“As if I were otherwise” metapragmatics of ego-splitting and virtualization, nanchatte!

Abstract Nanchatte is a Japanese gag expression, whose literal English translation could be “I have just completed the saying of something like what I have just said.” Its meaning partially overlaps with English expressions such as “Just kidding,” or “I am just saying.” Its felicitous execution is often intended to “crack up” listeners, to take the edge off an impression of formality, arrogance, aggression, austerity, or bluntness, to break the ice, mitigate face-threat or potential embarrassment, keep meaning ambiguous, or other similar performative effects. Positioned right after the completion of the preceding utterance, nanchatte performs a self-quoting speech act, in which it reflexively and retroactively turns one’s own utterance as reporting speech into reported speech. Ex post facto reframes the utterance from a narrating event to a narrated event, which then turns the speaker from the subject of the utterance to the object in the real-time temporal process of the utterance, splitting and doubling the subject “I” and the world it inhabits between the actuality and the virtuality. By doing so, nanchatte structurally produces the space of non-position-taking. As frivolous as it might be, nanchatte’s structural condition warrants a serious semiotic analysis. Drawing on Husserl’s concepts of neutrality modification and ego-splitting, this essay will discuss how and what kind of political subjectivity could be produced in the quoted space afforded by nanchatte. I proposes the concept of virtualization as a performative effect of nanchatte. As I will detail below, nanchatte as a self-quoting operation – that is, “I” quotes what “I” have just said – unsettles other familiar binaries in the illimitable movement of the virtual and the actual, and this paper considers its broader political implications.