Talking American: Cultural Discourses on DONAHUE. CARBAUGH, Donal. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1988. xvi, 206 pp.in
Language in Society
This book represents a real advance in the analysis of contemporary American culture. Here we have a careful look at a setting, the Phil Donahue show, where a particular form of speech in action has been institutionalized. Carbaugh has correctly seen that this type of externalized joint construction is directly available to an ethnographic analysis. Unlike some recent cultural analysts, in anthropology and related fields, Carbaugh realizes that all we can do, as social scientists, is "unveil cultural discourses that are used in an American scene" (p. 187). The Donahue show must have different "meanings" for each of the people involved from Donahue himself, to his guests, the studio audiences, the millions of people in front of their television sets, or the producers, executives or commercial sponsors who are all involved in various ways in the making of the show. Figuring out what it may "all mean" to these--if anything--must be left to social psychologists. Analysts of joint, social, institutionalized constructions are at their best when they squarely confront a text and offer an account of its structure, that is of the way general human experience gets organized into performances centering around various symbols--in this case "the individual," "the self," "choice," "(traditional social) roles," "honesty," "sharing," "communication," etc.--symbols which are themselves mutually organized. In the process, though Carbaugh does not talk much about this aspect of the historical institutionalization of such talk, experience is "framed" (in all the senses of this term, those that are connoted by Goffman's writings and those that derive from its colloquial uses) as doubly bound messages are presented as common sense.
Talking American is a significant contribution because it clearly derives a cultural analysis from widely available texts which future ethnographers will be able to consult as they build on Carbaugh's work. It is also a contribution in its demonstration of the analytic advantage of separating "America" from "Americans," "the talking that is American" from the "American that is talking" (p. 2). In fact Carbaugh has a hard time maintaining this frame, probably because it is one that is not quite common sense in scholarship on the United States. He does talk of "we as Americans," he feels obliged to say that his is a study of "the ways some Americans talk to each other" (p. 2). In my opinion, such caveats are not in order when one is dealing with something that is so evidently a manifestation of the cultural "center" in the Bakhtinian sense, the center against which poets, novelists, and also any "average" person must be seen as somehow struggling against. Indeed, one can see, in the exchanges Carbaugh quotes, resistance and struggle as well as continual enforcement of the accountable structure.
The above are mostly methodological comments but Carbaugh's contribution is also significant for what it does tell us about America, particularly about the complexity of what is generally glossed as "individualism." It is probably true that Carbaugh's title is overly broad. The book has little to say about community, about the state or the corporation, except indirectly when they are used in some Donahue talk to provide a contrastive background for an affirmation of the proper "self" that is not a product of "traditional-social-roles" (one of the more interesting of cultural categories in the American constellation) (Chap. 5).
As a study of the American "self" as a code both of and for joint behavior, Talking American should be read very carefully by anyone who dare enter the field of cross-cultural studies of the self or person. Carbaugh is modest when he gently suggests that, perhaps, there are ethnographic problems with the usual generalizations used by anthropologists, from Geertz to Shweder or Rosaldo, when they refer to "the Western category of the self" to highlight properties of local ethno-psychologies. When one compares these generalizations to the complexities highlighted by Carbaugh one realizes how far ethnography has to go, here as well as there. For "the self", in Donahue-land, is not simply a "concept," "category" or even "symbol." At certain times these words can be used to capture aspects of the analyzed performances. It remains that what Carbaugh demonstrates is that "the self" is a social performance, something that people do together, before it is an index to some internal state. The self is talk, it is "sharing," "communicating," "respecting," "(not) judging," etc., all matters that gloss special forms of quasi ritual performances. One could thus wonder whether, in cross-cultural comparison, it is more important to capture a "representation" or "notion" rather than carefully to describe a powerful scene. "Communication" is not "chit-chat," and what is significant about the Balinese "person" is that it presents itself as a teknonym. Thus we are back with Mauss when he emphasizes that his work "concerns solely law and morality" ([1938] 1985: 3), what we might now call, with the ethnomethodological tradition, the "accountable" structures of speech and performance.
One may not agree with me about the need to distinguish performance from representation. Carbaugh himself, in his more theoretical passages, do not hold the distinction systematically. In his analytic practice, in his decision not to tell us about any individual account of their "opinions" or "ideas" about Donahue, in his continual return to talk as performed in the context of its historical performance in interaction with Donahue, the guest and the studio audience, Carbaugh must be seen as indeed telling us about a "discourse," a way of talking on a stage. He does this very well and I hope that he, or others emulating him, will tell us in the same detail about ways of talking on other stages, in government, in social agencies, in corporations, etc. so that we can truly know what are the historical, cultural, conditions of life in the United States.
Mauss, Mauss (1938) A category of the human mind: the notion of person: the notion of self. Tr. by W.D. Halls. Reprinted in M. Carrithers, Steven Collins and S. Lukes (eds.), The category of the person: Anthropology, philosophy, history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1-25.