Approximations to the temporal instability of context

Abstract

The notion of context, which is fundamental to a series of analytical perspectives, gains in this article problematizations that highlights its instability, particularly defined from the connections with temporality. We seek to show that, in relation to textualities, context relations go beyond the dichotomy “inside” or “outside” of the text, since they are marked by the historical, theoretical and epistemological positions of the researches and their agents in the search for contextualization. For its part, the context, usually seen as a kind of past, background or frame that would assist in the understanding of texts, events, and other social and linguistic phenomena. Its seen as a function of complex temporal crossings. We propose, from the recognition of the temporal instability of the context, that the future, seen as anticipation, prediction or other strategies to “dominate” it, is the temporality often absent from the contextual analyzes, when it should be a primordial condition.