The Voice of Jacob: Entextualization, Contextualization, and Identity

To analyze discursively mediated interpersonal social action we differentiate two kinds of “textual” phenomena. Using an Old Testament example, we delineate an interactional text, “what is (socially) done” in-and-as the events and encounters of everyday life. Such texts are perhaps even consciously conceptualized and represented in strategic subjective agency, in memory of “what happened,” and, to be sure, in literary depictions. We can contrast this with a denotational text, “what is (in effect) said” in-and-by the totality of means for organizing communicated information, in which minutiae of form--the “how” of saying what one says--and the orderliness of its emergence are key. Our task thus becomes to understand how the organized unfolding--the entextualization--of “what is said” in language and its penumbral cultural codes comes to project into its own contextualization, that is, to count as “what is done” in the way of intersubjective socio-cultural coherence and consequentiality for the participants in an interactional encounter. Working out an extended--if banal--example of a dyadic conversation, we show that by invoking the semiotic qualities of the most determinative of such projections, that of full-blown ritual action, a properly analyzed denotational text of even an everyday encounter by degrees dynamically figurates the interactional text that gradually comes into being as the consequence of interpersonal communication, in the instance giving rich and mutually interpretable identities to the participants.