Acceso usuarios
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.
