Citation and Citationality

In: Signs and society, Volume 1, Issue 1, p. 51-78

Abstract

AbstractThis essay explores the semiotics of citation. The citation is an act that re-presents some other event of discourse and marks that re-presentation as not(-quite) what it presences. The citation is a play of sameness and difference, identity and alterity, an interdiscursive calibration of an event of citing and a cited event, and is reflexive about that very fact. As such, citational acts can open up new social horizons of possibility, signification, and performative power. This essay investigates the citational underpinnings of the Fregean sense, Austinian performativity, and Derridean deconstruction. I give particular attention to Derrida's reading of Austin, and his development of the concept of citationality. As I argue, Derrida's insistence on the necessary possibility of citationality elides the fact that citations are always already achievements in context, and thus empirical facts about particular (types of) acts in the world. Not all acts are reflexive about their citationality, and this has consequences for their material form and their pragmatics. Finally, the essay turns to the recalcitrance of events of semiosis to being cited, in particular, to taboo speech. Taboo speech presents a case of speech that seemingly cannot be bracketed, where performative effect necessarily and always attains. As such cases show, citation brackets and suspends, but perhaps never totally.