Abstract
Nanchatte is a Japanese gag expression, whose literal English translation could be “I have just completed the saying of something like what I have just said.” Its meaning partially overlaps with English expressions such as “Just kidding,” or “I am just saying.” Its felicitous execution is often intended to “crack up” listeners, to take the edge off an impression of formality, arrogance, aggression, austerity, or bluntness, to break the ice, mitigate face-threat or potential embarrassment, keep meaning ambiguous, or other similar performative effects. Positioned right after the completion of the preceding utterance, nanchatte performs a self-quoting speech act, in which it reflexively and retroactively turns one’s own utterance as reporting speech into reported speech. Ex post facto reframes the utterance from a narrating event to a narrated event, which then turns the speaker from the subject of the utterance to the object in the real-time temporal process of the utterance, splitting and doubling the subject “I” and the world it inhabits between the actuality and the virtuality. By doing so, nanchatte structurally produces the space of non-position-taking. As frivolous as it might be, nanchatte’s structural condition warrants a serious semiotic analysis. Drawing on Husserl’s concepts of neutrality modification and ego-splitting, this essay will discuss how and what kind of political subjectivity could be produced in the quoted space afforded by nanchatte. I proposes the concept of virtualization as a performative effect of nanchatte. As I will detail below, nanchatte as a self-quoting operation – that is, “I” quotes what “I” have just said – unsettles other familiar binaries in the illimitable movement of the virtual and the actual, and this paper considers its broader political implications.
Acknowledgements
I thank Gavin Furukawa, Ayumi Miyazaki, and Shunshuke Nozawa for their close reading of this essay and immensely helpful comments and suggestions. My sincere gratitude goes out to the two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions assisted me in clarifying some of the key points.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: ideologies of contact and space in Japan: a theoretical expansion of language ideological work
- The concentration booth and the handshaking lane: ideologies of the phatic
- Exploring the role of language ideology in disaster contexts: case study of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami
- “As if I were otherwise” metapragmatics of ego-splitting and virtualization, nanchatte!
- Wearing embarrassment: television discourse and the ideologies of T-shirt English in Japan
- The regimentation of femininities in the world: the translated speech of non-Japanese women in a Japanese TV documentary series
- Masculine pronouns are not only for boys: Japanese girls breaking traditional relationships between gender and language in a school context
- Linguistic ideologies and the fabric of everyday life
- Varia
- Irish English and national identity in the linguistic landscape of Ireland’s 2018 abortion referendum
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: ideologies of contact and space in Japan: a theoretical expansion of language ideological work
- The concentration booth and the handshaking lane: ideologies of the phatic
- Exploring the role of language ideology in disaster contexts: case study of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami
- “As if I were otherwise” metapragmatics of ego-splitting and virtualization, nanchatte!
- Wearing embarrassment: television discourse and the ideologies of T-shirt English in Japan
- The regimentation of femininities in the world: the translated speech of non-Japanese women in a Japanese TV documentary series
- Masculine pronouns are not only for boys: Japanese girls breaking traditional relationships between gender and language in a school context
- Linguistic ideologies and the fabric of everyday life
- Varia
- Irish English and national identity in the linguistic landscape of Ireland’s 2018 abortion referendum