Abstract
Abstract We have no apartments is a phrase repeated over and over again at the counselling centre for refugees on housing matters based in Vienna, Austria, where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork. Based on an analysis of processes of entextualisation, de- and recontextualisation in the reiterative, discursive chain, this paper traces the emergence of an institutional regime of communication and the ways institutional actors – counsellors and volunteers – produce, navigate and reproduce this regime by engaging in (meta-)communicative work. The analysis shows how individual agency is both contingent and co-productive of institutional order and social order more generally. With this contribution, I propose Judith Butler’s concept of the postsovereign subject as a way to understand the relations between “local” practices and wider processes of trans-situational meaning-making.
Highlights
We have no apartments is a phrase repeated over and over again at the counselling centre for refugees on housing matters based in Vienna, Austria, where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork
Based on an analysis of processes of entextualisation, de- and recontextualisation in the reiterative, discursive chain, this paper traces the emergence of an institutional regime of communication and the ways institutional actors – counsellors and volunteers – produce, navigate and reproduce this regime by engaging incommunicative work
In order to understand how the function of such a reiterative practice emerges in the institutional context, how it is negotiated and which effects this produces, I followed the recontextualisation of the phrase along the discursive chain
Summary
Crucially in our case, it is not just that the abstract statement we have no apartments was being used to fence off clients’ individual concrete requests, but that this happened over and over again, starting from a moment where the existence of the CC was at stake This repetition, I argue, entails more than just the cumulative effect of separable acts by sovereign speaking subjects, but generates slippages of meaning which are neither explicitly intended by speakers nor entirely random as they tend to reproduce logics of dominant discourses – for instance, the above-mentioned responsibilisation of the client in a neoliberalising welfare state. I follow pathways (Wortham and Reyes 2015: 66) reconstructed in my data between discursive events in which the phrase we have no apartments was recontextualised
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
