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Article

Abstract In this text I consider authoring as a historically

instituted and instituting social practice. The concept of
author(ship)—as a social function concerning the action and
identification of specific subjects in institutional places—is
discussed in relation to authority (power position) and
authorization ((dis)empowering position). I highlight Foucault’s
and Bakhtin’s most relevant theoretical contributions to the issue,
inquiring about the concrete possibilities and conditions of such
practice. Within the scope of an empirical research developed
with a group of students in a Brazilian public school, attention is
drawn to the graduation ceremony as a commonplace within the
school scenario. I focus my analyses on discursive practices,
highlighting two speeches uttered at the ceremony as particular
instances of authorship, and relate them to two students’ informal
talk. The analyses point to the interplay of voices and positions in
an intricate web of interpersonal relationships interwoven
with/in and marked by the institutional loci.

Key Words author(ship), discourse practices, historical-cultural

perspective, institutional practice

Ana Luiza Bustamante Smolka

UNICAMP, Brazil

The Authoring of Institutional

Practices: Discourse and Modes of
Participation of Subjects
Images of Author(ship) and Politics of Authoring
In our present-day society, the notion of author is commonly related to
someone who writes, or someone who comes up with an original idea.
Writing and/or originality seem to characterize authorship as a social
function. In Portuguese, as well as in English or French, we find in the
dictionaries remission to Latin: ‘Author: the one who produces,
originates, gives birth; the maker of anything; the creator, the pro-
creator; the composer; the writer; the one who compiles, who makes
alterations’. It usually carries the marks of individuality, of singularity.
To the author is attributed an intention to say something and the

Culture & Psychology Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications

(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com
Vol. 11(3): 359–376 [DOI: 10.1177/1354067X05055526]
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Culture & Psychology 11(3)

responsibility for what he or she says. One can say that the main mark
of authorship was and still is related to an assigned or attributed
proper name.
But authoring has not always been related to writing and responsi-
bility: inspired by God, the writer could be just the scriptor of a sacred
word that did not belong to him; and being original was not a value
per se, since the written text, inscribed in tradition, was supposed to
repeat or reiterate what had been already said. Indeed, on a further
etymologic search, we find that auctor comes from the Latin augere (to
increase, to improve), meaning instigator, promoter. Thus the author
does not create anything new; he has just to improve what already
exists.1
We can trace the emergence of the author as juridical subject, having
explicit rights and obligations, along the 10th through the 13th
centuries, when deep transformations in the socioeconomic conditions
and relations of production provoked the appearance of new forms of
organization in trading and commerce, consequently affecting written
practices (Haroche, 1992; Orlandi, 1988).
The position of the author as juridical subject became still more solid
and stronger throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Locke’s theory of
natural rights was used to anchor arguments for the author’s property
as result of his individual work, and it was also stressed that labor
gives man a natural right of property over what he produces.
Considered as product/production at the core of deep changing
conditions of production, the work of writing and the printed work
generated many disputes: right of property, privilege, copyright, were
at the center of the quarrel among authors, editors, book-sellers. In the
middle of such a dispute, one issue acquired special relevance: the
value of a written work, was it determined by its author’s inspiration?
Was it established by its actual conditions of consumption? Was the
author—the one who wrote—a locus of authority? Was the editor/
publisher—responsible for the product’s circulation in the market—
more important? Or was the most important person the one who
financed the publication, who was not necessarily either the author or
the editor? In that context, Diderot, as author, insisted: ‘I repeat: the
author is the owner of his work’ (see Chartier, 1994). Instituted as
private property, authorship was deeply related to the expansion of the
written culture and the politics of knowledge production, circulation
and consumption.
Throughout the 20th century, many authors placed the concept of
authorship under scrutiny, inquiring from different fields of knowl-
edge—history, philosophy, semiotics, linguistics, education, etc.—about

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Smolka The Authoring of Institutional Practices

the emergence, the historical configurations and the very functioning

of such a notion related to social practices. Not only the property of the
writer and the right to write, but the author’s intention and responsi-
bility, or the editor’s authority to alter the work, were at issue. Other
questions arose: the conditions of production of the written text, the
social positions of author and publisher, the autonomy of the text, even
the interpretations of the reader affecting the written text, were polem-
ical points that integrated the dispute (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984, 1997;
Barthes, 1977; Chartier, 1994, 1998; Foucault, 1969, 1982, 1992).
Today, when we think about our modern or postmodern (web)
conditions and modes of (text) production and consumption, beyond
the copyright age, we are most forcefully faced with the issue of
authorship: Who is the author? Who does the writing? Who is
speaking? Whose words do we listen to/read? Who owns the word?
Who does the work? Who owns the work? Why does it matter who is
speaking?
Taking the above questions into consideration, we could say that the
issues remain—now as then—basically the same, involving problems
related to division of work, to distributed knowledge, (non-)consen-
sual values, social positions. Nowadays, the material conditions of
production have changed, allowing for (or leading to?) looser and
more collectively assumed authoring practices (who is able to control
them after all, and how?); indeed, the notion of author related to the
origin and source of inspiration and responsibility, related to property,
related to the written word, is quite pervasive. It impregnates our
imagery of a specific type of work and social function in our daily prac-
tices.
In this text we will be considering authoring as a historically insti-
tuted and instituting social practice. We will be assuming the concept
of author(ship)—as a social function concerning the action and identifi-
cation of specific subjects in institutional places—related to authority
(position of power) and authorization ((dis)empowering position). In
such a frame, it becomes relevant to further inquire about the modes
of production and organization of practices, and to ask about the
concrete conditions that make possible, legitimate and sustain these
socially instituted functions and positions.

Institution of Practices and Constitution of Subjects

The institutional aspect of social life is usually related to stabilized
practices and regulatory agencies, often linked to the official, legal or
legitimate status of such practices. But between the legal, the official

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and the legitimate aspects there seem to exist important nuances. Not
all practices that are made legitimate through the actual (inter)actions
of living subjects are legalized, that is, turned into law. They become
legitimate based on certain tacit and shared principles not always
made explicit in daily life. As for the official status, it implies the formal
recognition of an established authority, which, by its turn, has to be
seen or recognized as such. Where does such authority come from?
How is such authority instituted? We could say, with Certeau (1994),
that ‘daily life is invented through a thousand ways of non-authorized
searching’ (p. 38).
As we focus our investigative work on social practices from a histori-
cal-cultural perspective (Vygotsky, 1987–99), and we take into
consideration the dynamics and the concrete conditions of production
of such practices, we cannot conceive the instituting of practices inde-
pendent of the constitution of human activity and mental functioning.
This means that, seen as possible modes of organization of human
social relations, institutions are resultant from these relations,
produced in/through the always transforming material conditions of
existence. Within this frame of reference, human activity also implies
and is engendered in/through social practice, in such a way that indi-
vidual activity can be seen as resultant from social practice. This dialec-
tical relation between socially instituted practices and socially
constituted individual subjects leads us to an inquiry into the articu-
lation of social structures and mental structures, an issue that has
recently been approached and stressed by many authors in different
fields.
We won’t be dealing here with the infinite intricacies of institutional
practices. Our aim is to contribute to the understanding of some
aspects of its functioning, discussing the status of discourse in such
practices. In other words, our attempt is to analyze specific modes of
institutional functioning, focusing on discursive practices, as we
assume that the verbal form of language, as historical product(ion) of
human activity and due to its multiple features and functions, has
become a most powerful instrument in the organization of social
practices, being at the same time constitutive of individual mental
functioning.
One point that becomes particularly interesting to discuss has to do
with the objective and autonomous status of collective practices as they
become established and instituted, impacting on the lives of individ-
ual subjects (we could think about the market, for example). Produced
in/through inter-individual relations, institutional practices imply an
anonymous dimension that appears as a resulting effect of the

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collective sphere: Who did it? It was done . . . Who was the author?
Who was the originator? Who was responsible? Agency, subjectivity,
authorship, are brought into question, indicating the need to consider
authorship in relation to this anonymous dimension.

The Instituting of Discursive Practices: Positions and

Voices
Two authors in particular bring special contributions to the questions
we are discussing: Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhtin. Their theor-
etical elaborations have some tangent points as well as distinct focus,
positions and arguments, some of which are worth mentioning here.
From their contribution we highlight: the stress that both authors place
on discourse and the relation between language and social practices;
their different ways of approaching authorship and the anonymous
dimension; their specific conceptual and analytical devices.
In his analysis of Dostoevsky’s work, Bahktin (1997) explicitly says:
‘We take into consideration discourse, that is, language in its living and
concrete integrity’ (p. 157). Foucault, by his turn, in the Archaeology of
Knowledge (1969), talks about
This work . . . that consists in considering discourse not only as a set of signs
(significant elements that refer to content of representation), but as social
practice that systematically forges the objects it speaks about. Certainly,
discourses are made of signs; but they do more than just making use of
things. It is this ‘more’ (plus) that makes it impossible to reduce discourses
to language (langue) and speech acts: it is this ‘more’ (plus) that we must
make visible and we must describe. (p. 56)
In the text ‘What is an Author?’ (1992), Foucault calls attention to the
historical conditions of production of authorship and to the power of
such a position related to the possibility of transgression in tension
with a controlling (religious) authority. He relates the emergence of the
author-function, as a possible social discursive position (a passive one
of being occupied by an individual subject), to the expansion of writing
and the need to identify transgressive, subversive authors. Before the
right of the author being at issue, the need to control the (in)con-
venience of the author’s word was the problem. So what becomes
visible in Foucault’s analysis is the intricate web of power relations
related to specific discursive (authoring) positions.
The Portuguese publication of ‘What is an Author?’ brings together
another text, ‘The Life of Infamous Men’ (in English in Foucault, 1979),
where Foucault analyzes reports and documents that tell of and attest
to the indignity of certain people. Highlighting the conditions of those

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who did not have the right to speak and to defend themselves,
Foucault discusses the issue of biographies, the relation between life
and written text, pointing to the fact that those lives were written about
and commented on by others. The lives of infamous men became the
motive, the object (the condition?) of an author(ity)’s text and speech.
Foucault distinguishes between a historical-sociological analysis of
the author as a character (the owner of the word), and the author as a
specific function of the subject function, related to the varying and
changing modes of circulation and valuing of discourses within differ-
ent cultural and historical conditions and social positions. Discourse,
then, is seen as a locus of articulation of knowledge and power—the
one who speaks does so from a certain place in a certain context, hence,
from an institutional position. Institutional conditions make legiti-
mate/authorize an enunciative position. Scientific texts, literary texts,
philosophical and religious texts are different kinds of texts, related to
different values and meanings of author(ship). In this sense, Foucault
(1992) even ponders:
We could imagine a culture where discourses circulated and were received
without the appearance of the author-function. No matter what treatment
given to them, all discourses would develop into an anonymous murmur.
We wouldn’t listen anymore to the always repeated questions: who was the
one who really spoke? . . . And on the other side, we could barely listen to
a rumor of indifference: it does not really matter who did it! (pp. 70–71, my
emphasis)
Foucault has been strongly criticized as he emphasizes the collective
and autonomous status of discourse and institutional practices to the
detriment of individual subjects. And here we can raise one instigating
controversial point between the two authors, as Bakhtin (1984) points
to the ‘exceptional importance of the individual voice’ (p. 323, my
emphasis).
Indeed, in Bakhtin’s work, we find distinct analytical elements, as he
focuses on the work of art, the aesthetic dimension of human produc-
tion, and he talks about the architectonics of writing, analyzing the
necessary exotopic position of the author as creator of a hero. Among
the many varied aspects in his theoretical elaborations, he explores the
I/other relationship in the process of literary creation. Such a creative
work implies that writing about the other is also partially to write
about oneself. In the process of creating the character, the author posi-
tions himself as an other, who is at once an other for himself and an
other for his character. This gives the author the position of a third one
in the relation. Authoring is, then, related to creation and eventfulness
of spoken/written utterances by enunciating subjects, in the sense that

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it condenses a dramatic relationship among different subjects, voices

and positions. For Bakhtin, the historical weaving of language in func-
tioning, as a concrete and integral discursive phenomenon—related to
the work of art as well as to daily enunciation—implies dialectical
relations between texts and meanings as well as dialogical relations
between texts and subjects.
Bakhtin (1984) further elaborates on the notion of authorship.
Founding such elaborations on two basic principles—the dialogical/
dialectic principle and the alterity/otherness principle—he affirms:
The word is half someone else’s. . . . The gradual process of effacement of
authors—receptacles of alien words. Alien words become anonymous,
familiar . . . consciousness becomes monological. We completely forget the
original dialogical relation with the other’s words: such relation seems to be
incorporated, in the word of the other turned familiar, turned one’s own.
The creative consciousness in the process of becoming monological fills itself
with anonymous words. This is a very important process. After that, monol-
ogized consciousness, in its new quality of unique whole, inserts itself in a
new dialogue. (p. 386)
In this sense, authorship can also be seen as a possible state of the
monologized consciousness. Emerging from the inescapable dialogical
relation, the monologization of consciousness consists in the appropri-
ation and transforming of alien words into one’s own in a singular
way; and in this process of appropriation, forgetting the other’s words,
there is a simultaneous emergence of anonymous words.
Both authors leave us with very important conceptual devices—
discursive formations, position; speech genres, voices—which have
been expanded today by many other authors. If Bakhtin (Vološinov,
1986) emphasizes the intrinsically interactive dimension of language in
functioning, arguing that the word is the most pure and sensitive
means of social relation, Foucault consistently and strongly highlights
and gives analytical visibility to the power relations that pervade insti-
tutional practices. Given their distinct theoretical orientations and their
conceptual specificities, both authors contribute to the elaboration of
the current notions of interdiscourse and intertextuality as a histori-
cally produced discursive reality, meaning that any discourse is
composed of other discourses and is necessarily built in relation to
others. Bakhtin’s and Foucault’s works consistently indicate that the
institutional dimension of social practices implies collective memory
historically affected by discourse.

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Institutional Sphere and Interpersonal Relationships:

Conditions for Authoring
Through the course of our investigative work, we became interested in
understanding how words (language) forge and (trans)form memory,
how memory, conceived in its psychological dimension, becomes
constituted and organized through signs and discourse; we also raised
the issue of how memory becomes inscribed in words, how practices
become inscribed in discourse, how what becomes the object of speech
and human emotion persists or evades (effaces?). In one of our lines of
research, we have focused our discussions on the tension between the
instituting of practices and the constituting of subjects, inquiring about
how subjects live, produce and transform such practices. The school
appeared as a significant locus of investigation in many ways.
As a social institution, the school has, assumes and claims as its
primordial objective the transmission and/or production of knowl-
edge common to all. As such, it can be taken as a public space, a locus
of production of common practices; a commonplace, locus of produc-
tion of commonplaces.2 In order to attain this objective, among many
forms of shared practice and understanding, the school organizes
knowledge in topics, as it works with and through language—archaic,
persistent, pervasive and efficient resource, deeply inscribed in our
formal ways of teaching and learning. As a public space of trans-
mission and divulgation of knowledge, the school develops ways of
evaluating the learning process, making legitimate and official the
mastery of such (a certain type of) knowledge. Within the school
scenario, graduation ceremonies can be seen as a common practice, and
can also be taken as a commonplace. In general, they constitute a
memorable school event related to learning achievement.
In the scope of our empirical research developed with a group of
students in a Brazilian public school, through a period of five out of
eight years of their elementary school life, the graduation ceremony
became an intriguing event that instigated a closer study. Seen as a
symbolic space, the graduation ceremony condenses images and
values that persist through traditional practices; as a rite of passage, it
indicates the conclusion, the accomplishment of a school period; as a
ritual, it is lived within certain contingencies, norms and protocols; as
solemnity, it is the place of public recognition and attribution of certifi-
cate; as celebration, it is usually pervaded by emotion as it makes
explicit interpersonal ties and relationships which sustained the
accomplishments; as a spectacle, it might be seen as an intense and
instantaneous mis en scène. Seen as commonplace, the graduation

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ceremony can also be considered as a memory locus—lieux de mémoire

(Nora, 1992).
The graduation ceremony will be taken, hence, as an empirical locus
for discussion of institutional practices and their ways of functioning.
We will be inquiring about the multiple meanings and senses of such
an institutional event as we relate it to the concept of author(ship)—
also an institutional practice—which generally brings with it the notion
of the subjects’ creation and responsibility. For the purpose of our
discussions with regards to author(ship) we will be focusing here on
two speeches uttered at the ceremony.
On our analytical efforts to account for the concrete and immediate
situation as well as for the historical and cultural dimensions of such
an event, we decided to assume the graduation ceremony as a
methodological, chronotopical (chronos = time; topos = space) unity. In
Bahktinian terms, the chronotope articulates space, time and value.
The chronotope emerges as a concept related to the creation of literary
work, to speech genres and collective memory, to the functioning of
language in social practice. Time condenses itself; space becomes inten-
sified (1981). Taken as a (school) chronotope, the graduation ceremony
appears as condensing discourse and (inter)actions, expectations,
desires, tradition, eventfulness. It condenses multiple meanings,
multiple forms of effective (and affective!) reality. We will proceed to
the analyses of speeches at the ceremony, as possible and particular
instances for authoring.

Listening to Authors
The space where the ceremony takes place is a community room right
next to the Catholic Church, a couple of blocks from the public school.
It is small for the number of participants: the eighteen students taking
part and their invited relatives, the teachers and other school staff. The
ritual is carried out according to the protocols: the solemn entrance of
the students, music and camera flashes, discourses, flowers and micro-
phones, certificates, smiles and tears.
After a sequence of speeches—from the students to God, to their
parents, to colleagues; from the elected teacher to the students; from
the students to the school teachers and staff, and to the director as ‘a
very special person’—the school director addresses the speech to the
students:
My message to you is about friends, intimate friends whom we should try
to acquire during our lifetimes. God knows how much we need intimate
friends to be with us. Intimate friends are rare. One, two, three at the

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maximum, we find on our journey. And there is something more about

intimate friends that makes their souls join together. That is what we call
‘kindred spirits’.
The intimate friendship has four features and we can find them all in the
history of David and Jonathan, in the Bible.
First . . . the intimate friend . . . makes sacrifices for you . . .
The intimate friend is a loyal defender . . .
Intimate friends give each other complete freedom to be as they are . . .
Fourth . . . they are a constant source of encouragement . . .
But wait . . . there is still a fifth one, not mentioned before, and it is very
important. The intimate friend gives confidences and keeps secrets . . . He
knows to keep his mouth shut. He is a prudent friend . . .
Do you have a friend like that? If you don’t, ask God for a friend with
these features . . .
Whenever you need, you can count on me because you found in me a
great friend.
. . . Are you crying? I am not!

The director’s institutional position is officially acknowledged as the

speech is addressed to the audience. Authorship is explicitly assumed
as the written text is read and directed to the students. The speech
brings up a few elements that are recurrent in graduation ceremonies:
friendship, advice. The highlighted theme—friendship—can be
considered a topic shared by the participants, adequate to this special
moment in life, when the students will be taking different routes, going
in diverse directions, after the conclusion of the eighth grade. It is
important to make friends, to have friends, to keep them. Friendship
can be seen as topoi—image and word, present in mind and in
language—commonly held: a commonplace inscribed in discursive
practices, which sustain the social values as it reiterates the already said.
Assuming authorship, the director invokes the religious text: what is
said echoes what has been instituted as a sacred word. The value of the
sacred word seems to attest to the veracity of what is being affirmed.
This explicit reference to the Bible gives the director’s speech further
strength and legitimacy as the locus of authority is transferred—the
function of the referendum—to the cited text. In the cited text it is
anchored, after all, the authority principle that sustains the arguments.
Friendship, then, gets specific contours, characterized as intimate: ‘The
intimate friendship has four features and we can find them all in the
history of David and Jonathan, in the Bible.’ And the speech assumes
the form of advice: ‘we should try to acquire during our lifetimes’, ‘ask
God for a friend with these features’. Descriptive and prescriptive
features mark the director’s speech, and this can be seen as configur-
ing specific pedagogical and religious speech genres. The diversity of

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genres vary according to the circumstances, the social position and the
personal relations between interlocutors (Bakhtin, 1990).
Indeed, a particular way of being in this place of authority also
marks the director’s institutional position, pointing to the tensions
between the institutional sphere and interpersonal relationships. In
fact, in spite of the emphasis on friendship, the director actually speaks
to a partial audience if we consider that only a third of the students
take part in the graduation ceremony. This is openly acknowledged in
the students’ speech to the director, as it publicly and explicitly refers
to the absence of many colleagues who could or should be participat-
ing in the ceremony. Let’s listen to the students’ speech ‘for a very
special person’:
The time we have been together was sufficient to test how marvelous you
are.
Everyday we’ve been together we could see how much we need one
another.
You are for us the wealth not comparable to money. Non-discussable
wealth . . . which could only come from a person like you [. . .]
Thank you, A.R. [. . .] for having helped us a lot, because if it were not for
you, we wouldn’t be graduating.
Many [of our colleagues] gave up. But we . . . but we didn’t. Thanks to
your carefulness [. . .] which made us struggle to get what was best for us.
We, [the students] graduating today, deeply hope in our hearts that we
have given you what you wanted from us, even knowing it would never be
enough.
And you must know, we learned a lot with you.
Thanks from our whole class.
Daniela is the author(ized) person (by the group?) to speak in the
name of the students. As she refers many times to we, it is interesting
to analyze to whom this pronoun refers. Whom is she representing or
speaking for? Here we can see the speaker/author(?) inserted within
or subsumed by the collective voice:
If it were not for you, we wouldn’t be graduating . . . Many gave up. But we
. . . but we didn’t.
We, in this case, is a pronoun that refers to the eighteen participating
students who did not give up, in opposition to the ones who gave up.
But why did the other thirty-two students give up?
We, graduating today . . .
Another thirty-two, non-present students were also graduating in spite
of their non-participation at the ceremony:
We learned a lot with you . . .

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The contours of the pronoun remain ambiguous: does it refer to the

small group at the ceremony? To the whole class? To the students in
general?
Thanks from our whole class . . .
But in this case, just a third of the students were present.
Through our analysis, many tensions between the institutional
sphere (social and discursive positions of school director and students)
and the interpersonal relationships (certain forms of friendship turned
legitimate through the director’s voice) acquire visibility. We are led to
ask: What are the possible images and meanings of friendship? And to
inquire: What do the speeches say about the web of relationships?
What history might they be condensing? How are these speeches
produced? What are some possible effects of such speeches?
The analysis of the director’s public speech to the students shows
that she: (1) proclaims friendship as a main value:
My message to you is about friends, intimate friends whom we should try
to acquire during our lifetimes.
(2) characterizes friendship as selective and private:
Intimate friends are rare. One, two, three at the maximum . . . .
(3) refers to religious discourse:
The intimate friendship has four features and we can find them all in the
history of David and Jonathan, in the Bible.
(4) explicitly positions the director/herself as friend of students:
Whenever you need, you can count on me because you found in me a great
friend.’

Thus, in the many tensions between subjectivity (who is speaking?),

agency (what does one do as one speaks?), authorship (who is respon-
sible for an idea, a statement?) and institutional status (from what
social position?), we can highlight the singular way in which the school
director positions herself in the discourse—’My message to you . . . you
can count on me . . . you found in me a great friend’—which (con)fuses
the limits of public (common to all) and private (intimate) relation-
ships. The speech reiterates and makes explicit the circumscription of
the friendship circle. It indicates the reduction of the possibilities of
participation and the restriction of the celebration to a few. In doing so,
it makes this selective participation not just legitimate, but official,
pointing to a way of officially (not necessarily intentionally) producing
exclusion or exclusivity.

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Listening to Others
Tania and Viviane were two graduating students who did not partici-
pate in the ceremony; they were later interviewed. What follows is a
piece of the interview:
Tania: Since the beginning of the year [there had been the idea of] making
a buffet but we had to get money for that . . . we had to pay R$10.00
per month [. . .] So, the girls started to make snacks for sale. I even
wanted to participate . . . My dream was like this . . . my dream was
to be in a church . . . everything beautiful, [I] don’t know . . .
everybody in white, or blue, or black, red . . . My dream was it to
be in a church . . . but the girls said: Ah, no! ‘cause one of them
wanted to lead everything, and she was not from the Catholic
Church.
Viviane: Some wanted the ceremony to be in the church and others didn’t
...
Tania: Why does it have to be in your church, not in mine? I said, well, it
can be in yours . . . My mother had already bought her dress and
was going to make mine . . . Then they decided to make it in . . .
Viviane: At the [Catholic Church’s] community room . . .
Res.: It’s like a neutral place . . .
Tania: The director did not give us any support either, see, ‘cause she also
was evangelical and did not want to go to [the Catholic] church . . .
did you see how few people, just a little . . . the girls who lead every-
thing, nobody liked them [. . .] At the end of the year, everybody
gave up, did you see, only a few made it [to the graduation
ceremony]. So, I think that if I had joined, I wouldn’t be happy . . .
’cause it is not worth being sorry about things.
Tania: . . . well, I don’t know . . . we used to talk to everybody . . . so, in
my dream, I wanted everybody too . . . just one whole school, you
see?
Viviane: I expected another thing . . . I wanted [the ceremony] to be in a
church. My dream was to be in a church.
Tania: In a dream, it doesn’t matter which church . . . it is a name only . . .
just because it has the name Catholic, they changed their minds.
One first aspect that can be pointed out is related to the image of the
church as institution, the strength and the power of such images,
historically built and constitutive of discursive memory. Images and
words related to religious and sacred rituals and ceremonies invade
and become determinant of the desire of individual subjects—‘my
dream was like this . . .’. The status—powerful image—of the church
as institution pervades the school relationships. Indeed, as becomes
evident in the director’s speech, it displaces the school’s priorities and

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values. Other aspects of school activity are not even mentioned—

school achievement, knowledge and learning, future possibilities,
further study, fields and conditions of working, and so on.
In this sense, is still worth commenting on the institutional position
of the school director, who condenses other social positions, as Christ-
ian, evangelical. In her public speech, all these aspects become consti-
tutive of the author(ship) she assumes. The web of relations
(Bourdieu’s social capital, 1980, 1987) seems to be working: being a
‘friend’ of the director, which means, among other things, participat-
ing in the same church, becomes socially and strategically relevant. In
occupying a position of authority, she explicitly interferes as she
empowers some students and disempowers others. Here, one could
ask about the responsibility of the individual subject who is in such a
position.
Another point acquires relevance here. Let’s focus on Tania and
Viviane’s talk: ‘so, in my dream, I wanted everybody too . . . just one
whole school. . . . In a dream, it doesn’t matter which church . . . it is a
name only . . . just because it has the name Catholic, they changed their
minds . . .’
In the girls’ talk, it becomes explicit that evangelicals do not usually
go to other churches and do not accept non-evangelicals in their own
church. According to the girls, Catholics would accept everybody and
would have no problems going to a ceremony in other churches. In a
certain way, the director’s speech confirms the girls’ talk. But the inter-
esting point is that, though invoking the same Christian root—the
Bible—and the same discursive formation—Christian discourse—the
produced senses seem to go in opposite directions: the director’s
speech, from an evangelical position, within the ceremony, proposes
division, separation, selectivity; the non-participating girls, from a
Catholic point of view, from outside of the ceremony, clearly express
the desire and argue for reunion and integration. So, what we see func-
tioning underneath is the (not so subtle) dispute between churches—
with different interpretations of the ‘same’ sacred word—that invades
and affects the school relationships and rituals.
This fact also calls attention to the historically established relations
between the church and the school as social institutions, and the
specific spheres of knowledge and competence attributed to each of
these institutions; it shows the intrinsic symbiosis between formal
education and religion, in spite of the official separation of state and
Church, since 1889. More recently, Brazil has had its Constitution
(1988) and National Education Law (1997) (re)formulated. Religious
teaching was a matter of intense debate. The newly formulated law

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Smolka The Authoring of Institutional Practices

states that religious teaching in public schools is ‘optional’ and ‘open

to cultural diversity’. In the particular situation analyzed here, what
became evident was not really a matter of formal religious teaching,
but the powerful functioning of values claimed as and founded in
religious precepts, which dominated the interpersonal relationships in
the school environment. Between the stated law, formulated to guaran-
tee impartiality in a public space common to all, and actual practice,
what happens?
We remember here Bakhtin’s (1981) analysis of centripetal (homog-
enizing) and centrifugal (dispersing) forces in discourse. Curiously, to
guarantee diversity, a type of common voice imposes itself in the name
of all. That’s the strength and value of the law. But this ‘common’ voice
implies disagreement and tension while it becomes instituted, general-
ized, commonly applicable, avoiding institutional anomy and regulat-
ing individuals’ behavior. It gains authority as it loses (possible,
defined or attributed) authorship. Common and impersonal, it
becomes anonymous, nobody’s and everybody’s.
In spite of the law formulated to distinguish teaching from catechiz-
ing and to regulate the intention and/or desire of imposing or convinc-
ing the other (students) with regard to religious faith, school and
discourse practices function in such a way that they escape the law,
even as they reiterate it. Silencing or not openly teaching religion inside
the classroom does not necessarily prevent the functioning of forceful
living practices and discourses. Through our analysis, we could see
how an arena of struggle pervades the actual interpersonal and insti-
tutional relationships, appearing as a powerful locus not only of resist-
ance (reaction and opposition) but also of eventfulness (enabling or
mobilizing certain modes of acting, living, believing). This reminds us,
once more, of Certeau’s words with regard to the non-authorized
searching previously mentioned.

Modes of Participation of Subjects in Institutional

Practices: An Intricate Web
Indeed, the non-authorized searching acquires special relevance as it
points to the not immediately evident power of anonymous ties, work
and activities in daily relationships. This preoccupation is not at all
new. In his famous poem, ‘A Worker Reads History’, Bertolt Brecht
(1959) asked: ‘Who built Thebes of the seven gates?’ And he began his
answer: ‘In the books you will read the names of kings’ (p. 108).
We have considered here authoring as a historically configured
and instituted social practice. After presenting and discussing some

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significant theoretical contributions to the issue, we inquired about the

values, the meanings, the concrete conditions that make author(ship)
possible, or convenient. Being author or anonymous demands hence a
further question: in relation to what? With Bakhtin we find theoretical
support to consider the author a creative, singular, articulating voice,
in the sense that authorship may occur in any enunciating act, since
this enunciating act becomes an individual subject’s monological
instance in the appropriation of others’ voices that become anonymous
in this very process of appropriation. This theoretical point of view
coincides with—although it is quite distinctive from—many other
contemporary tendencies that proclaim the importance of authorship
and which have been pervading many school practices today.3 But we
are also reminded by Foucault that many circulating discourses do not
need/have an author: contracts usually need a signature but not an
author; immediately forgotten daily conversation, technical recipes
anonymously (unidentified? unvalued? unauthorized?) transmitted,
do not have an author. Author(ship), as a discursive function, is intrin-
sically related to instituted positions, to specific texts and to power
relations.
Through the course of our investigative work, we have taken the
school as a commonplace and have highlighted here a formal school
ritual as the object of our empirical study. We have focused our analysis
on two institutionally author(iz)ed speeches uttered at the graduation
ceremony. The recognized authors—a school director and a student—
spoke from different institutional positions. We have also listened to
the informal talk of two students speaking from “inside” the school,
“outside” the ceremony, weaving these (non-)author(ized) discourses.
We have worked with the notion of author as social position and
author as singular, synthesizing voice. Our analysis pointed to an intri-
cate web of interpersonal relationships interwoven with/in these insti-
tutional positions. Indeed, the graduation ceremony emerged as
synthesizing a history of relationships. As we traced a history of
(power) relations, different loci of authority could be recognized and
some specific conditions of production of exclusion/exclusivity
became visible within the very core of discursive practices.
We have also explored the meanings and circumstances of the gradu-
ation ceremony, showing how the institutional devoir de mémoire deeply
affects social imagery and constitutes the subject’s desire for celebration.
Images and words, representation and arguing, as constitutive of
discursive memory, create, affect and mobilize individuals’ dreams and
desires, which are collectively and historically constructed and
sustained. Nonetheless, the actual modes of participation of subjects in

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Smolka The Authoring of Institutional Practices

the common, collective practices, routines and rituals are socially

situated and constrained. They become (im)possible within the inter-
play and weaving of relations, affects, beliefs, power positions, and so
on. This makes the commonplace quite heterogeneous, pointing to the
need of investing in further investigation that might raise and face the
issue of relating individual subjects in their affections to the political-
ideological dimension of practices. (A politics of) authoring does not
escape from these concrete relations and conditions of production.

Notes
This research work has been supported by grants from the CNPq—Conselho
Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, Ministry of Education,
Brazil.
1. http://etimologias.dechile.net/?autor.
2. As we approached memory and discourse as fields of inquiry, two relevant
rhetorical resources in the Greek ‘art of memory’ (Yates, 1966) became
conceptually important: the topoi and the commonplace. Created in people’s
mind as strategies for remembering, for organizing images and figures, for
building arguments for persuading others, the topoi concerned ways and
modes of organization of thinking and speaking shared by a community,
common mnemonic loci. From the term topoi we can trace, for example, the
uses of the concept of topic, as specific theme or subject in a given form of
organization of schooling and academic knowledge. The commonplace also
had the function of condensing images and words commonly used by
orators and commonly held by their audience. Commonplaces were
important strategic resources in the structuring and organization of artificial
memory, not just in its figurative aspect—places and images—but in its
operative aspect as well—dividing and composing. These rhetorical
resources—if they were characteristic of a metaphysical way of conceiving
knowledge and world—constituted what we might call today cultural and
semiotic means for thinking and communicating. Today, we can conceive a
commonplace being configured and emerging from historically built
images, arguments, narratives, on a common ground of assumptions,
experiences, information, (pre)conceptions, values, theories, practices.
3. The dialogical and alterity principles, constitutive of Bakhtin’s basic
assumptions, sustain the possibility of authorship as resultant from
different voices and not as spontaneously originated within the individual.

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Biography
ANA LUIZA BUSTAMANTE SMOLKA is Professor at the State University of
Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, where she has been teaching and conducting
research related to human development and education. Her main research
interests include thought and language, discourse practices and school
practices. She has been also focusing her studies on signifying processes,
memory and emotion. She is a member of the Grupo de Pesquisa Pensamento
e Linguagem (GPPL), of the Institute of Education. ADDRESS: Ana Luiza
Bustamante Smolka, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de
Educação, Rua Bertrand Russell, 810, Cidade Universitária, Campinas, SP
13083–970, Brazil. [e-mail: asmolka@unicamp.br]

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