Required reading:

  • recommended:
    • Garfinkel, Harold "Studies of the routine grounds of everyday activities" and "What is ethnomethodology?" in Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. 1967
    • Goodwin, Charles "The interactive construction of a sentence in a natural conversation," in Everyday Language, 97-121. Edited by G. Psathas. New York: Irvington Publishers, 1979
    • Sacks, Harvey "On doing 'being ordinary'," in Structures of social action. Edited by J.M. Atkinson and J. Heritage, 413-429. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1984b
    • Sacks, Harvey "An analysis of the telling of a joke's telling in conversation." in Exploration in the ethnography of speaking. Ed. by R. Bauman and J. Sherzer, 337-353. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
    • Scheflen, Albert "On communicational processes." in Nonverbal behavior. Edited by A. Wolfgang, 1-16. New York: Academic Press. 1979
This is the ninth in a series of notes to fifteen lectures for my class Communication and Culture.
Transition notes
When Benedict emphasized the patterned nature of culture, she inevitably called upon the work that the perceiver accomplishes when encountering the world. Gestalt psychology is above all a psychology of perception (rather than of knowledge). Benedict however could not specify how the elements (borrowed items out of diffusion and "new" items out of social evolution) came to organize themselves so as to present the perceiver with the overwhelming reality of the whole.

Note that this process is one that involves insider "recognizing" something as somehow "real to their world" (e.g. "a classroom in session" vs. "a classroom in waiting for the teacher")

When Saussure emphasized the social reality of language as a synchronic structure (related to a gestalt), he too approached the issue from the point of view of the speaker (learner) confronted with something, the pattern, that he does not control even though he experiences it, perceives it, uses it, and, possibly, makes poetry out of it, deconstructs it, etc.. Saussure by emphasizing the social and contractual aspects of all communication systems also emphasized their "arbitrariness," that is the fact that they are joint constructions. Communication does not arise out of the nature of humanity, narrowly defined, but rather out of its "culture" (which is of course an aspect of its nature, broadly defined). Saussure, however, could not quite account for this construction of syntagmatic gestals (i.e. gestalts that require complex sequences of movements over time to reveal themselves (e.g. the telling of a joke--see below).

  1. It is a fair criticism of Saussure to say that he had nothing to say about the actual production of sentences. While Saussure is most powerful in his insistence on the social source of language, his analysis of meaning considers only decoding, e.g. reading or over- hearing.
  2. To this extent he makes it appear that language processing is a psychological (cognitive) process.

System theorists, particularly Bateson, started the process of confronting the construction of social (group, joint) gestalts (system, patterns, structures). The first generations were not however very precise about the processes involved in human constructions of local structured events.

In fact, Bateson let his immediate followers reinterpret his intuitions in a particularly non-structuralist fashion when they appeared to hypothesize that, for example, a mother could "cause" schizophrenia in her son by manipulating her responses to his interactional advances.

In fact it may be that the main problem with the first generation of system theorists is their use of mechanical metaphors, particularly that of the thermostat.  This metaphor, like the now most popular metaphor of the "ecological niche," emphasizes the closeness and reproductive qualities of systems.  This is even more limiting when combined with functionalism, as in Parsons' version (1970:35-36): systems are probably never the "most functional" manner to accomplish a task  They are something that has evolved to accomplish the task--and probably many others at the same time.  Most importantly, we must preserve the "seeking" aspect of systematic interaction.

In the social sciences it has been the work of the discourse and interaction analysts to move the field even as most contributors to the field as eshewed the term "system."

  1. I think of the work of Sacks and Goodwin (and of Goffman earlier, as well as the more technical work of Sheflen) as exploring empirically and with more and more rigor what was most powerful in G.H. Mead's intuitions about "meaning" being related to the response of the other to an act crafted towards this other, within a social (cultured) field controlled by third parties.
    1. This is not a historical analysis of direct influences:
      1. G.H. Mead was claimed by Herbert Blumer and others interested in the "self" as constructed in social interaction (and constructing of experienced reality) leading to a psychology of personal qualities (e.g. self- esteem, etc.) little concerned with social interaction as problem area.
      2. until recently the link of recent work in ethnomethodology and discourse analysis to G.H. Mead's interest in the "conversation of gesture" was all but forgotten.
      3. There are also reasons to fear too close an association of ethnomethodology with Mead might lead to a reconstruction of concerns with internalization.
    2. This is a matter of intellectual affinities among those who are concerned with the actual production of social interaction in real time, in "natural" setting (that is, not in labs) leaving aside the issue of the "interpretation" that the protagonists might give to the event.
      1. An interest in open processes rather than outcomes.
      2. an intensively observational type of research using methods and machines first used by Bateson.
  2. Duranti and the evolution of the interest in the pragmatics of language, the self and conversation through a focus on direct observation of what can happen when language is actually used.
  3. Harvey Sacks and the development of conversation analysis
    1. Sacks (with Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson) is one of the most influential person in the theoretical developments in the past 25 years.
    2. Their work has moved from addressing purely linguistic issues in a broadening framework into a full blown theoretical and systematic investigation of the processes through which the most common of social action reach completion.
    3. In this way they are directly addressing the fundamental intuition that the traditional dichotomies between society and culture, what we say and what we do, ideology and practice, must be collapsed: society is text, that is conversation.
    4. Sacks has shown that the most ordinary, repetitive of events involve specific constructive work by all those involved: doing nothing is hard work by all concerned within a particular field where protagonists joust to produce a common task.
      1. work on turn-taking
      2. lying
      3. telling jokes:
        1. various fields:
          1. the overall conversation within the joke is told (p.342)
          2. the overall network of social relationship (the fact that all participants know about the sister who is reported as telling the joke.
          3. the joke itself as a narrative in three parts and as a set of conventions (testing understanding p.346; laughing as a defense against the charge of not understanding; particular kind of assessment (is it a good joke, well told etc.)
        2. various moves:
        3. a set of nested joint achievements:
          1. the joke
          2. the conversation
          3. the "relationship" (community?)
    5. Through this work he demonstrates that conversation is less a matter of ideational understandings than a product of practical work that reestablishes the continued relevance of particular contexts which it thereby repairs or reconstructs while, at the same time, being a continual struggle where all participants, perhaps at tripping each other, as "play" or worse.
      1. Joking about pain.
    6. It would not be difficult to rephrase much of this in the language of system analysis or structuralism if one interprets the work of all participants as keeping the focus on "joke telling" as a frame that is always at risk of collapsing.   Reproduction is never assured without work.

  4. Charles Goodwin and the current expansion of this work
    1. He has been conducting much empirical work developing conversational analysis. His major contribution has been to emphasize the visual aspects of interaction, and through them on the interactional processing of language both in production and interpretation.
    2. Goodwin demonstrates that language processing is interactional in that reveals that speakers/hearers are continually monitoring and altering the sentences they are producing.
    3. Talking is not only a matter of mentally processing an idea into a message; it is a process of monitoring what the audience is doing and transforming one's production in response to the audience.
      1. Note how closely related to Mead's "conversation of gesture" Goodwin's analysis is.
      2. Note also the fundamental expansion of Jakobson's model of communication in so far as the model does not highlight how the message is continually transformed by the recipient even as it is formulated. In other words, Jakobson approximates more directly purely asynchronous communication (writing/reading). In fact, of course, writing is also self-correction but purely in terms of an imagined audience.
      3. an example: two people talking (from Komoska's dissertation)
      4. more information about conversation analysis from Charles Antaki
        5.
Some questions
(in the context of this course)

taking the sequence

1) what time is it?
2) it's two thirty.
3) good!
  • show how the "meaning" of the first utterance is changed by the third?
  • is the first utterance a question? why (not)?
  • illustrate how the two common meanings of "accountability" might help us understand what it happening here: who is accountable to what? what is the account that the speakers are giving of each other
  • who controls such a sequence?

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