Registers in Circulation: The Social Organization of Interdiscursivity

The major outlines of enregisterment as a metasemiotic process are well understood in linguistic anthropology, so we can turn to its further systematic implications. The article explores three “moments” in enregisterment, positing that practices and value projects create registers that act as clasps, relays, and graftings, each producing interdiscursivity and thus circulation. They connect arenas of social action in different ways. The connections are rightly called social organizations of interdiscursivity, since they link and organize not only discourses and registers but also the societal arrangements – NGOs, nonprofits, welfare offices, political platforms, academic circles – that are constituted around registers and through which registers have their powerful effects of connection (and separation) in specific historical moments. The examples, mostly from the politics of Hungary, surely have parallels elsewhere.