Borders as Assemblages: Some Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives

Résumé

As a sociolinguist working with and on speech practices in a variety of contexts, I am interested in how social and institutional actors talk about borders in ordinary conversations, in institutional talk and in digital contexts (facebook, twitter). Within the praxeological perspective I mobilize in my research (Auzanneau & Greco 2017), borders are not just a topic in discourse, they are constituted, contested, reformultated by discourse, i.e. a multisemiotic repertoire composed by talk, text, bodies and different types of materialities. In a particular way, in this paper, I propose to approach the analysis of borders through the notion of "assemblage" as it emerges in anthropology (Marcus & Saka 2006), in philosophy with the work of Deleuze and Guattari ("agencement" in french, 1980) and in sociology ("assemblages", "agencements", "dispositifs" cf. Dodier & Stavrianakis 2018). Drawing from a corpus I collected at the Italian-French borders (Col de l’Echelle), composed by graphic inscriptions focused on borders, and inspired by the Italian debate about the reception of migrants and the closing of the ports (2018-2019), I will show four intertwined dimensions at work in the analysis: the multiplicity of semiotic resources, the temporality, the indexicality and the performativity of borders in and as speech practices.