"I'll be the Sun": From reported speech to semiotic remediation practices.

‘I’ll be the sun’: From reported speech tosemiotic remediation practices

PAUL PRIOR, JULIE HENGST, KEVIN ROOZEN, and JODY SHIPKA

Abstract

Discussions of reported speech have increasingly attended to mode, both the

mode of the utterance represented and the mode of delivery. In this article,

we argue for a more expansive engagement with multimodality, a view

already signaled in the theories of Go¤man, Clark, Hanks, and Irvine. We

first propose shifting the unit of analysis from linguistic or discourse repre-

sentation to semiotic remediation practices, a notion that attends to the di-

verse ways that humans’ and nonhumans’ semiotic performances (historical

and imagined) are re-represented and reused across modes, media, and

chains of activity. We then turn to three examples—a family pretend game,

a college composition course task, and a comedy skit—that illustrate how

semiotic remediation operates in concretely situated and culturally medi-

ated practices. We conclude by suggesting that this notion of semiotic reme-

diation will assist a fuller understanding of reported speech as discourse

practice, that dialogic views of reported speech may in turn contribute to

explorations of multimodality, and that attention to semiotic remediation

is central to understanding the work of communication and culture.

Keywords: reported speech; discourse practices; multimodality; mediated

activity; writing research.

1. Introduction

Reported speech (variously referred to as speech or discourse representa-

tion, represented speech and thought, constructed dialogue; direct, indi-

rect, and quasi-direct discourse) has been the object of much inquiry andtheoretical reflection (e.g., Lucy 1993; Sakita 2002; Semino and Short

2004). It has often been taken up with a tight focus on utterances where

syntactic, lexical, and nonverbal (paralinguistic or visual-textual) cues

1860–7330/06/0026–0733 Text & Talk 26–6 (2006), pp. 733–766

Online 1860–7349 DOI 10.1515/TEXT.2006.030

6 Walter de Gruyter

combine to produce highly marked cases of the phenomenon. However,

as Voloshinov’s (1973) analysis first suggested, reported speech also

can raise fundamental questions about the very nature of language: it

disrupts both the theoretical view that language is an abstract, imper-

sonal system and the everyday notion that language is the authorial

expression of a sovereign individual. Reported speech can be under-

stood then as a marked case of more di¤use forms of intertextuality andinterdiscursivity—the relatively unmarked and subtle ways that others’

words are woven into the very fabric of every utterance. We believe re-

ported speech also points beyond language to a broader family of semi-

otic practices. Baynham and Slembrouck (1999) noted that, although

there have been various calls for attending to mode in reported speech,

mode has rarely been addressed and then typically is treated as an excep-

tion rather than as a matter of theoretical import. This paper is partly

motivated by the desire to go beyond simply considering mode in re-ported speech to reconceptualizing reported speech as one dimension of

a multimodal phenomenon that appears as well in gesture, images, mate-

rial objects, and other media.

Further, we are interested in understanding multimodality in Voloshi-

nov’s (1973) dialogic terms, not only as a question of multimodal form,

but also as a question of situated and mediated practice, with complex

historical trajectories of (re)production, reception, distribution, and repre-

sentation. Such trajectories of practice may be most obvious when we lookat examples of written texts where multiple people are involved over time

in the process of representing some material. However, they are also

salient in talk, as Irvine (1996) clearly documented in her analysis of

shadow conversations. Practice o¤ers an opening not only to a broader,

multimodal field of communication, but also to sociogenesis (a concept

that unites individual learning and social formation). Current sociocul-

tural activity theory merges Vygotskyan psychology and Voloshinovian

semiotics and has, as Wertsch (1991) suggests, focused on the questionof ‘Who’s talking?’ as a way to explore the links of semiotic mediation

to learning—i.e., the historical co-production of people and society as

others’ utterances and signs are appropriated into sociocognitive systems

(memory, attention, self-regulation), personalized, (re)externalized, and

hence (re)woven into the fabric of social voices, practices, and identities.

In this article, we take up these three themes (multimodality, situated

practice, and sociogenesis) by first articulating the move from reported

speech to what we call semiotic remediation practices. We then explorethree di¤erent sites where semiotic remediation practices are particularly

foregrounded: a pretend game played by young children and adults in a

family, the experience of students in a college course where they were

734 Paul Prior et al.

asked to move beyond print-linguistic text, and finally the production and

performance of a comedy sketch by a group of college students. Each site

o¤ers a marked illustration of a mediated, embodied semiotics and high-

lights particular dimensions of semiotic remediation practices; together

they suggest why we see this notion as central to future research and

theory on cultural practice and discourse.

2. Resituating reported speech

For our purposes, a key move in the long conversation on reported

speech occurred when Voloshinov (1973) and later Bakhtin (1986) re-

envisioned language as a situated, concrete, temporal, social phenom-

enon, as histories of human interaction rather than abstract systems

(langue) that govern, imperfectly to be sure, situated acts of communica-tion ( parole).1 Voloshinov challenged the received notions of direct and

indirect reported speech, pointing to free indirect, quasi-direct, and other

subtle means by which representations of talk, text, thought, and stance

seep around and through the putative borders of reported speech—

through the framed (he said, she said ), syntactically signaled (e.g., tense

shifting), lexically realized (as register variation), and nonverbally high-

lighted (by gestural and paralinguistic cues in talk; quotation marks and

other typographic-visual conventions in text) markers that signal listenersor readers that someone else’s words are being presented. Voloshinov

stressed the importance of utterances that laminate di¤erent social and in-

dividual voices together. Bakhtin (1984) took up this emphasis, focusing

on various ways that literary texts might be double- or multi-voiced. The

stunning theoretical brilliance of their work was unfortunately matched

by very limited empirical means. Although Voloshinov and Bakhtin ar-

gued for a theory of concrete, historical utterance, their methods were

limited to close reading of literary texts, anecdotal reflection on everydayexperience, and the invented-example tradition of linguistics. Neverthe-

less, they did articulate the critical recognition that reported speech is, in

e¤ect, merely a synecdoche for a fundamental re-envisioning of language

as the dialogic appropriation and reuse of others’ words.

Voloshinov’s practice-oriented view is partly reflected in current no-

tional and functional analyses of reported speech, which have led to an

expanded understanding of what is being represented, how it is being rep-

resented, and what work such representations do. Beyond representationof past ‘actual’ speech/text by individuals, researchers (e.g., Besnier 1992;

Tannen 1989; Myers 1999a) have pointed to representation of fictive, hy-

pothetical, and planned talk; of thoughts, feelings, and attitudes; and of

Semiotic remediation practices 735

talk/text by collectives and nonhuman actors. Although the terminology

lags behind, a clear consensus is emerging that what has been called re-

ported speech might better be named represented speech and thought

(RST). Research (e.g., Gunthner 1999; Sakita 2002) has recognized that

RST does not require explicit syntactic framing. Typography and chunk-

ing in text, paralinguistics and register in talk, and for that matter inter-

textual common ground alone can mark utterances as containing orconsisting of others’ words. Varied borderline categories, such as narra-

tive report (I talked with Tom) and nonexplicit description (He was very

angry about his grades), have also been identified (e.g., see Hickman

1993). Corpus analyses have embraced an ever-expanding number of cat-

egories. Semino and Short (2004), for example, describe speech, writing,

and thought presentation (SW & TP) in terms of 21 categories, with a

core of six types of representation (direct, indirect, free direct, free indi-

rect, report of acts, representation of acts) times three objects of represen-tation (speech, writing, and thought), each of which can be further divided

by a set modifiers (e.g., hypothetical) to generate subcategories (e.g.,

hypothetical representation of a speech act). Looking to social functions,

research has focused on ways that RST participates in the discursive or-

ders (Fairclough 1992) of institutions. Working within phenomenological

and conversation-analytic traditions, where everyday talk is understood

as an achievement, not so much of communication, but of a social order

through the sequential unfolding of accountable acts, recent studies oftalk (e.g., Myers 1999b; Hall et al. 1999; Antaki and Leudar 2001; Hobbs

2003) have particularly examined how RST is deployed to do the social

and institutional work of characterizing and classifying persons and

events.

The multimodal dimensions of otherwise canonical reported speech

events may be most clearly visible when a single episode is realized

through a mix of modes. Hengst et al. (2005), for example, explored

marked use of RST in interactions between individuals with aphasia andtheir routine communication partners (e.g., spouses or children). Of par-

ticular relevance to the present argument is their close analysis of an

interaction between Ethel, a young woman with moderate-severe aphasia

(whose talk consisted typically or one- or two-word utterances, often quite

animated paralinguistically and gesturally), and her husband, Barnie. The

interaction begins at the dinner table when Ethel alludes to a question

that Hengst had asked before Barnie got home. Ethel gestured toward

Hengst (who was in an adjoining room filming the interaction) and saidto Barnie, ‘Bratwurst?’ Her gesture framed a direct report of Hengst’s

question about why they were having bratwurst for dinner; Ethel repre-

sented that question holophrastically, with rising intonation and a shift


in voicing. This kind of multimodal framing was seen in the same data set

among participants who did not have aphasia (e.g., a mother pointing to

her young child and then providing an otherwise unframed direct repre-

sentation of what the child said). Gesturing to identify the speaker is

also, of course, a routine practice in sign language, as a virtual or co-

present origio for an utterance is designated by pointing (see, e.g., Liddell

2003).Multimodality also appears in the transformative trajectories of dis-

course across times and places, in intertextual chaining (Fairclough 1992)

that involves shifts in mode. For example, Berkenkotter and Ravatos

(1998; Berkenkotter 2001) have examined how the oral talk of a psycho-

therapy session was converted first into notes (including both marked and

unmarked direct representations of the client’s speech as well as implicit

intertextual allusions to formal standardized categories of mental dis-

ease), and then those notes were further repurposed to produce case sum-maries and submissions for insurance payments. Their account of this re-

contextualization highlights not only modal movements from talk to text,

but also specific cultural/professional practices of speech representation,

as shifting genres and discursive orders recategorize the client’s lived ex-

perience in terms of the formal diagnostic codes found in DSM-IV (the

fourth edition of the manual of o‰cial diagnostic symptoms of mental

illnesses). Prior (1994, 1995, 1998) traced the circulation of discourse be-

tween talk and text in a sociology group, (graduate students and facultyin a seminar linked to a research project) as they participated in co-

authoring institutional documents (examination papers and theses) as

well as disciplinary texts (conference papers, technical reports, journal ar-

ticles, book chapters). Whether examining the impact of hypothetical di-

rect dialogues o¤ered as a critique of a hypothesis in a seminar or the

complex configurations of ownership and understanding around tacitly

co-authored text, his analyses foreground complex historical chains link-

ing RST, the appropriation of voices, and disciplinary enculturation (theproduction of both sociologists and sociology).

We are not the first to suggest locating reported speech within some

broader category. In his work on frames and footings, Go¤man (1974,

1981) made two critical moves by (i) treating reported speech as part of

a larger category of replays (shifting in other words from a language-

centric to a semiotic perspective) and (ii) seeing reported speech as a type

of laminative embedding that carries not only the represented words/acts

of another but also the represented participation framework of othertimes, places, and (often) characters. We find it telling that Go¤man

(1981) opened and closed his seminal analysis of footings with the story

of US President Richard Nixon asking White House correspondent Helen


Thomas to pirouette at the end of a press conference, ostensibly to assess

her fashion choice of wearing pants rather than a dress. Go¤man linked

this embodied replay to political and rhetorical strategy, to the particu-

larities of Nixon’s personality and politics, and to a broader cultural

policing of gender identities. He noted that the trajectory of Thomas’s

pirouette could be traced from the ballet stage to the fashion runway to

everyday interactions and finally to the public-political space of the WhiteHouse pressroom.

Go¤man’s work contributed directly to two complementary remap-

pings of reported speech. The first, Clark and Gerrig (1990), used Peirce’s

(1998) semiotic scheme (index, symbol, icon) to argue that indirect speech

and direct speech really fit into two di¤erent categories of representation

(symbol/description for indirect; icon/demonstration for direct). Clark

and Gerrig drew explicitly on Go¤man’s accounts of keying (so-called

‘non-serious’ activity). Non-serious keyings include things such as practic-ing, pretending, and acting, with ‘non-serious’ explicitly not intended to

mean ‘unimportant’ but rather to characterize activities that are not done

or taken as operating within the primary frame. Go¤man in turn was

drawing on Bateson’s (1972) ethological discussions of the metapragmatic

signals that distinguish play fights and bites from actual fights and bites.

In passing, Clark and Gerrig (1990: 769) note:

When Alice quotes George, she may depict the sentence he uttered. She can also

depict his emotional state (excitement, fear, shyness), his accent (Brooklyn, Irish,

Scots), his voice (raspy, nasal, whiney), and even the nonlinguistic actions that ac-

companied his speech (gestures, frown, head angle).

In other words, reported speech in talk routinely involves multimodal

forms of impersonation as well as re-presentation of others’ words. Writ-

ten quotations, they observe, can also demonstrate such things as the ap-

pearance of the script or print or the material features of the medium.

They note that quotations are often not only of imaginary speech/writing

(or inaccurate and partial depictions), but that these forms are used to‘quote’ sounds and nonlinguistic actions (‘The car keeps going ‘‘klut klut

klut’’ when I change gears.’). Clark and Gerrig (1990: 791) concluded that

quotation is, in practice, a fuzzy category, as ‘demonstrations come mixed

with descriptions in hybrids of many forms’.

The second remapping emerged more from close attention to participa-

tion frameworks and deixis. Working from Go¤man’s (1974, 1981) dis-

cussions of complexly laminated and embedded frames and footings,

Hanks (1990: 196) suggests:

This focus leads me to posit a relation between a variety of phenomena usually

treated as distinct. These include explicit quotation (direct speech), indirect report,


‘transposition’ of deictic categories (Buhler, 1982: 210¤.), certain kinds of highly

creative reference, and the subtle shifts in perspective that can be seen to underlie

much of deictic reference in connected discourse. These phenomena have in

common that they rest on displacement or alteration of the indexical ground of

utterance.

Hanks points to the way these phenomena all depend on participationframeworks and indexical grounds being decentered from the phenomenal

here-and-now of interaction. Haviland (1996) examines, for example, how

transpositions and projections may be accomplished through gestures in-

dexed in the virtual-narrated space as he analyzes a storyteller pointing,

as though inhabiting the space of the story, at a mountain that was not

there in a direction that was not the actual direction. Hanks (1990) and

Irvine (1996) make the critical argument that these complex framings of

participation and reference should lead not to an ever-expanding cata-logue of categories (e.g., the 21 plus types of RST), but more parsimoni-

ously and flexibly to a small set of operations (such as Hanks’ decentering

and recentering) that can generate very complicated semiotic e¤ects. Re-

sponding to Levinson’s (1988) attempt to formalize participation roles by

identifying a universal set of binary features (e.g., e motive), Irvine

(1996: 134) remarks:

. . . I believe that Levinson and others who would decompose Speaker and Ad-

dressee into a set of analytically primary components have got the analysis back-

to-front. To focus on the role fragments, rather than the fragmentation process,

reifies the fragments and, presumably, limits them to a finite number. Yet, one

might well suspect that the number of such participant roles (PRs) arrived at by

the decompositional approach may prove endless.

There is a very direct connection between these comments on participant

roles and the representation of participant roles and deictic fields in RST.2

Irvine (1996) extends discussion of participation frameworks by noting

not only complex representational transpositions, but also the multiple

ways that a present conversation or text is produced and understood

through a finely tuned sense of its history of production and its antici-pated forms of reception. She argues that such shadow conversations

(past, present, and future) represent a critical resource for participants’

production and understanding. Taking a multimodal perspective, we sug-

gest, should shift our attention from shadow conversations to, in e¤ect,

shadow acts.

When Baynham (1996) focused on speech representation, especially re-

formulations, in the discourse of a math classroom, he also documented

(without analyzing the linkages) the simultaneous production of writteninscriptions (words, numbers, and diagrams on paper and blackboards)


along with the use of gestures. The teacher in the class did not simply

speak for the students or others (human and nonhuman), but wrote,

drew, and gestured for them. A multimodal analysis of this whole semi-

otic ensemble could enrich the project Baynham (1996: 68) laid out of

understanding ‘the functions of speech quoting/reporting in terms of the

range of communicative resources/options available to speakers in a

given discourse context’. We see then a need to attend to gesture and ob-ject-oriented activity, to inscribed materials as well as talk, to longer tra-

jectories of practice as well as the immediate unfolding of events. To ad-

dress this need, then, we propose locating RST within a general family of

semiotic practices, which we refer to as semiotic remediation practices.

3. Semiotic remediation practices

Deciding how to name the phenomena we are interested in has by no

means been easy. We have chosen ‘semiotic’ over ‘multimodal’ because

‘semiotic’ signals our interest in signs across modes, media, channels, and

so on, whereas multimodal remains dependent on a definition of mode,

which is yet to be settled and may suggest exclusions (e.g., mode as op-

posed to medium). Although recontextualization (Linell 1998) and re-

semiotization (Iedema 2001) capture key dimensions of the phenomena

we describe, we have chosen remediation as a way of tying together sev-eral key approaches: Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) accounts of remediation

(transformations across media), Latour’s (1999) account of technical me-

diation in actor-network theory, recent work on mediated discourse anal-

ysis (Scollon 2001; Norris and Jones 2005), Hutchins’ (1995) accounts of

distributed cognition, and the concept of mediated activity (see Wertsch

1991) derived from Vygotksy’s work. We are hoping, in other words, that

you will read remediation as a strongly multi-voiced citation of these lines

of work, all of which focus attention on chains of media and chains ofmediation. Finally, we add ‘practice’ to stress the critical importance of

attending to both discourse (in concrete, historical acts and across ex-

tended trajectories) and sociogenesis (the people- and society-making

dimensions of activity). We intend, thus, to address the laminated multi-

modality of any moment of communicative practice as well as semiotic

transformations over short and long time frames, to attend to both arti-

facts and the situated activity in which they are produced, circulated, re-

ceived, and used.Semiotics has long wagered that general principles and patterns may be

identified across modes, codes, and media, a wager recently rearticulated

by researchers (e.g., Kress 1997; Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001; Bolter


and Grusin 1999; Lemke 1998, 2002) examining new media and transfor-

mations across modes and genres. Indeed, transformation is the focus of

Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) account of remediation, as they explore, for

example, how novels are made into movies that spin o¤ video games

that lead to Web fanzines and branded product lines, a process sometimes

referred to as repurposing.3 Bolter and Grusin argue that certain design

logics, particularly the tension between desires for transparent immersionand the value of hypermediation, operate across media. However, their

work and research on multimodality in general have so far focused on

questions of how to understand semiotic artifacts (representation) that

contain multiple semiotic modes (text and images, text and sound, and

so forth) and on the implications of changing technologies of distribution

(e.g., the Internet). It has been largely silent on situated practices involved

in the production and reception of such artifacts.

Chains of semiotic production, reception, representation, and distribu-tion have been traced in several lines of research. For example, Iedema’s

(2001) analysis of resemiotization traces the way a hospital renovation

project is worked out over a series of interactions in talk, text, drawings,

and object-production (from architect’s models all the way to full build-

ings and their sites). Likewise, Latour’s actor-network theory and his re-

search on science and technology have focused on the circulation of coor-

dinated series of objects and representations. At the Salk Institute, Latour

and Woolgar (1979) followed the ways brains were converted into puri-fied chemical substances and then into graphic representations from mea-

suring devices that were re-represented in papers that were then cited and

summarized in grant proposals. Latour (1999) traced the way a stretch of

rain forest was inscribed with posts and markers (overlaying the land with

a coordinate geometry), the way soil in these grids was sampled and

stored in a wood box that abstracted that geometry, and the way that the

box was transported to a French laboratory, where the soil samples were

analyzed and converted into numbers that were written up in a paper thatwas distributed in an issue of a journal. Latour (1999) examines the struc-

ture of such chains in his essay on technical mediation. We read these

studies as close analyses of semiotic remediation practices.

The approach that we take up here shares many tenets with emerging

work on mediated discourse analysis. Scollon (2001) argues that discourse

analysis should begin with the mediated activity of individuals in situated

sites of engagement, but should view such sites always as linked to

broader histories of practice and to the historical production of mediatio-nal means. To capture the hybrid, laminated quality that emerges when

multiple histories are tied together in situated actions, he proposes the

nexus of practice as something akin to Bourdieu’s (1990) habitus, i.e., as


a thickening and stabilizing of a site of engagement and a constellation of

social practices through repeated cycles of semiosis and action over time

and space. Scollon (2005) illustrates this theoretical approach through re-

flections on resemiotizations around the laying of a hardwood floor. He

notes how a professional resemiotized his work experience in a book on

laying floors, how he and his wife read and talked through the book

(text and images) as they first decided whether to lay a floor, then orderedthe wood, and finally with another family member laid it, all the while en-

gaging in multiple resemiotizations of the book’s text and pictures as well

as multiple instances of resemiotizing earlier talk and material action. Fi-

nally, central to mediated discourse analysis, as seen in Scollon’s (2001)

analyses of the repeated and varied practices of handing (handing objects

to babies, buying co¤ee at Starbucks, handing out literature on Hong

Kong streets) is attention to the ways people learn discourse practices

and redeploy them across sites of engagement.Theories of mediated and distributed activity (e.g., Hutchins 1995; Cole

and Engestrom 1993; del Rio and Alvarez 1995; Wertsch 1991, 1998)

highlight the constant recycling of such diverse cultural-semiotic artifacts

as hammers, languages, computers, narratives, and interpretable texts,

recycling that is critical to the (re)production of society and the devel-

opment of individuals. Work on the distributed nature of cognition

foregrounds semiotic remediation. Hutchins (1995: 118), for example,

describes distributed cognition as the transformative ‘propagation of rep-resentational state across representational media’, and notes how each

medium, including human minds, has particular properties. In his foun-

dational theory of sociogenesis, Vygotsky (1987: 280) presented the dy-

namic transformations—from thought to language and language to

thought—that drive and define psychological development as fundamen-

tally an issue of semiotic remediation. Discussing the di¤erent semiotic

properties of language and thought, he wrote:

Thought does not consist of individual words like speech. I may want to express

the thought that I saw a barefoot boy in a blue shirt running down the street to-

day. I do not, however, see separately the boy, the shirt, the fact that the shirt was

blue, the fact that the boy ran, the fact that the boy was without shoes. I see all

this together in a unified act of thought. In speech, however, the thought is parti-

tioned into separate words . . . . What is contained simultaneously in thought un-

folds sequentially in speech. Thought can be compared to a hovering cloud which

gushes a shower of words. (Vygotsky 1987: 281)

Vygotsky is highlighting here the shift from a holistic and multi-

sensory interior to a linear-verbal externalized semiotic. He was also con-

cerned with the a¤ective and motivational dimensions of consciousness,


questions of what Voloshinov (1973: 87) identified as socio-ideological

tone and evaluative orientation: ‘Any apprehension, after all, must have

inner speech, inner intonation, and the rudiments of inner style: one can

apprehend one’s hunger apologetically, irritably, angrily, indignantly,

etc.’ Is the barefoot boy celebrating with abandon a beautiful summer

day, evoking perhaps a complex mix of joy and nostalgia? Or is he a

starving and ragged child running from soldiers and explosions, produc-ing quite di¤erent emotions and motives for action? As Wertsch (1991)

notes, mediated activity o¤ers a unit of analysis that integrates the social

and psychological, the situated and the historical.

Semiotic remediation practice then is a notion that draws together di-

verse phenomena around a basic set of semiotic operations and that is at-

tuned to the situated and sociogenetic dimensions of everyday activity and

discourse. It aims to reach from the fleeting worlds of inner semiosis to

long, historical chains of material activity in the world. To explore the ap-plication of this approach, we turn now to cases that have functioned as

exemplars in our own developing understanding, that have led us from

reported speech to semiotic remediation practices.

4. ‘Can you go suck up blood’: Transpositions and impersonations in

‘Cindy Magic’

4.1. The world of ‘Cindy Magic’

Our first case explores pretend play, particularly a play world created and

played by Prior and his two young daughters, Nora and Anna. Using eth-

nographic methodologies, Hengst collected data on this game over a two-

year period, including three videotaped observations of game play and

four interviews with Nora, Anna, and Paul. With pretend play we are

looking at a pervasive activity in many cultural contexts (Goldman 1998;

Goncu 1999). Vygotsky (1967) identified play not only as the leading ac-tivity in preschool development of children, but as a critical step in human

development. In Hanks’ (1990) terms, Vygotsky was seeking the develop-

mental moment when decentering frees children from the domination of

environmental stimuli, allowing complex transpositions in the indexical

ground. Pretend play involves representations of others, including others’

voices. In RST terms, such voices are unframed, direct and hypothetical

or imagined. Play also involves the embodied impersonations of the fig-

ures (human and nonhuman) being represented and indexical transposi-tions as players travel back and forth between play and everyday worlds.

‘Cindy Magic’ was first played by Nora (about age 4) and her father

to pass the time on a five-hour car trip. Nora, who was fascinated with


animals and had already logged many hours watching documentary

programs on wildlife, had recently seen Disney’s re-release of 101 Dalma-

tians. Disturbed by the Cruella de Vil character, who kidnapped Dalma-

tian puppies from their families and planned to kill them to make a fur

coat, Nora created Cruella Magic—a good counter-character who would

save a whole host of baby animals, not just puppies, from Cruella de Vil

(cf. Dyson’s 1997 account of Tina, an African-American student who cre-ated a black female superhero, Venus Tina, out of a blend of Greek and

contemporary media material). In its earliest version, the game consisted

primarily of acting out conversations between Cruella Magic (played by

Nora) and the parents of lost baby animals (played by Paul). Although

the basic plot and characters were adopted from the movie, Paul and

Nora also drew on other sources including animal documentaries, as

they named all the animals they could think of; children’s stories, as they

made up names for all the animals; school routines, as they counted themissing animals and created rhyming or alliterative names (e.g., Henry,

Harry, and Holly Hippopotamus); and social routines, as they acted out

answering the phone and the door.

From this modest beginning, the game world grew—with characters,

settings, and plots expanding in number and complexity—and ‘Cindy

Magic’ became a family routine, with Paul, Nora, and eventually Anna

playing it on a fairly regular basis for over eight years; although, as the

girls grew older, play became less frequent (e.g., from multiple timesweekly to only a few times a year). Cruella Magic’s sister, Cindy (a name

Nora had used for a make-believe playmate) and Cindy’s three daughters,

Mary (played by Nora), Elizabeth (Paul), and Jane (Anna), became the

central players (with occasional visits from the original character, now

Aunt Cruella Magic). Cruella de Vil remained central to the plots, along

with her various evil henchmen (usually hunters) and the Magic sisters’

good allies (usually robots and cheetahs). The story lines expanded to in-

clude many, often elaborate, plots that would pit the good Magic sistersagainst the evil Cruella de Vil. At other times, play would simply focus on

mundane home events (cooking dinner, talking about what happened at

the Magics’ schools). However, opportunities to play ‘Cindy Magic’ were

almost exclusively limited to times when Paul, Nora, and Anna were run-

ning household errands (in the car) or completing family chores at home

(e.g., folding laundry). (See discussions of ‘Cindy Magic’ and how it was

played in Hengst and Miller 1999.)

Nora, Paul, and Anna used elaborate verbal and nonverbal resourcesto act out their characters in this world. In fact, it was the ease with which

all of the participants managed to shift footings along with the sheer den-

sity of such shifts that first attracted Hengst to this game as a research


site. ‘Cindy Magic’ was partly improvised on the spot and partly devel-

oped through gradual elaboration of character personalities and histories

o¤ered by repeated play within the same world. When speaking in char-

acter voices, Nora, Paul, and Anna adjusted their forms of address (e.g.,

used character names), pronominal reference (e.g., Paul being ‘he’ as

Paul, but ‘she’ as Elizabeth), and physical references (e.g., Paul is bigger

and older than Nora; but Elizabeth, who he played, is smaller and youn-ger than Mary, who Nora played). They also changed their speaking

rates, pitches, voice qualities, and nonverbal vocalizations (e.g., types of

laughter, growls, screams). Such shifts in voicing were a pervasive part

of this game play, and it was common for all three participants to voice

multiple characters during episodes. In fact, an analysis (Hengst and

Prior 1998; also Prior 2001) of one short ‘Cindy Magic’ episode (about

11-1/2 minutes when Anna was 4 years old and Nora was 8 1/2) identi-

fied at least twenty di¤erent characters or objects (e.g., door noises, flyingpants) that were voiced, with nine by Anna, ten by Nora, and seven by

Paul. At di¤erent times the participants voiced some of the same charac-

ters; for example, during that episode, Nora, Paul, and Anna all spoke as

robots. In addition to voicing characters, the acting out of plots routinely

recruited and decentered the physical environment where the game was

being played. For example, on one occasion when the family cat walked

into the room, he became a ‘baby lion cub’ that Aunt Cruella Magic had

dropped o¤ for the Magic sisters to take care of for a short time.

4.2. Analyzing semiotic remediation practices in one episode of ‘Cindy

Magic’

To better display the emergent semiotic remediation that was pervasive in

this game, we present here analysis of just over three minutes of a ‘Cindy

Magic’ episode that was recorded when Anna was 3 1/2 years old

and Nora almost 8. In this episode, Paul, Nora, and Anna were in thefamily living room with a large laundry basket, folding clean clothes

while P(Elizabeth), i.e., Paul as Elizabeth; N(Mary), i.e., Nora as Mary;

and A(Jane), i.e., Anna as Jane were watching A(Jane)’s kitties climb the

tree and talking about cleaning up for a party they were going to have.

Shortly into the game play, Nora, Paul, and Anna’s attention becomes fo-

cused on a spot on the rug where Paul discovered some mud. Through the

next three minutes, the rug along with Paul, Nora, and Anna’s shared at-

tention to it is taken up and woven into both worlds, finally becoming theMagic sisters’ backyard, which has been invaded by Cruella de Vil. To

trace these transformations (de- and recentering the indexical grounds—

conveniently here the rug on the floor/Magics’ backyard—for talk and


embodied action), we have divided this episode into four parts: (i) discov-

ering the mud; (ii) cleaning up the mud; (iii) transitioning back to the

‘Cindy Magic’ game; and (iv) characterizing new allies, the vampire bats.

This analysis then examines ways that semiotic remediation operated in

talk, in embodied impersonation, and in transpositions of the indexical

grounds of the socio-material environment.

4.2.1. Recentering: Discovering the mud. When Paul sees the mud, he

focuses his attention fully on the rug, stopping both game play and fold-

ing clothes for all three of them. The first still in Figure 1 shows Paul

leaning over to look closely at and touch the muddy spots on the rug,

while Nora (still folding clothes) and Anna (holding her stu¤ed cat)

Figure 1. Playing ‘Cindy Magic’ and doing chores


watch him. This shift out of the Magic world was clearly marked by Paul

speaking in his own voice (not Elizabeth’s slightly higher, lilting voice

quality) and by addressing the girls as Nora and Anna (‘Nora, do you

have mud on your shoes?’ ‘Anna, how about you?’). To initiate the clean

up, Paul sends both girls to take o¤ their shoes and sends Nora to get the

handheld vacuum. As Nora leaves the room, she briefly reinvokes the

Magic world by speaking as Mary (‘okay . . . okay Elizabeth’). In thisphase, the rug is a rug, and Paul, Nora, and Anna mainly focus their at-

tention on the mud, trying to identify where it came from.

4.2.2. Fluctuating centers: Cleaning up the mud. Nora, carrying the

vacuum, and Paul walk back into the living room, and Anna follows

close behind still carrying her toy cat. Speaking in character voice,

N(Mary) announces ‘Okay I’m doing it I’m doing it’ and begins to vac-

uum the rug. Also speaking in character voice and with transposed ad-dress, P(Elizabeth) acknowledges Mary’s e¤orts ‘Okay Mary (get) that

stu¤ cleaned up’ and blocks the toy kitty’s ears as he tells Jane, ‘Oh,

hold the kitty’s ears, this’ll be loud.’ A(Jane) pushes P(Elizabeth)’s hands

away to hold the toy kitty by its ears herself. After seven seconds of vac-

uuming, Nora stops, and in her own voice, complains, ‘It’s not doing

much.’ Paul tries vacuuming and after switching to a higher setting, suc-

cessfully cleans up the mud, while Nora shouts over the sound ‘Do you

have to do it so li- high and stu¤ ?’ and ‘Would you hurry up?’ Duringthis clean up, the rug was still the rug, but now not only were Paul,

Nora, and Anna focused on it, but it had been fleetingly blended into

the ‘Cindy Magic’ world.

4.2.3. Decentering: Back to ‘Cindy Magic’. As soon as the mud was

cleaned up, P(Elizabeth) walked out of the room to put the vacuum

away, calling back to N(Mary) and A(Jane) ‘That’s too loud. That re-

minds me of like Cruella de Vil.’ N(Mary) agrees ‘me too’ and A(Jane)announces ‘Ah help me Cruella coming uh.’ N(Mary) reassures A(Jane)

with ‘No she’s not, it’s just the vacuum cleaner, I think’ but P(Elizabeth)

asks ‘Where? Is she coming?’ A(Jane) looks around and points down at

the spot on the rug that was just vacuumed saying ‘Her right there.’

P(Elizabeth) takes up A(Jane)’s gesture by saying ‘Mary look, she is, she’s

down in our backyard.’ The second still in Figure 1 displays the align-

ment of bodily orientation and gaze as P(Elizabeth) says ‘What’s she do-

ing down there?’ In this segment, Paul, Nora, and Anna return to beingthe Magic sisters, but they have now transformed the former spot of

mud on the rug into the backyard of the Magic household, and the recent

noise of the vacuum cleaner into sounds made by Cruella de Vil.


4.2.4. Improvising impersonations: Rallying the vampire bats. Once

the Magic sisters establish that Cruella de Vil is in their backyard

making threatening noises, they then need to rally their forces against

her. P(Elizabeth) makes two routine suggestions ‘Maybe we should call

the robot?’ and ‘How about the cheetahs?’ N(Mary), however, still within

the ‘Cindy Magic’ frame, rejects both nominated allies, saying ‘Cause the

robot is already with her, don’t you see him?’ and then ‘The cheetahs arein their cage.’ P(Elizabeth) then appeals to A(Jane) for ideas, ‘What do

you think, Jane? What should we do?’ Looking down at the backyard,

A(Jane) proposes an ally that has never before appeared in a ‘Cindy

Magic’ episode ‘We call . . . the bats.’ N(Mary) enthusiastically supports

and expands this idea, ‘The vampire bats, good idea’, going on to tell

P(Elizabeth) that she and Jane know eighteen vampire bats. Mary and

Jane begin calling their bats. Then, breaking the play frame and speaking

in a quiet voice, Nora tells Paul ‘Dad, you be the vampire bats’ and Paulresponds ‘I’m gonna be the vampire bats? I don’t know how to be a vam-

pire bat.’ Nora acts out a suggested bat character by making fluttering

hand/wing gestures and high squeaky noises. Paul watches her and then

tries his own version of a bat, making lower voicing sounds, sucking

noises, and in a matching voice saying ‘What to eat?’ P(bat) looks at

Anna, who has been watching Nora and Paul try out the bat characters.

Then A(Jane) reaches out to P(bat)’s chest and swings her arm around

to point at the space on the rug projected as the ‘backyard’ (see the thirdstill in Figure 1), as if directing him to fly down and get Cruella de Vil;

N(Mary) immediately echoes A(Jane)’s gesture and voices the instruction

‘(Get) Cruella de Vil, can you go and suck up blood?’ P(bat) confirms the

target ‘Cruella de Vil’, calls the other bats ‘come on everybody’, makes

flying motions and noises, and reaches out with both hands to touch the

once muddy spot on the rug.

4.3. Semiotic remediation practices in ‘Cindy Magic’

In ‘Cindy Magic’, we see unframed improvised represented speech,

embodied impersonation, and the finely tuned means to de- and recenter

the socio-material environment that were available, even to the youngest

participant (Anna at 3 1/2 years) to evoke and negotiate transposed acts

and identities in a transposed world. More strikingly, we see how fluidly

laminated the interface of these worlds can be: In Hanks’ terms, decenter-

ing and recentering occur here in rapid succession, both across and withinworlds. What we also wish to raise here is the sociogenetic question of

the place of such play in development. Noting ways that children

and others—dolls, teddy bears, toy robots, animals—are spoken for,


Go¤man (1981: 150–151) stressed the complex laminations that children

are socialized into and socialized through:

. . . even as the child learns to speak, it learns to speak for, learns to speak in the

name of figures that will never be, or at least aren’t yet, the self. George Herbert

Mead notwithstanding, the child does not merely refer to itself through a name

for itself that others had first chosen; it learns just as early to embed the state-

ments and mannerisms of a zoo-full of beings in its own verbal behavior . . . .

Expanding on Go¤man’s reference to ‘mannerisms’, what we would add

here is that the child does not only learn to speak for/as a zoo-full of

beings, but also to stand, yell, move, for/as those beings; to project the

zoo as a virtual laminate over the everyday world; and, not incidentally,

to re-equip and repopulate the zoo.

5. ‘Everybody Dance Now’: Engineering a rhetorical event in a college

classroom

Our next case takes us to a first-year college composition course at the

University of Illinois in the United States, a specific course designed to

disrupt writers’ habitual written performances as a means of leading them

to richer and more nuanced understandings of how semiotic resources

and strategies might be taken up, transformed, recombined, and juxta-posed to a¤ord new kinds of rhetorical and material practice. For stu-

dents whose history of writing instruction had prepared them to under-

take assignments where the purpose, scope, and final appearance of their

work was already determined by the instructor, the sections of this course

taught by one of us (Shipka) posed a novel challenge. In them, students

were asked to undertake complex communicative tasks that did not pre-

scribe actions, audiences, purposes, materials, or methodologies so much

as they presented students with opportunities for (i) determining the kindand quality of work they aimed to accomplish in response to an assigned

task; (ii) attending to the ways various materials, methodologies, and/or

technologies might allow them to accomplish that work; and (iii) attend-

ing to the ways in which and conditions under which their work might be

responsively taken up. This approach contrasts sharply with those that

focus exclusively on production of print-linguistic texts. It asks students

to consider how the purposes, materials, and strategies associated with

everyday communicative practices might be taken up, remediated, (re)-combined, and, finally, brought into coordination to produce new forms

of action, knowledge, and participation. (For a fuller account of this

approach to rhetoric, see Shipka 2005.)


Here we focus on Mu‰e Connelly’s response to one assigned task, en-

titled ‘A History of ‘‘this’’ Space’. Created in part to address the dearth of

information on the lived experiences of college composition students, the

history task asks students to take up the role of class historian-for-a-day

to communicate to others something about who they were or what they

did in this context. By design, as the students were reading composition

professionals’ articles, this task also gave them an opportunity to contestdisciplinary representations of who composition students are and what

they do. Historians were encouraged to approach the task by defining the

specific ‘space(s)’ their history would represent, considering what space

(or aspect of a space) they would like to re-present for others, determining

the methodology (or methodologies) by which they would collect data,

and composing the means by which and/or conditions under which they

would re-present their findings. At the end of the year, contributions (that

could be) were photocopied, bound, and distributed to class members.Students were also encouraged to consider donating a copy to the student

life archive held in the campus library.

Mu‰e presented her history in the form of a live dance performance,

assisted by nine modern dance majors, none of whom were enrolled in

the course. This complex, tightly choreographed and highly peopled rhe-

torical event lasted but four minutes and, due to a technological glitch

with video equipment, would only be experienced by those who attended

class that day. As a participant in research examining the literate activ-ities of students in this rhetoric course, Mu‰e was asked in an interview

to sketch visual representations of the contexts and processes for the class

history. (For a detailed description of the interview protocol used in this

research, see Prior and Shipka 2003). The first panel in Figure 2 presents

one panel of her drawing along with her interview comments on it. Mu‰e

evokes the image of herself as a child engaged in dance class, wearing a

tutu, and then arriving (years later) in Shipka’s rhetoric class. In this im-

age, Mu‰e was forging connections between the work she accomplishedin the composition classroom and her long-term engagement with dance.

Given that the tutu works to signal ‘dancer’ or, more specifically, ‘ballet

dancer’ and that Mu‰e was representing herself as novice (her first dance

class, her first composition class), the image may have also marked the

life-long serious struggles with all kinds of writing that Mu‰e described

in interviews. When asked if she had worn tutus as a child, Mu‰e ad-

mitted that she had worn a tutu only once, as an adult, and that in that

case she was wearing it in a ‘sarcastic way’ to say, ‘that is not the kind ofdance I mean and/or the kind of dancer I mean to be.’

Mu‰e’s history task was initially motivated by her desire to take up

and transform another history, Body Language, a black-and-white video


collage of close-up images and clips of students’ (and Shipka’s) gestures,postures, and facial expressions in one day’s class that had been produced

by another dance major in Shipka’s course the previous spring. It in-

cluded the sound of people’s voices, but obscured their words by running

the audio track recording of the class in reverse and at low volume. The

day Shipka showed Body Language as an example in class, Mu‰e was

troubled that no one seemed able to talk about it with the level of detail

she felt it merited. She wondered why people (Shipka included) who al-

ways seemed to have so much to say in response to the arrangement anddisplay of words on a page seemed unable to read or respond to bodies

and bodily movement. Mu‰e decided to take up the work Body Lan-

guage had attempted (see Panel 2 in Figure 2). Viewing Body Language

as a powerful, beautiful, and moving composition, Mu‰e suspected that

it might be too ‘intricate’ a meditation on body language to reach an au-

dience of nondancers. She argued that few of her classmates were aware

that the way they walked into a room, sat at their desks, raised their

Figure 2. Selected panels from Mu‰e’s drawing of and interview comments on the process

for her ‘History of ‘‘this’’ Space’


hands, or held their pens was evidence of the fact that their bodies were

‘dancing’ all the time and, so, producing complex texts that others were,

consciously or not, always reading and responding to. Mu‰e saw the his-

tory task as an opportunity to replay the work of Body Language by

making what her classmates’ bodies said, did, or conveyed the focus of a

live performance.

Mu‰e decided that filming the class would be the best method of datacollection for her history. As she was also interested in exploring the com-

plex relationship between the way people represent their thoughts or

‘moods on paper’ versus what they say or do ‘with their bodies’, at the start

of the class she was filming Mu‰e also asked her classmates to take notes

on how they were feeling or what they were thinking at various points

throughout the session. Wanting to be just another body at a desk in the

classroom periodically jotting down her thoughts and feelings, Mu‰e ar-

ranged to have someone accompany her to class and do the filming.With the filmed data in hand, Mu‰e moved on to develop her presen-

tation. She had decided that the presentation would take the form of a

live performance, with dancers representing and repurposing the body

language of each student from the class session that was filmed. Mu‰e

took great care in selecting the ‘perfect’ song for the performance. She

chose ‘Everybody Dance Now’, saying it would be ‘illegal’ to be a dancer

and not know that song. The song would serve the dual purpose of, on

the one hand, underscoring her argument and, on the other hand, provid-ing a kind of structure or ‘counting’ mechanism for the various move-

ments and changes that the dancers would enact in the performance. To

recruit dancers for her history, she turned to members of her improvisa-

tion class, explaining that ‘those who are into improvisation are pretty

much down to do anything’.

Mu‰e reported that the bulk of the planning took place in her living

room (see Panel 3 in Figure 2). During these sessions Mu‰e began deter-

mining, first, which dancer would be assigned to perform which membersof the class (since Mu‰e could not recruit as many dancers as she hoped,

each dancer would perform two student roles) and, second, how the ses-

sion might be choreographed to ensure that the dancers’ movements with-

in the space of the classroom would provide definite clues as to whom

each dancer was portraying at a given point in time. With these goals

in mind, Mu‰e said that it was crucial that the dancers not take on two

students whose body language appeared too much the same or take on

the roles of students who were too close in proximity to one another dur-ing the taped session.

Mu‰e and the dancers also began working to align the qualities each

dancer possessed with what Mu‰e’s classmates seemed to be saying,


thinking, or doing on videotape as well as on paper. Mu‰e explained in

the interview:

Amanda is really, really small and tiny in her movement—and seamless. She’s not

a very loud dancer so we gave her Courtney who is pretty quiet and doesn’t really

move that much on the video. Whereas like Mimi, you know, will go perfect with

Ana who is a loud and huge dancer and not afraid to like, whatever! You know?

And Jessica played me. It was weird watching me because I’ve never watched my-

self outside of dance class. And having somebody else doing me? That was really

weird! Regan did the best Paulina. She was my favorite character because she is

just really good at ‘Paulina eyes.’ On the video Paulina is just all eyes and staring.

She looked really crazy . . . .

The dancers refrained from trying on the physical movements of Mu‰e’s

classmates until they were absolutely certain they had made the right

choices. Explaining how a dancer’s bodily memory can be fairly unforgiv-ing, Mu‰e said: ‘If you do something enough, your body will just natu-

rally do it without your thinking about it, so you don’t want to practice

doing somebody you’re not going to do because then, in performance,

when you’re nervous and stu¤, like, that person might come out instead

of the other person.’ Once the roles were cast, the dancers’ time and at-

tention was devoted to matching their interpretations of the data to the

a¤ordances of the song around which Mu‰e had decided the perfor-

mance would be structured. Because of time constraints and access issues,the dance was rehearsed in Mu‰e’s apartment, around her round bed be-

cause it resembled the semi-circular arrangement of chairs in the class.

Words cannot do justice to what the members of the class experienced

on performance day. The only tangible representation of the dance that

we have is the representation Mu‰e created during the interview (Panel

4 in Figure 2) as she talked about staging the delivery and reception of

her history of the class. On the day her history was due, Mu‰e asked if

she could ‘have five minutes’ to present her history. After asking everyonein class to get out of their desks and stand against the chalk board at the

front of the room (represented at the top of the image), she then handed

a member of the class a ‘boom-box’ and asked him to wait until she left

the room, count to five, and then hit play. The first line of the song

(‘Everybody Dance Now!’) functioned as a kind of epigraph for the event

as Mu‰e, a cameraperson, and nine dancers entered the room and began

enacting the composition proper. The portion of the performance repre-

sented here depicts what she called the ‘Shipka hand solo’ (Shipka beingrepresented by the dancer at the front of the class holding her arms out

to her sides). Mu‰e explained that the whole performance was struc-

tured around a series of ‘solos’, which involved moments when a specific


dancer’s movements were intended to be the main focus on the audiences’

attention. In the end, Mu‰e believed that the piece had achieved its

goals: the performance came o¤ largely as intended and the audience

seemed to have both enjoyed themselves and understood what she was

trying to say or do with the performance.

In this case, semiotic remediation focused on the embodied representa-

tion of the students and the instructor as well as on remediating Body

Language by transforming its argument from the video slide show to

a live performance. Students’ gestures, postures, and expressions were

filmed, viewed, interpreted, and repurposed, first in rehearsals and then

in the final performance. The performance was filmed (though not suc-

cessfully) so that it could be viewed by others, and it was described in

Mu‰e’s written reflection (a key part of all assignments). Here, again,

we see people impersonating others multimodally (by gesture, movement,

and location in the room) and hence decentering the indexical order ofthe classroom. Moreover, this impersonation was intended to make a se-

rious argument about the importance of the body and bodily movement.

It was tuned to an audience untutored in observation, description, and

critique of such semiotics and was designed to fulfill requirements for

the composition course. Mu‰e’s drawings and words also display some

of the behind-the-stage shadow acts, trajectories of production that were

basic to the final performance, especially illuminating practices of dance

(alignment of the a¤ordances of dancers’ bodies and habitual moves tothe demands of the dance, a careful tuning of bodily memory). Attention

to semiotic remediation practices in this course meant, not ignoring text,

but shifting from an exclusive focus on words on the page to a sustained

engagement with engineering complex rhetorical events.

6. ‘I’ll be the sun’: Potted Meat scripts and performs doing primary

school

We conclude with a particularly marked example of semiotic remedia-

tion, a student group also at the University of Illinois, Potted Meat,

whose members write and perform original sketch comedy, the kind of

performances popularized on television programs like Saturday Night

Live and Monty Python. Since 1992, an evolving cast of Meats, as they

refer to themselves, has been doing six shows per academic year in front

of a paying audience that includes students, friends, parents, faculty, andcommunity members. One of us (Roozen) began studying this group over

two years ago, as one of a set of longitudinal case studies exploring

the literate activity of undergraduates in school and out. The research


involved an ethnographic and situated design, with in-depth interviews,

collection of diverse texts from this and other settings, and observation

(usually audio- and video-tape recorded for close analysis) of Potted

Meat meetings, rehearsals, and performances. To get a fuller sense of the

contours of the semiotic remediation practices the Meats employ, we

trace the genesis of one particular sketch, titled That’s What Little

Dreams Are Made Of, performed during the group’s 2003/2004 season.The sketch parodied a group of first graders performing a play where the

children alternate between acting out a story about a bumble bee and

stepping to the front of the stage to narrate the story, their lines built

around the ‘advanced’ vocabulary words they have learned in class. This

analysis explores how people envoice others’ words (delivering the lines of

a play is one special cultural domain of represented speech), how index-

ical decentering and embodied depiction are achieved through multiple

semiotic means (text, talk, gesture, equipment), and how the live perfor-mance was produced and understood through trajectories of concrete

practice.

In generating the initial written script for the sketch, one of the Meats,

Lindsey, repurposed a poem she had written five years earlier in a high

school English class in response to an assignment asking her to incorpo-

rate a list of vocabulary words into a Valentine’s Day card. In recounting

the origins of her poem, which moves from a description of a beautiful

spring day to narrating the doleful story of a bumble bee that dies fromstinging a child who was threatening to pick its favorite flower, Lindsey

noted in an interview:

. . . the week of Valentine’s Day, our vocab[ulary] assignment was to make a Val-

entine with the words. For the most part, people did not take it seriously but

played around with it (obviously me included). I used construction paper and

made a flower where you could pull out the petals and unfold them to find a verse

of my V-day poem.

Years later, as a member of Potted Meat, Lindsey sensed that the poem

might serve as the basis for a comedy sketch about ‘a kind of morbid

grade school production’ that could be humorous on multiple fronts: the

children’s reactions as the events of the play grow sadder and sadder,

their struggles with vocabulary words that are far beyond their grasp,

their missteps throughout the play, and the teacher’s e¤orts to correct

them. In repurposing the poem as a script for the sketch, Lindsey broke

the stanzas into a series of lines that could be delivered by the cast, addedcharacter designations (e.g., ‘Kid 1’), and articulated some initial dia-

logue and stage directions. In a series of practice sessions, as the script

was read through and staged, other members of the group contributed


further changes to the shared written script: characters were added and

their personalities were developed, lines were revised, and the sketch was

renamed (from Caring Day to That’s What Little Dreams Are Made Of )

in order to align it with the overall theme of the show. The final script

was compiled with a dozen other sketch scripts, which were assembled,

printed out, and distributed in hardcopy form.

While the initial entextualization of the script listed characters generi-cally (Kid 1, Kid 2, teacher), character personalities were quickly devel-

oped as the actors represented voicing, gesture, and dress of first graders

giving a performance. The particular personalities of the characters, jot-

ted in the upper right corner on Lindsey’s copy of the script (see Figure

3), were drawn from various representations the Meats employed as they

read through and staged the sketch in practice sessions. Voiced represen-

tations had to be coordinated with the players’ actions and movements on

the stage as personalities were further indexed and projected. Asked byLindsey to represent Kid 4 as a ‘very sweet’ child who is constantly ‘seek-

ing approval’, Nicole responded by enunciating her words clearly and en-

thusiastically, although making sure to say the vocabulary words she was

learning for class in a halting manner. Delivering her lines at the front of

the stage, she stood straight with perfect posture, her arms straight down

at her side. After delivering her lines, she smiled brightly while lingering

on the stage, looking out into the audience for some hint of approval. Ka-

therine, playing Kid 1, the ‘spaz’, delivered her lines quickly, withoutpausing for breath, as if with a nervous energy. In addition, she ran to

the front of stage with quick frantic steps, stomping her feet loudly and

then stopping suddenly.

While gestural representations for the children they were playing

came readily to the Meats, the means for representing the sun, clouds,

flowers, and bees were not as obvious and thus occasioned extended dis-

cussion and trials. Initial e¤orts at staging action in the sketch (e.g., the

sun obscured by the clouds, flowers dancing in wind, bees disappearinginto flowers, the child being stung by the bee) in the rear of the stage

were collaboratively negotiated—tried, retried, discarded, and developed

anew until satisfactory ones were found. In the following exchange during

a practice session, for example, Lindsey, Nicole, and Steve work to de-

velop a set of gestures for representing the sun moving in front of the

clouds:

Lindsey: [looking at a copy of the script in her hands] And while this ishappening we need a cloud and a sun

Nicole: I’ll be the sun [raises both hands straight over her head, fingers

extended]


Lindsey: [to Nicole] So when she says ‘sun’ you can be like this [holding

arms out as if holding a large ball] or, yeah, like you’re doing

Lindsey: [talking to Steve] And then we can be the clouds [Lindsey and

Steve holding arms out as if holding up the hem of a skirt and

stepping lightly, as if floating, toward each other]Nicole: [holding arms straight up over her head, fingers extended] This

should be a flower

Lindsey: That can be a flower later

Figure 3. On the right, three Meats (Nicole, Lindsey, and Jeremy) lean on the stage during

practice, collaborating to personalize their performances in terms of voicing, ges-

tures, staging, and dress. Above is a personalized version of the script that respeci-

fies characters as players, adds in notes on staging the action (gestures, equip-

ment), and includes notes on the personalities (shy, spaz, know-it-all) to project

as well as the voicings.


Figure 4 displays an annotated video frame of the live performance where

we see some of these embodied representations in their final form. Lind-

sey is ‘reciting’ her lines as if a young child (and of course also reciting the

script). As she comes to ‘bluebirds chirping in the willows’, she stretches

out her arms and tilts to be the willow as Katherine shimmers backstage,

being rays of the sun; Leigh makes a flying bird with her hands; Nicoleglistens with her right arm and begins moving to the next gesture (listen-

ing, hands cupped to ears); and Steve stands sti¿y chirping.

What Little Dreams Are Made Of illustrates in a microcosm the multi-

modal and historied character of semiotic remediation practices. Tracing

the process reveals the trajectories of this skit, the repeated remediations

over time as the poem for a high school assignment was repurposed as a

written script for a comedy skit; as that script was collectively talked

through, acted out, and revised; and as scripts (of which there were mul-tiple versions) were embodied, equipped, and voiced first in rehearsal and

then in the show itself. And, of course, we would add to these chains of

transformation the present remediation, as we re-present the Meats’

words and acts in this text. The players’ impersonations of people, ani-

mals, plants, and the natural world as well as their decentering evocation

of the place as an elementary school and their hailing of the audience as

parents took shape through the coordination of densely textured semiotic

means. The Meats were not only animating voices from a script, but pro-jecting characters through embodied, interactive, and equipped perfor-

mance. Their acts and words on the stage were produced and understood

Figure 4. Potted Meat in performance: Lindsey recites ‘bluebirds chirping in the willows’

while being a willow as Katherine shimmers the rays of the sun, Leigh makes a fly-

ing bird with her hands, Nicole glistens, and Steve chirps


as a complexly laminated set of interwoven frames. Their design, and the

audience’s reception, of the performance were grounded in a particular

indexical order. In that order, the Meats were simultaneously in the phe-

nomenal here-and-now college students giving a comedy performance to

an audience of mostly college students, enacting certain social identities in

their college lives, while in the decentered and transposed space, time, and

identities of the skit, they were primary school children and a teacher giv-ing a performance for their parents, children who were pretending to be

bees, plants, the sun, and clouds, and (as the personality typing suggests)

children who were enacting certain identities in their lives through the pe-

culiar a¤ordances of a school play grounded in a vocabulary exercise.

Writing about what he called particularized direct discourse, Voloshinov

(1973: 134) alluded to this sort of multimodal projection:

. . . the traits the author used to define a character cast heavy shadows on his di-

rectly reported speech. The value judgments and attitudes in which the character’s

portrayal is steeped carry over into the words he utters. The referential weight of

the reported utterances declines in this modification but, in exchange, their char-

acterological significance, their picturesqueness, or the time-and-place typicality

grows more intense. Similarly, once we recognize a comic character on stage by his

style of makeup, his costume, and his general bearing, we are ready to laugh even

before we catch the meaning of his words. (italics added for emphasis)

It is not the words alone that carry the semiotic freight, but a host of se-miotic means, including voicing, gesture, dress, and action. Why then

should we treat words, acts, and contexts as separate and autonomous

domains?

7. Conclusion

We have proposed the notion of semiotic remediation practices and illus-trated its application in three settings. Because of the way this notion

draws together a range of semiotic phenomena across media, genres, and

activities, we anticipate three basic issues concerning the meaning and

utility of this proposal. Most specifically, there is the issue of the rele-

vance and reach of the three data sets, each of which features marked

(even staged) performance. Do these examples speak to everyday interac-

tion or are they special cases? In ‘Cindy Magic’, the repurposing of events,

objects, and discourse was much more opportunistic and emergent thanthe scripted and planned productions of Potted Meat or the danced his-

tory of the composition course, yet ‘Cindy Magic’ was clearly framed

as a pretend game, was modeled on fictional material (book and film),


and had an established (rehearsed) history within the family by the time

of these recordings. Following Bauman and Briggs (1990) and Hymes

(1975), we argue that marked performances operate on multidimensional

continua with unmarked everyday praxis. Just as reported speech is a

marked synecdoche for a dialogic theory of language, stage performance

can be seen as a marked synecdoche for a dialogic and performative semi-

otics. Paul and Nora’s joint working out of the representation in talk andgesture of vampire bats, the Shipka hand solo performed in Mu‰e’s

dance, and the emergent embodiment of sun beams in Lindsey’s skit

point precisely to such dialogic dimensions of situated activity. Moreover,

we would suggest, following Go¤man (1974) and others (e.g., Goncu

1999; Huizinga 1950; Wartofsky 1979), that various forms of play, dis-

play, rehearsal, and ritual are far more common to sociocultural life

than might be imagined. Whether it is the relative ease with which Anna

could e¤ectively participate in the indexical transformations of the rug/backyard in ‘Cindy Magic’, Mu‰e’s ability to repurpose Body Language

as a response to a novel task in a college composition course, or Lindsey

and the Meats’ flexible negotiation of the embodied and equipped repre-

sentation of features of the natural world, these data suggest that no ex-

traordinary practices were at work in these cases.

A second issue is pragmatic: Does this notion of semiotic remediation

practices move our research agendas on discourse, person, and society

forward? We believe it does. In relation to existing work on RST, it o¤ersa new map that highlights both the multimodal character of immediate

instances of RST (the ways that embodied impersonations, for example,

may accompany represented words) and that firmly links RST to trans-

formative chains of discourse over time. By foregrounding the interface

of instances of discourse to histories of discourse, this map also insists on

the close relation of RST to the fundamental dialogism of all discourse

events, as Voloshinov (1973) proposed.

The approach we take up here is congruent in key respects with Good-win’s (2000: 1490) call for a theory of action ‘that takes into account the

simultaneous use of multiple semiotic resources by participants (e.g. a

range of structurally di¤erent kinds of sign phenomena in both the stream

of speech and the body, graphic and socially sedimented structures in the

surround, sequential organization, encompassing activity, etc.)’. How-

ever, our approach di¤ers in several ways. Whereas Goodwin remains

committed to describing cognition as public, semiotic behavior (and we

would argue erroneously asserts that Vygotsky and Hutchins share thiscommitment), we believe in the relevance of inner semiotics to a full pic-

ture of activity. Methodologically, this di¤erence (which has been well de-

scribed in the literature, e.g., Cicourel 1992) can be seen, for example, in


our use of interviews as an aid in understanding activity. As a matter of

emphasis rather than principle, our interest in literate activity draws our

attention to writing processes as well as texts-as-artifacts-in-action. Fi-

nally, our approach is deeply rooted in dialogic theory, drawing on Vo-

loshinov’s (1973) fundamental argument that signs are historical, that

they are reused and remade-in-use. Dialogism, which has been explored

primarily in studies of language, can contribute to studies of other semi-otics, such as work on gesture (e.g., Kendon 2004; McNeill and Duncan

2000), which has generally focused on locating gesture in relation to lan-

guage, on demonstrating that gesture and embodied action is central

rather than trivial in communication. Situated studies (e.g., LeBaron and

Streeck 2000; Haviland 1996) have begun to attend to the ways embodied

action is emergent in situations and even to ways it may be professionally

socialized (Goodwin 1994). However, a firmly dialogic view of gesture

and embodied action has yet to emerge.We believe this notion of semiotic remediation practices can also en-

courage productive interdisciplinary dialogues. By drawing together work

on language, gesture, media, literacy, and other semiotic means, it o¤ers

the kind of focal concept that Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) have called

for, one that will aid us in identifying general semiotic principles while

remaining acutely sensitive to their variously mediated realizations. By

bringing together discussions of semiotics, mediation, and situated prac-

tice, it can promote the integrated analysis of situated interactions; longchains of semiotic transformations across media, genres, and sites of en-

gagement; and the dynamic transformations from thought to externalized

sign and back. This kind of approach to semiotic mediation also forwards

the fundamental sociogenetic question of how people come to embody

and remake their sociocultural worlds.

The third issue concerns the value of such expansive theoretical terms.

Simply stated, if most anything in our sociocultural worlds might be

understood as an instance of semiotic remediation practice, then havewe lost the precision that comes with fine categorization? We take this

question seriously. When we read Semino and Short’s (2004) expanding

scheme of categories of represented speech, thought, and writing or Lev-

inson’s (1988) long list of features to account for footings, we learn to no-

tice dimensions of discourse that were previously invisible to us. We, thus,

see a value in exploring fine distinctions in focal phenomena. However,

theoretically, we end up in basic agreement with Hanks (1990) and Irvine

(1996), that such categorical schemes may be endlessly expanded in whatamounts to ad hoc attempts to capture comprehensively the particulars of

an open-ended set of finely nuanced cases.4 Our argument then follows

Hanks’ and Irvine’s lead in suggesting instead that a small set of basic


operations be sought, out of which social actors might fabricate very

complex and novel e¤ects.

In conclusion, we have argued that RST should be seen simply as one

face of semiotic remediation practices. We have found that this view not

only encourages a fuller understanding of marked instances of reported

speech as discourse practices in complex semiotic ecologies, but also helps

us to recognize dialogic practices of re-representation in diverse semioticmodes/media. Finally, taking a sociocultural approach to these phenom-

ena highlights the fundamental place of semiotic remediation in under-

standing cultural practice. Semiotic remediation practices are not simply

instances of communication (externalized exchanges), but also engines of

distributed cognition and moments in the ongoing, historical, and dia-

logic production of people, societies, and environments.

Notes

1. The dates given here are for the available English translations of these works. Marxism

and the Philosophy of Language was first published in Russian in 1929, while Bakhtin’s

writing on these questions followed in the early 1930s (and some publications were de-

layed for decades). See Morson and Emerson (1990) for close historical analysis of the

emergence of these texts.

2. We recognize that ‘repetition’ and repurposing (especially in the absence of a specifiable

original) sharply raises the question of the grounds for recognition/similarity across dis-

course events. We do not discuss this dimension of semiotic remediation here, but recog-

nize its critical importance. See, for example, Silverstein’s (2005) account of how people

are able to tie together contexts through interdiscursive practices that forge tropic rela-

tions across indexical fields over time and place (chronotopes).

3. Interestingly, when Go¤man (1974) introduced the notion of keyings we discussed ear-

lier, a number of his examples focused on the same kind of shifts in genre and medium

(from novel to stage to movie) that Bolter and Grusin (1999) address.

4. In what could be read as a cautionary history for modern linguistic decompositionists,

Barthes (1988: 85) noted the unprincipled, ad hoc ‘frenzy of classification’ of tropes and

figures in classical and modern rhetoric, a problem he diagnoses in part as the result of

trying ‘to code speech [ parole]’ (italics in original).

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Paul Prior is Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of the Center for Writing

Studies at the University of Illinois. His research on writing, talk, disciplinarity, and practice

has appeared in articles, chapters, and Writing/Disciplinarity: A Sociohistoric Account of

Literate Activity in the Academy. Current projects examine genre systems, chronotopic lam-

inations in literate activity, and semiotic remediation. Address for correspondence: Depart-

ment of English, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA [email protected].

Julie Hengst is Assistant Professor of Speech and Hearing Science at the University of Illi-

nois. Her research takes up a practice approach to communication. She and her colleagues

have reported on their studies of communicative practices in individuals with acquired

cognitive-linguistic disorders in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research,

Aphasiology, and Nature Neuroscience. Address for correspondence: Department of Speech

and Hearing Science, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL 61820, USA 3hengst@uiuc

.edu4.

Kevin Roozen is Assistant Professor of English at Auburn University. His current research

explores the intersections of undergraduates’ nonschool and school literate activities and

how this interplay shapes literate development. Address for correspondence: Department of

English, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849, USA [email protected].

Jody Shipka is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore

County. She is currently working on a book-length project that illustrates the activity-based

multimodal framework for composing she has been developing since 1997. Her article ‘A

multimodal task-based framework for composing’ appeared in the December 2005 issue of

College Composition and Communication. Address for correspondence: Department of En-

glish, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA 3shipka@

umbc.edu4.


"I'll be the Sun": From reported speech to semiotic remediation practices.

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