Languaging as time travel

"So do you hear me? And how do you hear me?" Miyako Inoue (2003) ends her seminal article with this jarring, even uncanny interpellation. A "me" addressing a "you"—such a mundane occurrence. Yet here it pops out of an academic text at the most unexpected moment. I look around. Is she talking to me? Inoue momentarily ripped open spacetime to tap me on the shoulder, ensuring the phatic connection remained intact. Indeed, this warping of spacetime is precisely what Inoue's work illuminates: how absent people act on present social worlds. I heard Inoue's voice more than two decades after her words were first written, allowing myself to be interpellated as the subject of her utterance; this is precisely the type of subjectivity that many early career scholars, like me, desire—that is, to be recognized, addressed, even cited. More importantly, Inoue reminds me that this is what it means to do language—languaging is time travel. Past, present, and future people are engaging in a mysterious conversation with no certainty that anyone is listening (Irvine, 1996). Such mysteries initially drew me to the theoretical power of the "listening subject." In seeking to understand the socio-political afterlives of colonialism in postcolonial Algeria, I had to depart from the assumptions of a linear progression of time found in much discourse and conversation analysis (see Wortham & Reyes, 2015, as a notable exception). Because, as Inoue's final interpellation ("So do you hear me?") and my revoicing of it here show, conversations can jump back and forth across spatiotemporal junctures. In my 2023 article in the JLA, I conceptualized these time-traveling conversations as echoes—"sounds and voices persisting and repeating after the source sound has stopped" (72)—practices that (tenuously) link temporally disconnected speakers and listeners by reflecting and refracting from the material surfaces/spaces they share. Language's capacity to jump back and forth between spatiotemporal divides—possibly resounding as echoes—is manifested, for example, in the prefix "re-," a recurring morpheme in linguistic anthropological studies of listening practices. Etymologically, "re-" signifies both "back" and "again," implying a cyclical, non-linear temporal order of language use and social action. Building on what Inoue (2003: 165) described as "indexical inversions," linguistic anthropological studies frame this back-and-again as reconfigurations, re-assemblies, and "downward recursions" of social figures and colonial hierarchies (Reyes, 2017: 210), the re-reading of signs as epistemes of antiblackness (Smalls, 2018), or the re-channeling of language within the DeafBlind community (Edwards, 2018). All these scholars seek to understand the powerful yet paradoxical persistence of "recuperations, reactivations, and recombinations of familiar forms" (Stoler, 2016, cited in Reyes, 2017: 210, emphasis added) as actants in the present. In other words, embedded in a simple prefix like "re-" is people's potential for time travel. Challenging assumptions about linear temporality opens up several ethnographic and analytical possibilities. For example, in my work, I grapple with how and why contemporary Algerians reanimate "dead" colonial-era voices when speaking in the postcolonial present (Love, 2024). In postcolonial Algeria, anti-colonial revolutionary martyrs hold important social roles, shaping social life through their simultaneous presence and absence. Though dead, these martyrs "speak" to the living through their heroic actions, their images, and reported speech that I argue go beyond mere "ventriloquism" (Love, 2025). The martyrs exhibit a form of agency as authors and principals of their reanimated words and actions, while also suggesting a complex spatiotemporal warping between "animator" and "reanimated" (Goffman, 1974). Moreover, the sonic and visual presence of martyrs in postcolonial Algerian space allows them to be interpellated as witnesses (a participation role similar to the "listening subject," but from the hereafter) to ongoing postcolonial traumas (Love, 2024). In this sense, the conversation between dead martyrs and living people destabilizes who can be assumed to be an agent or actor in the world, not unlike the 19th-century Japanese schoolgirl's voice haunting the 19th-century male intellectual subjectivity as a "fantastic ghost" (Inoue, 2003: 176). Moreover, adopting this time-travel approach to languaging can enable scholars to see and hear aspects of their data that might have otherwise been invisible or inaudible. For example, Berman (2024: 337) discovered that "listening can precede the speech that it seems to follow," which challenges basic assumptions about the temporal order of speaking and listening, and therefore, the types of subjectivities that emerge from these participation roles. That listening can anticipate speech suggests how listeners often hear things that were never actually uttered, yet nevertheless bring previously non-existent or absent forms into existence in the future (see Rosa, 2019). In other words, language not only has the capacity to presence the past but also interpellate the future. As I already suggested, this complex warping of spacetime has implications for anthropological definitions of subjectivity, which have been closely linked to ideas of human agency and "free will" often associated with "speaking one's voice" (Kunreuther, 2014). In proposing the "listening subject," Inoue (2003: 180) aimed "to recast the notion of 'the speaking self' (and its accompanying ideas such as agency and resistance)." I view Inoue's commitment as part of a long genealogy of historical materialist theory that complicates human agency as always already a conversation between past, present, and future, perhaps most famously articulated in Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852: np.): "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please." These ideas seem central to Inoue's nuanced understanding (and near dismissal) of Japanese schoolgirls' agency in her work. However, less often cited but equally relevant are Marx's subsequent words: "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" (ibid). Or put less dramatically by Bakhtin (1981: 294): "The word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language… but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions; it is from there that one must take the word and make it one's own." Language—especially in the harmful and persistent racist-colonial forms that get re-configured and re-read repeatedly (Reyes, 2017; Smalls, 2018)—indeed weighs on people's brains (and speech) like a nightmare, whether one claims it as their own or not. And nightmares—like dreams, visions, omens, and harbingers—are future-oriented; they encounter the future as if it were predetermined, much like the Arabic concept maktūb, meaning "written" (Mittermaier, 2011), implying a destiny already decided by God. Cultures across the world have notions of the future not as a blank slate but as bursting with pre-existing potential. This absence-presence of the future also haunts social theory. Derrida, in Specters of Marx (2011[1994]), emphasizes this futurity of specters; revoicing Marx, Derrida reminds us that the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto were: "a specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism." For Marx, it was the future of revolution that haunted the powers that be in 19th-century Europe, not the past. Challenging the "methodological positivism" of sociolinguistic research, Deumert (2022) advocates for a sociolinguistics of the specter, moving away from the "metaphysics of presence" inherent in sociolinguistic analysis to embrace the absence-presences that shape social life and language. Like Deumert, I argue that the non-linear temporal complexity should not be overlooked in the sociolinguistics of perception. …the social danger of displaying racial bias, a danger which debriefing discussions showed many participants to be aware of…Some participants commented on the role that ethnolinguistic stereotyping plays in connecting perceptions of non white-appearing faces and foreign accented voices. Some reported explicitly attempting to avoid response patterns that might indicate such stereotyping. This also suggests that even listening subjects are not necessarily in control of what they hear. Listening subjects are socialized into complex, struggle-filled, and sometimes socially "dangerous" worlds where one might awkwardly say: "Listeners make their own perception, but they do not make it as they please." Even more, these specters of language have implications for the assumed boundary between speaker and listener. These participant roles—where perception and production are often treated as distinct fields of study (see Sprenger, 2024 for an example of how to combine the two)—usually capture only a snapshot of a single moment of interaction. Irvine (1996) long ago critiqued the field's focus on fragments rather than the processes of fragmentation, which, in turn, reifies participation roles and obscures the past, present, and future shadow conversations haunting any given stretch of interaction. For instance, the only way to empirically observe another person's perception is through their "active reception" (Volosinov, 1973), meaning some form of external response produced by this listener, whether it's an adjacency pair, a nod, the click of a button, reported speech in a novel, or metacommentary. As much as Inoue's Japanese male intellectuals were listening subjects, their power still resided in their elite positionality, allowing them to speak and be heard, even if they wrote in the voice of the other (i.e., the schoolgirls). And even their elitism couldn't prevent them from becoming "auditory doubles" or "acoustic mirrors" in Inoue's argument; these male intellectuals became the "object voice" or even "psychic object," through which the anthropologist (Inoue) emerged herself as a listening subject, refracted through but also haunted by social and political anxieties of these times. Here, I am suggesting a closer affiliation between listening and speaking subjects than is often assumed. There is a cyclical or recursive nature to speaking and listening subjectivity when viewed through the lens of time travel. Not even the dead stay still long enough to inhabit just one role. So do you hear me? And how do you hear me?