among other stereotyped signs that are assumed to be proper-to him (some of which are even his estate’s intellectual property). These are all repertoire forms that, entextualized together, may be used “point to”, parody, imitate, and presence Elvis Presley (who is thereby transported “… in the building”, as it were). Of course, his Memphis accent, the phrase “thank you, thank you very much”, a greaser pompadour, sequin jump suits, a cocked lip—none of these were, are, or will be unique to Elvis Presley. Elvis didn’t invent them and Elvis impersonators—among others—deploy them all the time! Nonetheless, when such signs are used—and in particular, when they are entextualized in co-occurrence patterns to convoke their indexicality so as to manifest an image-text of the man for some social domain socialized to the register—they point to him, they impersonate him precisely because such signs are taken to be proper to him.Footnote ¹³

Where persona- and person-indexing registers differ, then, is in their non-reflexively calibrated indexical values: in contrast to a persona-indexing register, what is indexically enacted through repertoire forms of a person-indexing register is not a nomically calibrated social type but an individuated entity in a reportive calibration to the event of entextualization (since the person/entity is indexed vis-à-vis the presumption of existence in some historical contiguity with the event of using the register). This, of course, itself presumes upon the individuation of the indexical object as an individual. How are we to conceptualize this semiotic process?

Rigid designation and rigid indexicality

We might think of this process in relationship to Saul Kripke’s (Reference Kripke1980) discussion of the way an entity is fixed with an identity through the conferring of a rigid designator—a name or equivalently functional sign—in a ritual event of baptism. In such acts, through one and the same process, a name and a referent are constituted in tandem: via referential shifters of various sorts (pronouns, demonstratives, eye gaze, pointing gestures, rubbing substances on the referent, etc.) an existent is individuated and then, via a performative nomination (accomplished variously in different contexts), bestowed a name which thereafter refers to—“rigidly designates”—that existent across events. This account is a kind of myth of Kripke’s; or we might say, it is the myth that rigid designators presuppose as the condition of their intelligibility/functionality. In any case, what is important for us is this: rigid designation is the semiotic infrastructure of person-indexing registers precisely because of the peculiar indexicality of proper names that Kripke puts his finger on.

As Kripke argues, a proper name like “Aristotle” or “Elvis”, once fixed to its referent, refers to it across its various contexts of use, indeed, in any “possible world” for those party to the original performative act of baptism, be it directly or through the “speech chains” that emanate from that event. By “possible worlds” Kripke means that, once fixed by a rigid designator, in any counterfactual situation where some intension of the referent, semantic or stereotypic, is hypothetically otherwise, that from the perspective of the speech chain of naming—that is, as anchored to the name’s performative event of nomination (the designator’s indexical origo)—the referential relation still holds. Even if all that was truly predicable of Elvis was discovered to be false (including his very existence or even that he was named Elvis), we could still refer to the entity so-fixed by with the name; hence, in the sentence “Elvis never existed” or “Elvis is not his name”, or “Elvis was never baptized ‘Elvis’”, “Elvis” still refers! The name, in other words, stipulates an identity beyond all intensional properties (Žižek Reference Žižek1989), independently of any of the characteristics, qualities, or stereotypes of its referent, simply by having been fixed to its referent at some moment, and thus across future moments (for some social domain). It is in this sense that rigid designators are reportively calibrated both to their putative events of baptismal origin, which serve as the ever-after origo of the name in its referential indexicality, and thus to their token-target/referent.Footnote ¹⁴ It is this peculiar relation that makes such signs unshiftable—or at least, differently shiftable—across contexts of translation or citation (in comparison to personal pronouns, e.g.). To shift the referent, rather, requires resetting the origo through a new baptism and thus the creation of a new speech chain (Butler Reference Butler1997): “not that Elvis, the other one, this one, him, the one with that band, ‘The Imposters,’ …”Footnote ¹⁵

Proper names, on this analysis, however else they function (which are quite diverse), refer based on their achievement of rigid designation. This property makes them central to person-indexing registers and the diverse phenomena they manifest (reputation, fame, stigma/taboo, celebrity, branding, etc.). Because rigid designators refer independently of both their intensions (semantic or stereotypical) and their contexts of use, they can thus communicate (in the sense of transfer) those intensions—and in particular, the social indexical (n + 1st) values that they absorb through their entextualization/contextualization and circulation—back to the referents which they designate. Rigid designators like names are semiotic batteries for social pragmatic power; they absorb and release the social meanings that are generated (i.e., entextualized) in their contexts back to their referents. For this reason, the name functions as an intertextual metasemiotic that links all such events in which something is predicated of or done to or around a name (Munn Reference Munn1986). The rigid designator anchors signs that co-occur with it to it, indeed, allows such signs to be incorporated into the personage of the name, that is, to become rigid indexes of the person. I call these rigid indexes and not rigid designators because they are non-referential signs; they do not contribute to the propositional content, or denotational text, of discourse but rather carry a second-order indexical value that rigidly invokes some individuated entity.

The name (like the face; Fleming Reference Fleming2024) is, thus, a shibboleth of a person-indexing register—and, indeed, is often part of the metapragmatic name for such a register; viz. “[Elvis_pn voice]_cn” (cf. [sportscaster_cn talk]_cn)—which co-textualizes co-occurring signs and thus may incorporate them, bringing them into the semiotic body of the register. Through this, innovative social meanings that are generated through the entextualization/contextualization of enregistered and non-enregistered signs (i.e., via the person-indexing text-in-context) can always be recouped into, and reanalyzed as, elements of the register, given a semiotic memory in the form of a default non-referential indexicality; in the case of person-indexing registers, such signs can be turned into signs proper to the person, reanalyzed as “theirs” in some way—indeed, as we’ve had occasion to mention, even as their property, as with the intellectual property of brands (trademark) or authors (copyright) (Nakassis, Reference Nakassis, Sullivan and Mortonn.d.), the face or publicity rights of celebrities (Wortham et al., this issue),Footnote ¹⁶ the clan rights of Tsimshian adawx narratives and ancestor names (Roth Reference Roth2008), and so on.Footnote ¹⁷ In such cases, the semiotic commons, through a kind of expropriation, is turned into indexical property, that is to say, into proprietary paths through which interdiscursive travels of value can be controlled (and in the case of brands and other commodified registers, through which the flow of profit/money can be channeled). There is, in other words, contra Jakobson, such a thing as private property in enregistered discourse, even if all that is proper-to a person always allows for (indeed, makes possible) theft, homage, and other modes of citational appropriation.Footnote ¹⁸ Only that which can be owned, after all, can be stolen.

Recall that person-indexing registers co-ordinate two indexical values, one “shifted out” to a non-reflexively calibrated person, the other the “shifted in” to a reflexively calibrated animator; one (special) case is when the two converge: where the speaker of the forms is also the target, say, Elvis speaking with Elvis-enregistered forms, i.e., as “himself”. (Of course, we should note that the two targets are never really the same, which is why one can sound unlike oneself, be different from one’s own personage.Footnote ¹⁹) Just as common, however, are cases where the two targets differ, say, where someone other than Elvis (e.g., Rondey Wooton aka Blelvis, an African-American Elvis impersonator in Washington DC when I was growing up) uses Elvis-indexing forms. In such cases, the animator cites the person or some aspect of them. And in doing so, they adorn themselves with that other person’s personage (Munn Reference Munn1986), even as they in turn become a vector of that person’s reputation, for better or worse (one can, after all, also defame someone by doing violence to signs proper to them, just as one may pay them homage). In so adorning themselves, such a person may even become an enregistered part of the register, where their social existence itself becomes an index of the person in relation to which they are defined (as with fans, acolytes, kin, devotees, and similar phenomena). (See Table 1 for a summary comparison of person- and persona-indexing registers.)

Table 1.

Some contrasts between persona- and person-indexing registers

Table 1 Long description

Two columns contrast persona-indexing speech registers with person-indexing registers across indexical targets, calibration, indexical type, interactional schema, repertoire, and default interactional text. Persona-indexing targets a social stereotype of personhood vis-a-vis some aspect of its context (e.g. current speaker). Person-indexing targets an individuated entity vis-a-vis current speaker. Calibration differs: persona-indexing links a cultural world of belief and reflexively ties that to the speaking event, whereas person-indexing links some individated entity reportively (and, in a way, nomically) through a baptismal naming event via a speech chain and then reflexively to the speaking event. Indexical type contrasts typifying index plus shifter for persona-indexing with rigid index plus shifter for person-indexing. Interactional framing differs between enacting or voicing a social type versus being or citing an individuated identity. Both registers can draw on multiple modalities,. Default use contrasts signaling social identity through register-conforming forms versus signaling an enregistered individual’s identity through similar forms.

As the comments above suggest, however, person- and persona-indexing registers are not so easily differentiated. Rather, they are two distinct but entangled dimensions of enregisterment that relate to each other through reversible “indexical orders” (Silverstein Reference Silverstein2003); as I discuss below, one may emerge out of the other (i.e., stand in an nth–n + 1st relation), just as some process of enregisterment may involve both dimensions at one and the same time (Figure 1).Footnote ²⁰ This is precisely because, as noted above, every rigid sign (designator or index) by being entextualized/contextualized serves as a magnet of stereotypic (n + 1st order) values that “stick” to the indexical object (as a social token or type of person/hood); such stereotypes of the person themselves may shade into—that is, be reanalyzed as—a persona, historically anchored to an individual yet ultimately detachable from them through a process of typification. Similarly, social personae may serve as the basis, through a process of rigidification, for the enregisterment of person-indexing registers, where persona-enregistered signs are appropriated as rigid indexes of a person. The vector for both processes of enregisterment are, as always, events of entextualization/contextualization, events wherein such indexical objects are enunciated through processes of shifting(-in). And the way, as we see below, in which these two dimensions (person- and persona-indexing enregisterment) are intercalated and transformed, one into the other, is through acts of citation (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2013a).

Figure 1.

Shifting, rigidifying, typifying, schematized: Token-signs entextualized into a text-(type-)in-context by some animator(s); such signs indexically invoke various (non-reflexively calibrated) stereotypes, organizable as a voice or character, a personage; such a personage also regiments the unfolding of the text (i.e., serves as its reflexively calibrating metapragmatics); further, such text-level tropes may themselves be enregistered, either to an individuated entity (person-indexing register) or a social type (persona-indexing register), or both. Each such register may transform into the other, serving as its fodder or effect, through citational acts.

Person- and persona-indexing registers in a U.S. classroom

To consider how persona- and person-indexing registers interact with each other, in what follows I consider an extended example from Stanton Wortham’s singular ethnographic monograph, Learning Identity (Reference Wortham2006). Wortham’s study of a ninth-grade school classroom in the United States clarifies this relationship through his discussion of the ontogenesis of “social identity”, that is, the ways in which particular individuals come to regularly experience themselves, and are experienced by others, as particular social types of persons. Wortham asks: how does an individual become a “bad student” or a “good student”, a “nerd” or a “troublemaker”, or whatever the descriptor happens to be? That is, how do biographical individuals come to “be” tokens of particular enregistered social types (what I’ve been calling persona-indexing registers)? This is, note, different from the (not unrelated) question that concerns this article: namely, how do person-indexing registers—whose repertoire forms are indexically linked to an individuated entity, a person—emerge (in particular, out of persona-indexing registers)?

Wortham begins from the premise that social identity is always an interactionally mediated phenomenon: social types exist only insofar as they manifest in real-time events of semiosis, which is to say that identity is always put into play in, and thus emergent from, interaction. At the same time, events of interaction themselves only take intelligible shape (are entextualized) to the extent that extra- or trans-contextual semiotic norms—such as widely circulating social types of personhood (viz. registers)—hover over and across interactions. As this implies, the issue isn’t simply that large-scale, widely circulating models of identity are uniquely contextualized (or troped on, i.e., realized) in different events of social identification, but also that those very models emerge through and across those token-events of identification (i.e., are virtualized). Through such an “enunciative praxis” (Fontanille [Reference Fontanille1998] 2006),Footnote ²¹ every event dialectically instantiates and thus also reconstitutes such models of personhood, thereby giving rise to self-differences within these models, enabling “local” or “meso” models of identity, as Wortham puts it, to emerge, say, in classroom activities across the course of an academic year.

While Wortham’s interest is how social types can be scaled “up” or “down” (to the level of individuals), here my interest is in how this dialectic of norm and trope—or social type and token-instantiation, virtualization and realization—and the forms of self-difference it continually produces relate to, produce, and are produced by the enregisterment of such indexicalities to individuated existents; that is, how such models of identity can be rigidified, fixed with a rigid indexicality to a person. What Wortham’s ethnography reveals, thus, is when the rubber of enregisterment hits the road of individuation and subjectivity. And this implies the distinct process of the enregisterment of a person, of the thickening of their personage, of their becoming a particular social type unto themselves.

The case of Tyisha

As Wortham tells us, one widely circulated stereotype in American schools that created a default metapragmatics for the particular classroom he studied was that “girls are less troublesome, smarter and more promising than boys” (Reference Wortham2006, 53). This was particularized in the classroom that Wortham studied, such that teachers articulated the belief that “girls cooperate more with the teachers, are more intelligent, and will more likely succeed professionally and economically in later life. Boys, in contrast, more often resist classroom expectations, are less intelligent and will most likely not succeed professionally and economically in later life” (Reference Wortham2006, 53). These stereotypes were elicited by Wortham in interviews with teachers. They were, however, also implicitly figurated—embodied and instated—in interaction as the way in which students were positioned within and across classroom interactions.

This relationship of stereotype to student behavior, of course, hardly worked in straightforward ways, where students were directly recruited to, or seen as, instances of these stereotypes. Rather, such stereotypes were the grounds of intelligibility of student behavior, whether they conformed to them or not. Consider Tyisha, an African American student who started the year as a “promising girl” but ended up as a “disruptive outcast”. While the first category is perhaps a relatively recognizable identity category for a student, the latter, Wortham notes, is not. Rather, the “disruptive outcast” was a locally emergent category particular to this classroom (and one mediated, as we’ll see, by the class’s curricular focus on Aristotle’s Politics); and further, this persona was the result as much as the source of Tyisha’s trajectory of person-indexing enregisterment over the course of the school year; which is to say that the persona emerged through what Wortham calls Tyisha’s “trajectory of identification”.

In September, at the beginning of the academic year, Tyisha was an outspoken student whose input was valued in the class because she was one of the few who participated regularly. As Wortham reports, when her answers were off topic or “wrong” they weren’t commented upon by teachers as such, and the uptake of her participation by teachers and other students was generally positive, even for forms of behavior that later became problematical for the teachers when more students began participating in classroom discussion (Reference Wortham2006, 153–55), such as couching her statements as personal opinions via epistemic modifiers like “I think” or “to me”.

By December, what largely went uncommented upon in the autumn began to receive implicit disapproval and even explicit metacommentary by teachers as negative behaviors. Wortham shows how Tyisha was increasing dismissed by the teachers as “missing the point” (Reference Wortham2006, 157–58) or being off-topic, as well as inappropriately framing her discussion only as her own personal opinion (rather than taking an impersonal point of view) or by using her own personal definitions (rather than abiding by the “social contract” of the class to use shared definitions), as we see below. Increasingly, as the year went on, Tyisha became cleaved off from the rest of the group, interrupted with more frequency and more quickly. She began to be treated as a different kind of student, and not in a good way. This wasn’t a named identity, however, but a pattern, an image-text (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2019), of interaction. Consider the poetics of pronouns and proper names in the following transcript from November 2 (Figure 2), and how students begin to take up the teachers’ stance to Tyisha two months later, in January:

Figure 2.

Tyisha in the classroom, November 2 and January 2.

Figure 2 Long description

Classroom transcript excerpt with two sections dated November 2 and January 2. The text includes dialogue lines with speaker initials and line numbers. Key elements (such as pronouns) are underlined or highlighted. In the transcript, the students and teachers are discussing the rights of men and women (November 2) and slaves and masters (January 2).In line 455, Tyisha is told by the teachers, and then another student in line 456, ′you just missed the point′ and ′we’re not comparing them.′ The layout includes two dated sections separated by a horizontal rule, with dialogue lines marked by speaker initials. Unintelligible portions are bracketed.

Source: Adapted from Wortham (2006, 156–57).Notes: Annotations on this transcript and those that follow—such as thick underlining (red, black, gray), red curly brackets, arrows, circles around text, sans serif text—are my own; thin underlines are in the original and indicate stress; see Wortham (2006, 292) for his transcription conventions.

In the first strip of interaction, note the citation of Tyisha (lines 372–74 in red brackets), which figures her as flippant and explicitly typifies her contribution as “vague” and without “specific” examples. Further notice how in both excerpts, the poetics of discourse (e.g., the person-deictics, verbal mood) provides a reflexive image (or meta-picture) of what is going on the interaction; namely, a contrast between:

This emergent figuration of Tyisha as outside of the consensus of the class is solidified over time, as revealed by the uptake of this position of Tyisha by Jasmine in line 456, whose “we” aligns her with the teachers (and potentially other students), as being in distinction to Tyisha (and another female student [FST]).Footnote ²²

As these brief excerpts show, up to this point Tyisha’s recurrent positioning in the class is figurated through turn-taking, interruptions, pronouns and other person-referring expressions, grammatical features (such as the imperative mood), as well as explicit commentaries. This positioning has an unspecified and unnamed quality: she is implicitly treated (“voiced”) as a student who doesn’t listen and who is outspoken. This image is solidified, or “thickened” over time (as Wortham puts it), as each interaction revisits, and conserves, something of these previous interactions, as this comparison of two events across two months hints at.

Critical to Wortham’s account of this thickening is how classroom interactions were informed by the curriculum. And when a new curricular topic emerged—Aristotle’s Politics with its thematization of the antimony between individual and society—Tyisha’s protean personage became a resource for academic learning. That is, her recurrent positioning in the class itself became an object of reflexive pedagogical interest; and this transformed, indeed, enregistered, such recurrent positioning into an image of the person herself. By being so figured, Aristotle’s Politics became a metapragmatics by which a social type/persona (the “disruptive outcast”) and an enregistered person (traveling under the name, Tyisha) emerged in tandem. Not simply exemplified by Tyisha, this curricular text also puts a finer point on, and fleshes out, the model of personhood that she was already being recruited to, that is, enregistered to within the classroom.

Central to this process is what Wortham (Reference Wortham1992, Reference Wortham2006) calls “participant examples”. This pedagogical technique aims to align the denotational text of the lesson with the interactional text of the classroom by making a student or teacher an example of something in it. Consider one of Wortham’s examples. The class is discussing Aristotle’s Politics and, in particular, the question of what differentiates animals and humans. The teacher is pushing the notion that humans have goals. Tyisha interjects, “Mrs. Bailey? I- I have to disagree” (Reference Wortham2006, 181), a statement of epistemic particularity, which is greeted by the class as a typical thing Tyisha does, as indicated by their immediate laughter. Tyisha suggests that her cat also has goals, such as to get on the counter, just like she has goals, like to win at Nintendo. The teachers push her on this, arguing that humans, but not animals, have long-term goals.

Tyisha persists and inhabits her position in the class as an impish disrupter, her persistence taken up by the teachers, and the other students, as a disruption. To counter the teachers’ arguments, rather than contest their framing, Tyisha plays into it and reverses its terms. It isn’t that her cat is like her but that she is just like her cat. In the summertime, all she wants to do is sleep and eat (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Tyisha in the classroom, January 24.

Source: From Wortham (2006, 184).

In lines 736–39, the teacher’s formulations offer up a set of alternatives for Tyisha, the first of which would seem to be dispreferred; it is precisely this, however, which Tyisha takes up and elaborates as “the same goal my cat had”. In line 742, the teacher typifies Tyisha’s equation as “interesting” with an increase in pitch that, as Wortham puts it, metapragmatically typifies this “goal” by mocking it. Next, the teachers and the students pick up this stance together so as to argue that, indeed, Tyisha is beastlike (Reference Wortham2006, 186). Note how, in the transcript below (Figure 4), the teachers and the other students collaboratively (re)entextualize an image of Tyisha as separate from the class:

Figure 4.

Tyisha in the classroom, January 24, continued.

Source: Adapted from Wortham (2006, 186).

In line 745, the teacher cites Tyisha’s equation of herself and the cat with a third-person construction (“her” = Tyisha), and in lines 748–49 the teachers and students both position Tyisha as “like an animal”, generalizing from her particular cat to the larger taxonomic category (“her cat” → “an animal”), using a nomic copula with the second-person subject (“you are”; cf. Tyisha’s reportively calibrated past tense reference, “same goal my cat had”), with Mr. Bailey’s stress on “are” indicating this being against normal expectations. At this moment (line 750), Tyisha begins to back off of her argument, and the teacher, Ms. Bailey switches footing to discipline her. Ms. Bailey shifts-in through a switch in address: from pronominal “you”—quasi-rigidly designating her hypothetical cat-like self—to proper-name address, “Tyisha”, the student in the here-and-now of the class. In line 756, the rest of class ratifies the teacher’s disciplining, solidifying Tyisha’s individuation and separation from the rest of the class (as disruptive, beastlike).Footnote ²³

This comparison between Tyisha and her cat is shaped, of course, by Aristotle’s text, whose point is that beasts, like Gods, are asocial creatures; they exist outside of society. Consider how the interaction continues to unfold (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Tyisha in the classroom, January 24, continued.

Figure 5 Long description

Transcript excerpt with annotations and underlines. The left column contains a dialogue with line numbers, discussing the definition of ′beast′ and its application to Tyisha, continuing the classroom discussion from previous figures. Key points include disagreement with dictionary definitions versus Aristotle′s view. Underlined words such as ′someone,′ ′at least,′ ′your,′ and ′you′ highlight emphasis. The right column features equation-like definitions that highlight implicit aspects of the interaction in the left column: ′beast = someone (nomically calibrated),′ ′Tyisha (reportively calibrated),′ ′not ′I′ (Tyisha; reflexively calibrated),′ ′you (reflexively calibrated).′ Summary: The dialogue explores the concept of a beast as someone who roams the earth, with Tyisha refuting the idea that she or her cat fits this definition. Key excerpts: ′FST: a beast- a beast = someone who roams around earth.′ ′TYI: I’m not a beast and my cat is not a beast.′ ′TYI: by your definition, you’re telling us because you have no society, to which you belong in summer by the definition of Aristotle.′ Visual formatting includes underlined emphasis and structured layout with annotations.

Source: Adapted from Wortham (2006, 187–88).

In this stretch of classroom interaction, the concept from the text—the definition of a “beast”—is metasemantically elaborated and humanized: note the existentially quantified human noun “someone” (cf. “something”) plus “who” (cf. “which”) in line 804, followed by the verb phrase “roams around the earth”. In the teacher’s utterance in line 810 (addressing another student), Tyisha again becomes a third-person topic, a usage that excludes her from the discussion while “connecting” her to the nomically calibrated curricular topic (“the beast”). When Tyisha protests in line 812, both the students and the teacher turn her argument against her. “Definitions” become the way in which Tyisha is shown to be a beast, like her cat. In line 816, the teacher says, “by your definition …” so as to fix her as a beast, not in a “possible world” but in the here-and-now of the classroom itself (Figure 6).Footnote ²⁴

Figure 6.

Tyisha in the classroom, January 24, continued.

Figure 6 Long description

A two column transcript excerpt appears, with dialogue on the left numbered at lines 830 and 835, and interpretive notes on the right connected by arrows. In the left column, a speaker labeled T slash B tells Tyisha that the class has repeatedly faced a problem because people cannot communicate unless everyone agrees on shared definitions, while Tyisha begins to object. T slash B continues that if Tyisha will not accept the definition she should step out of the conversation, noting the class is using Aristotle's definitions, that a classmate named Shereather was right, and that the ongoing issue is Tyisha not offering a different definition, adding that the discussion should stay grounded in definitions the class has already agreed on. In the right column, the same passage is broken into annotated segments: we and you are marked as reflexively calibrated terms for those having the problem, people is marked as nomically calibrated to those who communicate by agreeing on definitions, you and we together are marked as a blended nomic and reflexive calibration tied to the conditional clause, the classmate's name is marked as reportively calibrated to being right, and the word that is marked as a blended reflexive, reportive, and nomic calibration referring back to the ongoing disagreement.

Source: Adapted from Wortham (2006, 188).

In line 828, an explicit connection between an (exclusive) “we” having a problem with “you Tyisha” is drawn; the teacher switches to an impersonal third person (“people”) who must agree on terms. The hypothetical syllogism, already implied to be the case (as sketched in the interactional poetics thus far), is that if you don’t agree on a definition then you can’t participate with people [=us] (i.e., you are not one of the people, you are not a person, you are an animal). As the teacher says in line 835, “and if you don’t want to agree on the definition, I think you (should) remove yourself from the conversation”.

At the beginning of the interaction, there had been two possible entextualizations available: that Tyisha is joking around (as seen from the students’ laughter) or that Tyisha has made an argument that is valid and should be considered (as seen from the teacher’s uptake of Tyisha’s intervention). As Wortham suggests, both come to be reformulated as the interaction proceeds, and by the end of the interaction, by pursuing the latter, Tyisha has become the butt of the joke (line 815), her own inhabitation of the participant example turned against her. By the end of the sequence, Tyisha is not simply figurated as a hypothetical example of an outcast. She has been distinguished and separated out discursively from the rest of the group, which itself is figurated, via the abiding metapragmatics of the textual analogy, as “society”.

Here, the performative semiotic structure of such participant examples works as an engine of enregisterment: not only do the participant examples align the denotational text under question (here, Aristotle’s Politics) to the interactional text of the classroom and its discursive image-texts; they also make each the metapragmatics of the other, such that the interpretation of the pedagogical text becomes a function of its framing through the emergent interactional relations constituted by the participant example, just as the participant example is metapragmatically framed by the denotational content of the text which is being taught at the moment. This pedagogical modality socially locates Tyisha by positioning her vis-à-vis Aristotle’s text, creating analogies whereby qualities/intensions discussed in Aristotle’s text (in this case, of being disruptive and being an outcast, being beastly) can come to be lodged in the individuated entity that straddles the participant example (Tyisha). And vice versa. Such hypotheticals (“possible worlds”) double the text and the interaction, linking each world with the other (the world of the narrative, Aristotle’s Politics, and the world of the classroom interaction) through the signs of an individuated entity recruited to participate as their bridge: namely, the body, name, and conduct of the person, Tyisha. The participant example becomes a conduit or pivot, then, through which person-indexing enregisterment happens, through which a history of interaction (itself an emergent image-text culled over numerous interactional texts over the school year) and a pedagogical (and mythic) denotational text come to be entangled with each other vis-à-vis the individuated person; and to Wortham’s point, it is precisely via this dialectic of person- and persona-indexing enregisterment that academic learning and outcomes are mediated, for better or worse.Footnote ²⁵

What is interesting for this article is how this cumulative trajectory, this continuous positioning, is itself part of the emergence not simply of gendered or racial stereotypes in the classroom (of which Tyisha was a notable exception), nor of the curricular categories (e.g., of the “disruptive outcast”), but of Tyisha herself as the indexical object of this process of enregisterment. Here, again, the issue isn’t about Tyisha as a singular self with unique, idiosyncratic communicative behavior but rather about the emergence over the history of the classroom of signs whose indexicality, for that class (viz. social domain), is modeled as linked to her as an individuated entity. Indeed, it isn’t that epistemic hedges, disruptive behavior, and the like were singular to Tyisha (we imagine that many students engage in such behavior), but rather that through being repeatedly co-textualized to shibboleths such as her name such signs came to have a residual indexicality anchored in her person. By being co-textualized with her, they became proper-to her, even—perhaps especially—in her absence (Figure 7).

Figure 7.

Impersonating Tyisha in the classroom, February 7.

Figure 7 Long description

A transcript excerpt with numbered lines 250 and 255 shows a classroom exchange among several speakers. One speaker, labeled BRE, describes something as a test, saying it is strong if it lives and the opposite if it dies. A speaker labeled T slash B then announces he will play the role of Tyisha, followed by a bracketed phrase highlighted in red indicating the response is not right, which prompts laughter from students labeled STS. T slash B continues in character, calling the other students foolish and repeating the same red highlighted phrase, followed by a partly obscured line about something being missing. After more scattered laughter, T slash B refers to her today, with a bracketed note indicating several seconds of further comments and laughter. At line 250, T slash B asks rhetorically what Tyisha would say in response, with a bracketed aside asking what the listener's own response would be. STS responds with an unintelligible reply followed by laughter. At line 255, T slash B concludes that the other person would never say that while actually standing in the room.

Source: Adapted from Wortham (2006, 192).

Here, later in the year, Tyisha is now named as a character/social type to be “played” through the deployment of signs that have been rendered proper-to her, as indexes of her; in this case, parodied through disruptive and challenging speech acts (“these people are stupid, that’s not right”, “what is your response to that?”) co-textualized and regimented by her name.

What the case of Tyisha demonstrates is that the criterial feature of such a register is not the uniqueness of the repertoire forms vis-à-vis their indexical object. Rather, it is their citationality (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2013a), the fact that Tyisha as a person circulates through citable signs of her—signs whose contextualized values, however, return to her, as “hers”, in this case, in an ambivalent, indeed, somewhat negative light.

We might further suggest that it is this citationality that constitutes the register even as it partially undoes its rigidity, shifting it through typifying it (here, through an act of parody). For the outcome of every such enregisterment—every such individuation—is precisely its converse, its decontextualization and abstraction, a tendency of every individuated social token to become a social type, of the individual to give herself over to a self-different stereotype of “herself”, of the person, through their personage, becoming a persona. Tyisha, then, wasn’t simply a token-individual of a generalized social-type (promising girl, disruptive outcast, etc.), or even a token that altered the type; her identity itself became a type, not simply relative to itself, which is to say, as a self-same identity across time and space (i.e., as a biographical individual), but also a recognizable type across a social domain (the classroom over the year) that construed such signs as proper to her.