Lectures on Conversation, Volume 2 (lectures 1968-1972)

Part I Fall 1968

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks © 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6

Lecture

1 Second stories · "'Mm hm · " Stor" prefaces; �Local news;' Tel/ability '

'

.I

Hereafter I'll begin with some rather initial considerations about sequencing in conversation. But this time I'm going to put us right into the middle of things and pick a fragment that will introduce the range of things I figure I can do. I'm proceeding this way for this sort of reason: Basically what I have to sell is the sorts of work I can do. And I don't have to sell its theoretical underpinnings, its hopes for the future, its methodological elegance, its theoretical scope, or anything else. I have to sell what I can do, and the interestingness of my findings. So we've got this fragment of conversation, this thing about the automobile wreck. 1 I want to start picking it apart. I'll begin off with what I initially found interesting; why I initially worked on this fragment. And that is, some relationship between what I'm calling the 'second story' and the 'first story . ' The 'second story' is: B: A:

You know, I looked and looked in the paper- I think I told you f­ for the uh f-fall over at the Bowl that night. And I never saw a thing about it, and I I I looked in the next couple of evenings. Mm hm

B:

Never saw a th- a mention of it.

( 1 . 0)

Call that the second story. I will have to make a case that there is some reasonable warrant for talking about it as ' second; ' second to the first (the first being the thing that begins, "Say did you see anything in the paper last night or hear anything on the local radio, Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura yesterday, and on the way home we saw the most gosh awful wreck . " ) I think it's kind o f obvious that there are some similarities between the second story and the first. The second story, like the first, seems to be about an accident; involves a witness and victims. Let that suffice for now with respect to similarity. There seem to be more or less similar characters and a more or less similar topic; it's a different sort of accident apparently, but it's an accident. So we have these naively apparent similarities. We might be led to ask, "Are they happenstance?, " i.e. , it just happens that here's a story, and 1 A more extended fragment was handed out. It can be seen in Spring 1 968, April 24 lecture, vol. I, pp. 764-5 . Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks © 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6

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Part I

here's another story that has some similarities to it. One can easily enough find many stories that are similar to other stories. If you pick a row of books out of the library and find a story in one, it wouldn't take you all day to find a story in another book that you'd find more or less obviously similar. Does the similarity here matter? Is there reason to believe that the similarity is an achieved similarity?

This might be a matter of lay observation. One would, I suppose, figure, ' ' Sure. That similarity is not just happenstance. ' ' The teller of the second story is obviously telling her story in response to the other story. They happen in the same conversation. They happen as between the same people - A tells the first to B, and B tells the second to A. B tells the second shortly after the first, etc. Now we can develop a lot better reasons for figuring that the possibility of such a relationship exists. But just for now let's assume, on the basis of the fact that it's no jolt to our intuition, to our understanding of the world, that it may be possible that those two stories are similar for non-incidental reasons and therefore that we can figure that the similarity is an achieved similarity. Then we can ask, as the first real question, how is it that the similarity is achieved? What I mean by 'an achieved similarity' is that B produced this story in such a way that its similarity to A's will be seeable; that is, in such a way that A can see that what B is telling A is 'a story similar to the story that A told B. ' That is to say, the problem of achieving 'a similar story' is B's problem. And our question is, how did B go about doing that? What we now look to is, what would it take for us to have shown how B does it? What sort of a thing would be an explanation of that? Not an explanation of 'Why?' but an explanation of ' How?' We want, that is, a characterization of what B did; something which would set out, at least in gross terms, some of the parameters involved. Presumably what is involved is that B listened to A's story in some fashion, and engaged in some analysis of what A was saying (what exactly such an analysis would be, needs be found out). Then, that B used that analysis in searching her memory, and found in her memory some story which she could offer, which could be seen as 'similar. ' What we're asking, then, is "How is it that B listened and did her analysis and used her analysis so as to find a story to tell?" Now we can approach that kind of a question in a series of quite different ways. Consider these sorts of possibilities. Suppose that B analyzes out of A's story its topic and its characters. It's about an accident, it involves as characters 'witness' and 'victims. ' Having those features of the story at hand, what B then does is to see if she knows such a story. That is to say, she looks for a story which has an accident and a witness to the accident. That might yield the second story. Now is there anything manifestly or developably wrong or inadequate about such a possibility? What sort of stories would it yield? It might yield such a story as the following. "I remember reading about a wreck once, in the paper. Seven people were killed and it was three days before anybody noticed. " That is to say, it could just yield any story about a wreck. We can then ask, would such a story as would occur where this one does

Lecture 1

5

be just any story about a wreck? When people tell a story about a wreck they saw yesterday, could somebody then, e.g., report on a wreck they read about in the paper? What we need to do at this point is to watch conversations hereafter and see. I don't say that we should rely on our recollection for conversation, because it's very bad. What I mean by that it's 'very bad,' is this: It happens to be perfectly reasonable for linguistics and philosophy to proceed by considering, "Well, let's take a certain locution, a sentence. Would anybody say that? If they said it would we figure it was grammatical? or a puzzle? or not?" And pretty much reasonably educated people feel comfort­ able with such a procedure. That is to say, they feel that they have control over what it is someone might say. They recognize something as loony or not loony; they recognize something as what they figure to be grammatical pr not grammatical. One can invent new sentences and feel comfortable with them. One cannot invent new sequences of conversation and feel comfortable about them. You may be able to take 'a question and an answer, ' but if we have to extend it very far, then the issue of whether somebody would really say that, after, say, the fifth utterance, is one which we could not confidently argue. One doesn't have a strong intuition for sequencing in conversation. So relying on recollection is not a procedure that I'm going to advise us using, nor will I use it. Again, then, the possible analysis I offered as one that B could have used on A's story, will yield any which story. It seems to be that B's second story is not any which story. Furthermore, there are stories which would not be any which story, and they might be done, but they would be quite different from this second story. Consider this possibility: A tells a story about a wreck she saw. "I was driving along and I saw a car smashed up and I went over to see what happened. There were all these people laying on the street. I stayed there quite a while. ' ' Now B uses the procedure I initially proposed; find a story with such an event and with such characters, and tell it. And the story that B remembers goes like this: "I was in an accident one time and I was laying there on the street and all these people came over and stood around gawking at me. It was really awful. " Those two stories fit together in a rather different way than the ones we're considering fit together. That is to say, that shift as to who was who in the story may be something that matters. In this case, we have as a fact that A was a witness and B was a witness. And perhaps that's a relevant sort of thing for the way that B goes about determining what the characters should be in the story she should find. Not merely some particular set of characters, but, furthermore, that there are some characters in the first story and A is one of them, and there are some characters in the second story and B is one of them. And besides that, the character that A is in the first story, B is in the second story. That's a much finer sort of situation than 'search for a story in which there are the same characters. ' It's ' search for a story in which you are the character the other was in their story. ' A sort of gross possible reason for doing it that way would be that if the person is trying to make a point with the first story, then having such a second

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Part I

story is a way of seeing that you agree with the point. So, for example, in other materials a second story is prefaced with " I know just what you mean" and then a story is told which has the same paralleling of characters. Aside from that, there is a technical kind of problem; one that I can't all that easily develop here, but I'm going to try. It turns out to be rather important that there be an ordering to the way that B searches for characters, in the search for a story: The first character B searches for counts more than the second character. And by that I mean that the first character B picks will control the way B looks for a second character. That is to say, there is a way in which characters in stories fit together, and, as the position of the storyteller shifts, then the terms for conceiving the various other parties shift. So, for example, if I'm a victim in an accident then I may conceive of the others around as 'witnesses, ' but I may also conceive them as 'possible helpers, ' or 'gawkers, ' or whatever else, whereas if I'm a 'witness' then the way in which others are conceived may not be in exactly the same sort of way. I may see them as 'people to talk about the accident with,' i.e. , as possible co­ conversationalists. That sort of shift is rather transparent in one way, and that is, if you consider that it's not 'the same story' invariant to perspectives, characters, etc. , then 'the same event' in some sense may have quite different things going on depending upon who is telling about it. And depending upon what they said was going on, would also tum how they put everybody together. So that for a bunch of people on a train, each of them may have a different way of seeing who else is there. That can be suggested in a fairly obvious way. One guy on the train could see the others as 'whites , ' one guy may see the others as 'marks' (e.g. , if he's a pickpocket), and various other such ways of seeing what the others are. And if we're taking the situation as being one in which the storyteller is a character, then which character they are can matter a good deal for what the other characters are. Now I made that point so as to try to suggest that there is reason to believe that if somebody's going to be searching for some event in their memories so as to produce a second story, then they don't just want a list of characters, A, B , C, they want an ordered list of characters. And they want at least a first character around which to organize that ordered list - in contrast to, say, the characters' order of appearance, which just doesn't get stable. Now I proposed that one way that B might go about searching for a story would be to find such a story as had B being a similar character to the character A was in A's story. And that is then to say that such an initial use of the character A was in A's story could be basic to B's finding a story. There are some rather nice features for a procedure like that. One thing is that it's capable of enormous generality. It doesn't matter what story A tells you, you have a way of searching for a second story, that procedure holding independent of the particular character. You find what character A was, and then use that to find whether you have a story in which you were such a charaaer. And it's not just general in the sense that we could propose a procedure which says 'find a story in which the first character mentioned in

Lecture 1

7

A's story is a character, and tell this as your second story,' but it specifically fixes on the party who's telling you the story. That is to say, if we're talking about the story as being told in conversation, between some set of people, involving them in interaction, then what we have is not just a general procedure but one that's also the most interactionally relevant. That is to say, in each case, for a particular second story, the second storyteller is constructing his story not only by reference to the story that A told him, but by reference to what A did in that story, i.e. , that A told the story is then made something that B deals with. By going about constructing his story by reference to finding a story that he is a similar character in, B is making something of the fact that A told B the story, i.e. , the procedure is 'interactionally relevant. ' With this procedure we have a proposed description of how people may sometimes listen to stories; a proposed description which can be checked out. We can look to other story sequences to see whether it happens that as the stories vary in character we get second stories involving that the teller of the second story is the same character as the teller of the first story. If that is so, then we have a series of gains. For example, we have as one gain that we can talk about this being seriously a 'second' story. We have hints of far more interesting gains than that. For example, we may be getting some glimpse of the way in which somebody' s memory is at the service of a conversation. If we're talking about B going about searching her memory, it isn't overt labor. That is to say, when somebody comes up with a second story like this, they haven't found themselves working to do it, it just literally pops into their head. Which is to say, perhaps, that it may be possible that this thing we think of as an extremely private repository but which we're also aware of as operating quite without control, is something that operates by virtue of procedures which are socially organized and are characterizable. One thing we can be noticing about such a relationship between two stories is that B's story is told within 'conversation time. ' That is to say, it isn't a situation in which A tells a story and some time later B tells their story. That happens, to be sure, i.e. , B remembers something a week later, etc. , but for a considerable amount of stuff, B is able to produce a story right then and there. Now that B is able to produce a story right then and there matters a good deal for what can be done with the story. One of the things that can thereby be done is showing that one got the point of the first story, since B can tell it at such a place in the conversation that A, looking at it, can see what it's about. That is to say, if A told a story and then the conversation went along and they were talking about something or other, it may well happen that if B then tells her story, A is going to figure it's a new story, or it's a second story but it's second to some other first story. The juxtaposition of this story to that one may matter a good deal for, e.g., A to see that B's story is produced by reference to A's particular story. The reason for that is that B's story doesn't, after all, say that it's the product of an analysis of A's. It's only if you analyze B's story that you find that it's that. A has just produced her story; she knows what her story's about. She hears B's story, and if she's going

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Part I

about listening and analyzing as B did with hers then she'll find that ' similarity' is used in producing it. But that she has B's story so available may well turn on where the story is placed. And that is a topic to which a good deal of attention will be given later on. Now, in talking about the second story I gave a characterization of it which specifically was concerned with its having been produced by reference to performing some operations on the first story. I want to mention in passing, something which should be marked: That hearing in such a way as to analyze, and analyzing in such a way as to produce a second, is a basic way one goes about showing that one understands something that another person has said. Some procedures can be formally characterized in similar ways to the second story. Sometimes there are much simpler sorts of things, sometimes much more complicated sorts of things. Here's a simpler one: A:

B

:

A:

How long are you going to be in town? Till Wednesday. Oh you'll just be here a week.

The way in which "you'll just be here a week" is a way of showing one's understanding of what the other person said, involves the way in which it takes "Till Wednesday" and performs some operation on it by reference to, say, when 'now' is. 2 So what we're seeing is that people aru going about using their hearings. But anybody could say that; the question is, can we say something fairly clean about that. And also, can we use it to bring attention to parts of what happened which, not only were we not aware of, but wouldn't come to be aware of. That is to say, it isn't obvious in the first instance that if I had made a list of features of the second story which included the fact that B was the same character that A was, that one would notice that it was an observation that counted in any way. What we have at this point, then, is not only that it's an observation about this story, but an observation that we've done something with. I'm going to leave the second story for a while and go back to the first story. I want to deal with some other ways that story is listened to, beyond the ways that the second story shows it was listened to. One sort of thing we might want to fix on, but we would, I suppose, if we were conservative enough, figure we couldn't at all deal with, would be something like this " Mm hm: " 2 The actual fragment runs off a bit differently:

A:

B :

A:

How long are you going to b� here, Uh: (.) not too long. uh: : jgst until uh: : I think MQnday. ( 1.2) Till, oh you mean like a week tomorrow,

Elsewhere the actual data has simply been substituted for the presented data, but in this case the comment appears to be geared to the data as presented.

Lecture 1 A:

B: A:

9

Say did you see anything in the paper last night or hear anything on the local radio, Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura yesterday, Mm hm And on the way home we saw the: : most gosh awful wreck.

I suppose if one was altogether naive one might say that what a person understands when they say " Mm hm" is whatever the other person has said. It would seem obvious that you couldn't show that that was so, and furthermore, sometimes it's obviously not so. One sort of question is whether we can say anything about what "Mm hm" does in this case. One thing we can notice about stories is that we tend to get a sequence of things like "Mm hm" ("Uh huh," "Oh: : , " "Yeah," etc.) and then something else, like "Oh isn't that awful. " The question is whether that sort of fact turns out to matter, i.e . , whether that sort of fact gives us some idea about what " Mm hm" does. Let's notice what the story has so far involved. A begins by saying "Say did you see in the paper or hear anything last night on the radio. " Now obviously what we've got going there is that A is making some request of B for information. And B in due course fills that request for information, saying "No, I haven't had my radio on, " and a little later on, "I don't get the paper. " Now we can ask, how does B know where to place her answer? An obvious answer to that would be, she should place her answer at the end of the candidate news story. Well, how does B know when it's over? You could perfectly well have: A:

B:

Say did you see anything in the paper last night or hear anything on the local radio, Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura yesterday, No, I didn't see it in the paper.

That is to say, if B sees this as the thing that could occur in a newspaper, then B might, having read the paper, treat just this as adequate for trying to recall whether it was in the paper or not. But B does not do such a thing. She waits to get more. She does not see the first part as the candidate news story. And it may be that the request, indicating that 'news' is involved, helps B to decide on the matter. So that one wants to see that the request for information is placed at the beginning of the story, and also to see that at some point before the answer is placed, other things are done ("Mm hm, " "Oh: : , " "Uh huh," etc.) which have at least the relevance that they are talk, and not yet the thing that B is going to do at the end of the story. What "Mm hm" does is at least this: It says, "The story is not yet over, I know that. " And also, it is placed at a pause-point and shows that B is listening - where there is a sense that B would have to show that she's listening, to show that she knows the story's not over. That's at least a sort of listening, in that, in this case in particular, there is something that she should do when she sees that the story is over.

Part I

10

Now she gets what she should do from what I'm going to call the 'story preface, ' "Say did you see anything in the paper or hear anything on the local

radio. " It turns out that stories regularly have prefaces, and they regularly have prefaces which are relevant in approximately the sort of way that this one is relevant, i.e. , they inform their hearer what the hearer should do when the story is over. This is a particularly simplified one in the sense that it obviously consists of a request for information. Characteristically it's not that sort of a thing, but it's something like "I heard the most terriblejwonderful thing yesterday" and then the story is told. That line is similar to "Did you see anything . . . etc. , " in that we find that what that says is, 'When you hear the story is over, say something like "Oh isn't that terriblejwonderful" . ' That is to say, the characterizing adjective for the story is used by the hearer of the story to produce their remark on recognition that the story is over. And if they fail, then that can be picked up by the hearer, i.e. , the initial storyteller, and sometimes it could be a touchy issue. For example, in one bunch of materials there's place where A is telling about a house she has for rent. And the point that she wants to make, she makes in the following fashion. A:

B: A: A: B:

B: A: B: A: B:

So I thought just for fun, I would uhm -- uh, since I had this much time, I'd run a little ad myself ? Uh huh, And maybe handle it myself if I could? Mm hm, And do you know I was just amazed, it was in last night, I was amazed at the responses I got. Mm hm, And uh it's- I already have a ( 1 . 0) a deposit for it. Well good! Isn't that something? Well I should say.

Notice, where B says "Well good,! i.e. , "It's good that you rented the place" or " . . . rented the place so rapidly, " A says "Isn't that something?" Now what she's doing with "Isn't that something?" is picking up what she was telling about that was "amazing," i.e. , the responses she got from this little ad she ran herself, and not that she got the place rented, which is ' 'good. ' ' And the other grants that it was "something. " In that regard, then, we can find that something like "Mm hm" can have something said about it by reference to the way in which somebody listens to the progression of a story. That is to say, we're not in a position of merely being able to say something about the second story following the first and exhibiting an orientation to it, but we can say that the first story is listened to as it is developed, and that there are ways of dealing with the ways it's being de­ veloped. Where, furthermore, the ways of dealing with the way it's being developed are something that a person who builds that story is going about setting up. In particular we've seen that one sort of thing a storyteller can be

Lecture 1

11

occupied with is informing the listener what it will take for that story to be over, so that the listener can see such a thing as that it isn't over or that it is over, in that it's not at all common, usual, done, that at the end of a story one says, "And now the story's over," but, that the story is over is something that needs to be detected. For one, the teller of the story gives, right at the beginning of the story, information as to what should be watched for as the thing that will be the completion of the story. If someone says "I heard the most wonderful thing yesterday, " then you should watch for what it is that could be a wonderful thing. And when you've heard what could be a wonderful thing, then you should show that you see the story's over. If you don't, then they'll say "Isn't that wonderful?" and you'll be in a position to be seen to be thinking that the story is still to go on - which is to say, you've failed to understand it. And that obviously can happen. I certainly don't mean to be saying that that sort of thing cannot happen. In this particular case, the preface is indicating that the story involves something that might be seen in the local news, for a hearer who is presumed by this to know, perhaps, what the local news contains, not merely in the sense of what yesterday's newspaper contained, but what any local news contains. Where, that it might be seen in the local news locates for the hearer what they could say, for example, that they didn't see it; recognizing that it might have been there, but "I didn't read the paper, " knowing however that such an item has been presented as could be in the local news - which would, e.g. , rule out Ruth Henderson and A driving to Ventura. And that her knowledge of what constitutes local news is used by B, is something which is clearly present in B's own story. When B tells her own story, involved in it is not just an analysis of characters and topics, but specifically in addition to that, reference to what happened in A's story; that it was possible local news that was not found. Now this gives us a little bit more extensive sense in which B is attending A as telling the story. A was a witness to the accident, B is telling a story in which B was witness to an accident. But A was much more than a witness to the accident. A saw the accident as 'news' and looked in the paper to see if it was there, and didn't find it there. And by reference to not finding it there, by reference to an interest in it as 'news,' she tells it to B. And B comes back with a story that was just that sort of story. B also is not merely a witness to an accident, but was a witness to an accident who thought that it was a piece of news, a piece of local news, and who looked for it and couldn't find it. Telling the story to A, B remembers all those things. We can also be noticing that what A does in her story is not just report an accident; she's reporting something which she saw and then did a bunch of work on. What I mean by that is, what she saw was a wrecked car. She worked it up into the 'worst accident she ever saw. ' Now I take it that one doesn't just see, laid out in front of you, 'the worst accident you ever saw' you see an accident and make it into 'the worst accident you ever saw' by engaging in a comparison of other accidents you may have seen. But what I take it is going on is something like this: It is going to be claimed about the

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Part I

accident that it is possible local news. The fact that it's an accident is, by itself, no grounds for it to be local news. Not any accident is local news. What makes an accident local news is, e.g. , that it's a 'big accident, ' in that n people were killed, or something on that order. And now the way that she can deal with its candidacy as local news, is by her having come to see it as 'the worst accident she ever saw. ' That she makes of it 'the worst accident she ever saw,' and looks in the paper for it, are mutually relevant in this way: If I were to say, " Hey did you see Huntley and Brinkley last night? There was an accident out in front of my house yesterday and they didn't say a thing about it, ' ' one might ask, "Why would they ever say anything about it?" The accident is not something that, via it's having happened in front of my house, one would figure it should have been on Huntley and Brinkley. If I were to say "Did you see anything about it in the Daily Pilot?" then it might be a candidate for such a local newspaper, where it might not be a candidate for a national news show like Huntley and Brinkley. Now, it' s not that it happened on my block that prevents it from being reported on Huntley and Brinkley. Things could occur on my block that would be so reported. It's on somebody's block that a helicopter crashes. And some automobile crashes can perhaps make some sorts of national news. So that you can read in the New York Times about an automobile crash occurring outside of New York if, say, 1 1 people were killed. Not as headline news, but somewhere in the paper. So you build in your characterization of what sort of news it might be candidate for. In the case at hand, she builds in her characterization of it as candidate for local news by talking of it as the worst accident she ever saw, and by suggesting that there were people killed in it, where it is the case that local newspapers present reports of accidents in which people were killed. The point is, in her forming this thing up as something she's going to tell somebody, one wants to see that she has to do it right, or that she's telling them something that's not tellable can be claimed; "Why are you telling me that?" can be raised. The sheer telling of a story is something in which one makes a claim for its tellability. And its tellability cari be dealt with. We have a sequence in which a lady who works at Bullock's gets a call from another lady, who'd driven by there, who reports that it looks like there was a robbery at Bullock's. The recipient of the call has had the day off, and the lady who's calling is reporting to her what she's missed. The recipient specifically deals with the tellability of the story by saying " Oh I'll call Penelope right now. " (Where Penelope also works at Bullock's, and was at work when the incident occurred.) That is to say, she accepts the tellability in the classic way of accepting tellability, i.e. , to tell somebody else. Or to tell the one who told you that you are now going to tell somebody else. Many times when we're told a story what we specifically do is to say just that: "Wait till so-and-so hears this. " So she says, ' 'I'll call Penelope. " She calls her, and Penelope says she doesn't know much about it, oh yeah it happened but "in fact I didn't even say anything to Johnny about it because I just thought well it was so kind of silly. " That is, she deals again

Lecture 1

13

precisely with this issue of whether that thing is tellable. One finds as a recurrent feature in the telling of stories that people deal with its tellability; in that one could tell stories that people make you out a nut for, a bore for, whatever else. And so you're going about working them up into something tellable. 3 Obviously in some sense, to work it up into a piece of possible local news is to make it tellable. So that it isn't just another description, put in there for the hell of it, that it was 'the worst wreck I ever saw. ' And in that regard, the other person uses that questionable feature of its local-news status in her story, thereby gaining for her story its also-plausibility. That is to say, she saw something happen at the Bowl; it didn't occur in the news, also. That 'also' is a very curious 'also' in the sense that it may well be that it had no reason to occur in the local news. She figured it ought to be in the local news, the local news didn't include it, perhaps not for any reason other than that it wasn't local news. She may be saving that story so as to find, when she gets some other story told to her, that the other story is one that 'also' didn't appear but was 'kept out, ' so as to preserve the status of her story as having been local news. Such a use of 'also' is an enormously common thing, and to get a sense of it as a usual piece of rhetoric, here's a yesterday-instance of it. Governor Wallace is being interviewed by a reporter and he's asked about what he makes of the New York Times' characterization of him. He say, "The New York Times said Castro was a good man. They were wrong then, they're wrong in this case, also. " Again, then, in B's preservation of this story so as to make it an 'also' is one way of keeping her claim that the thing was local news alive as a reasonable claim, not a piece of nuttery. So, one thing I'm saying is that if you're going to claim something to be 'local news,' then that puts another task into telling the story. However, there's the possbile gain i.e. , if she can make it out as 'local news' then she also makes it out as something tellable, worthwhile. Let me turn now to a consideration of the line, "Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura yesterday. " I want to make a case for the fact that that characterization - as well as many many characterizations in the story - is specifically construaed for this story. That is to say, we don't want to propose in the first instance that when she and Ruth Henderson set out that morning they said "Let's go to Ventura. " It's at least reasonable that they would say "Let's go to Mary's," or to some store which happened to be in Ventura. It's by virtue of the fact that she's reporting on an accident and locating where the 3The following mmed up between the time the leaute was given and transcribed . From the

New York Times, October 1 , 1 968:

While Joseph Loo was watching television on Sunday evening, the telephone rang. His mother answered . It was Ngoon Goon, Joseph's 13-year-old friend , calling to say that the teachers' strike was over and that they had to go back to school the next day. Ngoon gave the message to Joseph's mother. The message was neither interesting enough nor important enough to the two boys for them to discuss it over the phone themselves.

14

Part I

accident happened that what is said turns out to be ' ' drove down to Ventura. " Now she could easily handle that by having said "Ruth Henderson and I drove down to see Mary Smith who lives in Ventura, " but there are some problems about that. If it was somebody who the other person doesn't know, then it would just cause a complication to mention Mary Smith: "Oh, who's she?" "She's a friend of mine who . . . " etc. And anybody knows that when somebody uses, instead of the name of the person they went to see, a place, then they're telling you among other things, 'you don't know who I'm talking about; ' e.g. , "I went to a party at La Marina last night" tells you among other things, 'you don't know the person I went to see. ' Where, if you knew who they went to see, they would tell you who they went to see. Again, then, what "down to Ventura" does is to help locate where the accident occurred. It occurred "on the way home, " i.e. , between Ventura and Santa Barbara. Note that it was " on the way to" Santa Barbara for these ladies, who were returning from Ventura to Santa Barbara. In no other way is it "on the way to" Santa Barbara. It could be "on the way to" San Francisco. A stretch of highway is "on the way to" wherever it is that you can go from that stretch of highway. And that's a real problem for seeing a 'local news event' on a highway. Let's say you're from Orange County and you're driving in Arizona, and you see an accident on the side of the road. It could happen that the person in the accident lives next door to you, or is the cousin of your neighbor. But you would have to have some reason to figure that an accident occurring on a road in Arizona involved somebody whom you might know. Odds are that most accidents you see in such a place are accidents that involve somebody that's nobody you know. And when you're driving the freeway you rarely ever see anybody you know. So we have to have some way of figuring out why it is that an accident seen somewhere on a highway can be seen as possibly involving local people. And not as a matter of craziness, either. Now, people do seem to have the view that there are some parts of some roads which, while they're traveled by people going wherever, are also specifically traveled by people going to some specific place. My evidence for that is such a thing as, e.g. , if you're driving up the Harbor Freeway on Saturday, and you look into the next car and see some distribution of people, you're liable to say "Oh they're going to the USC game, " though you can be five miles from USC. Or you could see that they're going to Dodger Stadium, and a series of such places. And people routinely do look into the next car, or see the traffic, and say "Everybody's going to the ball game. " So that they have some sense that some parts of the road, while they're trafficked by all sorts of people going all sorts of places, they are also specifically trafficked by specific sorts of people going specific places. And there then may be some part of the freeway outside of Santa Barbara which is seen as that part of the freeway on which people are, who are going to Santa Barbara. Now it's important that the people in the accident live in Santa Barbara, because unless the people live in Santa Barbara it's not likely to be local news. If the accident was on the border of Santa Barbara and Ventura and the

Lecture 1

15

people lived in Ventura, it might be in the Ventura newspapers, but it wouldn't necessarily be in the local Santa Barbara newspaper. For one, then, the borders for local news are not strictly geographic. Somebody who lives in Santa Barbara gets arrested half a block into Ventura, it might not be Ventura news but it might be Santa Barbara news. Somebody from Santa Barbara gets killed a mile into Ventura, it might be Ventura news if somebody from Ventura killed him; it might not be Ventura news if nobody in Ventura was involved, though it could be Santa Barbara news. You might perfectly well come home to Newport Beach from Arizona and find out about an automobile accident in Arizona reported in the Newpon Beach newspaper. Which is to say, you might find out that somebody from Newpon Beach got killed in Arizona. So the monitoring of events in terms of that they are local news 'for here,' wherever we are, can involve this business of 'on the way home from Ventura' as a rather serious kind of matter for characterizing where we happened to be. Indeed, had it not been 'on the way home from Ventura, ' then it might not have been a told story at all - or, for that matter, an auto wreck that anyone gave any attention to. That is to say, it's possibly the case that the interest in, the noticing of, the wreck is somewhat geared to where the wreck occurs by reference to where you normally are. Now I want to name what has been done. We took a couple of phrases, or clauses, " . . . down to Ventura . . . and on the way home . . . , " and what we are engaged in is trying to see what the social circumstances are which would involve these things being said. It's not a matter of 'style, ' but what knowledge of the world is there that persons have which involves them in putting these items in. The interest of the usage is if someone living somewhere else could use such a line as 'drove down to X . . . and on the way home' and be doing the same son of thing, exhibiting the same son of knowledge and attention to the same sorts of issues as to what 'local news' is made of, etc., as this person is. Let me just note one funher thing related to the local news, and that is that the event happened "yesterday. " That it happened "yesterday" is relevant in this way: The constraints on mentioning something can be rather severe, such that in talking of it today, it's only that it happened yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or some day formulatable by reference to today - and within very narrow limits - that it could be mentioned at all. That is to say, you wouldn't expect that you could say "Did you read in the paper six months ago there was an accident?" Under one alternative: You can mention it as a second story. One marked difference between first and second stories is that second stories don't contain time. The first story says 'something happened yesterday; ' second stories don't contaip. time, or don't need to contain time, or don't need to contain time that is related to the time of the conversation. And in this case the second story talks of something that happened "that night, " i.e. , some night, some time ago. And that's another sense, then, in which we can say that this is a 'second story. ' We have, then, a rather strong time constraint on mentioning a piece of

16

Part I

local news. Essentially the constraints are, what happened between our last conversation and this one - for certain sorts of people, anyway. And that can be something with real interest, in that it permits us to deal with what's a terribly deep sort of problem: It could be a subject of much puzzlement that two sorts of facts are coexistently so: If you talk to somebody every other day, you have something to talk about with them every other day. If you talk to somebody every six months you don't have anything to talk about with them when you talk with them. Now how in the world would it be that you could have something to talk about every day with somebody, and not have something to talk about when you talk to them every six months? Why is it that you don't have six months of news? You could figure that the less you talk with somebody, say, a friend who lives in another city, the more you'd have to talk about. It's a rather universal experience that that's not so. It's the more frequently you talk together, the more you have to talk about. The answer to it is like this: If you talk to them every other day, then what happened today is an item that could be mentioned. And for every day one can have events in that day which are a day's events, mentionable to somebody one talks to on that day whom one talks to regularly. However, suppose for example she had finished this conversation and somebody called up whom she hadn't talked to in three months. The odds are enormous that she would not mention the accident she saw yesterday, i.e. , the thing that happened yesterday was specifically 'local news. ' Or, narrowing it to things that are much more directly one's own, say you got a small raise yesterday. If you talk to somebody today you could tell them "I got a raise yesterday. " If you talk to somebody in three months, that raise is no news. What we have, then, is that you need something you can talk to them about every three months, which stands as a something which counts over three months. And the set of things that count over a day would not count over three months, and you then may literally find that you have nothing to say. Unless you're able to manage your tri-monthly conversation as though it were a daily one, which is on the one hand hard, and on the other hand the sort of thing that if you can do it you get known for it. People come away from a conversation with some sorts of people and say, "I haven't seen him in five years but it was just like yesterday," i.e. , you had a bunch of things to talk about, which one would talk about with somebody who you talked with yesterday. What is eligible to be mentioned can, then, have interactional consider­ ations. I take it you can shift from one conversation to another and find that the things that were perfectly okay in the last do not even occur to you to be said in the next. And that can suggest the operation of an order of attention to, not just who you're talking with, but when you talked with them last.

Lecture

2 Features of a recognizable 'story;' Story prefaces; Sequential locator terms; Lawful interruption I guess I ought to mention what it i s that people in the class will be doing. Your tasks will be to give yourself a chance to see that you're catching on, by doing some series of exercises. The exercises have a series of virtues to them, and that is that the stuff I'm presenting is, as I understand it, researcher's stuff in a particular sort of way. One tends to have a view from one's classes that you have the same access to what something means as anybody else, invariantly perhaps to your position. That is to say, there are things like a researcher, a textbook writer, a lecturer, a TV audience, a class. And people tend to have the view that everybody has pretty much the same understand­ ing of whatever material. Researchers don't have that view at all, at least the researchers I know, including myself. I tend to figure that in the way in which this stuff works, unless you do it or do some research, you don't know what research looks like. You don't know how to read the results, you don't kuow their sense, you don't know whether anything's been learned or what's been learned. By doing the exercises you can come to see what you, yourself, can do. For something that looks either like magic, or like nothing, or like impossible to be done, you can come to see that you could do it on different materials. You get a rather different view of things that way, and I would like people to get that view of things for themselves. You'll see that you can do things at one point that you couldn't do at another, so you get a sense of what sort of progress in your own minds you have acquired. You also find that you learn something from what you did. And this experience of finding something out may be fairly cut off from you, and it's something you ought to get, quite independently of what I'll be doing here, and the virtues of the sortS of things I do. So there'll be these exercises, and let me say just blandly I've had classes for four or five years now and the exercises aren't impossible; pretty much everybody can do something and they get better over the semester. People get a kick out of it, and find that they understand everything much better that way. Now, nobody's expecting you to make miracles. What I do for any given class, for example, will have taken me anywhere from six months to two years to work up, and I don't expect that you would do things of that elaborateness in two or three weeks. But the work is set up so that you can do 17

18

Part I

something in two or three weeks. It's set up so that you can do something every day, in that that's the only way I can live with doing research - to find something out every day. I don't like to have to wait four years to see if I've got anything. So it's designed, in a way, to give you constant small rewards. I'm going to start off by going over parts of the last lecture and redeveloping certain things in it which I fudged, our of I suppose initial fear that it would lose the class right then and there if, in order to make the smallest passing point, I had to begin with something elaborate. So I fudged some points and I'd like to come back to them and discuss them somewhat. Then I'll go on with some more stuff about the same materials. I began off by saying there are two stories here. A first thing I want to come back to is the issue of that those things which I'm calling 'stories' are stories. Now, it's obviously a story. What we're asking is, is there some set of features that stories have so that one can have some principled basis for using what is after all a lay characterization. What we want to find are some features that have been put into it which provide for its recognizability as 'a story' . We want, then, some features that are not just there incidentally, carried-along artifacts of its being a story, but features that are put in, in the making of a story. What I want to be dealing with - and I'll give a lecture on this sort of phenomenon shortly - is that among the most central things about stories is that stories go on over more than a single tum of talk, or a single utterance. Now, if you intend at the outset to produce talk which will involve that you talk, somebody else talks, and you talk again, then, in the characteristic environment of conversation, which is not two-party conversation but more-than-two-party conversation, there's a real problem. And that is, if you talk, and now B talks, it's open as to who's going to talk after B. Maybe you'll get a chance to talk then, maybe you won't. The question is, is there some way whereby you can provide that B should talk next, and also that when B is finished, you should talk again, i.e. , that the others allow you that next slot? The usual run of talk does not involve an attempt to control a third slot, and usually you don't have very good ways to control the third slot. Now the 'story preface ' phenomenon which I talked of last time - things like "Say did you see anything in the paper last night" or "I heard something wonderful today ' ' - announces that there is a story coming and therefore that what one intends is to be talking in alternate positions until the story is finished, not particularly caring who comes into the alternate positions, but whenever they finish their "Mm hm"s, "Uh huh"s, whatever else they put in, that others will be silent and allow you to go on. So that basically what a story is in some ways, is an attempt to control the floor over an extended series of utterances. Formally it can be said to be in the first instance an attempt to control a third slot in talk, from a first. That's why, in terms of the sequential organization of conversation, that one is 'telling a story' is an important thing for others to recognize. So that, for example, if there were more than two persons present in this conversation, if she finished "Say did you see anything in the paper last night or hear anything on the local radio, Ruth Henderson

Lecture 2

19

and I drove down t o Ventura yesterday, " and B said " Mm hm, " somebody else shouldn't just go on about whatever they wanted to talk about. And people don't. Stories can be told invariantly to the number of persons present in a conversation. That is, you have people telling stories in a seven-person conversation, and getting the floor for ten utterances across twenty. So that's one basic reason that, that you're telling a story is something you do right off. And it makes, then, the issue of recognition of a story something that's not only relevant to what happens after the story is finished, but to how the talk proceeds during the story. And one major import of the story preface is announcing a ' story' and thereby announcing that this person is going to talk across a series of utterances, allow for others to talk in the course of his talk, and want the floor back after each finish of another. The preface is, then, very important for the issue of ' a story. ' Further, I suggested last time that a story preface does a lot of work. It indicates what it will take for the thing to be finished, and it suggests what sort of thing should be done at the end. And that's one order of the things involved in 'telling a story. ' Now there are a bunch of other things that are also present. One gross, recurrent thing that is present for stories is that across its sentences one finds that a lot of the words, particularly those that are 'carriers of the story' so to speak, i.e. , the nouns, verbs, adjectives, can be said to be co-selected. If we take the various words like 'drove, ' 'wreck, ' 'on the way home,' 'car, ' 'smashed, ' ' small space, ' etc. then if we took each place in which the word we were considering occurred, we could get easily enough that the word that occurred there was a word from a similar class where one could replace it by more or less equivalent words, i.e. , that would in some way 'say the same thing. ' We have a partial picture of persons, in producing their talk, engaged in selecting words out of various formulations of word classes. They do it by reference to syntactic constraints on word classes and various things like that, and in various ways fix in on a word class from which a word is selected where many of them can be replaced with another. And one thing to look to is that range of talk within which it looks like a set of words of some sort are selected by reference to each other, or selected by reference to some stateable thing, e.g. , a 'topic. ' I'll eventually claim that when people are doing 'topical' talk it's not so much or only that all or some of their talk is 'about something; ' e.g. , they're talking about cars, or each utterance is about cars, but that how you talk about cars when you're 'talking about cars' is distinctive from how you talk about cars when you're 'talking about' something else. So, for example, this isn't a discussion about cars. And the ways in which cars are talked of in this conversation has to do with that what's being done is 'talking about a wreck. ' So that, e.g. , in describing the car she saw, she doesn't say "There was this 1 964 Chevrolet convertible, olive green with black uphol­ stery . . . What I'm saying is if you take what I'll call the 'descriptors' in talk, then you find that when people are telling stories, the descriptors are co-selected. Let me bring that kind of thing home in a particular way, by reading another story. If it's not too easy to see the point with one case, then with another case "

Part I

20

you might be able to get a glimpse of a kind of parallel thing going on. This story is told by a teenage boy, with three or four people present: A:

B: A:

B: A:

When I was thirteen some guys talked me into doing houses. Some guy stole this jade cigarette lighter it must've been worth two hundred bucks. Sold it for two bucks the next day. Cut down a chandelier y'know. They stuffed it in my locker. I wasn't there. I didn't go with 'em stealing. They stick it in my locker. A chandelier? A chandelier. It was crystal and all. They were doin' houses. It was all kinds'v loot. Principal comes over says open up your locker. I says why I just got books in there. Opened the locker. I didn't even know it was in there. Bam I'm kicked outta school till they find out I didn't have nothing to do with it. When did this happen. I was in junior high school.

Looking at the way in which the talk of, say, burglary goes on, one sees, with things like "doing houses, " that the person who's talking about burglary is using a way of characterizing what they were doing which is not, e.g. , the way in which some of us might talk about burglary. It's not that he's a crook, he happens to be an ordinary teenage kid, and many kids do that sort of thing. And he might not talk about burglary in that fashion but within the telling of a story about it. We get terms like "doing houses, " "loot, " "two hundred bucks, " "stuffed. " It's not, for example, that this follow has "bucks" as the only word with which to refer to money. In other places he talks about "dollars," and things of that order. If you look through stories comparatively, i.e. , take several stories and see if there's a same sort of item or a same sort of action referred to in them, then you can see each item or action looking like other items and actions referred to in the story that it's in, and if you try to shift them around then you find that it doesn't look right. Now, I haven't proved that this is a story, or given anything like a comprehensive analysis of what stories are like. But I think that I've suggested that in using the term 'story' I haven't used an utterly unexplicated term; that it looks explicable, that it seems to have parts, that its parts seem to be analyzable, that they look like they'd be more or less interesting. It isn't essential to the analysis that I prove that it's a story. But it is more or less essential - at least in the style of work that I'm going to be doing here - that when one is engaged in making an observation which proposes about some matter that it's a case of some lay class, that you have something to say about that lay class, or how it's a case of that lay class. That is to say, it misses the point altogether when, e.g. , occasionally a co-professional of mine will say, "Well what you really turned out to say was that that's a story. It was interesting logic, but what you're really saying is that that's a story. " That's not the point at all. The only thing that's interesting is the logic. That's the

Lecture 2

21

whole thing. That it's a story, anybody knows. That's not the sociology. The 'points' are the points in the analysis. Sometimes the observations have independent interest, where I take it that a lay scrutiny of some piece of material would not come up with those observations. But those observations were generated by some analysis yielding some phenomenon as observable. And what you want to be watching is the way the argument is made. It's not that that's a way to make an argument about the point, it's the way the arguments are made that's the whole thing. So, I take it there's a warrant for saying that the first is a story. Now if one took that as a more or less exclusive structure, then one thing you would be led to conclude is that the second isn't a story. You might say, "Well the second doesn't have some of those things. It doesn't look anything like the first. " Now how can we make a claim that it's a story. The key thing about this one, which I will now develop, is that it's a ' second story. ' I intend to develop that it's a second story in such a way as to have us be able to look at some other sequence of stories which are not about the same topic and do not involve the same people, and find there's a first story that looks like this first, and a second story that looks like this second. I want to make a case that there is a sequential organization with one of its characteristic features being, as a general matter, that there are ' second things; ' that there can be 'second stories, ' and that second stories are different than first stories. A first sort of thing that will give us indications about the more or less special character of this is that it says that what it's presenting has already been told before to the same person: "I think I told you . . . " Now what gives us any information that that's something distinctive? I guess the plain fact is, if it happens that you do monitor the possible things you might say by reference to whether you said them before and to whom you said them before, then if you come up with that you've said it before to the person you're now talking with, the consequence is that you should not say it. That is to say, there's a major sort of norm against repeating the same thing to the same person. If you do repeat the same thing to the same person, I guess that the usual circumstance is that you don't realize it, i.e. , you just happen to repeat the same thing to the same person. Here we don't have that she just happens to tell this person something she already told them, but she specifically announces that she knows she's doing that. And that would suggest that there's some specific reasons for doing that. That is to say, in that one should not tell somebody something you already told them, to tell them something you know you've told them before is to do something special. We can then ask in some strong way, why is she telling her this? There's always the question why is she telling her this, but we can now ask why is she telling her this in that she already told her, and she knows she already told her. One sort of thing relevant at least to why she might consider telling it is that she just remembered it now. Remembering is much involved here, in that, with "I think I told you . " she is engaged in asking the other to remember something. And that remembering is involved is of some real

Part I

22

importance. If we look to the occurrences of utterances which are accompa­ nied by the various announcements and requests for remembering, we find that they have very orderly features to them. For example, one announces that one remembers something when what has just been said stands as an explanation for how it is you remembered that. Using the terminology I'll eventually use when I develop that matter as part of a much more general topic, one of the ways you go about proposing that the talk you're delivering now is 'topically coherent' with the talk that's being done is to use "I remember. " Now that's a gross point which says that a term like " I remember" has a sequential function in conversation, locating a relationship between a given utterance and a given prior utterance. It's a rather common phenomenon. There are other terms in conversation which have a sequential, structural function. I'll give an instance from this same data that's perhaps easier to digest right now than "I remember. " A:

B

:

We were s-parked there for quite awhile but I was going to listen to the local r-news and I haven't done it. No, I haven't had my radio on either.

The term 'either' in conversation is this sort of a term. What it says is that what I'm saying, I'm saying after you said something. It's simply a sequential locator of some utterance. Now, there's an explanation for why it's done. I don't want to give the explanation by reference to "either" because I'm not on sure grounds about the sort of problems involved with it, but I suspect it's a same sort of problem as there is with another instance of this sort of thing, which is "I did too. " "Too" is exactly that sort of a term. Somebody says "I noticed that" and somebody else says "I did too. " It isn't that I noticed after you, it's that I'm announcing that whatever I did, I'm saying it after you. So that if I had said it first, you'd say "too . " And, for "I did too . " why you have that "too" is kind of neat. The reason is if you take "I did," it's an utterance that is occupied as to the sorts of actions it can do. It has essentially two possible sorts of actions it can do, which are affiliated with the stress pattern. That is to say, you can either say "I did," or I did. " Now the thing is, if somebody says "I noticed that" and you say " I did," then you seem to be quarreling, and you're not intending to quarrel. If somebody says "I noticed that" and you say "I did, ' it seem as though they doubted you. So, in that this thing is in that sense occupied as to the sequential actions it can do, i.e. , one says "I did" at certain places to do, say, 'reaffirmation' as a sequential object, and " I did" at other places, then if you don't want to be quarrelling or indicating that you figure somebody doubted you, but simply to follow some assertion, you put in 'too' and it takes the stress, and thereby takes off the alternative issues. So the whole set of ' 'I did, ' ' " I did, ' ' and " I did too" are fully issues about the sequential organization of conversation. And 'either' is that sort of object, too. You could fiddle around

Lecture 2

23

with such utterances without those terms, to see that they seem a little puzzling. I raised that by reference to "I remember" which is not obviously the same sort of thing, so as to show that there is a class of terms in places which are occupied with work which is specifically involved in the sequential organiza­ tion of conversation. I make that as a point because it's an utterly unknown one; unknown in this way: The area in which such sorts of issues as "What does 'either' mean?" or "What does 'too' mean?' ' might be considered, would seem to be the area of semantics. And the discipline of semantics doesn't take it that, that there is a sequential organization to conversation matters for, say, the meaning of talk in any strong way. I take it there are many things which have as their 'meaning' that they're sequential operators, in the same sense pretty much as there are things which are syntactic operators or logical operators. Sequence is an independently structured phenomenon in conver­ sation, and it has objects which work in it, whose explication consists in analyzing their sequential work. The field-related question is, what sorts of things will it yield that we thought were understood, or we didn't think were puzzles, or we didn't think were understandable, that a consideration of the sequential organization of conversation will illuminate or will solve. That is to say, what extensiveness of import does the fact that conversation is sequentially organized, and that it's an independent structure, have for whatever we know about language. I was saying, then, that one of the things that the use of "I remember" does is to propose that the utterance it's a part of is topically coherent with prior talk, that is, that it is second to some prior talk. What's involved is, it's not simply that a person proposes "I remember" something, but if you look at what they've proposed to remember, it's something that's similar to, touched off in some way by, topically coherent with what the other person said. As, for example, an article in the New York Times, April 2 , 1968. The New York Times has this Man of The Day article; some guy they talk about today by reference to something that happened on this day. And this one is about Avril Harriman: A mellow William Avil Harriman switched off his television set after President Johnson's speech last night, and picked a memory from his vast collection. Now the thing that's neat is that it's a "vast collection, " but given that buildup, what the memory will be is locatable. It was not really so extraordinary that the President had decided not to run for reelection he said, why, he remembered sitting in the District of Columbia's National Guard Armory that Saturday night of March 1962 . That was the dinner meeting at which Harry S. Truman, one of the four other presidents of the United States who Mr Harriman has

24

Part I

served, stunned the political community with the statement ' ' I shall not be a candidate for reelection. " It's that order of things for which I went through the issue of the hearer's analysis, etc. last time; that there really are sharp constraints on what somebody will propose they remember at some point. However, we have in our case something much more powerful than we have in the Harriman story. Because while we could do a distributional analysis of stories which suggested that when people use 'remember' they really do present a thing that's strongly similar to and apparently occasioned by something prior, we have in this case - and in other cases - that they aren't simply saying "I remember, " they're engaged in attempting to get the other person to remember. When somebody tries to get another to remember something, they'll present some body of information that can be used to find that thing. Now in this case she doesn't give very much information: "that fall over at the Bowl that night. ' ' What fall? (And there could be issues about what kind of an object a 'fall' is. We make it out that there was some sott of accident, but it needn't be heard as that. Indeed, this is one of the really fudged points last time; that a lay reader would see that the second story had victims, and there are no victims mentioned. I take it that we have the sense that there must have been victims, but it's also so that I can't just say that there are victims. I've fudged on that.) So the story is utterly spare. But it's sufficient. That is to say, a question is, how can the other remember it when it is as spare as it is? And the way it can be remembered when it is as spare as it is, is this: That it's recognizably intended as 'a case similar to this other story' is used to find what it is. The spareness of the story is, then, a feature of it. I'll give a much more dramatic instance, from these kids in a group therapy session. One kid is talking about a job he got. At some point the therapist says " Last week you were mentioning something about the fact that you uh-" and he's cut off by the kid saying "I got lost in one job? yeah. " The question is, how does the kid, given that information, ' 'Last week you were mentioning something about the fact that you . . . ' ' know what it is, of the things he said last week, that he's being invited to remember. Obviously what it turns on is things having been said right now in this conversation, where one can use what has just been said to find what you're being invited to remember. You can use it in a perfectly natural way, be not at all surprised that you turn out to know this thing that they were reminding you of, before they even say it by virtue of the fact that you know that they remember it in just the same way that you remember it. That is to say, what you just said reminded them of something, where it may well have reminded you of that very thing. One sort of consequence - and this is a rather technical consequence - is this: As we're all well aware, interrupting is not a thing that people are supposed to do in conversation. But interrupting occurs in conversation. The question is where does it occur in conversation. And there are some sets of lawful places that interruption occurs. That is to say, if we locate a class of

Lecture 2

25

places which have no obvious relationship to 'interruption' as it is semantically or otherwise defined, and we can say that there we will find interruption, then that's kind of an interesting prediction situation. What I'm proposing is that when persons go about doing 'reminding, ' i.e. , say to somebody "Do you remember, ' ' "I think I told you," etc., then there you will find interruptions. There you will find instances of talking before, e.g . , a sentence has been completed. So it's not an enormously rare thing that someone is engaged in announcing they've remembered, before what it is that the other person might figure it would take for you to remember has been presented. I leave aside the issue of why it is that when they remember they immediately come in and don't wait for the other to complete; I'll deal with that at another time. But that they do interrupt when they do remember has at least the import for this discussion, of making it a question: How do they come to be able to see what it is that they're being reminded of ? And I take it that that turns on the fact that one reminds people of things that are 'talk-so-far-occasioned. ' Which is to say that 'remindings' deal with the 'seconds' phenomenon. And here 'second' is a technical term. It could perfectly well be a third or fourth. A fifth story is for our purposes a 'second. ' It may well be there's some way of differentiating third and fourth and fifth, but I don't know it yet. That 'seconds' have different structural features than firsts seems to be a wider phenomenon than just for storytelling. So, for example, for another sort of thing that has firsts and seconds - questions and answers - then answers tend to be less like sentences than questions are. Now we don't in the first place tend to take it that there's a class of non-sentences and those are 'answers, ' since we can't recognize an 'answer. ' That is to say, that something is an 'answer' is not in principle detectable unless you also have the sequence in which it occurs. But if you get the sequence in which it occurs, then you're liable to find that 'questions' are indeed sentences, and 'answers' are, with some recurrence, not sentences. It's the same sort of thing for stories, and there are other things like that as well. That that is a ' second story' is, then, kind of intrinsic to it. Its production turns on its being 'second' in the sense that one of the things involved is asking the other to remember some story, where for that request for remembering to work turns on use of the first story to find what sort of story that second would be, and perhaps to find the very story. Last time I mentioned that not only did the first story happen "yesterday, " but that it happened yesterday is announced. And that there's n o announce­ ment of when the second story happened. First stories have specifically that character. If you're going to tell somebody something that's 'news,' some­ thing that you have some reason to tell them, then you tend to say when it happened. And you tend to only do it when it happened within some such unit as 'yesterday, ' 'the other day, ' 'last Saturday night, ' and things like that. The second story doesn't have to have that, as the first story occasioned it. One might figure that that's incidental, so I'll read another. If you get rwo you might feel a little better. Or you might figure it's still just chance.

Part I

26 A:

My little brother's an animal lover. He comes up with some wierd things. This morning he was mad at me 'cause people kill gophers. Says uh "gophers, " you know I said "Well people kill gophers 'cause they're on their property not because they don't like gophers, 'cause gophers are harming them. ' ' And then he fought back, ' ' But how do you know it's not the gopher's land. ' '

:

My mom came up with something like that. She said everybody's hunting all these deers and everything, what happens if the guys gave guns to the animals.

B

Leaving aside the ways in which those two stories can have the same other sorts of similarities as the auto wreck stories, i.e. , such similarities as "my brother comes up with . . . " "my mom came up with . . . , " and the ways in which they're topically the same, they also have this business of "this morning" for the first and no time for the second. So the 'time' thing is, I think, relevant in that it is transparent in the telling of the second story that it's occasioned by the first. [Question re. the purpose of the course}

In the most general terms, here's the purpose. If you're going to have a science of social life, then, like all other sciences of something or other, it should be able to handle the details of something that actually happens. It should be able to do that in an abstract way, while handling actual details. My research is about conversation only in this incidental way, that conversation is something that we can get the actual happenings of on tape and transcribe them more or less, and therefore that's something to begin with. If you can't deal with the actual details of actual events then you can't have a science of social life. That sociologists or anthropologists don't study this sort of thing is more cause for considerations about what are they trying to do, than anything else. I take it that this is the most obvious thing one would study if one had the interest of building a science of social life. [Question re leaving out things like facial expressions, tone of voice, etc.}

Leaving aside whatever else is left out - and the kind of analysis I do doesn't deal with , e.g. , all the things linguistics deals with - the main reason why it's left out is that the sorts of things I'm trying to do are not particularly to develop anything like a comprehensive analysis of what actually happened, but to begin to set minimal constraints on what an explanation or a description of talking or doing things together would look like, and one gets started where you can maybe get somewhere. And things like facial expressions are enormously difficult to study - which isn't to say that it wouldn't be great to study them. It would be great to study them. It's an absence. But there are lots of terribly difficult issues for trying to study things like facial expressions, having to do with, e.g. , it's difficult to even consider how you would do the filming that would be involved. Like, just consider two

Lecture 2

27

people sitting and having a conversation together; it's not too obvious how you'd get a picture which got you what each of them saw of the other, at the same time, so as to see what they were seeing. Clearly enough, a picture of the conversation from across the room wouldn't give you the same sort of thing as the idea of a camera built into each one's head. At any rate, the initial question I faced was, could I do something with conversation at all. Some people figure it's absurd to have a conception that we could develop a reasonable science of sociology, therefore let's do sorts of things we're interested in, i.e. , focus on problems in the world, and get better information for people to solve those problems. And others would figure that you could study materials like this, but you couldn't study them in any more or less obviously 'scientific' way. Now, I suppose that social science can be considered to be a primitive science in a very literal sense. Look at what primitive sciences tried to do, i.e. , they could make 'news' that anybody could see. You could point it out to somebody and they could see, "Yeah, look at that. " So that they're informative in a very conventional sense of 'informa­ tive. ' And, again, I take it that we can begin to work on the issue of what it is that descriptions or explanations should minimally look like, and that we could begin to get an idea of what might be involved in them as we developed a feel for the phenomena. Because we have all sorts of ideas about what explanations should look like, but not particularly ideas of what they should look like when they're controlled by coming to terms with this sort of material, i.e. , just whatever happens in whatever way it happens. So what's involved is a sort of beginning. Though that shouldn't be treated as claiming excuses. It might be possible to do some things with, say, facial expressions, but I don't know what to do with them now. [Question re. "I remember"]

The possibility that there are some ways in which memory is organized by reference to organizational features of conversation is kind of an awesome one, and one which I can give little bits of remarks on. One of the things about inviting somebody to remember is that one seems to feel confident that the remembering you invite, and it turns out with some large regularity to it the remembering you get, is something that can take place in 'conversation time. ' That is not merely to say that it can take place such that the person remembering can do it in the same conversation, but can announce the memory when you finish your utterance, or even before. And that the usual timing constraints of conversation - that people start up very rapidly after somebody finishes - can accomodate remembering is a kind of im­ pressive fact. Another way that it appears that memory is in some perhaps quite dramatic way at the service of the conversation is that what one remembers stands in some dose relationship to what it is that's just been done, and if you don't get a chance to say it, when you then get a chance to say it, you've forgotten it. It is in some ways an utterance by utterance phenomenon. I don't know, all I can say is that the fact that what one remembers, that simply pops into your head, turns out to be point-after-point appropriate, and that it pops

28

Part I

into one's head within these very severe timing constraints, seems to be a sort of fact that some attention should be given to. And whether it means that the organization of conversation has some relevance for the study of memory, I don't really know. The time constraints in conversation may be some basis for the time constraints of memory. At least that memory that's used in conversation. But I'm a bit leery of moving from people saying things like "I remember" to talking about ' memory. ' And I don't know a thing about stuff that would seem quite relevant; the psychological literature on memory-time, etc., but I once read a paper by David Rappaport, who specialized in things like memory. It's in his Collected Papers and it's a report on a fellow who had amnesia. And they gave him a story that they figured was similar to his circumstances, and he read the story aloud, burst into tears and his amnesia disappeared. So the issue of the way in which stories operate to produce memories is maybe a curious one. Now there's one other connection that's important in this regard, and that's the relationship between remembering something and making some­ thing into one's experience. As a way of thinking about the things that get presented in these two stories, they could be said to have as a peculiar thing about them that they're presented as these people's own experience. Whereas you could imagine living in some sort of 'objective' world in which the way one finds out to whom something happened is, e.g . , suppose it was a sad thing that happened, then you find out to whom specifically it was sad, and it's their thing. But what happens is not that at all. It's that everybody, in whatever way they're involved, it's their experience. There's relatively little about the people who were in the wreck; mostly there's stuff about the wreck she saw, and it's incorporated as her wreck. Maybe that operates by virtue of the fact that regularly what one can remember is one's own experience, so one works something up into its being one's own experience - for which there's old psychological literature. Like William James would have supposed that remembering, recognition, and the self are inseparable. And I suppose that turns on an interest in amnesia, in which you get specifically that having lost the sense of who it is you are, then you've lost all the memories that somehow are collected that way. But certainly if we reconsider the discussion of last time, the teller's position is in each case key. And one doesn't remember, e.g. , another story that the first storyteller was in, one remembers a story that oneself was in; where that holds independent of the characters involved. What's beautiful in its fashion is that it's not just one set of big problems that one can attack by considering even this little fragment of data, but that there are a considerable range of tacks one can take on it. That has a great virtue in that one of the research-psychology problems is how in the world do you get yourself to look at a page of conversation day after day, week after week - and you need to do that in order to get just the collection of small observables that you need, to be able to get characterizations of the phenomena. It takes a long time looking at a fragment like this to get even a list of 2 0 or 30 points about it, without any explanations, descriptions, etc.,

Lecture 2

29

just by virtue of the fact that it's hard to see anything when you look at a piece of conversation. You have to have a way to come back to it. And one way you can keep looking at it is to see the range of tacks you can take on it, which aren't just fitting it to something, but which it will bear consideration of. At any rate, I'm not prepared to talk about the relationship between remembering and the organization of conversation, beyond that small collection of points having to do with timing, topical coherence, the effectiveness of an invitation to remember, and the fact that if you don't get a chance to say something very quickly you forget it; all of which seem to suggest at least that memory is at the service of the organization of conversation. And a possibility that, on the other hand, the organization of conversation reflects the possible constraints on the way memory, physiolog­ ically or whatever, can operate, is certainly not to be ruled out. [Question re the teller of the second story as a 'witness' when she doesn't say that she "saw it. "}

A way to consider this is to ask, if you don't put in how you come to know something, what will it be heard as? That is to say, sometimes people don't put in how they came to know it, e.g. , "There was an accident last night . . . " And there's a series of possibilities. You could have read it in the newspaper, heard about it, saw it, been in it, etc. Is there anything that can be said about what people make of a report where there's no indication of how the report was gotten? My guess is that if no indication is presented, for some class of things for which it's at least possible that you saw it, then it will be heard that you saw it. And if you didn't see it, then you should announce that you didn't. That's a type of rule. It says that certain things should be done and if you don't do one of those things, then an alternate item is heard. For example, somebody might say "There was an awful traffic jam over at the circle this morning . " Someone else might say "How long were you caught in it?" And you say "I wasn't there, I heard it on the radio. " But they will in the first instance take it that you were saying you were there. That's one sort of thing. And if you were, say, in an accident, that would surely be put in, i.e. , you would surely say "I was in this accident . . . " by virtue of the fact that that would locate the sorts of things that the other should say when you've finished. They would then be engaged in commiserating and things like that. But I would rather withdraw the point that she was a witness and not look for that question in this material, and to say that you want to really look to the question of which things get presented, e.g. , "John told me . . . " "I heard, " etc. , and if none is presented, which is taken to be present. The whole game is to find out what you can find out from anything. If you can't study it there, you don't study it there. However, there are more than a couple of reasons why you'd figure that this person was a 'witness. ' One important sort of thing is that it really does matter that how her story is told maps in some ways onto some part of the categories that the first story has. If the memory-search operation goes on in the ways I've suggested, then even if she doesn't say she was a witness, the

30

Part I

way she found that story is by looking for a story in which she was a witness. And if you look at the other stories, then they come out that way directly. That is to say, "My brother comes up with . . . " "My mom came up with . . . " and in the other set of materials I gave out last time, it's really close. 1 So that's a procedure that people use. They take the teller's status in the story, seek to find a story in which they are just such a person, and then tell that story. If they don't have success they don't get a story. And if the procedure works this way, then it would just 'happen' that way, that she would be a witness. Now you may say, well that's not the procedure. But then the issue is that one wants to introduce materials which suggest that the procedure is not as I had extracted it from these and other stories. What one wants is not an absence, i.e. , that she doesn't say she was a witness, but a situation in which on the occurrence of a first story, someone tells a story that wouldn't have this procedure used to get it. The key thing is the procedure. And we're trying to extract from this sequence an apparently generalized procedure, a generally usable procedure. I'm not saying it's the only procedure used for finding second stories; I don't believe that for a minute. It's a procedure that is usable for finding second stories. It's an interactionally elegant procedure, since if a person is using a story to make a point, then what you can do to show that you agree is to tell a same story. Furthermore, if you want to do a disagreement you can tell a story which has you in a different position, for example. Which is to say that it's perfectly expectable that on some occasions people will tell stories that are 'different; ' analyzing out, besides the characters, the point of the story, and using now the point as the thing they're dealing with. [Question re proving that somebody understood something.}

If we had a bunch of experimental sociologists, psychologists, etc. , and we asked, "How do we prove that somebody heard and understands something that somebody said?" we would all come up with constructions of ways to determine that. A typical device is if somebody tells a story, you give a hearer ten minutes and then ask them to retell the story. Or you construct a set of short-answer questions. And they'd say that's a way of deciding what the memory is. Now what's impressive here is, instead of saying "Let's find a way of seeing whether people understand what somebody else says, " we've asked "Is there some procedure people use which has as its product a showing that they heard and understood?" And if we describe that procedure, we have a way of showing that they heard and understood - or finding that in some sense they didn't hear and understand, i.e. , sometimes the other person will say "No that's not what I meant. " So it could be a test, if you like. But we have an abstract procedure which describes how people go about showing an 1 Probably referring to the "Oh God Christmas" fragment which has, "his father said, 'Well, after 25 years, I don' t think we're gonna give presents ' , " and "I know just what you mean . . . my father said ' No gifts ' . " See Spring 1 968, May 29 lecture, vol. I, pp. 795-6.

Lecture 2

31

understanding. It is also a description of how they proceed. A further beauty of it is that, for such a question as what is it that somebody's supposed to find out from what somebody said, that procedure is directed also to telling us what they found out. So it's in these sorts of ways that relevant to, e.g . , proving things is that you try to find some procedure they use and then characterize it.

Lecture 3

Turn-taking; The notion 'conversation; ' Noticeable absences; Greetings; Adjacency This time I'm going to give a lecture which, in its standards and its import, and the implication of its parts considered, will make up the substance of the rest of the course. What I want to do is to lay out in as general a way as possible at this point how the sequential organization of conversation is constituted. I start out with two observations about single conversations, and thereafter develop some of the ramifications of the initially observed features. I give in this first instance no materials for the observations, in that they are grossly apparent. By the term 'grossly' I mean that while they're overwhelm­ ingly present features, they are also sometimes not present features - and their sometimes non-presence is something I will talk to at considerable length. In that they are grossly apparent, there will be no news involved in the observations themselves. That is to say, I make no claim that there's any particular insight in making those observations. They are not the first observations one would make about conversatiop, they're not the first observations I made about conversation. But the interest in them is not that they are news, but what news can be gotten from them. Here's the first feature: In a single conversation, people talk one at a time. Or, putting it in a different way, at least and no more than one party talks at a time in a single conversation. The second: Speaker change recurs. Now, an initial observation about those features. It's not just one feature and another, but those features are co-occurrent features. That those two are co-occurrent is a fact that we should make a lot of. In particular, from the co-occurrence of the two features, we can produce an initial problem which is clearly an interesting problem; clearly, if you like, a sociological problem. That is, it's a coordinational problem. The problem is, how is it that while speaker change recurs, one-party-at­ a-time is preserved. That's clearly a coordinative problem in the sense that what it involves us in noticing and trying to see how it could ever happen, is that the stopping by one speaker and the starting by another speaker occur in close order. And the question is, then, how does it happen that when somebody stops - though the notion 'stop' is clearly a very problematic kind of notion - somebody starts up. And only one starts up. That is to say, on the one hand, people don't start up talking just anywhere in the talk of others. 32

Lecture 3

33

And on the other, if conversations take place with more than two people present, then there's a question as to how it could happen that at each given point when somebody stops and somebody starts up, only one starts up. Let me put it this way: We have the initial observations, one and two. We have, then, an observation about the features observed in one and two. And that observation about the features observed in one and two. yields a problem for us: How is it that two happens while one is preserved. Now that problem has this to recommend it in the first instance; that it locates for us a class of places in conversation where the two features whose co-occurrence it's dealing with are particularly problematic. Call that place 'completion-transition points, ' i.e., a completion point or a transition point. That is to say, the problem tells us to look at completion-transition points as a place where the initially observed features have a distinctive problematicalness. And the problematicalness is evidenced in these sorts of ways: First of all, just observationally, that's one class of places where more than one speaker talking at a time specifically happens. It happens of course elsewhere that more than one speaker talks at a time, but here we're locating a class of places to look at where that thing occurs and where we have reason to figure that it will occur, so that we can get at how it comes to occur there, and perhaps the particular sorts of features it has when it occurs there. Also, silence distinctively occurs here. That is to say, no one talking at a time occurs here. Recall that the initial observation was 'at least, and not more than one. ' It's not just that at some places in conversation one person is talking, but that someone is always talking. That's clearly not true in some ways, but I'll deal with that. I want now to make a case for what may or may not be obvious on any sort of reflection; that achieving the co-occurrence of one and two takes work. So we have an initial problem, how is it that while two occurs one is preserved, and what we want to do is to find out what the achievement of a solution to that problem involves; what sorts of coordinative work are involved. First of all there's that sort of work as between a current speaker and any others which involves how it is that a current speaker is able to show other participants to the conversation that he isn't yet, that he's about to be, that he is now, completing. What does he do so as to indicate that he's still talking. I take it it's plain that it isn't obviously the case that you just have to keep spewing forth words, i.e., people are recognizably 'still talking' when they are, e.g. , paused. And more importantly in its fashion, speakers have ways of showing that they are now finished. If the feature is that exactly one should be talking, then showing that you're finished when you're finished is important so as to allow somebody to start talking directly upon your completion. And this has as a correlate, how is it that non-current speakers go about determining, from whatever it is that a speaker is doing, that he is or is not finishing, is or is not finished. Another sort of problem concerns, at least initially, the relationship between the various non-current speakers: How is it that the various current

34

Part I

non-speakers coordinate their actions at the transition point so that at the transition point some one of them talks, and only one of them talks. Now, given the initial observations and now this third, we can pose a problem by reference to just those features, when we come to consider some other sorts of facts about these features. And these facts are the sorts of invariancies that these features have when they co-occur. They are not features that vary with, e.g. , the number of participants to a conversation. They hold for single conversations across whatever n participants there are for the conversation, and across changes in the personnel of a given conversation. They hold across various other compositional features of the parties. I don't know which features they don 't hold across, but they seem to hold across things like sex, occupation, political persuasion, etc. That is to say, it's not particularly a feature of, e.g. , male conversation or female conversation or female-male conversation that one party talks at a time and speaker change recurs. They hold also across types of conversations - argument, business talks, whatever else. They hold across the parts of a conversation beginnings, middles, ends. They hold across topics. So they seem to be, then, rather general, formal features of conversation. Let me note a couple of incidental things. With respect to the point about n participants not serving to provide variants of 'one at a time,' what I'm saying is that it doesn't happen that when we get six people in a conversation as compared to two, what we get is more than one party talking at a time. However what we do get, at least sometimes anyway, is that as the n goes up you may get more than a conversation going. So that what happens is that the features are preserved and more than one conversation emerges. That is to say, it may be 'hard' to conduct a conversation with ten people. As a way to ease the problem, we don't then allow three people to talk at a time in that conversation. What you'd get, however, is two, three, four conversations developing out of it. It's via such sorts of points that some of the points in the initial observations can be gotten. That is to say, you can begin to see that people 'adjust' to these features. And that observation itself, about the emergence of multiple conversations, becomes available as something one might look to, by consideration of the initial observation. So we're really going about abstracting whatever we can from these initial observations. And we'll be doing that for a very, very long time. So we have these features, one and two. We have some suggestions about their generality of presence and their invariance across other features (and by 'invariance' I do not mean 'invariableness. ' They are utterly not 'invariable'). We also have a problem, i.e. , how is it that while two happens one is preserved, and some brief considerations about the sorts of coordinated work that we want to be looking to so as to see how it is that that problem might get dealt with. Let me stop that line of consideration for a bit, so as to give a different way to consider this sort of issue. When I began to work on conversation, one sort of question was: Did it seem to be the case that there was a reasonable unit, 'a single conversation, ' i.e. , could that be an analytic unit. That is to say, as

Lecture 3

35

compared to its being the case that there are only, e.g . , subspecies. That there are various types of conversations, the various types have their features, but if you look at the various types there's nothing that is literally in common, though there may be something here and something here and something here, so that we could get an average and say there is a generalized 'conversation' but no actual conversation has its features. And if no actual conversation has all the features, then there's no point in talking about the unit 'single conver­ sation. ' Conversations may go on that way but they're not organized to go on that way. What I wanted to find was, are they organized to go on that way. Now, how do you go about coming up with something like an answer for that question. One obvious way would be to see if there seems to be any invariant parts to a conversation; parts of a conversation which were parts of any conversation. So, consider what seem to be 'parts' of conversatons. For example, asking about the weather, or saying goodbye at the end. Do those seem to be present for any conversation? Clearly not. And there didn't seem to be anything that, as a 'part' in that sort of way, was a part for any conversation. But there was something that seemed to be rather close to that, and that part is what I'll call 'greetings. ' What makes 'greetings' close to an invariant part, aside from the fact that greetings occur in a hell of a lot of conversations, is that there are some rather neat aspects to greetings which might permit you to use them as a definitive feature of conversation, and thereby permit you to say that, there being a definitive feature of conversations, i.e. , single conversations, then 'single conversations' are things. Which is what we've been attempting to find a way of doing. One of the nice things about greetings is that while greetings sometimes do not occur in actual conversations, at least sometimes when they do not occur their absence is noticeable. For example, people say about somebody they talked to, "He didn't even say hello. " That the absence of greetings is at least sometimes noticeable suggests that they have a relevance beyond their aaual use. That is to say, they are used in some corpus of conversations but beyond that corpus they have a relevance for other conversations in which they are noticeably absent. The 'noticeably absent' thing is very, very important and it will come up again and again. If you're going to make a statement which proposes that something is absent, then you can't in any serious way propose that X is absent unless you have some way of discriminating the absence of X from the assertable absence of millions of things, or ten things that anybody could name. In order to make a non-trivial assertion that X is absent, you have to have some way of showing that a statement, "X is absent," is different from some statement, "Y is absent, " where Y may also be absent. For example, I might say "There is no greeting in this conversation" and somebody else might say "Well, there is no suicide threat, either, so what is it that makes your statement that there was no greeting something other than just something you're saying?" Now one way to go about dealing with making non-trivial statements about absences is to have some way to say that the

36

Part I

absence is also an event. That is to say, for only some class of things will it be the case that you can say that X is absent by virtue of the fact that the absence of X is a noticeable feature of what happened. And one criterion for its noticeable status is that people say about it, "X is absent. " There are other things about greetings, particularly relevant to their absence, and also relevant for that there are indeed 'parts' of conversation. One of them is that greetings have a place where they occur if they occur, so that if they don't occur you can say where they didn't occur. Greetings occur at the beginning of conversation. It's not just a part anywhere in a conversation, look for it maybe you'll find it, but you can say where to look for it. It has, in that sense, a structural place in conversation. And there's another rather neat feature which also raises greetings as candidate for a part of conversation: It isn't obvious that one can come up with an exclusion rule for greetings. If there is one I don't know about it at this point. But it appears to be the case that for most sorts of conversations that you could think of, at the beginning of that conversation a greeting is a relevant thing to do. People you speak to every day, year after year, it doesn't happen as, e.g. , with exchange of introductions, to take a gross comparison, that after some nch meeting they become irrelevant and you don't do them anymore. Greetings remain relevant. You're married 2 5 years, you can still, when you come into the house, say "Hello . " S o there's this candidate part o f conversation. Now we get into a little bit of trouble. Clearly enough, I suppose, one would say that if you happen to have, e.g. , some half.,hour conversation with greetings at the beginning, then you have a conversation. What happens, however, if you have only an exchange of greetings? And we get, not at all infrequently, people doing 'merely' an exchange of greetings. Would it be said that that's 'a conversa­ tion'? Having picked on greetings as at least a part that conversation has, and therefore we can talk about a 'single conversation' as a structured thing, we now end up with the possibility that we're in a position of calling "Hi" "Hi" a conversation. And that grates on people. It seems to be inconsistent with people's conception of what a conversation is. I'm going to leave the consideration of is there a unit, 'conversation, ' and talk now to the issue of what's a conversation. The problem can come up in a series of different ways; for one, in just the way it came up here, where we're engaged in allowing for something being a conversation which people figure is not a conversation when it's brought to their attention. Once the issue comes up, it can be framed as a matter of modem philosophical interest: What do we have to say about the notion 'conversation'? And taking myself as a particularly relevant sample for that sort of issue - i.e. , philosophers do this sort of discussion with me - that problem seems to be dealt with by saying things like, "Well, would you consider a press conference to be a conversation?" "Would you consider that section of your class when people are asking questions to be a conversation?" "Would you consider the talk that people do, who are engaged in assembly-line work, over time, to be a conversation?' '

Lecture 3

37

Another sort of procedure is to look to actual conversation to see when the notion 'conversation' comes up, to see what it is that people seem to understand by it. That is to say, to explicate the notion of 'conversation' used in conversation, and then use that to constrain the candidates, classes, parts, or whatever else, that you're going to call 'conversation. ' That would seem to be a rather natural procedure. Now, in that this procedure may seem quite close to procedures I routinely use, it's very important to follow the distinctions I'm going to make about it for 'conversation. ' I'm going to be proposing that such an explicational procedure for 'conversation' will not work, should not be used. The reason we want to reject the results of that procedure has to do with a consideration of when it is that the notion of 'conversation' comes up in a conversation. It can come up in places like this: You say, "I had a conversation with so-and-so yesterday. " And somebody may say "Oh? What did you talk about. " And you say "Nothing," or give some kind of a characterization. And by reference to what you offer, he may then say "Well that's not a conversation" or "You call that a conversation?" Now the point about that is, in part, that the locus of use of a notion may be criteria! for what the notion is. If the question of the notion of 'conversation' comes up only at special places, and those special places operate in particular ways, then perhaps one ought not to suppose that the notion that comes up at those places is the notion used independently of its coming up. That is, for the notion 'conversation, ' as for an enormous range of other notions, its conversational locus is relevant to what use you want to make of it. The use of conversation as a way of locating some conception which you then are going to give the status of 'semantics' to, e.g . , to use to rewrite an entry in the dictionary, has as one major sort of difficulty that the structure of conversation is relevant to when it is that that notion becomes a talked of thing. And unless you have reference to what sorts of issues are involved when that thing is being talked of, then claims that, e.g. , when it's not talked of it's known in the way it is when it is talked of, can't be made. I want to turn our attention just a little bit and notice the following. The complaint that if you had a candidate conversation that went just "Hi" "Hi" then you don't have a conversation, is in the first instance looking at some historical object. It may be that what will turn out to be the correct criteria for deciding what is a 'conversation' don't particularly involve you in focussing on the fact that a conversation finished where it did, as defining where it could have gone. And instead, if what is involved is conversation's sequential organization and the rules for that sequential organization, then the question is not whether something that we can lay out that went from here to there was a conversation or not, but whether whatever was done was done by reference to how conversation gets done, and via that, that it could have more or less gone on indefinitely. It being done, it needn't have ended this way. The rules will allow for it to end this way, and for it to end other ways. That is to say, 'doing conversation' is behaving according to certain sorts of orderly procedures. And we can notice, e.g. , that "Hi" "Hi" satisfies the

38

Part I

initial observations, i.e. , "Hi" "Hi" occurs by reference to ' one party at a time' and 'speaker change' occurring. So, if it turns out that the features of conversation are not 'parts' in that way, but are formal features in this way, then what happens is, having offered greetings as candidate 'parts' , the shift that takes place is coming to see that one doesn't want, or need, or have, 'parts' like that at all. It need not be the presence of some lexical items in some order that is definitive of 'conversation, ' but that there are means for the preserving of certain features. Where the rules that provide for the preserva­ tion of those features, and the tasks that are done in satisfying those rules, can permit you to focus on what the potential is at any given point in a conversation. We're using, then, a much more abstract procedure and a different set of features than 'parts of conversations' like 'greetings, ' 'endings, ' o r whatever. We can then ask d o we have 'conversation' i n a somewhat different way. In its fashion the history I've recounted is a perfectly natural history; i.e. , it would be perfectly natural for whatever course of development of analysis of something that what you're looking for initially when you look at something - a plant, a social object, whatever it may be - is to find some parts. One would begin off, then, with things like 'greetings' and in due course come to things like 'one at a time' and 'speaker change' occurring. Now I want to talk to the issue of what a solution to the problem, How is it that while speaker change occurs, one at a time is preserved, looks like. I'll begin that by sketching out what at least initially seems to be a simple solution - and a simple general solution, i.e. , one that can hold for any conversation of any length in some community of conversations. The aim of that is to give some idea about what in the world it means to say we have a solution to that problem; what a 'solution' would look like. The solution that I offer is an adaptation that I made from a research report on a somewhat affiliated problem, 'Logic, rhetoric and poetics among the Burundi' by Ethel Albert, in the issue of the American Anthropologist called 'The ethnography of communication' , 1 9 6 5 or 1966. For the simple solution to this general problem, what we have to have is some way, no matter what the number of conversationalists is, and no matter who that number consists of, i.e. , not only for, e.g. , five conversationalists as compared to seven, but for any five, to order their speech relatively to each other for any actual conversation they go through. We need some solution which anybody can consult so that they don't have to have, e.g. , negotiations before the conversation - which would themselves be conversation - to arrive at some way to get through the conversation. And here's what Albert proposes, reconstructed somewhat. What you have is a single stratification system in which every member is, for other purposes, ordered relative to every other member in the society. And everybody knows their relative ordering to everybody else. When any subgroup gets together for conversation, what is done is to use their hierarchical positions to generate a first round of conversation, where a first round consists of each person present talking once. Highest ranking person goes first, next highest second, etc., etc. When you

Lecture 3

39

get a first round, then all that's necessary is just repeat the round indefinitely. What's left out of Albert's account is some indication of how it is that anyone decides that, e.g. , the first speaker is finished so that the second should speak. Well, you could imagine that there'd be a particle or word that's used only and always to end an utterance. Such things exist, e.g. , in radio communi­ cation techniques, "Over," "Roger, " "Over and out. " And then the next speaker goes. There are a range of problems that this sets up, some of which seem to be unsolvable, e.g. , what happens when speaker one stops talking and speaker two doesn't talk? Albert has a remark to the effect that if a high ranking person refuses to talk on his turn, the conversation just stops. For other problems you could get solutions: Such issues as how anybody talks to some specific other person and how they, then, go about talking back to him. You could consider the sort of thing that is done in some sort of parliamentary bodies: If A is talking and A insults B in the course of his talk, then B has a right to talk at that point; B doesn't have to wait until his turn to talk, to deal with A's insult. But in any event, it gives us a stark simplicity we can see, and a fabulous interest for social sciences, which turns on this: You could predict the in-detail order of speakers of any conversation in that society without ever looking at those conversations. And you could find whether there were any particularly odd events, or anything worth further examination, by simply inspecting the actual order of some conversation. That is to say, you predicted it would go: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4, 5 ; 1 , 2 , 3 , 4, 5 and it turned out that in some round it didn't go that way, it went 1 , 4 5 , 2 , 3 or 1 , 4, 2 , 3 , 5 , etc. We might then focus on that as a problem and try to find out how it happened. Perhaps some change in status had taken place. But it's altogether unclear what would happen and Albert doesn't have much to say about it, she says it doesn't happen - if somebody spoke out of turn. You might find that what happens is they kill the guy, since in a way there's a lot invested in its coming off in order. There do seem to be a series of ways in which it's fragile, and in fact I think that it doesn't work that way at all, but it gives us some sort of idea about what a solution looks like. Now turn to our society of speakers. While there might not seem to be any reason in the world to suppose that there's a general solution, perhaps the reason that people believed there might be more or less general solutions turned on the fact that the possibilities of conversation are enormously widespread. One can talk on the phone, doing what's a recognizable conversation with somebody one has never met, without any trouble whatsoever - or at least for some people one has never met. And one is able to engage in conversation - at least with respect to these sorts of features - with an enormous range of 'new' people. Which would seem to suggest that pretty much everybody must have some way which they take it is the same or similar to others for dealing with the question of how it is that sequencing in conversation is achieved. There are a series of issues. One issue concerns the question of the 'completion ' phenomenon: How is it that people go about producing

40

Part I

recognizably complete utterances. And a basic thing that seems to be involved is that there's a generically available packaging device for utterances, and that's the sentence. And what we'll be doing is examining the sentence for those aspects of its structure which are relevant to sequencing in conversation. The gross point is that the utterances in conversation seem by and large to occur in integral numbers of sentences, and not fractional, or integral and fractional, and in terms of units of one. Furthermore, not only is that more or less roughly so, it's so across rather large variances in the length of the utterance being produced, i.e. , it doesn't happen only if people are producing utterances of six words, but they will adapt even rather long utterances to single-sentence formats. The sentence is a great packaging technique for a series of reasons, only a couple of which I'll mention. It has a structure which can at all points be seen as to whether it is possibly complete or not possibly complete, and people are able to deal with it in such a way as to see, on its occurrence, that it's possibly complete. And also, from its beginning it can be looked at to see what it will take to complete it. If somebody begins with "If, " for example, then there's already strongly usable information as to what it will take to complete that sentence. Now the sentences we'll be considering here, we'll have to re-imagine as they're being produced. That is to say, I'll be talking about what I'll call 'process-sentences, ' and not 'product-sentences, ' and there are some differ­ ences. Mainly what I'll be distinguishing is that process-sentences can be grammatical in such a way that, dealing with them as they happen, they're recognizably grammatical. If, however, you take the utterance off a page of transcript, it will tum out to be an ungrammatical sentence in some way. A simple way to think of it is, A talking along producing a sentence, and B cuts him off. Then what A has produced, looked at on the page, is an ungrammatical sentence or at least a non-fully-grammatical sentence, though it's a so-far grammatical sentence. Recall also the discussion about stories, where I mentioned that we have these 'story preface' phenomena. There I suggested that a reason for the story preface phenomenon was that if you intend to produce talk of more than a sentence length, then you want to be saying that in advance, so that people will not figure that every possible completion is your completion. Now if you're going to do that, you have to have ways to signal your completion independently, since hearers are attentive to this formal technique for recognizing completion, i.e. , the sentence as a packaging unit. That suggests how people massively go about producing utterances which are recognizably complete or recognizably incomplete, and how, then, if others don't talk while someone's talking, you get one-at-a-time until the transition point. And it tells us when it is that transition points will occur. Now how is transition dealt with. There seems to be an ordering of solutions. A first solution - and it's first in the sense that if this one is done, it operates; if it's not done, the second may be done and if the second is done it operates; but you only get the second if the first hasn't been done. So, the first solution: Current speaker can select next speaker. The rule for the various non-

Lecture 3

41

speakers would then be, look to see whether a current speaker has selected someone. The whole business might sound very simple, but much of the work we'll be doing will be on the various techniques that speakers use to select next speaker, and the way that that occupies their sentence. That is to say, there is some work in a sentence besides showing its completeness or incompleteness; work which is devoted to doing a seleaion of a next speaker. The thing we would think of first, i.e. , saying the name of the speaker you're selecting, e.g. , "Joe, what do you think, " is not at all anything like the only or even the most common way that people go about selecting next speakers. So we have 'current speaker selects next speaker. ' If we consider that alone, we see that we have an altogether different system than the one I sketched before. Consider only a couple of differences. In the system sketched earlier, suppose you're Number 5 . While there's a conversation proceeding, insofar as your talking-turn is concerned, you don't have to listen to anything except the talk of Number 4 . That is to say, the sort of participation involved provides that you need to listen to nobody but Number 4, and to Number 4 only to find that he's finished. If you have a situation in which each current speaker can select a next speaker, then as long as you would be willing to speak if you were selected, then - forgetting about common courtesy, interest in the conversation or anything else - you have to listen pretty much to every utterance in the conversation. What I want to be locating is the way in which the obligation to listen is built into conversation. It isn't built in merely in the sense of, be a good guy and listen to the other people, or, if you don't listen and people see that you're not listening they'll get mad at you, or, listen because you want other people to listen to you. It's built into the operation of the system. It's built in, in that if you're just willing to speak when selected, then you have to listen to each utterance, since it's each utterance that can select a next speaker. It's not that now comes in some big shot and he goes about selecting the next seven speakers. The biggest shot in the world selects only the next speaker. And the next speaker after him selects a next speaker. That is to say, it moves case by case. And in that regard, then, if you wanted to come up with a characterization for a single conversation of how it is that its actual order of speakers is arrived at, you would have to study all the utterances of that actual conversation - in contrast with the system I sketched earlier, where you wouldn't have to look at anything in an actual conversation. And that's kind of an interesting side-fact, in that social scientists tend to imagine that they can adapt procedures to any which world. In that case, the Burundi should be the most studied group in social science, since - if that's indeed the way the Burundi talk - they're about the easiest to study, their system the one which you have to give the least attention to study; you could build the most interesting models on, and you could do it in a week; you could have a computer program of all Burundi conversation. But dearly enough for our society of speakers with a system of case by case selection, it's not the same circumstances.

42

Part I

Again, then, the first preference is: Current speaker selects next speaker (with a series of constraints which I'll come back to). The second preference is: Current speaker does not select a next speaker but he selects a next action. For example, a person will ask a question but not specify who should answer it. If a bunch of people had seen a movie and you hadn't, you might say, "Well, was it a good picture?" and then somebody will select themselves to speak, and when they do so, they will provide an answer to that question. The current-speaker-selects-next-speaker situation also involves selecting next speaker's action. While you can select a next action without selecting a next speaker, you pretty much can't select a next speaker without selecting a next speaker's action. It would be hard to simply select a next speaker; for example - leaving aside that it's got a character to it that I can't develop now and don't want to merely assert - "Well John, you haven't said anything all night, say something. " The thing about these two techniques is that the technique is built into an utterance. It's not an independent part of an utterance that it does selection of next speaker or selection of next speaker's action. That is to say, you don't talk along, "My opinion on this is such-and-such-and-such, " then pause and say " Mary next, do a joke. " And that turns out to be absolutely of fundamental importance for the study of sentences, since the study of sentences has not taken it that sentences in speech are occupied with work involving their successors and predecessors, as formally built into those sentences. The curious thing in its way, is that a closest natural approximation to the separated-pares situation doesn't work very well at all. And that is, such things as "John, I want to ask you a question, what time is it. ' ' What you get is, you say "John," that's already an utterance, and he says "Yeah?, " ' 'I'd like to ask you a question, " that's also an utterance, and what you regularly get is simultaneous talk consisting of your question and his "Go ahead. " And you don't have to pile up these external pares which announce what you want to do; there are ways of doing that in a built in fashion. And if it's built in, one import of its being built in is that to go about choosing either of these two selection techniques is to constrain what you yourself do in your utterance. You only have one sentence more or less, and if among the things you're going to be doing is this sort of work, there's going to be a considerable constraint on what you can do in that utterance. Now, we have a third possibility, which like the second, can operate if the first is not used. The third is open, i.e. , whereas the second involves that a speaker selects himself but does the action that's been selected for him, the third involves that a speaker selects himself and selects the action he will do. But there are a series of other layers that operate so that when situation three occurs they constrain what it is that the self-selected speaker does. It's not that the one who speaks says anything in the world. What he says will be closely ordered with respect to what's been going on. And in that both the first and second involve next action selection, it seems better to say, not that we have a next-speaker selection system, but that we have a next-action selection system, in which next-speaker selection is also one thing that gets done.

Lecture 3

43

But the idea is that we have a system which operates case by case. I'd say 'utterance by utterance' but by virtue of the connotations involved in the notion 'utterance' I want to be talking instead of something I'll call an 'adequate complete utterance. ' The basic relevance of an adequate complete utterance is that it's adequate for sequential purposes. When it's over, a next should speak. People's business is to produce 'adequate complete utterances' and if I use the term 'utterance' I use it only out of socialization. Here's a sketch of further matters to be focussed on. The case-by-case operation makes one relationship between utterances a central one, and that is the adjacency relationship. And the adjacency relationship is used in talk in an enormous number of ways for a series of other layers or orderings that the sequential organization of conversation has, besides just the issue of selection of next action. One of the most immediately observable ways in which the adjacency relationship matters is this sort of thing: A has talked at some point and he's selected B to do something. Now the way B has of showing, among other things, that he sees that he's been chosen, and chosen to do something, is to do that right then and there. And that is analytically a great resource for us. That is to say, we're put in a position to be able to see what it is that some speaker A has done by reference to its being part of B's business to show what he sees that A has done, i.e., to produce an utterance which in some way exhibits that he sees he is selected, and sees he is selected to do some thing. The adjacency relationship will matter an enormous amount since - to put it in a sentence - the kind of massive integration that conversation can get, i.e. , with people talking for a considerable while in some way that they see is related, operates through adjacent relationships. That is to say, suppose we have four utterances. Utterance 1 and 4 are not directly related. There aren't formal techniques for locating an n-minus-third utterance as the utterance you want to be talking to. There are formal techniques for locating the last utterance as the utterance you want to talk to. Now if the last utterance also located the utterance before it as the utterance it was talking to, then you can have some way of locating that utterance as one you are talking to, through this last one. So you're operating through a series of adjacent utterances. I'll consider in detail how that operates, in due course.

Lecture 4

Turn-taking; Complaints about interruption; Enforcement I want ro finish some points from last time. First, the fact that there is an orientation by co-participants to 'completion' as 'transition point' defines not only sorts of work that co-participants do, but time constraints on when it is that the product of the work should be available. That is to say, you not only need to be able to find completion, but, in that completion point is also transition point, your finding of completion has to be available on the occurrence of completion. Presumably, therefore, you will be doing work of attending to the upcomingness of completion while the thing is being produced, so as to have the results available for use by you on the occurrence of completion. Also, I made a point that a gross sort of fact was that utterances are packaged in single sentences. What is involved for that is generally that the rule for recognizing completion is that the first 'possible completion' is to be recognized as the actual completion. One other thing. I offered as the third possibility in the selection procedure that there is no selection of action or speaker. Now, what happens there is that the first starter on completion of prior utterance seems to be the one who gets rights to be next speaker. That would obviously enough differentiate the sorts of things we could expect in case 3 from what we would expect in case 1 , where speaker is selected. Case 2 and 3 can be similar in the sense that first starter goes, where we can then have 'competitive starting' occurring there. I noted with respect to case 1 , that if people are willing to speak if selected, that can involve a rather pervasive listening to others' utterances, so as to find, e.g. , if they are selected, and if they are selected, when they should speak. Let me add that if one wishes to speak next independently of having been selected or when no one is selected, then if one is going to bring off one's utterance after someone's and before anyone else does, then that also involves an obligation to attend the structure of some corpus of utterances, i.e. , those utterances which you might choose to speak after. So again there's motivation to listen, which is independent of any rule that would say 'you ought to listen in conversation, ' motivation to listen which turns on a willingness to speak or an interest in speaking. Now the mechanism that I outlined last time serves to show how it might be generally possible that we have, in actual conversation, the co-occurrence of one party talking at a time and speaker change recurring. There was no 44

Lecture 4

45

focus o n either o f those features as having, each independently, regular structures involved in their preservation. That is to say, I did not consider any sorts of regulations devoted to, e.g . , the preservation of one party at a time, or the preservation of speaker change recurring. And there are regulations which deal with each of those. A basic reason why I did not deal with those sorts of rules first was that you could perfectly well have a consideration of those rules and not at all have the mechanism whereby their co-occurrence was achieved. Those are quite separate sorts of things. I am going to talk this time about one aspect of one party talks at a time. That aspect is that not more than one party talks at a time. And I am going to be dealing with some of the regulations around that feature. The main point will be to develop one further way, beyond the ways I developed last time, that these features are basic for conversation. The question that we are going to be attending is how is it that conversationalists deal with both the possibility and the actuality of it happening that there is more than one at a time talking. There are some perfectly transparent things that happen, one of which is that somebody complains, e.g. , "You interrupted me. " I want to discuss some sorts of orderlinesses involved in the occurrence of such a complaint. A first thing to note is that when it happens that two people are talking at the same time in a single conversation, a first thing that happens is that one of them stops. The basic general way that parties deal with the occurrence of two or more talking at a time is for various people to stop; to stop, that is, before they have completed whatever it is that they were in the process of saying. Now, being able to prove that somebody stops 'before they completed' is an independent sort of task, which we will consider on another occasion. But stopping is very neat in that if two are talking at the same time and one stops, that renders the circumstance that it is no longer the case that more than one is talking at a time - independently of who it is that happened to have, as it may turn out, brought about that two were talking at a time. So, if a party is speaking and another starts up, then the party who is speaking may stop. And such a complaint as "You interrupted me" would then be placed on the other's completion. Now two things are involved. One is, he tries to put the complaint into a point at which no one else is talking. And also, he tries to put it into the first point after the person who he is claiming interrupted him stops talking. I want to focus on the point that he tries to place the complaint directly after the event he is complaining of, to suggest that that fact - that complaints about interruption occur in very located places - unveils a small part of some rather general facts about conversation, which have to do with where things are placed. And complaints are placed in several other rather restricted sorts of places. A second place complaints can go is a version of the first, and involves that if you have not raised a complaint, e.g. , on some occasion of your being interrupted and you are interrupted again, then you may say "You keep interrupting me, " which involves focussing on the last thing as something that is non-unique.

46

Part I

A third such place is - and this will turn out to have some rather neat consequences - after a complaint has been made to oneself. If A at some point in a conversation complains to B about something he did, then one thing B can do is, in return, place a complaint to A. Now notice that if the first complaint is placed in an orderly way, then it will not be just anywhere that the second complaint will go; i.e. , a return-complaint will not only be relative to the first complaint, but relative to some other event, relative, e.g. , to the occurrence of a complainable by the one who then does the return-complaint. In either case, having not taken some chance to complain about some given event, one may well yet get another chance to complain about that event; under the circumstance of a recurrence of a complainable, or under the circumstance that somebody complains about something one did. Now I've been talking about a statement like "You interrupted me" as a 'complaint. ' We could, I suppose, give the thing a more neutral character­ ization by saying that it is, e.g. , noticing an interruption, merely making an observation, or offering some formulation of a prior occurrence. Where, for the latter, saying "You interrupted me" would be assimilated to saying "You asked me a question" or "John gave Mary a greeting, " etc. And seeing that possibility gets us somewhere. You could figure that somebody goes about offering a formulation of a prior occurrence by virtue of the fact that their formulation is correct; that is to say, that the way someone happened to come to say "You interrupted me" is by virtue of the fact that someone interrupted him. You might then be in a position of saying that people can, as some utterance they can make at any point in a conversation, assert some name for a prior utterance. But that clearly gets us results which we do not want to have, since if one went about saying what any last utterance was, one would be met with returns that would indicate it was an odd thing that one was doing. So that we want perhaps to restrict it more sharply than saying 'a formulation is being made of a prior utterance. ' Perhaps we could say that 'a formulation is being made of a prior utterance where that prior utterance is a violation of some sort,' which would restrict the occasions of going about formulating a prior utterance much more sharply. One thing suggested by the foregoing remarks is that when one goes about formulating a prior utterance, one's hearers inspect one's own utterance for what it is doing. And the fact that one is saying something that may be 'correct' is perhaps not the only thing, or even a thing that they look to. But where one 'notices that a violation occurred, ' one may be seen to be 'doing a complaint. ' Now there are a couple of things involved in the selection that you're 'doing a complaint. ' One is that the doing of a compliant locates, via the placing of the complaint, what to look to to see whether there was a 'complainable. ' Secondly, the doing of a complaint sets up a sequence. With regard to the first point, complaints regularly do not say "In the last utterance you interrupted me" or " In the last utterance minus three you interrupted me. " They just say "You interrupted me" and things like that. And participants can know where to look, to see whether it is so that such a complainable occurred, i.e. , in this case, to the immediately last utterance,

Lecture 4

47

such that if they don't find it there they may say "No I didn't," or "No he didn't," though he may have made some interruption somewhere. That is to say, they use the placing of the complaint to locate the complainable. And just as it is the case for complaints that they do not need to say what to look to to find whether a complainable occurred, so the same goes for the various things that can follow a complaint. That is to say, if you offer an apology like ' 'I'm sorry, " or an excuse or a denial, then those are heard as apologies, excuses, or denials for that complaint. And they furthermore exhibit that you saw the statement. "You interrupted me" as a 'complaint, ' and furthermore, that the complaint was 'well taken. ' That is to say, they exhibit not merely that you saw that this was a complaint, but saw also that it was a complaint about this utterance, and that this utterance was a complainable. Now it will turn out that the placing of an enormous number of things work in just that way, locating which prior utterances are being dealt with. So, which prior utterance is being 'answered' is located by the placing of a possible answer after a particular question. It will be heard as 'the answer to that question, ' and not, e.g. , the answer to some question that went five minutes before. And that turns out to be important in another way, in that for some sorts of things, the very recognition of what the item is turns on its placement. That is to say, e.g. , for the category 'answers, ' that something is an 'answer' turns on its placement after a recognizable question, where answers don't by and large have the sorts of forms that permit their decontexted recognition. Various sorts of things, like " I went to the movies, " are seeable as 'answers' via their placement. S o it's not just that they are seen as 'answers to a directly prior question; ' their placing controls that they're seen as 'answers. ' That placing should matter is not at all surprizing, given that we have a serial coordination system if we are going to have any coordination in a one party at a time structure. I've already said that the adjacency relationship is very important, and placing is one way that one uses the adjacency relationship. With regard to the second point, that doing a complaint like "You interrupted me" sets up a sequence, the occurrence of a complaint can locate the sorts of actions that appropriately follow, and who should do them; for example, that an apology is appropriate, or an excuse or a denial, and should be made by whoever it is that's 'accused. ' Now that will turn out to be relevant to considerations of why people sometimes don't do complaints, an issue that is important in this way: If one is examining conversation for possible occurrence of violations, or examining social interaction generally for possible occurrence of violations, then one may have constructed criteria which permit one to recognize the occurrence of a violation. But independent of one's recognition criteria, one knows that one thing about the occurrence of violations is that they can be noticed by participants. One may then be in a position where one has located some possible cases, only some of which have been noticed. Now one either has to say, "Well the occasions that have not been noticed are not violations, ' ' or come to a position whereby one can say that they may or may not be violations, but they're not not-violations simply

48

Part I

because no one noticed them. And the way one could establish that they're not not-violations simply because nobody noticed them, i.e. , 'complained' about them, is to establish that there are reasons for not noticing violations. And people do both see a violation happening and not complain about it. I am suggesting that the complaint's starting a sequence will turn out to be relevant for that sort of issue. For one, the sheer fact of a sequence being started involves that when the sequence is over, the last utterance before that sequence is no longer available for being used to place utterances in the same way it was before that sequence got started. So: One was saying something, something perhaps fitted to something somebody just said, and one is interrupted, now there is this sequence. What one was saying, and what the utterance one had fitted one's utterrance to was saying are no longer available simply by placing an utterance. If one's interest is to get one's chance to say something that is placed by reference to what was just being said, then it is one's interest to not put in one of these sequences. The sheer fact of doing a complaint selects somebody other than oneself to speak next, selects them to do something other than deal with what has been going on, i.e. , to deal with the complaint. It gives one the floor back after, e.g . , the excuse, to, e.g . , accept the excuse, like "Okay" after the other says ' 'I'm sorry, " but when one is finished somebody else may then speak, and one is not then perhaps in a position to directly continue what it is that was going on. That is to say, insofar as placing considerations matter, it may be more in one's interest to use the place one may get to talk, to talk to what is going on, than to start a sequence which intervenes. And that's one possible sort of account for not complaining, i.e. , for not 'noticing' an interruption. Earlier I mentioned that complaining serves to select the complained-of person as next speaker. Now, one sort of problem for a complaint is that apologies, excuses, denials, are not the only sorts of things that they can do. One thing that a complained-of person can do has already been mentioned they can return a complaint: "You interrupted me, " "Well you interrupted me in the first place," or "Well you never give me a chance to talk. " ' 'I'm sorry. " Which is to say, for one, if you do a complaint you may end up apologizing. So that if what you want is, e.g. , for the other person to apologize, a complaint does not guarantee that you will get that. Another thing that can happen is, as a complaint can formulate a last event as illegal in some way, so can an utterance be placed which formulates this last event, i.e. , the complaint, as illegal in some way, e.g. , "You're always complaining. " That is to say, what you did can be examined for its possible illegitimate status, and that finding used as a next utterance: ' 'You inter­ rupted me, " "You're always complaining. " Which then involves another way in which, having begun with a complaint, one may find oneself in a sequence that is not the sequence one intended. The sequence that a complaint starts is equivocal with respect to the fact that a complaint in some way controls what happens, but does not fully control what happens. In particular, it does not control that the event it has noticed will be the event that will be dealt with.

Lecture 4

49

Obviously then, if one knows that one has dirty laundry, one has a basis for avoiding recriminations. Not any occasion in which one could complain will be used to complain if that the other has a collection of complaints they can offer is known to one. But sequences which tum on the fact of a complaint are, in their way, overwhelmingly frequent. I leave aside the issue of what sorts of import they have for where the conversation goes beyond the complaint sequence, noting only that one can dearly get into, specifically, an argument. And that is a matter that is exceedingly important, in this way: One question that could be asked is, is it the case that only some sorts of conversations have a reasonable potential of yielding an argument, or is it the case that any conversation has the potential for yielding an argument, independent of, e.g . , topic. And one can see that, for one, the internal violations to the ways that conversations proceed can generate an argument. Another issue related to the question of can any conversation yield an argument, is that of reasonable diagnostic interest in the following sort of phenomenon: Some people say about each other, "Why is it that we can never have a conversation without it ending up in an argument?" And in that it is a thing that is said all the time, it is of interest to see how it could be sensible. I think fiddling with just some of these resources, one can get perhaps a glimpse at the way in which 'having an argument' as a possibility gets built into conversation, and the way in which, then, considerations about avoiding an argument can be involved in avoiding raising a complaint. There is another sort of thing. Leaving aside any issue of later raising a complaint - recalling that if one does not raise it here but talks otherwise, one may still be able to raise it later - one can do one of the sorts of things that are utterly beautiful in their conversational occurrence: One can in some other conversation, in which, say, a party who did an interruption to you is being talked of, not only raise your complaint against them, but you can raise your complaint against them while saying that you did not complain, e.g. , " I didn't say anything about it, but h e constantly interrupted me, " which i s a chance to both show your graciousness and get your score. Now the problems raised with making a complaint can in one sense be said to turn on the fact that it is the business of parties to the conversation to deal with the conversation's violations. That is to say, we are dealing with a particular sort of set of rules. There aren't officials present monitoring conversations who insert corrective operations or who allow it to proceed to the end and then asses fines. It is a situation in which there is a self-enforcing system operating. And given the ways that conversations are done here, there, anywhere, between whomsoever, it is essential for the workings of conversa­ tion that they have self-enforcing systems. It might be a dream that we could have a system where there were outside officials who would deal with the violations. However, if anything like the rules for conversation that are operative now were preserved, such a dream could be seen to be nonsensical, in that there is a sense in which the detection and dealing with of violations is not only the business of the parties and not an outsider, but that the very

50

Part I

detectability may be something that the parties and not outside observers can do. And this raises some really interesting kinds of issues. We have in the first instance, some formal normative features for conversation, which are in a way a public law for conversation: One party at a time, speaker change recurs, the selection mechanisms, and a large range of detailed specifications. The question is, how is it that the parties to a conversation are mobilized in the interest of society, to monitor their conversations so as to have it that their conversations satisfiy the general rules. This is really a very classical sort of sociological anthropological problem. How is it that a society arranges to have people have a concern with some sorts of rules that in any particular case may be uninteresting for that scene, but which needs in some way be generally operative, and which needs that the local participants have it as their business to do the enforcing if it is going to be enforced. There is a usual sort of solution, one aspect of which is to fit on to some generally required mechanisms a series of what tum out to be private rights and private obligations, and thereby have the possibility that people will attend to violations as violations of themselves. That is to say, we have a generalized feature, exactly one party should be talking at a time, which has as one aspect, not more than one party should be talking at a time, which turns out to be very crucial for the workings of conversation. All sorts of mechanisms are built up around it which require it for their working. But nobody has to learn, e.g. , that those things require it, in order to see the importance of it. What you get are some norms built up which say, e.g . , that a currently speaking party has a right to speak to completion. Then, the occurrence of more than one talking at a time can tum out to be an observable violation of the current speaker's right to speak to completion. The current speaker can then be mobilized to see that some right of his has been violated. And if a current speaker is built in the right way, then he can get aroused at somebody dealing wrongly with his property - his property being that space in the conversation in which he is now talking. Now a current speaker's getting angry at somebody interrupting him involves that his anger is something one has to consider as analogous to a cop in the room. That is to say, by organizing emotions such that people will get angry at, or feel contrite or guilty about doing such a thing as, intruding on X's time, speaking while he is speaking, interrupting him, then one has the possibility of having any actual parties to a conversation engaging in enforcing these sorts of mechanisms for each other. Maybe in some extremely private situation, off by themselves, some set of people can glory in that they do not have conversations like this, that they do not treat each others' rights in that fashion. But it is just that sort of thing, i.e. , indeed it will be reported as a sign of X and Y' s intimacy that "When we talk together neither of us ever finishes an utterance, we pick up on each other immediately. " Which is to say, for one, they haven't got a sense of their private rights being affiliated to that rule, and nonetheless they can find a way of doing conversation together - though they're not about to try to use it elsewhere.

Lecture 4

51

Max Weber regularly says things like, the big problem for any society is that there are some more or less generalized organizational techniques which it sets up and which people need to be mobilized to behave in the interests of, but - and in this I'm not clear whether it is one or the other of the following alternatives: Either Weber thinks you cannot mobilize people unless you mobilize them about private interests, or it's that he says that societies 'know' that they cannot organize people unless they are organized about private interests. And so they find some kind of techniques whereby private interests are fitted to 'public requirements. ' It's a theme that occurs again and again in Weber; for example in his incredible paper 'Politics as a vocation, ' he locates the political boss as that sort of person who is able to monitor the range of private interests and use them, and interest in them, to engage in some sorts of public action. He makes a case for the ethical disinterest of the political boss and thereby assimilates him to the priest who is engaged in the same sort of task of monitoring the relationship between an ethic and anybody's ethics. He also does a similar sort of discussion when he begins The Sociology of Religion as follows: The most elementary forms of behavior motivated by religious or magical factors are oriented to this world. ' 'That it may go well with thee . . . and that thou mayest prolong thy days upon the earth" (Deut. 4: 40) expresses the reason for the performance of actions enjoined by religion or magic. The point being that any religion, he says, is m the first instance needing to show that it is this world's interests that it has in mind. With Weber's interests at hand, one of the things one wants to be looking for is how it is - if it's so - that some sorts of mechanisms which nobody could be interested in, which nobody could use an interest in to build some specific actions, nevertheless can be found to be operative. I say 'nobody could be interested in them' in an extremely serious way. There is a series of things which, even if you were interested in them, or claimed interest in them, they're not believable. So, for example, the classical suspicious person is the public spirited citizen. If you call the cops and tell them that you're just reporting something because you are a public spirited citizen, then they have doubts about you. And, as we know from our own circumstances, when you propose to do something by virtue of its public interest, then that is immediately doubtable, where, if you take it that you did it for that reason, if you propose some private reason it is believable. And I'll deal with issues of 'believable' and 'doubtable' in due course. What we have then is a series of mechanisms that are built around general features, and those mechanisms are in general operative. But there is no particular interest that anybody could have in the preservation of those general features in any given case. What we get apparently is that the general features are transformed into local private rights which are affiliated to anybody by virtue of the fact that they just happen to be talking now. And

52

Part I

emotions are apparently organized around those in very strong ways, so that, e.g . , in the case of interruption people will become utterly outraged over its occurrence, in a way that is presumably no weaker than the outrage they could feel about any other of their private rights. Now that type of operation gains the extensiveness of its power by reference to a series of things that are done with the occurrence of an interruption. What happens is that if somebody does an interruption to you, though there is the rule about interruptions that provides that they should not be done, it needn't be dealt with simply as an interruption, preserved historically as an interruption; it can be assimilated to a class consisting of a bunch of other things like it. And the organization of that class involves that each of the cases can - almost like a bunch of kids trying to deal with a bully - give each other case support. So, if one does an interruption it can be used in such a way that somebody reporting it does not say "John interrupted Mary, " or "John interrupted Mary yesterday, " or "John inter­ rupts people, " but "John is rude. " And indeed, when somebody interrupts you, you can say, not "Why did you interrupt me?" but "Why are you so rude?" Now 'being rude' is not specifically, say, a synonym for 'interrupting. ' If that were so, that would obviously be no gain whatsoever in terms of what you are saying about someone. But the way it works is, for the variety of things that stand as cases of 'being rude,' the class can be used and the case needn't be. That is to say, you can tell somebody that so-and-so is 'rude' and you do not have to feel that you are telling them only the gist of it; you do not have to tell them what in particular he does, or he did. And there are a whole bunch of things that can be done when something somebody has done has been transformed into 'being rude; ' things which tum out to be relevant for whether one does anything that can be so transformed. That is to say, what we have is not simply a situation in which there is some way of dealing with the fact that, e.g. , two or more talking at a time occurred, but ways in which the possibility of its occurrence are dealt with in advance. It is by no means the case that the fact that somebody can complain to you and you have to apologize constitutes the sorts of sanctions you can suffer if you interrupt someone. The sorts of sanctions which you can suffer tum initially and heavily and sufficiently on the transformation of "You interrupted me" (or any of the other things which stand as 'being rude' ) to "He's rude. ' ' Let me note that, in that the doing of an interruption is a case of the class 'being rude,' when you come to be talking about 'being rude' you are also talking about the treatment that the violations of a series of other rules get. We have located a population of events for which we now have, at least as a proposal, a similarity between them and 'interruption, ' all of which are also more or less privately noticed, privately enforced violations. Now there are a series of things that can be done with the determination that somebody was 'rude. ' Just to assert the name of that thing, though what we're interested in is what the name stands for, such an observation as that somebody is rude is usable for 'gossip. ' We then have to consider how it is

Lecture 4

53

that it is used in gossip, and how it is that, that it is used in gossip matters. I just have a collection of points, and it is not enormously well organized. But for one, when someone is being talked of, one candidate item of even a brief biography is that they are 'rude. ' That is to say, if we are looking for a model biography that people can offer about somebody in a minute, or in an hour, i.e. , it does not matter how brief it is, then 'rudeness' is one item, whatever the other items are. And 'rudeness' is hearsay usable. That is to say, if someone, talking to you about a person you haven't met, says that he's rude, then if somebody asks you about that person, you can say he's rude: "I don't know him but I hear he's rude. ' ' 'Rudeness' occurs, not only in exchanges of gossip among co-conversationalists, but in brief biographies in newspapers. I have the suspicion that, of the things that you remember about somebody whom you don't know, one such item is that they're rude. And if it's known about somebody that they're rude, then if you meet them and they do an event which can be conceived of as rude, then that event can confirm that they're rude. For one, then, 'rudeness' is a feature of a 'personality,' and that somebody is rude is one of the things that is preserved in the constituting of that personality. One of the deep problems with trying to deal with interaction by reference to a notion of 'a person' is that it would seem obviously the case that a thing like 'rudeness' as a 'personality trait' turns on the construction of a person such that various sorts of enforcement mechanisms can be operative. And the types of things that stand as 'personality traits' constitute ways of making it operative for anybody that they behave in some way or take the consequences. And if you have an interest in your biography, then you have an interest in being or not being rude insofar as you care that that item be known to some indefinite set of others who know you or don't know you, where some others whom you don't know may encounter people who've never met you, who know some very small amount of things about you, and one of the things they may know is that you're rude. Which is to say, some distant operation is being performed on the fact that you interrupted somebody. Further, it isn't simply your biography with respect to which 'rudeness' can be used. Rudeness can also be used by reference to various sorts of identifications which involve you, but yet not 'you,' uniquely. It's not simply that one can preserve "John is rude" when John has done one of some series of things that involve somebody in some way coming to say that he is rude and passing it on, but "John" can be transformed also. For one, "John" can be transformed into a last name, i.e. , "The Smiths are rude. ' ' So that, leaving aside your own biography, if you are concerned with your sister's biography your rudeness can serve to constitute a part of her biography, say, as a transformation from "They're rude" to, when she is being talked about, "She's rude. ' ' And again, her behavior can be monitored by reference to whether it turns out that she does what it is that confirms 'rudeness. ' And there's a series of other transformations: "People in that neighborhood are rude, ' ' "The younger generation is rude, " whatever.

54

Part I

What we have then is an enforcement system for conversation which operates on transformations of a series of violations made to whomsoever, the knowledge of the operation of which serves in part to provide bases for not doing those things - or doing those things if you'd like to have that reputation, or your sister or your mother or your neighbor or your friends to have that reputation. I say that, in that it seems to be plain that people know that they can indict others via such actions of their own. And of course they're specifically socialized so as to know about such things, i.e. , they're specifically told not to do certain things as will reflect not on them alone, but on others. So that we have really enormously elaborate and apparently powerful - if not overpowerful - sets of regulations operative about the classes for which 'interrupting' is a case, fitted onto the general feature 'exactly one party talks at a time. ' And of course the same enforcement structure will be operative for a series of other features, fitted to other parts of this general structure. And when we ask, as we might reasonably ask, "Why in the world would a society be built in such a way that such a big deal is made of that somebody interrupts someone? Why are there these enormous machines ready to operate on such a fact? what we've done is to misconcretize the phenomenon. That is to say, we've asked "Why is it such a big deal that somebody interrupted someone?" where what we have is a mechanism designed to get at the general way of preserving whole classes of things. So that besides the private enforcement we get all the rest of this business of the transformation to rudeness, the usability for gossip, the generalization of personality traits, etc., all of which I suppose would look like some absurd irrational fear, were we to have started out only with the notion that it's all designed by reference to a rule that says 'don't interrupt. ' But when we have more or less some picture of the way in which 'one party at a time' works, such that the communication system turns on it in many, many ways, and also that we can at least consider that for other things about conversation the same mechanism is operating, and consider what the possibility of operation would be of a series of independent mechanisms, you might see that it's not as irrational as all that, or as weird as all that, or as overbuilt as all that. Now, I introduced this whole business in the first place so as to make the point that there was another way in which the co-occurrence of 'one at a time' and 'speaker change recurs' was basic. Forgetting about the latter things I talked about, that other way to see that they're basic is this: It can be said about the rules of sequencing in conversation that their enforcement proce­ dures turn on the operation of the rules for sequencing in conversation. They are self-organized in that sense. That is to say, the fact that one places one's complaint about an interruption in a silence; that a complaint serves to select the complained-of to speak; that he speaks next; that he speaks to the complaint and speaks to the complaint by reference to the candidate interruption, all this proceeds by reference to the rules of sequencing. And I take it that that's an extremely natural criterion for some rules being basic; that is to say, when you reach them, you reach the ground. There are no other

Lecture 4

55

rules which deal with how to deal with violations of them. And if those rules for dealing with the violations of them aren't operating, then there is no dealing with the violations of them. A further way to see the basicness of the rules of sequencing is to ask what domains of violations, for example, or of other things, turn on the operation of the rules of sequencing in conversation. Any domain that turns on them requires for its operation the operation of conversation, which can then again suggest the reasons why these rules would be subject to the sorts of enforcement possibilities that are involved.

Lecture 5

Collaboratives; Possible utterances; Utterance pairs; Greetings and introductions In the last two lectures I gave some rather general considerations about conversation. I introduced some suggestions about orders of organization, e.g. , that the adjacency relationship would tum our to be very important. And also we began to see some small, primitive sequencing, and to see that sequences could get fitted to adjacency considerations. So we're beginning to build up some further types of organization operative in conversation. This time I want to shift gears somewhat, moving from a rather generalized consideration of conversation to some specific material. What I want to do is to go through a consideration of how it is that we come to tum some particular materials to technical interest. I want to do that by reference to some problems that we're now ready to handle, having to do with the sentence as a packaging technique, with utterances, and with completion, and also in due course, one party at a time. Turning to the data handout, I want to focus on aspects of three parts of it. The first part is: Dan : (

):

Dan : jim : Dan : jim : Ken : Dan : Roger : jim : Dan :

Jim, hhhjjhh This is uh AI, Hi. Ken, Hj ji Hi, [ -an' Roger. Hi. Hi, Jim Reed.

The second part is: Ken : Roger : (

AI : 56

):

We were in an automobile discussion, -discussin' the psychological motives fer hhh/jhhhh hh -drag racing on the streets.

Lecture 5

57

And the third is: Ken : Roger : Ken : AI : Roger :

I still say though that - If you take, if you take uh a big fancy car out'n the road, - - an' yer hotoddin' around, yer- yer bound to get- yer bound t'get cau: :ght, and yer bound t'get shafted. ("Bound to, " I I man-) W'l look. Now II I'm gonnaUnless yuh do it right. II THAT'S THE CHALLENGE. THAT'S THE CHALLENGE YOU WANNA TRY AN' DO IT RIGHT SO YOU DON'T GET CAUGHT! That's the problem with society! heh heh

I'll start off with a phenomenon which one might or might not find interest­ ing - and I suppose it's something that anyone could conceivably notice, and perhaps even be able to make something of, though I'm not sure about that. What we want eventually to do is to show how it's interesting, and then also to see what kinds of work we have to do to get at a local explanation of it where the issue of its interestingness will turn out to be much more general than the explanation of its occurrence here. The phenomenon is in the first instance available in the second fragment. That is to say, a gross thing that this material just exhibits - exhibits at least for the right sort of attention to it is that there are three people producing a single sentence in concert. It is at least to be supposed that they're not doing it with a script, but that the first person intends to produce a sentence and the second brings off a continuation of that, and the third brings off a continuation of the second's. The name I use for this is either 'collaborative' or 'joint productions. ' An initial reason to be interested in them might have been that we have the initial gross fact that utterances are packaged into single sentences. So if we got variations on that thing, I suppose that we would find our usual expectable variation to be a person producing a series of sentences, not a series of persons producing a single sentence. As soon as you raise the question of methods about it, i.e. , how do they do it, then you can immediately come to see that you have something that is technically of great, great interest. It's really one of those sorts of things that is a naturalist's dream. There, in nature, is the sort of thing you would dream of having, if you could dream that well, but you'd never figure would be given to you whole. I gave a consideration in the third lecture about how it is that if people are willing to talk if selected, or want to talk when they get a chance if no one is selected, then they ought to be 'hearers. ' They ought to listen for completion and they ought also to listen for selection. One could, by just thinking it through, figure if they're going to talk on completion, then they have to have been listening for selection, to have the selection results available before completion. They would have to be listening to something that somebody was saying, and analyzing that, for some purposes anyway, while the thing is being said. They'd have to do that if they're going to have some result of that analysis available, first of all to see that 'completion' has happened, but also

Part I

58

to have available the results of the analysis on selection, to be used, e.g. , to start up speaking, to pick a right action, on the completion's occurrence and not an hour later. So we more or less have the idea that they must both be listening to and analyzing an utterance while the utterance is being produced. Now that's an argument. Is there some way to go about proving that people are listening to and analyzing an utterance in the course of its production in such a way as to have the product of their analyses available, e.g. , on the completion of the utterance? While you could try to figure out experimental techniques for showing that, it turns out that there's an ideal procedure available in nature, and that is: One thing that people sometimes do is, e.g. , someone is talking along, producing a sentence, and they may pause with an "uh . " And somebody else puts in the last word. If you know anything at all about syntax, you know it's not so much an issue of getting the correct last word - via syntactical considerations that would be almost magical - but it's a sufficiently interesting thing that somebody has so analyzed a sentence that they know that the next word at some point should be, e.g. , a noun of some particular sort. That is to say, given the structure so far - where the structure as it develops is setting continual constraints on what sorts of syntactic object can go at each particular point that they're able to put in a syntactically coherent part is then direct evidence that they have been listening and analyzing in the course of the utterance, and have the results available to use so as to fit in a part right then and there. That is then to say that they have a way of proving to the person they're talking with that they're hearing and understanding what he's saying. So there's that phenomenon which might be a thing you could be amused by, or have happen many times and not even notice, which is technically of great interest. And we'll have a lot to say about some aspects of it in due course. The second utterance in this fragment, ' '-discussing the psychological motives for, " is rather a different sort of thing because "We were in an automobile discussion" is a perfectly good sentence. It's not an incomplete sentence that's continued, it's something that is in its fashion even more interesting - a complete sentence turned into an incomplete sentence, as is "Unless you do it right" a completion to " . . . you're bound to get caught and you're bound to get shafted, " though again that one looked like it was a complete sentence. We do have a case of an incomplete sentence which gets finished by some other in ' '-drag racing on the streets, ' ' where that is a completion to the whole thing. And we want to notice that they're not finishing off an idiom, e.g. : Roger : Dan :

Kids don't drive long. They start off when they're si- by the time- when they're sixteen, by the time they're eighteen they're back walk(hh)ing hehh through circumsta(hh)nces hehhehh -beyond their control.

That is to say, "through circumstances beyond their control" is a packaged phrase. Given various other considerations, if you see the beginning of it you

Lecture 5

59

could fit 'beyond their control' onto such a beginning. Now one thing we can say, where a possibly complete sentence is continued, is something like this: For utterance completions, one doesn't want to say that the end of a sentence is, or can be treated as, a recognizable end of an utterance, but one has to talk about 'possible sentence ends' and 'possible utterance ends. ' One has to talk about it that way because, among other reasons, it may well be that people treat even the ending that an actual speaker uses for his sentencejutterance as only a 'possible ending. ' That is to say, having engaged in some analysis of the sentence structure of an utterance while it's being done, one is engaged in seeing what possibilities are open at any given point in it - at least from some point into it, i.e. , I'm not in a position to say that when you say "We . . . " that anybody could finish that one off, though they may be able to finish it off in some way. But there are points at which people have some sense of sets of possibilities. Apparently they need not treat what you choose as the necessary, but they treat that as a possibility so that they still have possibilities available to them, and they can if they choose go on with the 'same sentence; ' that is to say, they pick another possibility. Or, for example - and this is a perfectly familiar occurrence - if you're speaking along, and you produce a sentencejutterance and nobody starts up immediately, then, even though you've done what you figured to be the end of what you were doing, you don't necessarily 'start again' if you take up speech. What you do is, you 'continue' the sentence which you had been engaged in producing. You can treat your own initially intended end as only a possible end, and hearers can do the same thing. Of course the question is why in the world would people ever do it? Why would they ever mobilize the energy and resources required to engage in an analysis into possibilities and then using it to fit a continuation? Or is there any reason why they would? Is there a 'why'? Maybe even if there isn't any 'why, ' as long as we know they do it. In fact, when I first found "We were in an automobile discussion" I was absolutely awed. I thought "God, look what an amazing thing these people are doing. " And then something like, "Does it ever happen?" And we searched around and found that it had some literary use; some high literary use, like in some recent plays, and it also occurs as the normal form of speech in Donald Duck cartoons. And then it turned out that in ordinary speech it's really extremely common, not some arcane art at all. The gain is something like this: If we say that utterances are packaged via the use of sentences, then there is a way in which we could say that a sentence is a unit of social organization. If, however, it turns out that people can collaborate in the production of sentences - now, not of sentences that they're repeating, like the collaboration on an idiom - but collaborative production of new sentences, then there's a different sense in which the sentence is a unit of social organization - the sense in which a sequence of sentences is a unit of social organization. Where that is our usual, comfortable sense of something being such a unit, i.e. , that the coordinated activity of a set of people is involved in its production. And one doesn't think of a sentence as being that sort of object at all. At most you'd figure, well, a sentence might be that sort

·

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of object in the sense that while somebody is doing it others are attentive to it and are silent. It's used as a building block for conversation in the sense that each person does one or does two or whatever, and not that for all we know if they wanted to, they might have a conversation system - even our system with our capacities - in which it was a norm that people engaged in the production of sentences which, say, tended to be of a mean utterance length of three. Which would be kind of an earth-shaking fact for various disciplines that take the sentence as a unit and are concerned with, e.g. , the psychological explication of how it is that people produce a sentence, treating the fact of single sentence equals single utterance as very, very important. So we're talking now about 'possible sentences' and 'possible utterances, ' and furthermore we're not just talking about that a s a kind of statistical caveat (i.e. , we could talk about actuals but we're not going to venture that far); what we're saying is that for producers and for hearers, an actual sentence is ' one possibility, ' or some actualization of possibilities. And they have as a capacity that they can actualize other possibilities. And that stopping is 'stopping a possibility at some point. ' One other thing that we might want to consider in that regard is the first fragment, which has this guy Dan producing a sentence, ' 'Jim, this AI, Ken, and Roger, ' ' over a series of provided-for insertions of other people. Again, it's a natural fragment. I didn't make it up, it just happened that way. In order to get into a position to deal with these particular occurrences, we need to engage in a consideration of the circumstances. It's a group therapy session, Dan is the therapist. It's been going on for something on the order of an hour and 20 minutes of a two-hour session before Jim, a new patient, comes in. The others know, by the time he enters, that a new patient is coming. He opens the door and we get the following: Roger :

(

):

(jim) : (Dan) : (jim) : (Dan) : (jim) :

( (

): ):

(

):

Dan :

Dan : jim : Dan : jim :

On Hollywood Boulevard the other night they were givin' tickets for dirty windshields. ((door opens)) ) ((whispered)) ( HUnh! (Hi Jim, c' mon II in) (G'momlling) (Whyn'tcha close the door) (Ok,) ((door closes)) hhh ((snifHe)) Jim, hhhllhh This is uh AI, Hi. Ken, Hili

Lecture 5 Ken : Dan : Roger : jim : Dan :

61

[Hi, -an' Roger. Hi. Hi, Jim Reed.

Perhaps a first thing to mention is that the initial greetings betwen Dan and Jim followed by the introduction sequence with greeting exchanges, stand in some disjoined relationship to what's been happening in the conversation, i.e. , it's not something in the conversation beforehand that provided for this sequence happening. Which is to say more generally speaking, that there are some sorts of things, anywhere, that have their placing accounted for not by reference to what's been taking place in the conversation, but by reference to other sorts of events. That is to say, there are some conversational occurrences which have sorts of priorities. And that has an interest to it, in thise sense. It may be somebody's business, and an etiquette book might tell you that it's somebody's business to, e.g. , greet Jim and to, e.g . , do the introductions. An etiquette book would say 'when a new person comes into a dinner party (or a meeting, etc. ) it's the business of a host to greet them and introduce them to the various persons present. ' That's fine and dandy as far as it goes. However, one of the things that needs to be considered, and that makes the character of the rules in an etiquette book not the sorts of rules that, as sociologists, we need, is this sort of problem: When Jim comes in there's a conversation going. It stops. It stops and this sequence gets going. Now the rules in an etiquette book tell you whose task is what, when there's some task at hand like greetings or introductions. It doesn't tell you what other people should do, and it doesn't tell other people what they should do. And it's not sufficient to have a rule which says 'the host should greet the newly entering party' when one wants there to be some control on what other people do. Not merely that they don't greet the newly entering party, but that they, e.g. , stop to allow that sequence to take place. For each rule of the form 'X should do Y, ' one apparently needs some rules which tell other people what they should do, and that would probably be a rather complicated task if you set out to include that in an etiquette book. Eventually I'll have something to say about this exchange, "Hi Jim, come on in, " "Good morning. " I avoid it now because it may seem to put too large a burden of investigation on a sort of thing that looks like a 'that's just the way they happened to do it' occurrence. The thing I will get to is this difference: Dan uses Jim's name, but Jim doesn't use Dan's name. And that's a real difference. It's a difference that matters; it's a difference that's an orderly thing. Roughly speaking, if a person names the person they're talking to in, e.g . , a greeting, then which sorts of people do or do not name somebody in return? 'No-naming' of people is a very big business, and it has rather notable sources of its occurrence. Roughly, a source of its occurrence is the problem for the returner of choosing what name to use. Should he say "Hi Dan"? "Hi

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Dr so-and-so"? "Hi Mr so-and-so"? etc. And I want eventually to get back to that. I talked about adjacency placing. Now I want to introduce one type of organizational object that's used in conversation. It's a thing I'm going to call ' utterance pairs. ' Various sorts of things come in pairs, specifically in adjacent pairs, such that if a first is done to somebody, then the somebody to whom the first is done does a second in return. Greetings come in pairs. For greetings, the pair consists of a first greeting and a second greeting. For other pairs that's not at all the way they work. For a pair like question-answer, the first item is a 'question' and the second is an 'answer, ' and for various others there are other combinations. Also about greetings: Greetings are complete utterances. That is to say, we can notice about the timing of greetings that there is an occurrence of a second " Hi" right after the first with no wait to see if one is going to talk some more. Which is to say that greetings are sequentially adequate. On the completion of a greeting the sequencing rule operates; the selected speaker speaks and does the return. Now, someone having been addressed with a greeting, selected thereby to speak next and specifically to do a greeting in return and do it right then and there, its absence is noticeable, commentable on. So you get occurrences where somebody says to a kid, "Hi Johnny," and after a rather short time, if Johnny doesn't say anything his mother says "Didn't you hear somebody say hello to you?" or the person who said "Hi Johnny" will repeat it, " Hi Johnny. " I'm not going to talk about 'repeats' but let me just note that, that something is a 'repeat' is itself noticeable. Which is to say, for one, a ' repeat' will be done in a different way than the original item is done, and you get a funny thing that sometimes happens: "Hi Johnny" ((pause)) " Hi Johnny,' ' "Oh I didn't hear you. ' ' Where you might figure, well how in the world does a person say " Oh I didn't hear you," it's only a puzzle if one doesn't see that in fact 'repetitions' are recognizable. Someone recognizing this as a 'repetition, ' they can thereby realize that this was a ' second' greeting, and thereby that they failed to return a first. So far as I can tell there is a considerable freedom in at least some parts of the culture for what sorts of things you return a greeting with, but it may well be that that's a regulated matter in some places. There's this guy Ross who wrote a famous article called 'U and non-U speech' which is about upper-class and non-upper-class speech in England. He reports that upper-class people in England normally repeat whatever greeting they've been offered; non-upper class people may not. So, you might figure that "Hello" is not upper-class, and upper-class is "How do you do. " If somebody says "How do you do, " upper-class people say "How do you do,' ' and if somebody says "Hello, " they say "Hello. " S o that sort o f thing, a s 'nothing much' as it may seem, can be an object for regulation. So we have the exchange of greetings and then the introductions. And if we're going to have both sequences, it's going to be in this order. One might not have the greetings, or the greetings could be done without a verbal greeting exchange; with glances, nods, waves, etc. But, as between the two

Lecture 5

63

sequences both of which can happen, one of them goes first, i.e. , Dan is going to exchange greetings with Jim before he does the introductions. So now we're talking about a relative organization of sequences in conversation, aside from the issue of the priority status of the insertion of these sequences into the conversation that has been taking place. Notice that we don't get, on the completion of the exchange of greetings, people starting to talk. Silence is maintained except for those who are selected to talk throughout the sequence until it is completed. One thing that is kind of neat is the ordering of the prepresent persons as they are introduced. There seems to be a right way, or alternative right ways, to introduce some person to a series of persons. How is it that the order of persons is selected? Apparently, if the ecology of the room can be used, then the ecology of the room is used. The way the room is set up, "AI, Ken, and Roger" is a clockwise going-through of the persons. "Roger, Ken, and AI" would also be an orderly procedure in the sense of going through adjacent persons, as compared to going from AI to Roger and then to Ken. And I don't know whether clockwise and counterclockwise are equivalent. I just haven't been able to have the presence of mind to see it when it was being done. It may well be that it's always clockwise, or that it varies with the position of the introducer, but it is something to look to. I have a suspicion that either way may work, by reference to the "uh" in "This is uh AI; " i.e. , the "uh" is not by reference to Dan not knowing Al's name, but if clockwise and counter­ clockwise can work from himself, then there would be an initial choice for him, i.e. , should he start with Roger or should he start with AI, and it may be that issue which is involved in the hesitation. That's again something about which I don't know. But it's something that we might be able to guess. In any event, it goes through in a clockwise order. There would be grounds for doing other orders, i.e. , if you wanted to specifically point someone out first. And one of the neat things in its fashion about this is that, e.g . , that you're picking out someone especially, in an order of introductions, is something that can be seen from one sequence. You don't have to see the same person introduced over a series of sequences to see that. In this case, the use of the clockwise movement through adjacent persons provides that nothing is particularly being done aside from introducing the people, i.e. , they are not being differentiated. The fact that AI is first doesn't mean a thing; it is not to be information for Jim that, e.g . , Al's status is higher than the others. We have, besides that, that they're all first names. Again, that could be differentiated: "Jim, this is AI, Ken Goss, and Mr Roger Mandelbaum. " That is to say, it's not always the case that if you get one first name you'll get another first name. You can perfectly well get "Jim, this is Mr so-and-so" or " . . . Dr so-and-so. " And that has, at least initially, the import of having somebody telling the various participants not merely what each's name is, but what it is that they can call each other. That is the work of the item used in the name part of the introduction, and one way that, as an introducer, you can go wrong, make people angry, be yourself embarrassed; if, e.g. , you say "Dr Jones meet Mr Smith," and the first thing Dr Jones says is "Just call me

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Jake. " Or you introduce him as Jake and he wants to be called Dr Jones. Etiquette books are full of information about the way you make decisions on that sort of a matter, and the way, as a person to be introduced, you inform others as to how they should introduce you. Emily Post has a big discussion about dinner parties where, if people are differently aged so that there are younger couples and older couples, if you don't want to be called Sam by somebody your daughter's age, then there's a strategy which can get him to call you Mr Smith, and it turns on introductions. And it's important to emphasize that it's not a matter of what it is that the introducer calls the introduced people. Somebody may call two people they're introducing Jim and Al, and nonetheless not introduce them to each other as Jim and Al. You can watch that in operation, and it's very lovely to see, e.g. , when somebody is talking about somebody, the way in which they go about finding the name to use to talk about the person, which is a name that has some independence from what either of them call that person when they're talking to that person. The character of names as property is something one can very easily find, even in our egalitarian sociery. If you collect that set of names that, e.g., your mother is called over the day, you'll find that it's not a small collection, and people own the rights to do various names, and those rights to use various names can change. We can note also about the introduction sequence that it goes to completion. That is to say, it's not only that he goes around clockwise, but he also takes them all in. He doesn't introduce only somebody, or leave out somebody. And that's again a thing about which etiquette books and other sorts of regulations talk, e.g. , for what size group do you introduce somebody to each, as compared to saying, "This is Joe. Joe, this is everybody. " Those things vary not only with reference to the size of the group, but with reference to who it is that you're introducing. Some people come into a group and you may just introduce them to "everybody. " Others come in and you may do the introductions one by one. There is, by the way, no "hi" from Al. I just don't know whether Al in fact said something that we couldn't pick up on the tape, or whether he nodded and didn't say anything, or whether he didn't do anything. I have no particular guarantee on it, i.e. , from what I know about these sessions it's perfectly conceivable that Al refrained from returning the greeting on purpose. He may have or he may not have. In any event, with the others we have these definite greeting exchanges. Now there's a neat problem. If people are introduced in pairs, what sort of attention is each giving to the sequence in which somebody else is being introduced? We could imagine that, introductions and greetings and things like that going in pairs, then it's nobody else's business to hear, or they can hear but that's up to them. And what one wants to see about this sequence is that for the later speakers in it, i.e. , Ken and Roger, the way it comes off shows that they were engaged in attending to its earlier parts. In particular, the work of the word "Ken" as an introduction of Jim to Ken turns on that it follows "Jim this is uh Al. " The word "Ken" is not

Lecture 5

65

necessarily a way that one 'introduces. ' The word "Ken" can be, e.g . , a way of getting Ken's attention. Ken gets that he's being 'introduced' via the fact that he knows that an 'introduction sequence' has begun, and the sequence comes off as requiring that he show that he knows it, which he does by his way of dealing with "Ken. " He's not, then, an overhearer to this first part, he's a proper hearer, and he should and does use his hearing of this first part - and so does Roger: We have an utterance, "-and Roger. " If we took this utterance and asked what is it for, and how the hell does Roger know what to do, then we have no way to handle it but by reference to the fact that it is organized with respect to the prior utterances. So, that this is a sequence of introductions and not, e.g., merely a list of paired introductions, is something that the way it's done brings off. He could bring off a list of paired introductions: "Jim this is Al. " "Jim this is Ken. " "Jim this is Roger. " Where, for the participation of the parties to the specific occasion of their being introduced, that they participate in it would require no attention to the other parties' being introduced . Here, the thing is brought off coordinatively. Let me make one brief remark about "-and Roger, " about 'and' as a conjunction. One tends to have a picture of 'and' being used for just conjoined things, like items on a list. Now, while it is used that way, it has a specific use here. It isn't only or particularly used in lists to locate that something else is going to follow that's also on the list, but it's used specifically to signal that the thing that follows is the last thing on the list. So you will regularly see that 'and' placed, not in each spot or any random spot, but placed before the last item on the list. (Now I say "placed before the last item," and that's a transformation from "it signals that the last item is coming. " That's a kind of thing I do all the time, but it has to be sceptically viewed. It may be a 'signal,' I don't know, but I treat it as that. If it has that sort of association, then I tend to treat it as doing that kind of a job. Now it may be that that's not reasonable, and when I think about it I don't know if it does that kind of a job for some of them, and I would like to prove it for some of them. But I say things like that, and will probably continue to.) Now, the fact that you can go around a table so to speak, provides that the fact that there is an order to introduction sequences is something you can see in pre-operation. One sort of way you can make such observations - and if one learns to make them one may learn to like them - is to watch, when you see a sequence about to happen, e.g . , people are sitting around a table and somebody comes up who knows somebody at the table and now they're going to be introduced around. It you watch the others, then you can see that there are characteristic ways that they prepare to be introduced; characteristic ways they behave before they're introduced. Things like: Before they're introduced they avoid eye contact with the person that they're going to be introduced to, but when they're about to be introduced they may keep their head in a particular way, ready to turn, i.e. , they don't keep it in any which way, but ready to be just turned up. The order of introductions is important, then, in the sense that you don't get " Al , " and then he realizes he's being introduced,

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and now they sit around waiting to see who, if anybody, is next. But if now it's AI, then Ken knows he's next, and Ken prepares to be introduced, and can then lift his head in such a way as to catch Jim's eye when Jim looks at him, so it doesn't then happen that Ken gets introduced, offers his eyes to Jim but Jim had already looked at him and has passed him by, or he offers his eyes and finds himself being stared at. The timing is kind of a nice thing, where you want to arrive at the exchange at the same time. And you can watch heads for that sort of thing. I've heard it said about our society that all the old graces are lost and people are just not the way they used to be. But if, e.g. , you watch them moving their heads in an introduction sequence, then you'll see some of the old graces. Coming back to the issue of producing a sentence across a series of other persons' insertions: If we consider the task of introductions, and consider that if what the guy is up to is to do an introduction of Jim to 'the members of the group' as compared with an introduction of Jim to three people, then to organize the production of that introduction in such a fashion that it comes off as one unit within which they have all attended to it as a unit, may be the elegant way to do specifically introducing somebody to what you want to be ' members of a group. ' To pack it into a sentence structure can perhaps make the fact that there is a relationship involved, a something that you are able to bring off in a way that you might not have as a specific thing you're bringing off otherwise. I'm not saying that if he'd said, e.g. , "Jim this is AI, " "Jim this is Ken," that people would figure that they don't have any particular relation to each other. That's not the issue so much as that there are ways of doing it so that their relationship is built in via, e.g . , that they all are shown to be attending to other than their own introduction; that he's addressing each of them in this sentence, and in a way, he's addressing each of them in each utterance.

Lecture 6

Greetings and introductions; Orienta tiona! utterances; Ultra rich, infinite topics; Being �honey' I'll continue for a bit on the greeting-introduction sequence. What I want to do now is to consider what sorts of things serve to occasion an introduction sequence, and what relationship there might be between the occasioning of it and the work it does once it's occasioned. The occasioning of an introduction sequence can in the first instance turn on certain formal co-participant considerations, having to do with just such things as that some people are in a possibly public place and somebody comes into view who's known to only one of them. If, for the one to whom they're known there's rights or obligations to have even a brief exchange, then engaging in an introduction sequence may be thereby occasioned. That is to say, if the newcomer who is acquainted with one of some pre-present group has occasion to start talking at all, then it may be felt that the pre-present acquaintance should introduce the others to him. And that can matter with respect to future possibilities. People can be seen to attend to the possibility that they will be put in a position of engaging in such a sequence, so that one thing that they will do when they're with some given other is to monitor where they will go in an attempt to control the chances of coming across an anybody that they know, for whom they thereby may feel obligations to do an introduction. And this suggests that they use such formal considerations as 'the co-presence of an acquaintance who was not originally with you' as grounds for doing an introduction. Now I'm not here referring to the possibility that you won't do an introduction, because whether you do or don't do an introduction is in its way irrelevant, since if it's the thing that's appropriately done, then that you don't do it can just stand as a notable event on the part of any of the other parties to it. The person who came into the view of you and your acquaintance can go off and comment, "He was with somebody but didn't introduce me, " or, e.g. , people you're with can say "How come you didn't introduce us to that one?" etc. And they do. Indeed, with an exchange of greetings, immediate introductions is a normal and perhaps normative thing, in just the way it happens in our case - which would seem to be perhaps a much more special case, bur it probably isn't very special. So there's that sort of way in which introductions come to be done. The sheer fact that people of certain sorts of relationships come into each others' 67

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presence suffices to occasion them. That means that these things can be rather massively used, insofar as, e.g . , people operate in relatively public places and insofar as there's some 'underlapping' rather than overlapping, I suppose, of acquaintances, i.e. , that there's some chance that when you're out walking with X, the Y that you meet will be a Y who doesn't know X, who you know. Or the reverse; when you're out walking with X, some Y appears who is known to X but not to you. The question is, what do these introduction sequences do. Well, one thing they do is, at least in some rapid minimal way, put the two people who are introduced into a state of talk together, a state of talk which has a legitimate source for its occurrence, the introduction. The state of talk you put them into may be a very minimal one, but one thing that I've already at least suggested is that states of talk once having gotten started have, at least with regards to the sequencing structures, indefinite possibilities of continuation. And the question of once it gets started where it will go, even for this conversation, is not particularly constrained by how it got started, i.e. , that it got started this way does not particularly constrain future possibilities. And you give them certain resources whereby to conduct that state of talk you're putting them into. The basic resource in this regard is, not giving them each other's names, but giving them names that each can use for the other. That takes some work on the part of the introducer, i.e. , determining what name each should use requires sorts of analysis on his part. And apparently that choice is not the introducer's free choice, i.e. , it's not just that he has a task to do and however he brings it off, that's okay. He can do it badly and he can do it well. What sorts of things seem to be involved in what names you pick? Let's consider that a bit. When you put people into a state of talk with their names, are you giving them nothing more than a name to use, or is it that the choice of a name is already informative to them of more that they can use in conducting their conversation? Each of them knows you, and there may be some rather specified ways in which they know you, i.e. , they know you as a this or as a that; as a neighbor, a colleague, an old friend, etc. And they may know whole bunches of other things about you. And the fact, then, that somebody is with you can, before you've made the introductions, set up various kinds of constraints on who they figure that other person is. Not 'who' in the sense that it's your cousin from Milwaukee, but that it's a 'somebody like you' in some way, for example. Where, if they each have various such properties as the right age, appearance, etc. , it may well be that each can figure that the other is 'a friend of yours' and then they are perhaps potential friends of each other's. Which is to say that they can perhaps use your presence with the other person not merely as something that occasions their introduction, but as informative about each other and each's possible relationship to the other, i.e. , what they could possibly have to talk about. And the sort of introduction you give them, even if only the exchange of names, may be something that allows them to see that such is the case. For

Lecture 6

69

example, introducing them to each other via nicknames may be saying to them that they are the same sort. So the idea is that the fact that an introduction may be brought off puts one in a position where each of the parties to the introduction are engaged, before that's taken place, in some attempt to determine not merely who the other is, and not merely who the other is with respect to you, but perhaps as well, who the other is with respect to them. And they can use a range of information to set up possibilities on that, which, in the way you bring off your introduction, can be delivered or not. Now, as one limiting end of this, you may determine that while the conditions have otherwise been satisfied for an introduction, the people don't belong to meet, by reference to, e.g. , the possible status relationships of the two. And you may decide not to do an introduction, or that an introduction is to be a purely pro-forma thing. So, e.g. , Emily Post gives instructions on how to introduce your neighbor to your gardener so as not to set up a conversation, or to set up a conversation of a rather delimited sort, in which she wants to know when she should cut her tulips. So the way in which you bring the introductions off matters by reference to what sort of a fix you put these people into. You could put them into a conversation in which one or the other doesn't want to be or shouldn't be ­ leaving aside that you put into conversation people you don't want in conversation, etc. Or you can put them into the conversation they want to be in, as compared to a conversation that they don't want to be in, where they only discover after an hour of talk that in fact they have gotten into a conversation that they could have had, but you didn't let them know that they could have. So that regularly, besides an exchange of names, you can give them that sort .of information which can 'get them started; ' such things as "You're both from the same town, " "He was in the same class as your brother, " "He's been dying to meet you," etc. Now it's in the way that the information you announce informs the various parties of things like their respective positions, presumably based on some determination you've made, that the detailed character of each actual introduction sequence turns out to count, where one has in the first instance a rather general structure which is just, as I say, occasioned by the fact of co-presence for anybody. It's not that this holds for rich people, poor people, high school kids, pairs of people under a formulation that the initial pair walking together down a street are acquainted for more than a year or barely acquainted, or that there are two people and one enters, or three people. That is to say, this is really an extremely formal kind of situation. One person comes into the presence of some collection of more than one, where now, for the collection of 'more than one plus one,' some two are acquainted across those lines. That can set up the possibility of an introduction sequence taking place, given that it sets up initially the possibility of at least greetings and perhaps a conversation, across the lines. However, there's this specific work of the introduction sequence. And it's in terms of the specific work of an introduction sequence for some actual group that we have all these elaborated

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kinds of workings being used, in which who you introduce first can matter, the names can matter, and all the rest. One way to think about it is to consider that a way to simplify the task of doing any introduction would be, e.g . , to constrain the occasions under which introductions could get done. You could say, for example, introductions should go 'first name to first name. ' That can operate to constrain the initial use of an introduction to only people you can introduce that way. But notice that that already sets up a problem, and anything other than the actual one creates problems, in this way. As you're going along, you're initially going about the business of exchanging greetings and perhaps getting into a conversation with somebody who comes down the street whom you know. Now that is to say that the doing of the introduction is contingent on something else happening which is regulated independently of any consider­ ation about whether you should do introductions. It's a more general thing, that walking down the street or being in some public place, whether you're with other people or not, if you come across somebody you're acquainted with you can get into a state of talk with them. The addition of other people only serves to provide what may then or ought then happen in the conversation that can have been generated independently of their presence. So that if you wanted to simplify the kinds of tasks that have to be done on each occasion in which you're doing an introduction by constraining where you're going to do introductions, then you come up against the structure of the ways that conversations get started. A situation can then arise in which you have a possible conversation taking place between two people in the presence of others who were already in a state of conversation with one of those two. And in that one person is overlapping as a co-participant in two conversations, there's some business of 'bringing the whole thing in, ' which is apparently obliged. So it's that the introduction sequence occurs upon the occurrence of the greeting phenomenon, and the greeting phenomenon is occasioned independently of that there are others with you, where the introduction thing turns on that there are others with you, that implicates this involvement of work in how you do an introduction sequence. What this amounts to is, if you were to figure that an introduction sequence is merely a ceremony, then it would be an awfully elaborated sort of ceremony, in the sense that it's not one ceremony which you do time and again, but for each use of the ceremony you have to engage in some work of analysis in order to bring it off right. One wants to know why is it built in such a 'complex' way. Transform that terminologically into an 'adaptive' way. That is to say, it's built in such a way that if a person who needs to use it knows how to use it, it can be used on any occasion of its invocation, where its occasions of invocation are specified only in extremely weak, i.e. , general ways - only in terms of things like ' more than one person plus another person' plus ' acquaintanceship' plus a conversation getting going, where a conversa­ tion getting going is provided for independently of the addition of others. So the thing is really geared in very nice detail to the conditions for starting conversation. And that involves then that one isn't to view the properties of

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the introduaion sequence as some sort of indication of the fantastic lengths to which people went in the old days to make elaborate ceremonies. That is to say, it's not only that it's adapted to the sorts of work it does, it's adapted to the conditions of occurrence. Its work of getting people into a state of conversaton could be done quite differently under different conditions of occurrence. For example, you might have a rule which says ' for two people who are to be brought into a state of conversation in a situation like this one, then it has to be the second or third time that they encounter each other, and they have to encounter each other via passing you in both positions. ' That is to say, if A knows B and C, then one time A is walking with B and meets C. And another time A is walking with C and meets B. Then the third time, A can bring B and C into conversation, having had, e.g. , time to inform each of them about the other. Or you could carry around letters to hand out, about the various people that you know. The point is that you don't have those sorts of preparations set up in principle, but you have to be ready, and perhaps in code of some sort, to tell them what they can do together and various other sorts of things as well. In that regard, it's not incidental that introductions use names, in the sense that if you're using names in an introduaion, then it's one property of names for introductions that names are adequate to any round of introductions. ('Any round' means that it's not as though you will have an expectation that you will have to introduce a thousand people to each other, but that any two or three people you introduce to each other will have a name.) And there's lots of other identifications you could use which would not be adequate to any round. If, for example, you went about introducing people via their bridge scores or their grades or, e.g. , via the position they play on a baseball team ­ which you do sometimes - then you might find that you would on some occasion be introducing people and have nothing to introduce them with, i.e. , they don't have a bridge score. But there are some sorts of identifiers which have a value for everybody; like you could introduce everybody by their age. Eventually we could introduce everybody by their telephone number or some such thing as that. That introductions take place between anybodys, anywhere, involves them in having as an item that information can be fitted to, something that anybody would have, anybody could exchange, etc. A name is one. (And now the name gets fiddled with so that you end up having eleven or three or six different names, which the various people who know you use.) Now I want to deal with 'part two ' : Ken : Roger : ( ): AI :

We were in an automobile discussion, -discussin' the psychological motives fer hhh 11 hhhh hh -drag racing on the streets.

I want to be able to locate where, i.e. , at what sort of layer of organization, the joint production is operating. We can get a bunch of general points about,

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see a lot of interest in, the joint production phenomenon. That's something separate from locating, for each occurrence of one of them, what order of organization is it operating out of, i.e. , what is the faa of collaboration doing there, or what is the faa of a joint production doing there. The question is, then, what's being done in that they're bringing this thing off in just the way they do, as compared perhaps to allowing "We were in an automobile discussion" to be a sentence, and if Roger wants to talk, he'd be producing another sentence. Let me more or less outline the course of the discussion hereafter. I want to propose that the first utterance in this series is what we could call 'orienta­ tiona!. ' I'll have further things to say about how it goes about being orientational, but one aspect of that is its placing, i.e. , its placing directly on the occurrence of an entry, greetings, and introductions, into a conversation that has been ongoing. There is that order of sequencing which operates to provide that where greetings and introduction-rounds take place on an entry of a new party into a conversation, then the introductions being over, some orientation is an appropriate object to do. There is, then, an aspect of "We were in an automobile discussion" which is operating at the organizational level of 'introductions' and things like that; in terms, then, of an overall sequential organization of a fairly general sort, where that sort of sequence is really quite recurrent, and placing a candidate in such a place can involve its being recognized. So, then, we have needed at least some sort of consideration of the prior materials because we can't find what this thing is doing without them. It isn't an inspection of this line that tells us what it might be doing - where we have to know some sense of what it might be doing to find out what they're then doing to it. And furthermore, it's not just an inspection of this thing plus the utterance before it; but in order to find what that was, one has had to see the sequence it was involved in. So that it's via attention to the sorts of sequences that have been proceeding that we can get a beginning handle on this. And its understanding by the various parties is presumably the same sort of phenomenon. It locks into a sequencing potential that their attention to the prior sequence as an 'introduction' makes relevant. And we saw that the very way that the introductions were brought off involved attention by the various parties to a 'round of introductions' as something that each will have shown the other that they were doing. (For example, I mentioned last time that on the doing of each greeting pair, the parties to it stopped talking. Normally when you're introduced and you do a greeting pair, upon the completion of the greeting pair you do some more talk. So that the enclosure of these greeting pairs within the introduction is handled by such a thing as that they don't begin to talk, but that they stop and each next pair starts up; apart from that it's organizationally brought off by Dan through his use of a single sentence.) And the next item stands in a sequence to the introduction round, as compared to being just some next item which may be related to prior things but which has no relationship to them in terms of that order of organization. As, for example, a question "What did you say?" might be related to a last

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sentence, s o when he says "Jim Reed" somebody could say "What did you say?" Now that's related to what was last said, but it's not related in the way "We were in an automobile discussion" is. I'm suggesting that you can try to get an idea of an order of organization and see the sense in which some aspects of an object are operating at one order of organization while others may not be. I am proposing that "We were in an automobile discussion" is operating at the same order of organization as the introductions, and is something placed 'after introductions. ' Now let's consider some aspects of it as an 'orientational' utterance so as to get some feel for the sorts of work involved in such an utterance. One very characteristic way that an orientational utterance is done though the formulation I'll give will sound simpler than it is - is to name a formulation of the topic that was being engaged in before the entrant came. That is to say, upon the entrance of a newcomer to the conversation, even if you don't have an introduction sequence, i.e. , with people who are already acquainted, upon greetings being done somebody can orient the new party by saying 'what we were talking about. ' I say it sounds simpler than it is by virtue of a rather complex problem of the ways in which the topic name is chosen. There are a lot of options involved in the choice of topic name. And the choice operates in some independence of whatever the pre-present parties may understand is the topic they were talking about. There are some sorts of analyses that such a speaker as the one who is here doing the orientational' utterance should do in determining what topic name to use. And one sort of analysis that he should do involves some consideration of alternative topic names in terms of some identification he makes of the entrant, and as well, some sorts of identifications he claims for himself and others. The choice of a topic name can be the product of such a determination. For example, if a bunch of ladies are sitting around talking, then if somebody enters they may say "We're talking about the new breed of petunias" under some determi­ nation of what the new person is like, or they may cast what they're doing into quite different sorts of terms, e.g. , "We're talking about the garden club" , etc . , having to do with, among other things, that they figure that the person who's entered knows about the named topic in such a way as they could join that topic. Another sort of thing is that the entrant can see that they do or do not belong in this conversation. One sort of thing that is specifically done by these orientational utterances is to inform an entrant that they should stay, participate, or leave. So that the person who's making the orientational remark engages in a determination of such a thing as would the entrant like to join this conversation, would they be able to join it, or not. They then don't use the product directly, e.g . , "You wouldn't be interested, go away," but some formulation of what's being done which tells them that they don't want to be there or that they don't belong there. And this can be done in a variety of ways. For example, there is a terminology which does that work specifically. Somebody comes into the room and you look up and you say "We're talking shop talk" or "We're talking girl talk" - not that they're ·

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talking about girls, but, e.g. , two women are sitting and talking, the husband of one of them comes into the room, and now they say to him "We're talking girl talk. " Or, for example, one can say "We're talking about . . . " some item which is known by the other to be, e.g. , 'shop talk. ' That is to say, they know nothing about that item, but it's a term in some business that they don't know anything about and are known to be uninterested in. Any technical term for any field, offered to a non-specialist, serves as information that you take it they're not interested. Now if you're going to use some possible descriptor of a topical sort, e.g . , "We're talking about the new breed o f petunias" a s compared t o a characterization of the topic, e.g. , "We're talking girl talk, " that has a problem in it. That problem is the kinds of information you have available to you about the person to whom you're offering this thing, i.e. , what do you think you know about it with respect to what you think they know about it, where the choice of terminology may exhibit your intended position with respect to the matter, and also your understanding of their intended position with respect to the matter. If somebody says "We're talking about gardens, " then somebody who doesn't know much about gardens may figure that they could perfectly well get along in a conversation about gardens, i.e. , that they know as much as anybody who isn't a bug about gardening. But if they're told that what's being discussed is some new breed of petunia, they might figure that they wouldn't be able to handle themselves in this crowd. But then again, if you tell somebody that you're discussing some new breed, it may tum out that though you think you're an expert on it, you're a novice compared to them. So you have to make those sorts of determinations, which are classically famous sources of amusement, embarrassment, etc. , i.e. , you pick a technical term to show your expertise to somebody you meet at a party, and they tum out to be the authority on that thing while you know little more than the name of it. There are, then, those sorts of orders of work involved in an orientational utterance. And the last thing in the world you want to find yourself saying is, "He says 'we were in an automobile discussion' because it's true, " i.e. , because that's a correct characterization of what they were doing. That it's true couldn't be more irrelevant. The fact that something is true is not grounds for saying it, i.e. , not grounds for saying it in any given place. But naming a topic is one way of doing an orientation, and the choice of a topic name counts in a variety of ways. Let me just note that the use of a topic name to do an orientation has, aside from the work it does by reference to the recipient, that it gets that topic up on the board again. And in that regard, this sort of orientational utterance is a case of one way of dealing with interruptions, i.e. , it's a case of reassertion of topic, where reassertion of topic works not just to announce what we were doing - i.e. , an announcement of one does not provide now for a list of others, e.g. , "We were in an automobile discussion and last week we were talking about high school dropouts" - but it works to reinvoke a topic. And they do reinvoke the topic, or they can be quarreled with, " No we weren't, we were

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doing something else. " But again, lt s via the fact that the thing is 'orientational' that to whom it's directed can be found; indeed, seeing that it's orientational is crucial to seeing to whom it's directed. And seeing that it's orientational involves seeing its sequenced position with respect to the introduction sequence. I want now to suggest that an 'automobile discussion' is a special sort of topic for the sorts of people that are doing it here, i.e. , these teenage boys. There are various ways to develop the sort of topic it is. The way I'm going to talk about it is as a topic 'for them, ' a topic for teenage boys - not that it's a topic, and it can be a topic for teenage boys and for others, but 'automobile discussion for teenage boys' is one name because the way in which it's a topic for them is different than the way in which it's a topic for anybody else. Let me give one way to show that it's a special sort of object - and at least incidentally we may see whether my formulation of it is acceptable or not. There has been a bit of literature about special topics for a culture. In a book called The Nuer by E. E. Pritchard, an anthropologist of a slightly earlier day, he talks about cattle for the Nuer; how cattle for the Nuer are a topic of a very special sort, and how you can't talk about anything with the Nuer without it ending up being about cattle. This is from Chapter 1 , pages 1 8- 1 9 . We have seen in a brief survey of some Nuer institutions and customs that most of their social behavior directly concerns their cattle. A fuller study of their culture would show everywhere the same dominant interest in cattle. For example, in their folklore. They are always talking about their beasts. I used to sometimes despair that I never discussed anything with the young men but livestock and girls. And even the subject of girls led inevitably to that of cattle. Start on whatever subjeas I would, and approach it from whatever angle, we would soon be speaking of cows and oxen, heifers and steers, rams and sheep, he-goats and she-goats, calves and lambs and kids. I've already indicated that this obsession - for such it seems to the outsider - is due not only to the great economic value of cattle, but also to the fact that they are linked in numerous social relationships. Nuer tend to define all social processes and relationships in terms of cattle. Their social idiom is a bovine idiom. Consequently he who lives among Nuer and wishes to understand their social life, must first master a vocabulary referring to cattle, and to the life of the herds. Such complicated discussions as those which take place in legal disputes, can only be followed when one understands the difficult cattle terminology of colors, ages, sexes, and so forth. Now, he wants to make a case for the central status of cattle in the Nuer society but I'm not particularly involved in that. The question is that you can make a case for the central status of cattle conversation among the Nuer. And we want to make a case for the peculiar status of automobile talk for teenage boys. And I want to talk about the topic as being 'ultra rich' for them. I

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suppose it's something that I could just say, but I'd rather not just say it if we can get anything out of a discussion of it. One sort of thing we can mean by 'ultra rich' is that it's in some literal way an 'infinite' topic. Imagine that we're talking about a car. A car has a finite set of parts. Any part can be talked of, for some amount. Then you can imagine that talking about the parts of a car would involve you in reducing the amount of talk you can make about that car's parts as you proceeded through the conversation, i.e. , you would be getting into a position where you'd have less and less to say. In the first instance this situation is rather simpler for adults, in that, e.g. , for some car you have, not any part is an object that you could talk about; there may be very few parts and there may be very little that you could say about them. But we can begin to get a picture of the way in which automobile conversations for kids are not at all constrained in the way they are for adults, by considering what sort of an object a car is for a kid, by reference to its parts. A car for a kid has an infinite set of parts. That's an assertion. That assertion doesn't turn on that there are a lot more parts than you think, but what I'm saying is, for one, any part of a car can be replaced. And any replaced part can be replaced. You can have, then, infinite conversation, in that you can replace a part, announce that you've replaced a part, discuss the replacement of some replaced part, etc. And there are very nice relationships in that replacing a part leads to considerations of other parts to be replaced so as to keep the car organized now around the new part. The dramatic difference is if, e.g. , an adult happens to announce to another adult that they just replaced the engine in their car, or the tires, etc. there are extremely few sorts of reasons why that could have happened, e.g. , the engine died, the tires wore out. While such reasons could exist for teenage kids, their reasons are in no way constrained like that. The replacement of a part has to do with, e.g. , making it a better car. And there is no issue of economics, i.e. , it isn't that the part is replaced instead of replacing the entire car, but one replaces a part as a way that one keeps one's car in model shape. The idea being that the ways in which kids treat cars have as their consequence that they can have talk about cars, not merely of much more technical sorts, but of a much more elaborated sort than adults could have. Now there's a phenomenon like the following involved. If a bunch of people go to a restaurant and they get the menus and somebody says "Gee I think I'll have roast beef, " that is not treated as merely their choice, it's treated as a proposal. So that somebody else will say, "Oh I just had roast beef last night, ' ' or something like that. If the first statement were not heard as a proposal, the relationship of the second to it might be obscure. But you get that a person's proposed thing that they will eat is treated as a proposal for others. And people say why they will or will not have that thing, or engage in some discussion about what this person ought to have other than roast beef. That's a way in which what might seem in the first instance to be personal proposals get treated for some rather small group. Now for kids, cars have the same sort of status. If you propose, e.g . , "I want a Chevvy 409 , " then that

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proposal will b e treated in the same sort of way. Another kid will say "I don't want a Chevvy 409 " and say why, or that you shouldn't want a Chevvy 409 . So there's that sense of anybody's 'want' being a community affair. And again, it's a sense in which a proposal is conversationally generative. That is to say, if you say "I want a Chevvy 409 , " if that can be turned into an issue of whether everybody else ought to have one or you ought not to have one, then the way in which it can produce talk is different than if you say "I want a Chevvy 409 " or "I want a steak" and the business of anybody else is to just list their desired item. So there's that sense in which this is a kind of special item for conversation. We could just begin to consider, as one criterion of possibly interesting items for conversation for different sorts of groups, what sorts of things which you offer as simply a personal proposal, are treated as intended as otherwise. I suppose to some extent for students, course selection might be such a thing. If you go around at certain times and say ' T m going to take this, " then perhaps your friends will treat it as something they should consider, something you should reconsider, etc. Now with respect to car parts there is again that character, for at least some teenage boys anyway, that the parts are replaceable, that conversation can be about replaced parts, parts to be replaced, parts to be replaced after parts that are to be replaced have been replaced, i.e. , "After I get the new aluminum VS engine, I'll do X, Y, Z. " So you get a picture of conversational possibilities that are really immense. And again, that sort of format, of 'after I get what I don't have now, what I will then do' is, I take it, something rather constrained in its use. Another thing that allows for the kind of extensions it has is the scope of the community involved. For lots of things, to introduce them comparatively operates within very restricted lines. So, for example, if we're talking about bridge playing and we're not professional bridge players but just occasionally play bridge, then I pretty much can't use any bridge player for comparison apart from the people we play bridge with. If I'm talking about how somebody cooks and we're not listed chefs, then I can't talk about anybody for comparison as a cook except somebody that we know. Now as our status shifts on those things, the constraints on to whom somebody can be compared, can shift. In that regard, even negative comparisons can be a major indication that people figure you are in a different league than they figured that you were before. When they say you're worse than X, X being some sort of professional, that's a lot better than being better than Y who's just a neighbor. Now it's a character of comparison of cars, that a kid hotrodder can compare his car or somebody else's car to some car of somebody that neither of them know; some car they've heard of. Cars which haven't raced can be compared. And the community of stories about cars can be passed with considerable hearsay. So that it's not just your car compared to a friend's car, but your car within a community of cars. I wanted to suggest that we can say in interesting ways that an automobile discussion is something special for kids. And we've found some ways of

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showing it's special which are themselves interesting. The point is it's not simply that kids talk more about cars than other people talk about cars, it's how they talk about cars that's interesting. And how they talk about cars may provide for that they talk more about cars. Now how kids talk about cars may be undifferentiated from how other people talk about other things, or how kids talk about other things. It just may be that there are some cultural objects for a group, 'ultra rich conversational topics. ' And for some conversation system there's a way in which something can operate as an 'ultra rich topic, ' so that any 'ultra rich' topic gets talked o f in more or less the same way. I don't know if it's so, but it's at least possible. Now it's perfectly possible to be a teenage boy and talk about cars in the way that anybody else talks about cars. But then one wouldn't be in a position to engage in talk about cars with those for whom it is special. For one, you simply wouldn't be able to understand what they're talking about, i.e. , you might not know what the terms mean. What are 2 0-inch slicks? You don't have any idea. There are other sorts of things involved: If, for example, at some point in the conversation somebody says "I can get you ten seconds for 500 dollars, " you might not know whether that was good, bad, cheap, too much. If somebody proposed that the engine weighed 340 pounds, then you might figure that its weight was relevant, but you might not know whether it was particularly light or particularly heavy, or that's just what it weighed. Where, when they talk about that thing they would have no reason to state the value of the variable when that variable is asserted. And that is a characteristic way that they're doing 'member' talk about something. That is to say, when people know the values of items, they don't attach that value to the assertion, "It weighs 340 pounds and that's very light for an engine of that sort, and that it's light is a good thing. " You wouldn't even know that you wanted a light engine. So there's a whole range of ways in which the talk can be opaque. And while you may figure that you're perfectly well interested in having a conversation about cars, that conversation about cars, with its opaque terms, etc., may be specifically uninteresting. And that it's uninteresting can be a way in which you find yourself left out, and left out of something that can matter for such as you. There are certain sorts of things which one can be quite uninterested in, have no feelings about, and nonetheless know that 'people like you' do. The classical sociologist Simmel introduced a concept which he called 'completeness, ' which had to do with the extent to which some group formulated as a group-within-a-group was able to make members of all of those, or only part of those, located as eligible. So that, e.g . , the fact that you work in a factory may make you, for some people who also do it, eligible for being a union member though you may not want to be a union member; you may see that some people will figure that you should be a union member and that you have to take a position, say, with respect to whether you're going to be a union member or not. And he employs the notion as a way of assessing organizations. Any organization which claims some population as its eligibles, to what extent did they want completeness - some don't want

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completeness - and to what extent if they wanted completeness did they get it. And one can at least approach the way in which persons within some group orient to the fact that there's some claim that they ought to be a member. So teenage boys may, whether or not they are interested in cars the way, say, 'hotrodders' are, know that that's a thing that they have to take a position on. That is to say, it's of such relevance that they either are or they are not. Whereas there can be things which if you aren't, you don't figure yourself as a 'not such-and-such, ' there are some things which gain such relevance within a group that you can be a 'not such-and-such. ' In that regard, then, the topic that Ken proposes with "We were in an automobile discussion" is one that is not at all incidental for Ken to be proposing that we were engaged in. It's a topic about which it can be expected that there is some considerable identificational interest in on the part of Jim, the new entrant. Now I take it that it's not too much to say that their knowledge that somebody new was coming into the group, that he was a boy, was relevant to the projection of this topic as something that they could continue until he came in, and indeed have going when he came in, as compared to other sorts of topics that they could have going. That sort of inference can be made in that it is altogether relevant to parties that when somebody comes in, that they be caught in a characteristic pose. There are all kinds of funny things involved in that. If, e.g . , you're sitting in your house and watching TV, watching some serial at 8 : 3 0 at night and the doorbell rings, then the first thing you would do is tum off the TV so as to not be in a positon of having somebody who comes in seeing you watching that TV program. Where, although you may claim "I never watch it, I just­ this is the first time, " they can nonetheless figure that when they catch you doing anything, they catch you doing what you characteristically do. Knowing that some people are coming may, then, involve you in arranging things so as to have a 'characteristic appearance' evident. The import of this sort of characteristic appearance on the entrance of somebody is really profound. And it has some very neat sorts of throw-offs. Suppose, for example, that people are coming over to your house. Now, you have magazines on your coffee table. And the magazines you have on the coffee table are legitimately treatable by them as ways of determining, e.g . , what you read, and via what you read, what you're like. Or rather, they can use some magazine that you have, to make an initial determination of what you claim to be, so that they can say later on, "He's a phoney" though you haven't asserted any claim, in the sense that you haven't said ' 'I'm a real intellectual. ' ' But by virtue of the fact that you have that magazine there even though you might say ' 'This is the first time I ever bought it' ' - they can figure that you put it there for them to see and are thereby claiming that you're the sort of person who has that thing. And of course it's classically known that people specifically arrange things so as to locate who they are, to others. That initial appearance is, then, something that is known to be projectable, and can be treated as projected whether it's projected or not. By

·

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that I mean that somebody can say "He's a phoney, at first I thought he was an X but then I realized he's not, " where the person being talked about 'never claimed' to be what he isn't, It's something that requires attention, that people pick something that matters; in our case, that they may have engaged in such a conversation as will allow them to be in the position to say "This is what we're doing" when doing such a thing as this can matter. And that's one sense in which it's misguided to say "They say 'we were in an automobile discussion' because they were in an automobile discussion. " They may have arranged that they are in an automobile discussion so as to be able to say "We were in an automobile discussion. " That initially used orientational item isn't to be seen as simply chosen by reference to what they were in fact doing, since for one, if they weren't doing something that they wanted to use as an orientational item, they could use some other orientational item; they could do other things, e.g. , discussing who they are, or who he is, or something else. And of course it's perfectly possible that one will say, not what one was doing, which is true, but say what one might well have been doing, which is more useful. Now let's notice one feature of 'an automobile discussion for teenagers' which begins to invoke another aspect of this orientational usage here, and that is that these people were in an automobile discussion is specifically interesting in that they're not just 'teenage boys' and this is not just a 'teenage boys' conversation; ' it's a group therapy session. And there can be for the entrant quite a question as to what in the hell do they do in here? And the claim involved in "We were in an automobile discussion" may well be "There's nothing special here at all. We do what we always do. " That is to say, it does not in any way whatsoever differentiate the talk done here from such sorts of talk as teenage boys do, independently of settings. Consider that you really would have no idea what in the world they'd be talking about. They could be talking about things that you have no knowledge with respect to. Or one might have one's imaginations about what people talk about in a group therapy session. They could be talking about things that you absolutely don't want to get into, etc. Is he going to have to talk about his fantasies with respect to his mother? It's perfectly plausible for him that when he enters, that's what they're talking about. So there's perhaps this enormously comfort-offering character to this statement. One feature, then, is that the proposed topic does not locate the setting that is transparently involved here, or the status of the boy as is transparently involved, i.e. , that they're 'patients. ' Instead, it locates - at least by naming it - that it's a thing that such people as we do wherever. One further rather neat aspect of it is, as I said, it's special for teenage boys. Which is to say that they're going to be talking about something that they're experts in. Which is to say that they're going to be talking about something in the presence of an adult, in which he's not an expert. Which is to say that they're going to be talking about something in the presence of the therapist in which he's not an expert. Which is something perhaps peculiarly safe. He's coming into a

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position in which there's an expert there, a therapist, knowledgeable in ways that he's not knowledgeable and he would figure that the other patients are not knowledgeable, i.e. , they're going to be saying things which they don't know the sense of. That's one thing everybody knows about therapy; you're going to be saying things and you don't know what they mean, but the therapist knows what they mean. Now a topic is proposed that is such a topic as he knows that he and the others will know what they mean, and the therapist won't be able to understand them - not in the sense that it will be psychiatrically dense for him, but that he's a culture-outsider for it. Also of course, remember the early point that automobile discussions for teenagers can go on forever. You could have a topic announced which would clearly provide for, "Well, where are you in it, the beginning or the end?" For example, "We were talking about Psycho. " Psycho could be talked about for a while, and if you've already been talking about it, I'm probably in at the end of the conversation, maybe it'll go on another ten minutes. If we're in an automobile discussion, there's no sense in which it is relevant that we just began or we've been going on for an hour. Whatever length it's so far had, it can have an indefinitely continuing length. So he doesn't have to figure ' ' Well God damn it I came in at the end of just the sort of thing that I'm able to handle. ' ' And that possible extendedness of a topic from where we catch it is in principle an important issue, in terms of the view you have of what's taking place. So he's being invited, perhaps, into a situation in which what's going to be done is that sort of thing that he is possibly most comfortable with, done with colleagues, done in the presence of an adult who might be expected to be peculiarly knowledgeable about what he says in ways that he couldn't control, but where the adult is perhaps not at all in that position, and for such a topic as can go on indefinitely. Not only go on indefinitely in the sense that it can continue until the end of this session, but it can go on in the next session just as well. And a topic for which, whatever it is he already knows, has had conversations, experiences, etc., about cars, he is stocked with material that he can tell them. He doesn't come into a position in which he's told that he's going to be speechless. So it's a very powerful topic choice used orientationally. If one considers the options of attractive orientational topics, I would venture to say that there is none better for them. That is to say, the alternative favorite topic that you might come up with would not have the kinds of attributes this one does. Sex, which would be a great teenage boy topic, is hardly the kind of topic that could proceed with the kind of ease that it could with the absence of a therapist. A sex conversation here would be quite different than a sex conversation outside. And whatever other topics one might come up with would not have the peculiarly neat status that this one does. It is, then, orientational in a large range of ways beyond 'what we're now going to talk of here. ' It's orientational about who we are, what we talk about, the sorts of ways we talk about it, etc. I would particularly single out things like the expertise relationship for the item with respect to the therapist.

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That having been said, we can at least notice that, the introductions having been finished, it is one of the kids who goes about doing the orientation, as compared to leaving that for the therapist to do. That is to say, if there is that sort of job to be done, then they take over that piece of work, where there could be questions about who does it, and what's involved in one or another of the potential doers doing it. If the therapist spoke, would he say "We were in an automobile discussion" or "They were in an automobile discussion"? If he'd said either of those, what sort of a reinvoking of the topic would that be, i.e. , would it be voluntary or would he be instructing them to go back to their conversation? I don't mean that in the sense that if the therapist said it, it would oblige people to talk, because you can't oblige people to talk, but it would set up the import of their talking or not talking. And of course, whether he would pick that sort of orientation at all is another issue. In several ways, then, it can indeed matter who does that sort of thing. Now, I'm not trying here simply to give information about teenage boys or favorite topics of teenage boys and things like that. I want to be pointing out something like this: If one were asked to say something about that item "We were in an automobile discussion, " one might find that it was utterly dense, and utterly dense specifically because it seems so "Well, that's what they were talking about, so it's true, isn't it? What else should they say? So what can you say about it? " But we've been able to marshall a bunch of ways of getting at this thing that permit us to say a lot about it, and a lot about it that makes us eager to look to other conversations in which, e.g. , a topic gets named, so as to see what that's doing. What one might do, then, is review the character of my discussion, not for what it says about automobile discussions and teenage kids, but for the sorts of attacks that were made on this utterance, i.e. , the various kinds of attacks that were made on this utterance, i.e. , the various kinds of starting and restarting that have been done to locate the kind of work involved in a thing like this. Now I'll shift ground altogether and begin to get back to the continuation that's done. And when we come back to it now, we have at least the idea that perhaps there's a lot going on in that thing, so that if there's a lot further happening it's not surprizing. Again, the point I want to make is that what we want to do is to lock in on where, organizationally, is the doing of the collaboration accomplished. Is it accomplished at the same organizational level as, e.g. , that it's 'orientational' or is it involved in other sorts of matters? I want first to note that there's an aspect of the form of this collaborative that's extractable so that collaboratives like it can be built, and in fact, utterances can be built by single speakers as well, which use this form, i.e. , its form is perhaps one that is not altogether unique. Let me give another instance and the relationship will be obvious: "We were at dinner, dining on roast beef and mashed potatoes. ' ' So that you have here this kind of relationship between a noun and a participialization of the noun which permits you to treat a possible sentence as only the 'independent clause' of a sentence that has an independent and a dependent clause, via the use of just participializing the noun. "We were in an automobile discussion" "discussing

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the psychological motives for . . . " The construction clearly could have been used by Ken himself, and it doesn't involve some really arbitrary fitting. We can note that Roger's starting up clearly preserves the orientational character, though there's obviously some modification involved. And we can note that, that Roger's utterance is a continuation of Ken's is something that Al then shows that he saw. Al could have built an utterance which would involve transforming Roger's from a continuation to a new beginning: ' 'discussing the psychological motives for' ' ' 'drag racing on the streets, is what we were doing. " Had Al provided that last utterance, he would have turned Roger's into the beginning of his. So what he actually does is relevant to what Roger will have done, just as what Roger has done turns Ken's from a perfectly good sentence into a clause. That of course doesn't tell us at all why Roger does this. Now we had an initial feature which was that if Ken's is an orientational utterance, then it locates Jim as the recipient. If it locates Jim as the recipient, then Jim should speak next. And I want to propose next time that it's by reference to dealing with Jim speaking next that we can deal with what Roger is doing here. 1

1 None of the subsequent Fall 1 968 lectures was transcribed.

Part II Winter 1969

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks © 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6

Lecture

1 Announcements; Touched-off utterances; Noticings; The makings of conversation; Local resources The following fragment occurs about six utterances into the first of these group therapy sessions that I've been fiddling around with. Roger has been talking, and I put the last bit of his talk in for a reason which I'll get to shortly. Roger : AI:

Roger : AI :

Roger :

. . . of the desk that 'e lijjkes. Hey you have a hole in yer shoe, heh Do(hh)n' tell me. hhh heh This place co:s' too much money. Can' afforda buy shoes. (2 . 0) ' S breaking my folks. (2 . 0)

Roger :

My insanity's breaking their bankb'k. Have yer folks said anything? (0 7 ) Nah(h)

(Roger) :

((very soft)) (They ain't sayin nuttin' . )

Roger : Dan :

.

(4. 0)

I've been collecting notes on this thing for a long time, kind of a conglomeration of things. I'm starting to talk about it now in that it has some rough relationship to at least some aspects of 'weather talk. ' 1 It may be a relevant predecessor to considering weather talk by virtue of this sort of issue: Where do people place announcements, noticings, in conversation? That's one sort of thing. Another sort of thing is more in point for weather talk in particular and concerns the 'makings of conversation, ' which is something I've worked on a bit with regard to a conversation in which a piece of news, ' 'I got a raise,' ' is used to make certain sorts of talk, i.e. , is used in the making of conversation. And I want to deal a bit with the makings of conversation by reference to this fragment. But I'll start off by just grossly saying something about that first matter, the placing of announcements - leaving aside for now some sorts of noticings, including the one in this fragment, "Hey you have a hole in your shoe. " 1 The class had been given materials to consider, on talk about the weather. Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks © 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6

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It appears that there are, maybe, three sorts of places that announcements go; two of which have one sort of orderliness to them, and the third, another. First of all they go in what is in its way a 'free space' for announcements - at the beginning of conversations. When you say to somebody "How are you?" or when you begin a call, then one of the things that's done at that place is to make some sorts of announcements: "How are you feeling?" "Lousy, my wife just had an operation, " or, "I just called to say I have to have an operation. " So that's one place that announcements go. However, not all sorts of announcements should go there, and indeed announcements which you may want to make, you may not want to put there because in putting them there they are thereby given a kind of status. There appears to be some sort of hierarchical relationship among an­ nounceables. Putting an announceable at the beginning, you might be seen as claiming one order of importance for it, i.e. , treating it as 'initially mentionable' or as a 'reason for a call. ' It may perfectly well be an announceable, but not an announceable that should be treated as initially mentionable or as a reason for a call. So even if you have a bunch of announcements and you get a chance to make an announcement, you may not make the announcement in that initial place. Of course for the dealing-with of an actually occurring announcement there is the problem that for those two people that thing that should not go first could, for some other people or on some other occasion be placed in, e.g. , 'reason for the call' status. Again, then, first there are the sorts of things which are useable as reasons for a call or gotten by "How are you?" Second, and in a way related to this type of first, is a place that occurs when somebody signals that perhaps the conversation should close. There, one regularly gets somebody saying "Oh by the way . . . " and then putting in the announcement. Now I haven't talked about 'closings' but I'll just say for now that one of the big things about closings is that closing is not something that's done like 'greetings' in that you say "Hi" and you've done a greeting, but closing is something that's collaboratively done and takes a sequence itself, so that there are closing­ beginnings and then closing-ends. And in conversations people go about getting together to close. So one second place for an announcement is after a dosing-beginning with somebody saying "Oh by the way . . . " and putting in the announcement. Third are announcements that are placed in the 'middle. ' And if you take a collection of announceables that are placed in a conversation, the ones I'll talk of now do not seem to be so easily interchanged with the first two. The character of announcements placed in the 'middle' is this: They're a sort of thing that occur as ' touched off ' utterances. And by that I mean something like this: In one of these group therapy sessions we get the following sort of occurrence: Ken :

Hey put your shoes back on c' mon I can smell you all the way over here. Roger : It's good for I I you.

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AI : It's your problem. It'll grow hair on your chest. Roger : Yeah and all that good stuff. Ken : heh heh God any more hair on my chest and I'd be a fuzz boy. Roger : 'D be a what? Ken : [A fuzz boy. AI : Fuzz boy. Ken : Fuzz mop. AI : Then you - then you'd have to start shaving. Ken : ehhehh Roger : Hey I shaved this morni - I mean last night for you.

What you have is the occurrence of the mentioning of shaving occasioning Roger's announcement that he shaved. That announcement is not, perhaps, the sort of thing that he would do at the beginning of the conversation - or if he did announce it at the beginning he would be claiming for it some sort of status that he might not want to claim for it. Now some things shouldn't go as touched off utterances in the middle of a conversation. If, for example, they're talking along and somebody says "Harry and Mary just had a baby, " then you wouldn't at that point say, "Hey I just had a baby. " A thing like that should have gone at the beginning, it shouldn't be ' merely' touched off. But for some things, if you announce them right up front, people can ridicule them, like "What's the big deal about that?" which happens in one of the group therapy sessions. Ken's first utterance in the session is "I was at the police station this morning. " That's an announceable. Somebody else says "Big deal. " That is, it's seen that not only is he making an announcement but that, in that he places the announcement where he does, he's making a claim about it. Were the talk to come down to, e.g. , a discussion about cops, he might then say, "Well I was at the police station this morning and . . . " and launch into whatever he wants to say. And it might perhaps be treated quite differently. The question of how the things get treated, depending upon where they're placed seems to be relevant to where they get placed. Now what's interesting is that one of the ways in which you don't have to put announcements in at the beginning of a conversation is that the course of a conversation can allow for the 'natural placing' of announcements by virtue of whatever it is that happens to come up. So if you have a bunch of announcements you don't have to figure that if you don't get them in right at the beginning you'll never get a chance to say them, but you can simply introduce them as appropriately placed, more or less, given what's just been said - given that the character of the conversation is that it may wander over this and that. (And if it doesn't happen that way, and you still want to say something, then you can put it into the dosing section, after a dosing has been begun.) Of course if you're using the touched off mechanism then there are ways of setting up that you might be able to touch things off. But then there are also topics that, for some set of people, you may be able to feel fairly assured that something like it will come up and you can mention your news. To take

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a dramatic instance, in these materials one topic that is invariable is talk about cars. And it happens in one of the sessions that something really godawful happened. Roger had sold Al a car which then "blew up" shortly thereafter, and that was a rather touchy sort of thing. Al doesn't announce it. What happens is that the conversation - as it invariably does - gets around to cars. Roger's car club is working under his direction, and there is discussion about how they may be being exploited. 5 Roger : Ken :

And I'm not using other people to do it. They're enjoying it too. I'm just I'm just enlightening 'em to my uh method of enjoying themselves. heh

(4. 0) Now Al. Al likes t- likes II tKen : Roger : 1' m opening new channels for II eight out of the thirteen. Waita minute wait. Ken : Ken : Al likes to uh t-to ride sailboats or- or something II ( Roger : Not any more bah hehh ah bah heh Ken : Why? What happened? Roger : She's gone hehh AI : She is sold. She's gonna be sold. Ken : Oh. Well, he used to. AI : [Mm hm, Or-he-he still does in-in the back of his mind probly. Ken : Roger : Now he likes to drive fast Austin Healys now. AI : Not any more. Roger : What happened? --AI : It blew up. Roger : Didju really?

And that may be more effeaive than if he had just started off with an accusation. These touched off things are technically very elaborate and all I'm saying now is that we can watch for them. One thing about the touched offs is that if you're going to make one, then the placing of that item upon the occurrence of the utterance that touches it off is crucial. What that involves then is that that's a place where you can find somebody really trying to get the floor, cutting somebody else off, interrupt­ ing and the like, with their touched off announcements. Now some sorts of noticings, e.g. , 'environmental' noticings like "Hey you have a hole in your shoe" and all sorts of things which occur in conversation and which involve the noticing of, e.g. , the passing world ("Hey your cigarette's gone out," "What was that noise?" "Did you see that?") are similar to the touched off announcements in that - again as for most sorts of things that happen in conversation - the timing of their occurrence is one integral part of their occurring. And with environmental noticings one of the ways that one tends to go about showing that what one is asserting, one has just noticed, is to do

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it by reference to, e.g. , an interruption of somebody else. So we regularly find that these sorts of noticing announcements cut into someone else's talk. It isn't then, perhaps, an altogether incidental thing that this "Hey you have a hole in your shoe" does start up while another person is talking. That's kind of a characteristic thing for noticings. Now I take this to be a weak assertion in that I don't really know that it's so that noticings are specifically interruptive. I raise it as a possibility. It is a matter of some interest for us, in that any place we can cut into and locate specific classes of things which occur as interruptions means that we are reducing the random disorderliness of the occurrence of interruptions. There are bunches of different things, and each one is something we would want to consider. Another weak but possibly so feature, which is a feature here, is that "Hey you have a hole in your shoe' ' announced by AI, interrupts Roger and is directed to Roger. That is to say, it is perhaps the case that that sort of a noticing is a sort which would be directed to the person just talking. And if that's so there's a good reason for it which is, if Roger is talking then one legitimate - if not somewhat obliged - thing that AI can be doing is looking at Roger. And that then involves that while not in any way topically related to what Roger has been saying, that AI has been paying attention to Roger is something that announcing the seeing of the hole in his shoe can involve. So it might turn out that, e.g . , noticings of things like the physical features of persons in the room are placed by reference to the talk of the person whose feature is noticed. And that is an offshoot in its way of that attention that one might, should, be giving to the speaker, and involves then that one isn't just announcing any noticing, but announcing a noticing which in its fashion turned on an attention to the speaker. That is so here, it may be so elsewhere. And if we're looking for aspects of the orderliness of noticings, then that they are interruptive and that they are directed to a current speaker are two possibilities. Now that doesn't tell us anything in the world about why AI says "Hey you have a hole in your shoe" - where the fact that Roger has a hole in his shoe doesn't account for Al's saying it - and why he says it is one sort of thing I want to give some attention to. I want to make a partial lesson out of the talk about the hole in Roger's shoe because involved there is a kind of thing which, if you are an analyst of conversation who is a knowledgeable member of the society whose conversation you are analyzing, could trip you up. That is, it would not lead you to see a sort of thing that a cultural stranger might see, but which in any event I guess we can come to be in a position to observe. What's involved is this: When you're thinking about this hole in the shoe and what's being done with it you may tend to start off with, as your primary sort of fact, that in the world - as apart from in the conversation - the shoe is Roger's, and use that possessional relationship as central. Whereas if you're going to use that sort of a fact, what you want to do is to ask, Well how does that fact, that an object is somebody's, conversationally matter? And you may get one immediate sort of payoff. Whereas in the world, that it's Roger's shoe

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matters in that, e.g . , if it's Roger's shoe then Al can't walk off with it, that doesn't say that Al can't talk about it. But that it's Roger's does matter for Al talking about it in this way: If Al's going to talk about it, e.g. , notice a hole in it, then he has somebody to talk to about it - Roger. And he can figure that if he talks about it Roger's going to talk back. That is to say, the possessional relationship turns out to mean that that's a thing which serves to locate who it is that will talk if you raise a topic, so that if you raise as a topic, an object that is owned by somebody, then you can perhaps pretty well figure that they'll be willing to talk in turn about it. So that fact that Roger owns the shoe controls some sorts of uses in the world, but doesn't in any way prevent somebody from, e.g. , talking about it - though it happens that in some cultures, and for some objects in this culture, the fact that somebody owns something serves as a perfectly adequate constraint in a conversation for anybody talking about it, e.g . , when they're present. Now the lesson is something like this: With respect to, say, things being conceived of as "That's X's, that's Y's, that belongs in the room, that's Z's," etc. all those sorts of things are possible makings of a conversation, where the fact that it's somebody's can count in various ways, but not automatically as something which says, e.g. , that only they can talk about it. So you want to think of bringing a bunch of possible conversational equipment to a conversation with you. Think of Show and Tell in grade school as a model; where, however, while it's perfectly obvious that some things are specifically brought to a conversation for their possibly being noticed and remarked on in some occasions, it's not just the particular thing that you want to talk about that you bring, but you bring a range of things - some of them unavoidably, e.g . , your body and attributes of your body, its odors, etc. What you want in the first instance to do, insofar as we're talking about the organization of conversation, is to think of the collection of attributes a person has, as possible features of the conversation. This one happens to be brought by X, that one happens to be brought by Y, but it's a collection that one might as well imagine as being brought and thrown into the middle of the room. And in its fashion one of the striking sorts of facts about people's talking together is what they can make do with. You might figure that ]ohnson and Rusk have lots to talk about, but me and my girlfriend, we see each other every day, nothing much happens, what the hell do we have to talk about? And it's just not so. It's specifically a trained sort of thing, i.e. , one takes delight - and sees it as perhaps quite different from one's own life - in watching a little kid make a morning out of a piece of string and a tin can. You say "Look what a kid can do. Just a piece of string and a tin can and an odd pair of shoes lying around, and he's able to have a morning's play. " The point I'm getting to is that the local resources are what people make conversations out of, what they can make conversations out of, and endlessly. And the only way you can begin to think about, well, how in the world can they do it; how in the world can they take whatever's at hand and make conversation after conversation after conversation out of it (and of course weather talk begins to come up as a thing at the back of our minds), is by

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seeing that whatever they happen to bring in with them is available for conversation. And on some occasion you will have found that your T-shirt and your sweater and your shoes and somebody else's, and your glasses and your ears have been turned to use. It's in that sense that you want to see that whatever anybody brings into a room, they bring as possible makings, to be turned to use. And where things like 'who owns it' matter for, e.g. , what your're doing when you talk about it, who you're selecting to talk, what the chances are of getting anybody to talk, and things like that, but not so much in the way in which 'who owns it' matters for other sorts of events. So a shoe is then a perfectly good ordinary object to make some talk about. The issue is to find a way of turning it to use under the various sorts of constraints that there are in conversation, which involve that you pretty much can't say "Hey you're wearing a shirt" or things like that just anywhere in a conversation. That is to say, you have to be attending the things everybody brings in and piles up in the room so to speak, for now-sayable things about them. So if the shoe has a hole in it, that may be noticeable. If you weren't wearing a shirt before and now you are, then "Hey you're wearing a shirt" may be now-sayable. And when we come to see that it's things like the hole in the shoe that are used, or that you're now wearing a shirt or that you're wearing a new shirt, then we can see that a vast amount of conversation is devoted to those makings that everybody brings with them, and that even though people don't make an altogether only topic out of those makings, they nonetheless show, again and again, that they're attending those things, awaiting their possible use, so that when something happens, then they can use it. And we can see that, furthermore, the fact that such a thing was talked of last time doesn't mean it isn't to be talked about this time. The fact that it was talked about last time can set up its being talked about this time, e.g. , "You look better today than you looked yesterday, " where yesterday I said "you don't look so good. " Okay, so for the question 'why did he talk about the shoe?' what I attacked was 'what is it that makes anything like a shoe talkable-about?' where, for the discussion so far, 'shoe' could be replaced by anything that somebody brings. It's really worth trying, insofar as we're thinking about social organization, to attempt to reconceive all these objects as just piled in the middle of the room and available for talk, and then to try to reconceive how it is that things like whose it is matter for the organization of conversation. You can then get to things like how whose it is turns what you might say about it into some conversational action. That is, to say this about that, given that it's so-and-so's means that I'm doing an 'insult' or that I'm doing a 'compliment' or that I'm 'flirting,' etc. One wants to see the way in which those conversationally implicative doings turn on treatments of this collection of things piled in the room, available for making conversation out of. Now another sort of thing to be considered is that Al didn't invent that particular noticing. A hole in a shoe is a noticeable, mentionable thing; it's been noticed and mentioned before Al came up with it. And secondly, with respect to the issue of what's going to happen upon the mentioning of the hole

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in the shoe, a hole in the shoe is something about which there can be some sorts of controls on what will happen, by virtue of the fact that 'a hole in the shoe' is specifically a symbol. By that I mean it's not just that I'm saying it's a symbol but that it's known to be a symbol, i.e. , there is a collection of things like a hole in the shoe that are specifically treated as symbols, e.g . , a frayed collar, shiny pants, etc. And that is to say, it's known to be a symbol with respect to money, though it's not only a known symbol with respect to money - it can be a symbol with respect to other things as well, but related to money, i.e. , that somebody doesn't care ;lbout his appearance. Somebody who can walk around without holes in their shoes may walk around with holes in their shoes as a way of, e.g. , exhibiting to others that they don't care. And when you're talking about something as being a symbol, then there is the issue of its cultural dispersion. And a hole in the shoe is a symbol in a more dispersed way than, say, wearing shirts with button-down collars is a symbol. I read once where Jack Kennedy was commenting on Bobby Kennedy and said, "You want to know what kind of slob he is, he still wears button-down collars. " That is to say, for some colleaion of people at the time the comment was made, button-downs were no longer worn. And for some collection of people the shirts that are worn can be symbolic of either that one can't afford to or doesn't know enough to keep up with what it is that we wear. But that hole in the shoe is a different order of symbol than that. Now in asserting there's a hole in someone's shoe, that it can be a symbol specifically used with respect to money-talk is relevant to its use. There is, then, a kind of natural sequence involved in noticing a hole in a shoe and getting money-talk of a particular sort - that sort being complaints about expenses. Where the complaints about expenses serve as one way to deal with an aspect of the sequence involved in the initial noticing, i.e. , given that sort of a noticing, a sequence can be done in which an explanation of the noticed phenomenon is offered. Here, the complaint about expenses serves to explain the hole in the shoe, where what might be independently 'an explanation' and 'a complaint about expenses' can be combined, i.e. , it is 'an explanation by reference to a complaint about expenses. ' Given those possibilities, another order of quesiton is, what is it that's going to be complained of to produce the explanation? Or, more abstraaly asked, how is it that people go about getting what it is they're going to use to make the explanation? For one, one may find that there is a considerable regularity between "Hey you have a hole in your shoe" and thereupon some explanation involving a complaint about expenses, but where the explanation will vary across uses of "Hey you have a hole in your shoe, " i.e. , on some occasion it's one explanation and on another occasion it's another. And the question is, is there some way that people arrive at which one they use or do they just use any one? That is, in its way, one particularly interesting issue in that it looks like it's kind of an orderly thing as to how the particular explanation-item is arrived at. Focussing now on the explanation-item in our data, ' 'This place costs too much money, " let me make some points on it, particularly about "this

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place. " And what I want from those points is that we collect some features of the use of "This place costs too much money" which recommend its use here to produce an explanation/ complaint with regard to the hole in the shoe. One thing is of course that "this place" costs money - without regard to whether it costs "too much" money, it costs money. A second thing is that it costs money for both parties involved; the person noticed to have a hole in his shoe, and the noticer. That this place costs money for both is relevant in at least these sorts of ways: If, as is the case here, the noticer is going to produce the explanationjcomplaint, then there's a question as to how he can come to know why the other might have a hole in his shoe; what kind of expense might be involved which prevents the other from having decent shoes. That is to say, he could pick such an expense as, while it might be true, the question is how would he know? It's after all the other guy's shoe and the other guy's expenses that he's talking about. Well, one obvious sort of thing is that he can pick such an expense as he also has; where, then, given that he knows what the import of that expense is for himself, he can perhaps find in part that he has some view about what that expense is for the other. So, that he picks an expense which he also has is perhaps not at all incidental to the particular explanation he offers. And it's an explanation which involves not only that it's an expense which AI and Roger both happen to have, but that AI knows that Roger has, and that AI knows that Roger knows that AI has. It's not merely that they both happen to have that expense, but that they each know that the other has it. So, for example, suppose that Roger is an alcoholic, and perhaps AI is also an alcoholic, but AI doesn't know that Roger is, or Roger doesn't know that AI knows that Roger is. Here what we have is that AI knows, and Roger knows that AI knows, that they have this expense, i.e. , the cost of therapy. It's also perhaps so that Al's using an expense that he has as well can be relevant to Roger's accepting that candidate explanation, i.e. , that Roger doesn't have to be embarrassed about that expense. And again, it's not so much the hole in his shoe, but remembering that the hole in the shoe is a symbol; it's not an issue of explaining only the shoe by virtue of the cost of therapy, but explaining such things for which a hole in the shoe is a symbol, i.e. , that going here is affecting what it is that you might spend on things like your shoes. And such issues are perhaps relevent to Roger's being willing to acknowledge the item. That is to say, there might be a thing which AI knows that Roger has an an expense, where, say, AI doesn't have it as an expense, and if that were offered Roger might say "Well that's not the reason, " i.e. , then you could have issues of the embarrassability of the item. So that's one order of considerations having to do with, if an expense is going to be used, what some constraints are on the selection of an expense, where the expense is, say, selected by the noticer of the hole in the shoe. If you watch the use of noticings like this one, you'll find that if it is the noticer who offers an explanation, he offers one which can hold for him as well. Where, then, one of the most characteristic things that go in a place like that is taxes. "Well, taxes are just too high. " What makes things like taxes such a

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magnificent item is that if you just meet somebody, then you can feel assured that taxes is an expense for whatever they might complain about; a thing for which you can legitimately suppose that they suffer from, as also they can suppose that you suffer from. There are quite separate sorts of further considerations involved in "This place costs too much money" which appear to be relevant here. One such order of consideration is this: Without regard to the issue of expenses and complaints, 'this place' and aspects of 'this place, ' of which only one is that it "costs too much money, " is a thing that we can talk about in this place. Which is to say that the therapy situation is something that is talkable-about in therapy. So that with respect to producing talk that is, say, continuable, appropriate to the occasion, etc. , talk that has 'this place' as a subject is appropriate to this occasion. Not perhaps for any 'this place,' but for such a 'this place' as a therapy session. Where, then, for other things that the two might have going for them, know about each other, etc. , 'this place' is an apt topic in general. And for a range of things other than its expense, 'this place' comes up throughout the conversations. And that, again, has to do with the makings of talk. If you leave aside the issue that the cost of therapy is or is not a good explanation for having a hole in the shoe, the fact is that for all sorts of things, when explanations are needed local materials are usable for the making of the explanation. And one indeed tends to think most directly of what, locally, is to be used to explain something when something explainable occurs, even though on reflection you regularly know that it's a ridiculous explanation. If you're sitting with someone and they look glum, then one of the things you routinely do is try to figure out what it is about here-and-now that they might be glum about. If you call somebody up and they say " Hello" in a lousy voice, the first thing you think is "What are they mad at me for?" although you may perfectly well know that somebody can be mad about anything, it can have nothing to do with you, now, here, etc. I'm suggesting that local explanations, for whatever, are preferred expla­ nations if they can be used. And for a large range of expenses, across places, 'this place costs too much money' will be used. And then, forgetting about just money explanations, when you have an explainable, then 'this place + X' (where X is a feature of 'this place' that explains the explainable) is used. And that turns on 'this place' as an utterly apt object for use as an explanation, i.e. , on the topical appropriateness of 'this place. ' And although it may have nothing particular to do with the availability of 'this place' for 'money explanations, ' the two unusually recommend each other. If you think of looking for a money explanation, looking for a money explanation which I have in common with him, looking for a money explanation which I have in common with him that we both know about for each other, then you may get a collection of eligible items, where 'this place' has much to recommend it along lines of just the sheer usability of 'this place' in talk at this place. There's another sort of thing which also helps to recommend that usage of "This place costs too much money. " And that is, if one is looking for an

Lecture 1

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explanation having to do with expenses, then local expenses are the best. So, for example, if somebody is deciding if they should buy some item, then the best way to decide that you shouldn't buy it is by reference to something that you just bought, and ideally that you just bought at this store, i.e. , 'this place. ' So that 'this place' as an excuse can then be used by reference to that sort of preference for the most local expense to be used.

Lecture

2 Safe Compliments I'm going to take off on a point that several people made about 'weather talk' - that weather is a ' safe topic' - by reference to where one might go with that as an initial possibility. 1 I will sketch out some stuff I did a while ago on something which had the modifier 'safe. ' I did some work on 'compliments, ' specifically on what I called 'safe compliments, ' the idea being to see what it was about some compliments that made them 'safe' compliments, i.e. , to rum an initial observation into an analysis. The initial material went like this: Ken : Dan : Ken : Dan : Ken :

Dan : Ken : Roger : Ken :

So did Louise call or anything this morning? Louise? No. No? Why, didju expect her t'call? No, I was just kinda hoping that she might be able to figure out some way t-to come to the meetings and still be able t'work. C'z she did seem like she d-wanted to come back, but uh she didn't think she could. D'you miss her? Well in some ways yes, it's-it was uh I I nice having­ (No he thinks if uh-) -having the opposite sex in-in the room, you know, havin' a chick in here

I was playing with 'it was nice having a chick in the room' as a compliment, and specifically a safe compliment. The question then is, can we extract from the sort of thing this one is, a set of fearures which will locate a class of compliments like it, which are also safe compliments? Where that is a test of the fact that we had some generative features. And also, whether when we get those features what we get is something which in its fashion recommends the use of such compliments. So, among other things, I want to be able to discriminate between 'safe' and 'unsafe' compliments, consider the kind of treatment that safe versus unsafe compliments might get, get criteria of them, and see then whether, e.g. , the treatments that they might get can serve as grounds for choices between them. That is to say, one might well choose 'unsafe' compliments, but the choice could be directed to what transpires given the alternatives. In order to make the analysis I have to deal - in rather simple terms - with 1 Most of this session was given to an untranscribed discussion of 'weather talk' based on materials the class had been assigned.

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an area of work which I haven't talked about yet, having to do with the organization of identifications of people. We can note that the term used, 'chick,' names a feature of the person complimented - that they're female, which is used for the compliment, which also differentiates that person from all others present. That is to say, the set of people present is, by reference to 'femaleness' which has female-male as its alternatives, (M, M, M, MjF}, where a characteristic has been picked that isolates the complimented person. I take it that that is a really non-incidental sort of fact for a compliment, and I'll try to say how it's non-incidental. I'll also suggest that a procedure of producing compliments by finding some attribute of a person that discrimi­ nates them from all others present can be employed rather more widely than in just this way. One of the reasons we can go from the fact that he picked ' female, ' to locating 'male' as an alternative - apart from the fact that 'female' and 'male are obviously in alternation for the compliment in this case - turns on a way that compliments get dealt with by parties present. If one says, e.g. , "It was nice having her here because she's got a good sense of humor, ' ' then apparently what one sets up is the possibility that someone could say, "Well what about me? I'm pretty funny aren't I?" Or if you say "It was nice having her here because she's smart, ' ' again they could say "What about me?" And even if they don't say "What about me? " apparently they can take it that you are saying something about them as well. Now, why they can take it that that's so, and why they come to say that that's so, are independent sorts of issues of interest in themselves. But the first sort of fact is that they regularly can take it you are saying something about them when you say, e.g. , "It was nice having her here because she's smart. " That is to say, they can take it that a compliment to X can be, by virtue of the item it picks, thereby an insult to others. Now that raises interesting sorts of issues in this way: If, when we were talking about multi-party conversation we had, say, a model of a two-party conversation, then we might figure that if, e.g . , somebody is being addressed in the multi-party conversation, then only the person being addressed is being done something to. That is to say, e.g., if A is offered something, then nothing is being done to C and D. If A is promised something, if A is insulted, questioned, argued with, etc., then nothing is being done to C and D. That is to say that C and D don't see anything done to them or that B, doing something to A, doesn't see that he's doing something to the others. Then we should have a view that to whom an utterance is direaed is to whom something is done. It's quite plain, and quite important, that that's not so. And it raises some · rather neat technical issues that it's of interest for. If there is a possibility that in doing an action in conversation to some party one may thereby be doing actions to others as well, the question then is how is it that others find out what is being done to them. Are there any sorts of systematic relationship between doing X to A, and how C finds that something is done to him? Can he find that just anything is done to him? Is there some procedure whereby he

Part II

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finds what's done to him? Is it perhaps that doing an X to A permits C to see specifically that a Y is being done to him? If that's so, then that sets up as an interesting possibility that one way of doing a Y to C is to do an X to A. That is to say, you might have no particular interest in doing the X to A; what you're interested in is doing something to C in some way, and that you can do it by doing an X to A. Let me make this very concrete. Consider the case of two guys and a girl in a place together. If she flirts with B, then she may be seen as teasing C; C may see that she is teasing him; her way to tease C may be to flirt with B. That is to say, she may have no interest in flirting with B, she may be interested in teasing C. That's one sort of obvious situation. Let me give you some other data, again from the GTS material. The first fragment goes like this: They're talking along, and at some point Ken, in a low voice, starts talking to Roger. Ken : Louise : Ken : Ken : Louise : Roger : Louise : Ken : -Dan : Ken : -Dan :

Roger. Well, he mentioned II 'bout talking I I freer. ((very soft)) Dju wanta((very soft)) Dju wanna come over after uh school t'day I I an' I'll give yuh the (radio), We c'd all get rea(h)lly II free then. Okay, hh It's almos' done. I think it'll take me 'bout II two­ Ke:n, -two more I I hours ( ), Y- why don'tchu make these arrangements out of here, huh? ( 1 . 0)

(A/) :

((very soft)) Oh-oh (2 . 2)

Yes teacher. Where we could ask why does Al say "Yes teacher"? Nothing was said to Al. Another thing we can consider is a sort of recurrent sequence in these GTS sessions, which involve threats from Al to Ken in which Al ends up saying "If you don't do X by the time I count to three I'll beat your brains out," and Ken does whatever the X was that Al had threatened about. At the end of which, Roger will say to Al, "You're so damned vicious. " And we can ask is there any orderliness to that kind of event. We would want to know if there is some orderliness involved in the production of what we could call ' third utterances' after a sequence in which two other parties are involved and where, as the first part of that sequence, one of those two parties specifically does something to the other of those two parties. I take it that we could come to see that there can be some relationship, of maybe a vague sort right now, between these materials and what happens in

Lecture 2

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them, and something like "I like her because she's so funny" "What about me?" So that, in terms of the sequential organization of conversation, we're asking about some orderliness in the production of talk after a sequence, by somebody who is not involved in that sequence. Where what we're saying, among other things, is that those third utterances are perhaps produced by reference to their speaker engaging in an analysis of what the first speaker did to the second, and using that analysis to find what's being done to him, and using what he finds being done to him to produce an utterance in return to the first speaker's. Taking the case of "Why don't you make those arrangements out of here," there can be a way in which Al sees that the warning that Dan has done is a warning not only to Ken but to the others as well, and is replying to that warning. And for the case where AI is threatening Ken, what we may have is that insofar as relative power is being dealt with in that exchange, that Al can exhibit his power over Ken makes the question of Roger's relationship to AI with respect to their mutual power also an issue. If Roger does nothing, that doesn't mean that he's less powerful than Ken, but it can allow that he's less powerful than AI, whereas if he then takes on AI and AI gives in, then that AI is more powerful than Ken, and Roger is more powerful than Al, puts Roger in a position in which he is, for now, on top. Now one aspect that's of technical interest is this: The initial condition that an utterance directed by A to B needs to be analyzed by B to find what B should do, but is of no interest to C and D - tells us what sorts of analyses of that utterance C and D need do; for example, that C and D can stop, having found what it is that A has done to B. The suggestion I offer now tells us that that's just not so, and also tells us something about the order of analysis that C can do, given some utterance by A to B. Suppose that C is going to do an analysis of an utterance from A to B, an action done by A to B. How is he to proceed? In principle we could imagine that what somebody does on any utterance is to find out, say, what it is doing to them, i.e. , that they look at it independently of to whom it's done. I suppose that's a possibility but I just don't have any good way of seeing how it could work. An alternative, and workable, way to proceed is this: What you do is find what it is that A has done to B. Then you use that result to see what his having done that to B involves him in having done to you. That is to say, produce the first analysis and then use its results to find what he's done to you. Then the question is, how do you find what he's done to you? And to find what he's done to you can perhaps proceed by reference to issues like: If, for the action he's done, he's classified B in some way, e.g. , possibly inferior, smart, etc. , then you might ask, am I eligible for such a class? If I am, I may be involved in one way; if I'm not, then I may be involved in another way or not involved. That is to say, you use the categories involved in the classification of B to see how you stand by reference to those categories. You then use how you stand to find out what he's done to you. So if A is a female and she's flirting with B, a male in the room, and you are a male in the room, then you're eligible for being flirted with, and if you're not being flirted with, what

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are you being done, by reference to the fact that you're eligible for being flirted with. If B is being threatened, and he is being threatened by reference to the fact that A is a therapist and B is a patient, and you're a patient too, then what is being done to you by reference to the fact that a patient is being threatened? The point I'm making is that on the one hand it does appear that people produce third utterances to sequences in which they're not, so to speak, involved; that they do it in an orderly fashion; that they do it by reference to a consideration of the initial utterance of that sequence; and that they do it involves then that they examine those sequences. All this is in the first instance to the point that when somebody is being complimented others can assess what's being done to them. And if someone can find that nothing is being done to him, then that is one way in which you can be producing a 'safe compliment. ' This holds, of course, not only for compliments but for a range of other things. But that is one aspect of a safe compliment, i.e. , it isn't anything about which anybody else in the room would feel that they have been slighted by your making it; they're not going to use your compliment to somebody else to produce a comeback. I take it that's a rather natural sense of 'safe,' and also a sense that is employable within the sequential organization of conversation. Now this compliment is not only safe, it's weak. And 'weak' is another feature that such a thing can have. It is weak in this way: While it compliments the person in this safe fashion, it also provides that, on what it compliments them for, they are easily replaceable. All it locates is that she's 'a chick. ' It doesn't locate some feature which is both absent from the others and also rare. I suppose one could construct some way of complimenting her such that the loss is magnified by reference to the fact that she's relatively irreplaceable, given the features presented. And of course compliments often specifically deal with issues of the relative replaceability of the person complimented. We can build this particular compliment up in other ways with regard to its making. It may well be, e.g., that insofar as he employs something like ' male' - 'female' for something on which we have a situation of (M, M, M, MjF}, then it's 'safe' not merely in the sense that he picks a Y and there are only X' s present, but also in that it's a sort of thing that any X could have done, using that Y. That is to say, he hasn't put himself in a position where the fact that he picked that feature is useable by the other X's - now, not by reference to what he's done to them but by reference to what he's said about himself, distinctively, e.g . , for having, say, an interest in that feature, for which he could then be twitted. But the particular compliment used here is the sort of thing that 'any male' could say, such that he's not particularly twittable by another male for it. They are all similarly situated; they are all M with respect to F. Though of course, suppose now there's a bunch of males and they are differently situated with respect to age; then, should one who is 60 produce that compliment, somebody younger might say, e.g. , "What could you do with her?" That is to say, they could differentiate them and him

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to produce something which turns on his compliment and turns on his doing it. So that the sheer fact that they're all males, while providing for one sort of safety of 'chick, ' can nonetheless involve for other things about the males, if they are differentiated on those, that they can use that differentiation to deal with the compliment. A compliment can, then, serve to partition people into categories. A thing we want to look for, then, by reference to the way the compliment will get dealt with, is how the various people are aligned by reference to the partitioning. And a criterion of a compliment's safeness is that it picks an attribute on which others are not in a position to figure they stand differently than the complimentor, and are in a position to see that they do stand differently from the one who is complimented, so that they are not also judged and therefore are not judged in a negative way by the compliment's formulation. And of course, safe insults can be produced in a similar fashion, i.e. , so as to discriminate the insulted person from the others present. Now the question is, with respect to 'weather talk, ' what do we need, to be able to show that ' the weather' is a ' safe topic'? What we need is to develop a notion of ' safe' for 'topics' so that we can have said something when we say 'weather' is a 'safe topic. ' The discussion on 'safe compliments' was to give a sense that something could be done with a notion of ' safe, ' something of a formal sort, i.e. , it doesn't have to be merely an intuition, but what's involved in something being 'safe' can be laid out. I specifically do not know what it is that we'd want to be saying about 'safe topics' that would capture how weather talk is safe, or at least discriminate between safe and unsafe topics. It may be that there aren't too many safe topics other than weather, but that there are lots of unsafe topics. And how they're unsafe needs be seen. I can't even say that this is a model for a notion of ' safe' for topics. It is offered as a way to see that it's at least a possibility that something can be done with weather as a 'safe topic. '

Lecture 3

'Patients with observers' as 'performers with audience' I'll be talking this time about a fragment which almost directly precedes the "Hey you have a hole in your shoe" exchange which started off lecture 1 . It is specifically the beginning of the first group therapy session that I observed. What happened was approximately this: I came a little early and got introduced to the guys, and they were informed that I would be there. I was in a room, sitting behind a one-way mirror, and they were in an adjoining room. We met in the observation room and then they went out because it was a little early, then came back into the adjoining room. There was a microphone in the ceiling, and the following took place: Roger :

Tum on th'microphone.

AI : Roger :

T(h)esting, We're about to sta(hh)rt. hehh hh heh ((thump)) We ah gathuhd heah(h), on this day(hh) ,

( 1 . 0)

AI :

(4 . 0)

This has a series of sorts of interest, some of which are my basis for going through the description of the preceding events, and I'll get to those. In terms of the organization of conversation, I became interested in this sequence because it looked like a different sort of sequence - while surely being a sequence - than those I had primarily focussed on. In earlier work I had come upon and considered things like the utterance pairs - utterances in which somebody does something of one sort directed to a present party who then does something in return. In this sequence there appear to be no pairs. Nor do the utterances seem to be sequenced by virtue of being tied together in the way that earlier lectures have talked about ' tied utterances, ' i.e. , having syntactic relations to each other across utterances or across sentences. 1 The question then was, since it is in the first instance plain that this is a sequence, what sort of a sequence is it? How is it a sequence? Another type of interest this fragment has turns on the way in which its use involves the exhibiting of an attention to the presence of observers. I will talk at some length about that. 1 See Fall 1 96 5 , lectures 4 and 5 , and Fall 1 9 6 7 , lectures 1 1 and 1 2 , in vol . I.

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A third sort o f interest is, when it gets considered i n detail, related to the first two. On the one hand we might say that insofar as what they're doing is exhibiting an attention to the presence of an observer, why do they do it in the way they do? That is, why do they do it in a play-like fashion; 'play' having two different senses, both of which I think are appropriate: 'play' as in a game, and 'play' as in a performance. Why, that is, do they enact their attention to the observer as compared to, e.g. , talking about it? If they're going to deal with the fact of an observer being present, I suppose it wouldn't be particularly strange were they to begin by talking about how they feel about there being an observer. And occasionally, in this session and in others, they talk about that. They notice, for example, that some people seem to be attentive to the presence of an observer; that someone keeps looking toward the two-way mirror, or someone seems to be 'on; ' they sometimes say that they're hesitant to talk, and things like that. But that's not the way they in the first instance deal with the presence of an observer. On the other hand, with regard to the type of sequence it is, it's 'a piece of play, ' again in the two senses of a game sequence and a performance. Now dealing with the presence of observers and producing a piece of play can be quite alike things and need not be a merging of disparate things, in that it's not at all peculiar that people do, e.g. , 'playing in the presence of observers, ' specifically behaving in ways that deal with the fact that there are observers. And one needn't restrict that to professional sports, there are all sorts of other things which are types of play which take place in the presence of observers. We'll consider how it might be kind of a play sequence, and how it might be a play sequence by reference to the presence of observers. And also, what might be involved in doing their exhibition of an attention to observers in this way as compared to, e.g . , talking about it - which I introduced in the first instance because it is a way that is usable and that they do use. We might notice in the first place that this isn't just any possible play sequence that could exhibit an attention to observers (I'll talk about it as a 'play sequence' - we'll leave the question of whether it is that aside for now); it's a play sequence that has other virtues to it: It's a play sequence that specifically works as a 'beginning. ' And while it may perfectly well be that one could begin right off conversationally, with the topic of there being an observer, this thing is 'a beginning' in independence of that sort of fact. That is to say, if it does 'attention to the observer' it also does 'a beginning; ' or, if you want to put it the other way around, it's 'a beginning' and it also does 'attention to an observer. ' There is reason to say that some things, of which group therapy sessions are one, can specifically have 'beginnings' as compared with just getting started in any which way, where 'any which way' is, in its way, 'a start. ' I'm talking, then, about a 'beginning' as a 'part,' recognized as a 'beginning part,' perhaps not to go anywhere else, and accomplishing 'beginning. ' Instead of going over the reason to say that some things are beginnings, etc . , I would recommend a paper that a friend of mine has done, which is about beginnings of such

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group therapy sessions. It's Roy Turner's paper on therapy beginnings. He deals in some detail with how therapy sessions begin, and that they have specific ways of beginning. The way he gets into the phenomenon of their beginnings is that what tends to happen is that people arrive one at at time, more or less, and the therapist comes into the room, say, last; and while if at least two patients are there they talk together, there is a way that the session 'begins, ' i.e. , they begin to do therapy talk or they begin in particular sorts of ways. In this colleaion of therapy sessions there are other occasions in which an attention to such a thing as 'a beginning' is done. It's worth some consideration in that, e.g. , in one session they're talking along for, say, a minute or so, and Roger says "Shall we commence?" Now one might note that the term 'commence' is not only a term that is synonomous with other terms for 'begin,' but it is particularly a meeting-type way of referring to beginnings. And one of the things we find in these sessions is that participants use a terminology appropriate to things that have structures in ways that, say, one might not use when just conversing where, if we're already talking, it might be queer to say "Well, shall we begin?" But a 'beginning of a therapy session' is an attended part of the therapy session, as compared to just drifting into therapy talk, or 'therapy talk' being undifferentiated from any other talk that gets done while these persons are more or less together. In that regard, then, this fragment is a 'beginning sequence; ' a pre­ beginning and then a beginning. Sequences like it are used specifically to begin performances, i.e. , when a lecture or some other sort of performance is being done, people go through a sequence like this. And anybody who's seen one of those things more or less knows that such a sequence is gone through; you needn't have done it yourself to be in a position to do it some time. Now there are some immediately interesting aspects of this fragment as a beginning sequence which are related to its known, standardized use. For one, someone just does this first thing, "Turn on the microphone, ' ' and that first thing, occasions a second which occasions a third which occasions a fourth. That is to say, at least so far as I can tell, we're not dealing with this sort of sequence in its normal environment, in which it is somebody's business to say "Turn on the microphone" and some particular other person's business to then go "Testing, ' ' etc. When Roger goes "Turn on the microphone" he's not invoking a bunch of jobs that have been pre-assigned. What he's doing is making a first move which is also a proposal to have a series of such moves. So, for example, there are various ways to begin a game. You can begin a game by having some negotiations: "Let's play X" "Okay" "You be this and I'll be that . " Now there are other ways of beginning games which people use. One of them is to make a first move in what could be a game. Then, that we're going to have a game is something that others can accept, not by saying "Yes let's play that game, " but by doing a second move. You throw a ball to somebody, they can catch it and then do something with it and a game can get started. It isn't unheard of to both propose and start a game in the same

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move, though to do it is to put oneself in a position of having one's move left in the air. Others might not do a next move that involves acceptance - they might not choose to, they might not know to. What we have, then, is such a thing done which, for it to come off, involves some collaboration on the part of others present. And the character of their collaboration is sharply defined. That is to say, the character of their collaboration is that somebody makes a second move, and not anything they might do stands as a second move for this beginning. And from among the sorts of things that they might do that could stand as second moves for this beginning, the alternatives matter a good deal. For example, one perfectly reasonable second move to "Tum on the microphone" is "okay" or "It's on; ' i.e. , rather than taking a performer job one might take a co-laborer job, and produce, then, an action which involves that you have taken some piece of work that is consistent with the sort of jobs available if another person has a job which involves him in saying "Turn on the microphone. " But given an acceptance of some sort of gameplay that the first has chosen for himself, then, in choosing one for himself he's constrained the sorts of ones you can take for yourself if you're going to play some such game as he's made a first move for. How then do you go about choosing which sorts of moves to pick, if you're going to pick something consistent with his first move, that turns his first move into a first move in a developing sequence? One wants to note, then, that the thing thereafter proceeds with reference to what these first moves have involved, i.e. , with reference to the jobs that each has picked. A second move having occurred, a third is done; a third having been done, a fourth is done, and they're done in some consistency with the position each has taken in the first two. The person who says ' 'Testing' ' also does the speaker-beginning "We are gathered here on this day," and the person who does something like directing, "Tum on the microphone," does that sort of thing again with "We're about to start. " There would be nothing particularly interesting about that if it was done by reference to some job assignment that had been given to, e.g. , co-workers, but that is not the case here. And in that regard one wants to ask not only how does Al choose a particular second move, and such a second move as locates some position he has with respect to the sort of game Roger has begun, but also, how does Roger come to choose such a game as a way to do beginnings? I intend to deal with both those questions, i.e. , given what Roger does, how does Al come to choose what he does? And how does Roger come to choose this particular beginning (leaving aside that he can venture it with some hope of success, i.e. , with some hope that somebody will pick it up)? The question, how does Roger choose such a beginning, has as the relevance of its answer that it is by reference to the features of the thing that it begins, that he can, with the help of others, bring off a way of exhibiting an attention to the observer. Let me try to lay that out now. Here's the situation: An observer has come to watch a group therapy session composed of patients and a therapist. The patients know that that's so, and also perhaps

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know that it is they, the patients, who are to be specifically watched, their activities to be made out. So they're in a situation where they're talking to each other, not to the observer, and while talking to each other they're being listened to by somebody to whom they're not talking. That somebody is legitimately listening to the talk of others who are not talking to him is a fairly peculiar situation, i.e. , one does not normally have rights to overhear, nor does one normally have to bear being overheard. Now the question is, can one find situations in which one has just those features - talking to others in the presence of someone who is legitimately listening and making out what is going on, but is not participating in the sense of talking? There is at least an obvious place where that occurs: the theater. The circumstance of the theater is specifically that people are talking to each other onstage, but what each of them is attending as the thing that's interesting is what somebody to whom they're not talking is making out of their talk, i.e. , the audience. So there's a very nice, formal relationship between the circumstance of the therapy session with an observer and the properties of the situation that Roger adapts the beginning from, i.e. , the theater. And that at least raises the interesting possibility that this beginning was picked for that relationship. And there are some rather neat results of its use. For one, they're talking, there's an observer present, the observer is engaged in making out what they're saying to each other; using it, so far as they might think anyway, to make some assessments about them. That is to say, they've had observers before. The observers before tended to be other therapists. They might well figure that what an observer is doing is listening to what they say in a similar way to that of their therapist, e.g. , to figure out what's wrong with them. It might be an aim that they could have, to put the observer in a position of not being able to be assured that what they say in this session is to be read by him for its therapeutic interest, i.e. , to be read by reference to what each of them is like. How might they go about complicating the work of an observer? If they can bring off for the observer that while they're talking to each other it's an attention to the observer in the way that it's done in the theater that they have, then that makes a reading of what they say to find what they're like, complicated. It does so because in the theater, while the only people who talk for the audience are the actors, there are perfectly serious senses in which the actors are not talking to each other. The actors are talking with each other's talk; cuing each others' talk, i.e. , you could perfectly well have an actor get up there and do his entire part, and then each of the others do it, though when they aa it out it gets meshed as 'talk to each other. ' Each of the parts are written out, somebody memorized one, somebody else another, and the completion of an utterance by one occasions the utterance that should go there by someone else. But they are not listening, producing, etc., by reference to what another one says except in the sense that the other cues them or is cued by them. Nor would one sophisticatedly figure that what they say says anything about them in particular - they're actors.

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So by using this theater format they deal with the question of the readability of their particular statements, since that readability turns on that they're saying it to each other, and that each is producing, on his own, what he's saying, and producing it for the others and not for the audience. And that seems to be a really neat sort of thing to do. You then tell the observer that something he might make out as said each to the other, you may well be producing for him. Which would be a quite different task of understanding. In that regard, the enacting of it is far better than the saying of it. That is to say, if somebody were to begin by saying, "Since there's an observer here I'm not going to say what I really think, " that very statement could be subject to a usual kind of reading by an observing therapist. That wouldn't be 'acting' it would be 'clamming up, ' etc. , and would be just as good material as if they produced talk, e.g., without knowing that there was an observer present. So there's a way in which this enacting of a theater sequence is a rather subtle sort of address to the observer. And when we turn back to some of the details of this thing, what we can see about it that now becomes interesting is that none of these utterances are addressed to each other and nonetheless they're in a sequence that is orderly. That is to say, "Tum on the microphone" is addressed to whoever it is that could turn on the microphone. It occasions the utterance "Testing, " which is again not directed to any of the people present. That occasions "We're about to start, which occasions a 'start, ' "We are gathered here on this day. " They've now exhibited that they can talk in a theatrical fashion, i.e. , in which the utterances are not directed to each other but are directed to someone who is not talking to them, and they nonetheless can talk consecutively and in close order. And I mean 'consecutively' in a strong way, i.e. , Roger begins right off after the utterance "Testing," which is one word. Now one-word utterances are not the most normal sort of thing, and it might well be that Roger, were he not treating it as a 'cue' could, e.g. , wait for its completion. But he sees its completion. So the way that they bring it off is a nice exhibit of their capacity to talk in a sequenced fashion while talking, each not to the other, though each is hearing and using what the other said to then produce a next. Let me add that in picking the analog of the theater as a way to begin, they choose jobs for each other, from the theatrical repository of jobs, that are consistent with their position in the therapy situation, i.e. , they pick 'performer' jobs. They are going to be the ones who will be talking to an audience in their circumstance as patients with an observer. That is to say, they've picked the theater and mapped its categories of performerjaudience to patientjobserver, but they could also have picked the theater and then proposed about themselves that, say, they're the audience, thereby perhaps assigning to the observer the possibility that he's the performer. They could come in and say "Well, I wonder what the show's going to be like today. " That they pick those categories which will allow them to do whatever it is that their business here is to do, under the auspices of those categories (i.e. , 'performer' where their business here is to be 'patients') is one aspect of their selection of the theater.

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We have, then, a rather nice way to see that their circumstances are being used to locate analog structures which have similar properties, which can be used to do work for them, where they then pick positions from that analog's categories that preserve some features of their initial positions - where for each such picked analog they could take categories which didn't stand in that relationship. And one will routinely find that when persons in some stateable circumstance pick an alternative collection of categories through which they're going to operate, they pick such a collection as preserves some features of the initial circumstances. So that, e.g. , when at one point the therapist sanctions one of them he gets "Yes teacher, " which is to say that the collection 'teacher-student' is being used to deal with 'therapist-patient. ' If one wanted to characterize what that is, it's something I talk about as 'partitioning consistency' and I gave some instances of 'partitioning' considerations when I talked about 'safe compliments. ' By 'partitioning' I mean putting objects into various classes which stand in some relationship to completely different collections of categories and their internal relationships. So not only do they pick the theater but they pick jobs in the theater that have a nice relationship to the circumstances they're dealing with in beginning a therapy session with an observer. Furthermore, that the theater is picked and its beginning used has as its virtue that, a first move made, others know what a next move can be, i.e. , they have picked something that - whether anybody has done it before - is familiar. So the choice then is presumably, in part at least, constrained by what can be brought off with a first move; what first move can be recognized as such a first move as can be replied to then and there, in such a way as to bring off a sequence. And this ties back to the issue of why this beginning, and how does Roger get something that can be used by the others if they want to. If they're going to do a kind of play sequence, one of the things that really does matter is the order of moves, that they get done in just the right way though of course there could be some variation on it. And to do a first move which is an invitation to play can work by virtue, in part, of the fact that one of the things that people know about 'play' is, e.g. , that the moves occur in alternation (A goes then B goes then A goes, or A goes then B goes then C goes then A goes, etc. , etc.), such that if this is a play move though it isn't addressed to anybody present, then they ought to go next and do a move that should follow this first. Order of moves is a crucial phenomenon for games, and alternation is one of the most usual patterns that games have. It's that sort of fact that sets up the issue of whether it's going to be picked up and tells how it should be picked up, independent of content. For many possible game first moves you know that you'd better try to make a second move if that thing is to get going. Let me say specifically what I take to be one of the central sorts of points that this discussion has. If this analysis is anything like right, then what it means is that people - kids like Roger who is 1 8 years old or something like that - have their circumstances available to them in an abstract way, such that they can use the abstract characteristics of their circumstances to locate other

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circumstances that stand in a strong abstract relationship to their current circumstances. And they use the concrete features of those others to signal that they see an abstract relationship, and to invite other people to see the same and to then produce actions by reference to their abstract analysis of their circumstances - and they accomplish all this rapidly. That is to say, a question might be, what sorts of abstract knowledge do people have of their actual circumstances? Well, they may know that being a patient is one sort of thing and being an observer is another sort of thing and when the patients talk to each other what we say is being made out by the observer, etc. Okay, suppose they have some abstract knowledge of that. How can they use that abstract knowledge? They are able to use such knowledge to locate circumstances which have features that stand in a strong relationship to the initial circumstance, and those features are then used to project actions by reference to those other circumstances, which actions have some hope of being picked up. It's not just one person who is by himself capable of that, but he can have hopes that others can see what he's doing, see it fast, and collaborate with him. Now one might say, Well how do you know it's going on there? At least in the first instance what one wants to see is, is it a feature or two features, or a whole collection of features all of which are presented here - actually brought off by these people, which stand in what is a discoverably nice relationship to particular thing that they are using, like the theater. Then, if it's a whole bunch of features, the notion that it's accidental that he picked the theater, or, if it's not accidental that he picked the theater it's an accident that he picked that he's going to be a performer, or it's an accident that he picked the theater when there was an observer present, etc., etc. , might seem too neat to be accidental. Also, if they can do this here, i.e. , use the theater with their circumstances as patients with an observer, and we're considering that it's an abstract capacity that they have, then that suggests, well, look to other circumstances. Do they do a similar sort of thing elsewhere? If so, then in considering the initial instance you don't need so much to rely on collecting a list of features that they've preserved in their enacted performance. If they do a similar sort of thing in other circumstances, with other analogs, then you can see that it isn't that they happen to know a lot about the theater and they've thought a lot beforehand about the relation of being a patient and being an actor. So that's the main interest of such a thing as they're doing here: It raises a possibility which is intrinsically interesting; 'intrinsically' because we want to know what sorts of abstract knoweldge people have of their circumstances, and what they can do with the sorts of abstract knowledge they have. Let me just throw out a suggestion that I can't really develop here. The question is how it is that people are prepared for these sorts of performances, not only with a first move generating next moves, but also for the knowledge that if you pick some situation, you can and ought to bring off a sequence that all actions are part of, i.e. , you don't have something that's not a part of such a sequence. You might well have "Tum on the microphone, "

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"Testing, " and then Roger puts in something which has nothing to do with theater beginings and then returns to it after a while. That is to say, aside from being orderly and alternating, etc. , the whole thing comes off with all its parts being parts. I think some case can be made for it being at least a specific feature of children's imitative play (playing house, playing doctor, playing ship, playing school, etc.) that in that sort of work they gain a command of producing sequences of actions within a particular framework, and orienting to it move by move. A sort of instance of what I'm talking about, I pull out of a book called Intellectual Growth in Young Children by Susan Isaacs. It's an old psychology book done in the thirties or thereabouts, when people used to sit around in grade schools, kindergartens, and nursery schools, trying to study children's intellectual and social development by just watching them. And there's lots of more or less raw material in the book. One piece goes something like this: The class is playing that they're in a boat and the boat is going somewhere, and the children in the boat are doing boat jobs. One of the children is a passenger and he's working on some sewing that the class had been doing over the course of the day anyway, and he runs out of thread. The teacher says "Well, why don't you go get some thread?" He says, "I can't, because the boat's still moving, " and he then goes through a sequence which involves asking the captain to bring the boat to the dock, the captain docking the boat, announcing that the boat is docked, the kid now getting off and getting the thread, coming back, and the boat taking off again. The boat of course is just a bunch of arranged chairs. Now attending to the sort of thing you're doing and how that thing is done, is then an exploration of what's involved in using, collaboratively, some set of categorized terms, and how one then produces a correct sequence of actions for some set. Kids are constantly playing with what sorts of actions belong in a game and what are outside of it, and how the fact that you're in some game constrains and permits collaborative sequences of actions within it. So it's at least a possibility to be considered, that things like imitative play are a considerable ordering resource for people learning the sorts of shifts from one structure to another, and then the orderly procedures within a new structure that they're for now adopting. Where the key thing about the game situation is that people who do imitative play do it interestingly when they produce a series of analogs, doing them separately so that there is one sequence in one situation, another sequence in another, etc. Another point is relevant for our materials here; that here we have the starkest instance of what is otherwise less apparent but also more or less so, and that is that the way Al has of showing that he sees what Roger is doing, is to do something that fits there. Not to say, e.g., "I understand, " or to say ' 'What you said was . . . ' ' but to produce an action that fits there, and that sets up another which can fit with it. That is to say, probably from the kind of academic training one gets, one has acquired the idea that what 'understanding' means is to be able to paraphrase, or to be able to say what somebody means that they didn't say. Now, I think that the natural place for

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the notion 'understanding' is in something like this. In terms of sequencing in conversation and many other things, you do 'showing that you understand something' when what you do is, not talk about it, repeat it, paraphrase it, etc. - that would normally mean that you're puzzled. When you say "What you said is . . . " or "What you mean is . . . , " then that's how you show that you're puzzled or doubtful. The way that you go about exhibiting your understanding is just to produce another that you intend belongs, given what has just been done. You can put another item in that is consistent with the sort of thing you figure they're doing. And then, that we're playing it out right, is the way each of us sees that we're 'grooving,' as they say. Another sort of point turns on similar considerations. If we ask, What does what Roger says mean? then at least one thing we really have to come to terms with is What is Roger doing? Where what Roger's doing is ' making a first move' and what AI is doing is 'making a second move,' and that what they're doing is really, specifically, something in a sequence. It is not that it's incidentally in a sequence, i.e. , that it happens to be in a sequence but it could perfectly well be the same thing and not be in a sequence; it is that what they're doing is 'doing parts of a sequence. ' And that's relevant because people might well figure when, e.g. , they're studying talk, that you could perfectly well examine, say, what "Tum on the microphone" means, without reference to the fact that "Tum on the microphone" is a first move in a sequence. But for various sorts of issues like its effectiveness, its being understood, and such sorts of things, that it's 'a first move' is what it is.

Lecture 7

Alternative sequences; Challenges; Claiming membership Ken : AI : Ken : Roger : Ken : (A/ ) : AI : Ken : AI : Ken :

(

):

Ken :

Roger : Ken : Ken : Roger : Ken :

Hey - Hey check this: I went down to uh H-Hollywood All- ­ - down to the Holla- Ho:llywood, ( 1 . 5) uh Automotives? Mm hm? And they told me how I could stick a th-uh: : Thunderbird motor? ( 1 . 0) - in my Jeep? And I bought a fifty-five // Thunderbird motor. Not 'motor, ' '�ine. ' You speak of // electric 'motor' and a // gasoline 'engine. ' Okay )­ ( Yer nojjt. 'Engine. ' // Okay, Internal combus-tion. ' Alright, so // lookit, mhhh I moved this thing in the Jeep, yesterday, an' it took me all day to do it. Why the // hell you gonna put a Ford in a Jeep. (An' nen I) This thing is the hottest thing in town! Fords aren't hot, That Ford- In comparison to that old four cylinder I had in there it's hot,

Initially I'm interested in this data via an interest in what types of things have a set of permutations as a real set of alternatives, where this thing seems to present one type. What I mean by a set of permutations is that beginning with one type of question, of which ' 'Why the hell you gonna put a Ford in a Jeep" is an instance, and, alternatively named, they could be 'challenges' or 'requests for explanations' or 'requests for justifications' - beginning with that, one can get several different types of sequences. So you could get some sort of an R (request) and then you could get a candidate explanation, and then a treatment of that explanation, done by the requester. That's one sequence. That might characterize this sequence here. Or you could get R and then some sort of a question in return, then an answer Lectures 4, 5 , and 6 of Winter 1 969 were not transcribed.

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to that question, and a treatment of the answer. Here what I'm thinking of is, e.g., "Why the hell you gonna put a Ford in a Jeep?" "Why not?" or "What's the matter with that?" or "Wouldn't you? " where the requester may himself then do something akin to an explanation. Or it could go on from "Why not?" to "What do you mean 'why not'?" Alternatively you could also get something that is not a question but is a peculiar kind of explanation for this environment. That could be a thing like: A: B: A: B:

Why do you have a gun? Well, everybody does. They do? Well maybe everybody where you live does. Well I don't mean that, but I mean it's not unusual.

That is, you get an explanation of the sort "everybody does," which is closely related to "Why not?" Now I take it that those sequences stand as kinds of alternatives to each other. And what sort of things are alternative to each other is a matter of interest. It's also particularly a matter of interest when what stands as an alternative to, say, an answer-explanation is some sort of question. That is to say, we're not talking about the sort of alternative as, instead of "This thing is the hottest thing in town, " "This car is the hottest thing in town, " or some other explanation for it, but that one not make an explanation is an alternative. So that "Why not?" is an alternative. Perhaps you could say "Why not?" is an alternative to anything. But that we can locate how "Why not?" is an alternative here, as we specify what is going on here, is one sort of interest for this sequence. There is a large range of further interests that this material could have, some of which I'll mention, others of which I'll be forced to mention, others of which I won't deal with at all. As an example of things I won't deal with at all, we might note that, having been corrected about his usage of 'motor, ' having acknowledged the correction via " 'Engine. ' Okay," on its next potential place he uses "thing. ' ' I would venture that that sort of usage may be recurrent, i.e. , having used a wrong word and having been corrected on it, the next situation where you should use one or the other, you may use something else. Let me get into the details of this sequence. I suggested that "Why the hell you gonna put a Ford in a Jeep?" is a 'challenge. ' Let's say we think it's a challenge. How could we go about deciding it's a challenge; specifically that it is seen as a challenge? We might examine its characteristics. We might alternatively examine the return to it, ' 'This thing is the hottest thing in town!" where a consideration of this return is relevant to seeing that Ken sees that he's been challenged. In a nutshell, it's a 'password' answer. That is to say, it is a 'correct answer' without regard to whether that is Ken's reason. Now challenges and passwords are of course closely related sorts of things. The way you respond to a challenge is with a password, and passwords are correct in some independence of what that 'question' might have as a correct

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'answer. ' So that you could have as a challenge that a guard gives, "What day is this?" and the password-answer might be "Christmas, " where that might have nothing to do with whether or not today is Christmas. So I'm proposing that "This thing is the hottest thing in town" is a password-answer. And I'm suggesting, then, that for the issue Does Ken see ' 'Why the hell you gonna put a Ford in a Jeep?" as a 'challenge, ' that he produces a password-answer is a way of establishing for the candidate challenge that it's seen as a challenge. Now we have to make a case for it being a 'password. " One thing about passwords of course is that they are passwords for some group. That is to say, a password-answer to a challenge is correct for them where, again, correctness of the answer in independence of its being a password-answer is irrelevant. Roughly what I want to propose is that for Hotrodders the password­ explanation for replacing one engine with another engine is that the product is "the hottest thing in town," in the sense that the motivation for building cars, changing cars, etc . , is to produce, as an intended product, "the hottest thing in town. " There are materials where that is posed in a series of different ways. At one point when they're talking about cars, talking about somebody else's car than Roger's, Roger says " I want to build the hottest street machine in West LA" And at other places such sorts of statements are offered, and I take it that's a prototype 'good motive. ' Now that's of some interest in locating the following sort of thing. When Roger asks his question, the question's status as a challenge turns that he asks what would otherwise be, i.e. , for lay people, non-hotrodders, a kind of peculiar question. Ken has proposed, without any justification in the first place, that he just put a Thunderbird engine in his Jeep. And I say 'without any justification' by virtue of the fact that if I were to be telling somebody that I just put a new engine in my car, then I suppose I would say something to the effect of, "Jeez I had to put a new engine in my car, the old one blew and I can't afford to buy a new car. " That is to say, lay people, straights, non-hotrodders, don't replace engines in cars except for 'good reason' having to do with two sorts of things; the defective character of the engine they initially had, plus that there is some reason for not replacing the car. But Ken doesn't say anything about why he's putting in a new engine by reference to the defectiveness of his old engine, and Roger doesn't ask why Ken is putting a new engine in his car, e.g . , "What happened to the old one?" And indeed, the state of Ken's old engine is not raised until the end, and even then it's not raised with respect to the old engine's being shot, but rather it's proposed that it was not as hot as the new one. So what we have is the picking of a quite peculiar - though not for such people - question; the question itself, then, locating the world in which the talk is going on. That order of consideration locates this question, "Why the hell you gonna put a Ford in a Jeep?" as, for these people, not an alternative to " Why are you putting a new engine in your car?" or "What happened to the old engine? " or "Why are you putting in a fifty-five engine?" Now, aside from the discussion so far offered about how this question would be, within that world,

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for them, a candidate 'challenge, ' there are particularities of the utterance itself which are relevant to its status as a 'challenge. ' One, which is not a particularity for this challenge, has to do with the use of "the hell. " And of course that form, "Why in the world are you doing X?" "Why in the hell are you doing X?" "Why in God's universe are you doing X?" , etc. , is a way of turning some question, "Why are you doing X?" into a challenge - or a request for explanation in any event - in which one doubts the correctness of the action being reported; not doubting that it is being done, but doubting that it should be done. "Why did you do that?" is one sort of question. It says 'this sort of thing perhaps should be explained. ' "Why the hell did you do that?" says 'you shouldn't have done it, why did you do it?' It doesn't merely request an explanation, but also a justification. So that insertion, "the hell," is relevant. Relevant also is a transformation that is made in the question. Roger says "a Ford. " Ken didn't talk about a Ford, he talked about a "Thunderbird. ' ' Now aside from that Thunderbirds are Fords, there is the issue that Fords are not necessarily Thunderbirds, and insofar as you're classifying Fords, then Thunderbirds are the highest kind of Ford, and in that regard, then, "Ford" is on the one hand the result of some operation performed on ' 'Thunderbird, ' ' and also an operation that does not elevate or retain the status of Thunder­ bird, but specifically lowers it. Now, all name uses are very relevant sorts of things, and for hotrodders, the quality of engines for hotrod use can be in such terms. A Ford engine's hotness is something which can be compared with Chevvy hotness, etc., without respect to whether it's a particular Ford or Chevvy engine that's being considered, though of course that is modified by things like which year, i.e. , some year's Ford may be acceptable, whereas without regard to equivalent power a Chevvy for any of those years might be acceptable and a Ford not. In any event, the way that engines are referred to, and the way that cars are referred to, is quite elaborate. A particular feature, for example, of the special status of cars for hotrodders is that for hotrodders, and for hotrodders rather uniquely, cars have names. Not just names like ' 5 9 Ford Fairlane, but also a name that you give it, e.g . , Voodoo. Regularly the sorts of things people give names to the particular objects of, involve kinds of criteria for the special treatment of those sorts of objects. There are some things which everybody more or less gives a name to each case of, e.g. , their pets. There are some things which pretty much nobody gives a name to, e.g. , their TV sets. There are things like cars which only some people, e.g . , hotrodders, give names to. In that event, the choice of how to talk about a given object of a given class of object is a rather sensitive issue. It's a much more sensitive issue by virtue of another sort of consideration: That what my car Voodoo is, is something that the way in which anybody would normally refer to it would not tell you. If Voodoo is a ' 5 5 Chevvy, if its name is Voodoo you can be sure it's not just a ' 5 5 Chevvy. It's a ' 5 5 Chevvy with "a three twenty-seven 'Vet in it, dual quads, full roller cam, four-speed neon hydrostick, four fifty-six positraction,

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big slicks, " or "with a three ninety bored out to four ten, two four barrels, straight ( ) cam, four-speed closed spline, four fifty-six, big slicks, " etc. , etc. That is, it's a conglomerate of various brands' products. It's not just that we're giving it a name so as to avoid calling it by the name that everybody else is calling it by, but that what anybody else would call it wouldn't be correctly naming it. I take it that the name ' 5 5 Chevvy has this sort of character: It's what it is that I started with. And that could end up having almost no relationship to what the parts of the car now consist of. The point is that the way it came off the assembly line defines an initial way of characterizing it. It's not, then, simply a matter of "I call my TV set Charlie" but actually I'm differentiating it from any RCA 2 3 -inch TV . If a car has such a name as Voodoo or whatever its name might be, then it should be absolutely differen­ tiated from anything else that came off the same assembly line it came off. Again, then, all name uses are very relevant, and the operation of transforming the proposed Thunderbird into a Ford is not doing nothing. For one, it's setting up "Fords aren't hot . " Again, then, "Why the hell you gonna put a Ford in a Jeep?" and "Why did you put a new engine in your Jeep?" are just not alternative questions. If one was asked, the other would never be asked. Specifically, "Why the hell you gonna put a Ford in a Jeep?" is asked by virtue of hearing a claim being put forth by Ken that maybe he is building something that he wants to have recognized as a hotrod. It is that that provides for the challenge, not that Roger couldn't say in some other circumstances, "What was the matter with the old engine?, " i.e. , were Roger talking to his mother - or even were he talking to Ken, where Ken didn't seem to be proposing that he was building a hotrod. Now one question is, on what basis does Roger see a claim being made? For Roger seeing a claim being made, we want to look to the way Ken goes about characterizing what he did, how he characterizes that replacement, in part by reference to how people characterize replacements. And again, it's my suspicion that people will regularly talk of the state of the object being replaced and why they didn't buy a new one, where the reason for replacement will have to do with things like price. So, that Ken is making a claim of building a hotrod turns on perhaps such a thing as that he offers no account of the Jeep engine's failure in his characterization of the replacement he's made. Where, for building a hotrod, nothing in the slightest needs to be wrong with the engine; the engine could be perfectly magnificent - for that engine - and yet be replaced. That Ken doesn't mention anything the matter with the engine is, then, the right way to be talking about building a hotrod. So the occurrence of the challenge can turn on it being seen that Ken is claiming to be building a hotrod. Now that then involves claiming some sort of membership, which membership is challengeable by somebody who figures that they for sure are such a one, and who is then going to stand as guard to whether anybody else who claims to be such a one is such a one. And this is in itself kind of an interesting matter. The question is, who's business is it

Lecture 7

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whether or not Ken is, thinks he is, decides to be, a hotrodder? Why should it be Roger's business? Is it any hotrodder's business whether somebody else wants to pass themselves off as a hotrodder? And if it is their business, what are their means for dealing with those attempts of others to pass themselves off as hotrodders? One wants to begin to notice that the range of resources are not in the first instance terribly large, though they may be terribly relevant. That is to say, one may presume that hotrodders don't drive around the neighborhood looking for people who are passing themselves off as hotrodders, and write nasty letters. Nor do they send notices to a central office where there are some officials for deciding the claim, as, e.g. , if you were claiming to have some lineage, someone might write a letter to the DAR and say X is claiming that his family came over on the Mayflower, is that so?" and the DAR could find out, and they could take some action, i.e. , they are a central organization devoted to that sort of thing. And I'm not kidding, they stamp genealogies, "Passed on by the DAR that this is a true geneology. " Now hotrodders don't do that sort of thing and yet they do care that people do not successfully pass themselves off as hotrodders. The question is, how do they go about dealing with that they care? I'm not sure about that, but I take it that one way that you're recognized as a hotrodder by a hotrodder is by being given a challenge to dragrace. If you're stopped at a light and a car pulls up next to you, and he figures he's a hotrodder and looks you over and figures you're a hotrodder, then he can offer a challenge by, e.g . , revving his engine. If he doesn't figure you're a hotrodder he can decline to challenge you. Of if he challenges you, you can refuse. Now you could figure if hotrodders like to drag, why don't they drag with just anybody? Some of the reasons for that being an issue have to do with the kinds of structures that hotrodders are operating within, i.e. , it is not just a matter of a person judging another person but may have to do with that hotrodding is socially under pressure in a series of ways. One import of the whole change in the character of automobiles is that they're vastly more powerful than they were when hotrodders began to do hotrodding. You can buy an awfully powerful car right off the assembly line, and you can also buy awfully powerful modified cars. And if all that counts is any sort of speed that you might want to use as a measure, on a drag strip or on the street, then hotrodders couldn't beat everybody. So the hotrodder is operating within a situation in which, insofar as kids are building cars to be hot, others can have hot cars built for them - and better ones. That competition, unfair as the hotrodders see it, can be by 'rich kids, ' not that hotrodders can't also be rich, but somebody who could just buy a car that could give competition, where a 'hotrod' is something that you yourself, or you and your friends are doing. But primarily the competition is by adults. Now kids invented hotrodding and kids want to keep hotrodding for kids. What that means, among other things, is that perhaps old hotrodders are now competition, i.e. , not seasoned hotrodders but ex-hotrodders, now adult ' '

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competitors. 1 So, kids other than hotrodders have gotten interested in worked-up fast cars, and persons other than kids have gotten interested, and ex-kids remain interested. That any given hotrodder tries to put down somebody else as merely claiming to be a hotrodder is, then, a relevant sort of thing for that given hotrodder to do on behalf of hotrodders in general. One thing that one wants to be aware of is that the structure of these activities has nothing to do with hotrodding. One could substitute many many sorts of things for which people have memberships, etc. , and they operate in similar ways. Hotrodders reinvent procedures, problems, concerns, orientations, etc., which a range of other social organizations have as well. That hotrodding is one of those sorts of things only locates the type of materials that they have available. So, for example, one of the materials that is obviously fundamental is their technical language. But that is of course fundamental for a whole range of those sorts of things that one can be a member of. You have to have at your command a technical language, and it's the sort of thing that people pick you up on and correct you. Why do they have to bother to correct you? After all, many times people say the 'wrong' word, as long as everybody knows what they mean, what's the difference? The sheer fact of their correcting you is telling you that they know what you meant. Now it is not just that everybody likes to correct everybody else, but that when they correct, something particular is going on, in that the sheer action of correction is something that operates under constraints. Correction in public is a sanaioned event. Adults can correct children in public; adults shouldn't properly correct each other in public. You can say afterwards, "You said X but you should have said Y," e.g. , "You said it happened Tuesday, it happened Wednesday. " But you don't, at the time it occurs, say "No. Wednesay. " The sheer fact of a correction, "Not motor, engine. You speak of elearic motor and gasoline engine, " even it if weren't specifically a put-down, would be some sort of evidence for the issue that Roger at least takes it that he's a hotrodder and he hasn't (yet) decided that Ken is. That is to say, for anything that has that kind of ranking, the higher ranked person can correct. Teachers 'Sacks doesn' t use the word "seasoned . " Now and again there are words and phrases in the edited transcripts that Sacks did not actually utter. Sometimes they were used to make new transitions, fill gaps, etc . ; sometimes they were used in an attempt to clarify or bring out a point Sacks is making which, in the spontaneously produced wording of the lecture, is unclear or latent. In this case, in the unedited transcript, Sacks notes that the "competition" is "primarily adults" and a bit later goes on to say: There are some fascinating aspects to it, which have to do with that kids invented hotrodding and kids want to keep hotrodding for kids. What that means among other things is that perhaps ex-hotrodders are now competitors; i.e. , not 'old hotrodders , ' but adult competitors. [Winter 1 969, unedited lecture 7, p. 1 2} Inasmuch as 'ex-hotrodders" and " old hotrodders" seemed problematically synonomous, the contrast was reorganized, now with the addition of " seasoned hotrodders. "

Lecture 7

12 1

can correct students in public; students don't correct teachers. (Regularly students will come up after class and say "You said X but you meant Y, " and you have to go through a whole thing to get students to correct in public. ) So that phenomenon is absolutely unparticular to hotrodding. That it's there in hotrodding is nonetheless interesting; a resource that hotroddders have, not only for the business of dealing with cars, but also for dealing with setting up prerequisites for acceptance. Many kinds of groups take a considerable amount of work to become a possible member, e.g. , work like learning enough about cars so as to be able to talk about cars in the way that they talk about cars. That obviously has a great virtue if they don't want their group turned into something that if you just happened to take a fancy to it yesterday, you can consider youself a hotrodder today. You can't become a hotrodder overnight. And that is to say, for seeing the serious kind of object that some group is for kids, you could perfectly well appreciate that for any group that they might set up, if they were concerned about the size of membership, i.e. , they wanted to be large, one thing to do would be to reduce the cost, the work involved. Now when you find that they build up the work involved, then what's going on is that they're putting barriers between the initial interest of somebody in becoming a member, and that they can become a member. So, for example, one question about the hippies is, is it possible to become a hippie overnight? You can take such a thing as the requirement to have long hair, as a thing that could put somebody two months away from being a hippie at the moment they decide to be a hippie. Hair, in that regard, is work. Having hair of that length evidences not only that you haven't cut your hair in two months but that you withstood any attempts to get you to cut your hair in that two months. Which is to say that for kids of a certain age, the length of your hair can evidence that you've been through fights with your parents, the school, etc. , and withstood the pressure, so that three months' , six months' , etc. growth of hair is evidence of some sort of work you've done, even though you may have just arrived on the scene. And hippies of course do talk about 'weekend hippies,' and they are seeable and are in a different status, etc. What I want you to see is that it's sociologically nice that the signs of possible membership, the stigmata of candidacy, are things that can evidence work having been done between the time that you might have decided that you want to be one, and your being a candidate. And it's fascinating to find for kid groups that those sorts of operations that the society otherwise uses, that many groups in it use in one or another fashion, kid groups also use. Like these sets of tests. And in the case of some sorts of groups, including these kid groups, they make it a work and time test rather than simply a money test. Money tests are characteristic for adults. All you have to do is send in your $ 5 or $ 1 ,000 or whatever it is, and you're a member of whatever it is. Now, that you have the money is a test of other things, but it isn't a ' character test' like learning hotrodder language is a character test, i.e. , you have to do it yourself, you have to make a commitment and spend X amount of time before you could ever make the conversation go. Though of course for many kids it

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happens naturally in that when they're 1 3 and 14 they're talking with kids who are 1 3 and 14, i.e. , they know the language a little bit and then learn it a little better, etc. But, e.g. , joining the President's Advisory Club which costs, say, $ 5 ,000 a year, doesn't take the kind of character test which being hotrodder or a hippie does. It's in parallel interesting that some of the things which work for kids' groups, e.g. , to be a hippie you have to have long hair, and things like that, are the sort of things such that you could be an acceptable hippie today and tomorrow an acceptable middle class kid, i.e. , you go get a shave and a haircut and some new clothes. This can be compared to those sorts of memberships whose conditions are such as to make it not only work to get in, but work to get out. Various sorts of organizations set it up so that the kinds of signs that are required for being in, are not easily removed, e.g. , if you became a Hell's Angel for which you had a collection of tattoos. Whereas, for all the work it might take to learn hotrodder language, people are enormously sophisticated at 'code switching' as they call it. Every kid who comes to live in a dormitory presumably has the occasion of, when he's home, speaking in a way that he didn't speak before, and being embarrassed, but the order of shift that he's able to make over the weekend is fabulous, and absolutely characteristic. People are really adaptive in terms of language capacities. Certainly some things are not easy to get out of, e.g. , if you were brought up as a Negro slum kid, how easy would it be for you to get accepted as a bank clerk, i.e. , in terms of that sort of language. But that's a different sort of thing. I'm talking about adolescent socialization into some kind of language. Now presumably if you used it a great long time you might not know what the other words were, e.g., how to express excitement other than to say "Wow. " But then, words like these are so generalized in their use that your unique usage of "Wow" is not seeable as a sign that it is your only term for expressing excitement by virtue of being a long-time hippie. So kid groups are designed so as to allow their members, at the end of their stay, when on the one hand they're no longer welcome in the kid groups by virtue of being an ex-kid whether they like it or not, and in any event they're now graduating, to have that thing be cheap for them, i.e. , they can leave easily. Now any time a kids' group claims to be more than a kids' group, presumably one of the ways it can bring that claim off is to increase the cost, not of getting in but of getting out. And that is to say, not of 'getting out' in terms of leaving the group, but of getting back into something else. And I suppose one could look at kids' groups in that light. And it is these sorts of cost considerations that are in part involved in why somebody would want to be a borderline hotrodder. That is to say, to want to be recognized as a hotrodder by hotrodders and not recognized as a hotrodder by others, e.g. , cops. And since hotrodders know that hotrodders are the specific objects of cops' attention, some people's ideal is to be a hotrodder in the sense that any hotrodder could recognize them but not to be a hotrodder in the sense that a cop will recognize them. And that's terrible for other hotrodders; if they drag you, they can be arrested and not you. Like,

Lecture 7

1 23

here's what happens: Two cars take off from a light. They don't go very far, and they slow down very rapidly. If you're within a ten-block range you hear the sound. So a cop has been around the corner, he's heard the sound, knows there's a drag going on, and now he comes out. There might be five cars on that block of traffic and now he's engaged in picking out the cars that have been dragging. The hotrod was clearly doing it. If you have a car which is just a powerful new Pontiac, then you're not particularly a suspect object. Not to mention that if you're a hotrodder you might be stopped any time, where if you're not in a hotrod but you pass as a hotrodder with hotrodders, you won't be stopped when you're not engaged in a drag race. And that is the classical problem, e.g . , the problem of the promiscuous homosexual is that he wants to be recognized as a homosexual by other homosexuals but not by cops. And that is his job, to accomplish that. So one of the ideas is to see that the character of this fragment could absolutely be replicated for a series of other phenomena than cars. Now, I've gotten altogether off the track of where I initially wanted to go. What I initially wanted to deal with was the alternative ways that we deal with a challenge, as 'alternative: ' Such issues as that the relationship between claims and challenges is close, so that Roger, seeing Ken doing a 'claim, ' could be doing a 'challenge. ' And that Ken can recognize a challenge in a series of ways; for one, he knows he's doing a 'claim. ' Also, from the character of this question, "Why the hell you gonna put a Ford in a Jeep?" not being, say, the question his father asked him about how come he put a Ford engine in his car. Also from the particulars of the way that the challenge comes off. Then we have the password-answer, "This thing is the hottest thing in town! " And I offered, as an alternative to the password-answer, the question "Why not?" It is specifically an alternative here because the other is a password-answer. As it happens, he has offered a password-answer and it's been shot down as to its appropriateness for the materials at hand, i.e. , that password didn't cover the work he'd done. Now, that it got shot down is not the point. The point is, if it is a password, then you could invoke the password by a thing like "Why not?" If you took it that you were perfectly well a member, and you were not about to let the other person put your membership in question, then your way of showing, e.g, 'how could there be an issue about that?' could be via a "Why not?" kind of question, which would say 'Look, I know there's a password, and what the password is, and your asking me makes me doubt that you know that there is an obvious explanation for what I did. ' Then you put them into a position to have to justify their question, and you in a position to comment on their justification, as compared to the way it runs off here, which ends up with Roger commenting on Ken's justification with "Fords aren't hot. " Whereupon we get a fabulous reduction and change in character of the claim from ' 'This thing is the hottest thing in town!" to "In comparison to that old four cylinder I had in there it's hot. ' ' And I should tell you that the sequel is that not long after, he comes in to a session and says "How do you put a Chevvy engine in a Jeep?"

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Part II Roger : Ken : Roger : Ken : Roger : Ken :

Roger : Ken : Roger : -+Ken :

I did a helluva lot of work last Saturday. I put three different engines 'n three different cars plus a brake job. Y' wanna do a brake job? Hm? No, I don't wanna do a brake jo(hh)b hhh I gotta Jeep that c'd use a good brake job, heh heh mhh eheh You don't think that's a Iotta work? I'm proud I I a' myself. No I- I know that's a Iotta t-work to put a set of brakes in that's why I keep hesitating, I put three engines in three cars. You wanna put a new engine in a- in a new Jeep? For money. Okay, fit a Chevvy Two into a Jeep. ( 1 . 0) I've been trying to figure out how for the last two weeks hhh

And they more or less accept that question and give him advice, and nobody asks him what happened to the Thunderbird engine. What I want to pick up now is that the sort of choice makeable between "This thing is the hottest thing in town! " and, e.g. , "Why not?" matters in this sort of way: It is a sequencing problem. Now, I mentioned that, given the question "Why not?" we could get "What do you mean 'why not'?" And of course we could then get "What do you mean what do I mean why not?" The question is, why would we get an extension like that, i.e. , of questions building on questions? Well, if what you do is offer an answer to the challenge, then what you're setting up is that the other person operates on your answer. You know that they're in a position of being doubtful, and that if you produce an answer they are thereby put in a position of being able to do a critique on your materials. A way to switch the thing around is to attempt to get them to offer such sorts of materials as that then put you in the position of commenting on their candidate explanation. That is to say, we have here an occasion of battle for which sequencing considerations are operative, where the position of commenting on the answer is an ideal position to be in, a position one may want to achieve. And these attempts of people to get into a position of being the commentor on the answer of the other can be done via the production of actual sequences from a set of sequences that are alternative to each other. So the possible answer to the question, why would we get an extension made up of questions building on questions is, we get that sort of thing where an 'answer'j'comment on answer' relationship is one in which the comment will have considerable power. Then we want to ask where do we get this ' question building on question building on question' sequence going? Could it get going for any kind of question? Does it get going only for a special kind of a question? Can we say something about its populational positions? At least one place where it occurs is with initial challenges: "Where were you last night?" "Why do you ask?" "What do you mean why do I ask?" And there are other things to be done at any point than just building up a question sequence. You can give an answer that's a useless answer: "Where were you

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last night?" "Why do you ask?" "Oh, I just wanted to know. " Where "I just wanted to know" doesn't give the person anything to make a good comment on. What I'm attempting then to do is to deal with a distributional question in a way. Where does this 'question on question on question' sequence occur? Where does the attempt to get into a position to do a comment on the answer occur? Do they have some locus? Do they occur everywhere, anywhere, or do they specifically occur somewhere? Where one wants to get from that some determination that some sequencing positions are 'better than others, ' or that people figure that that's so, and figuring that that's so has involved them in evolving a really elaborate set of ways they can move from a given position, where there may be a much more elaborate development of possibilities in one sequential place than in others. Now we're not talking about what can somebody do given the question "Why the hell you gonna put a Ford in a Jeep?" in the sense of 'what set of possible things could they do, since they could do anything?' That is, Ken could say "Good morning, ' ' i.e. , one could do 'anything' that has nothing to do with the question. We're asking what sorts of things are in sequence with some given object, and is it possible to develop a comparison between the kinds of permutations that have been developed off of one object as compared to the kinds of permutations that are developed off others. If a comparison can be developed, then the sorts of permutations, their character and their import, would be a matter of interest.

Lecture 8

'Identification reformulation; ' Pairing off at parties; 'Abstract' versus 'concrete' formulations I want first to talk about problems that I 'll call ' identification reformulation . ' 1 I haven't dealt much with materials on identification so far, but I would like to give a glimpse of the niceness of the materials involved in that. In the following bit of data, Nancy is a lady who is taking a class at college. At the end of the course she goes out with some of the people in the class to a place where they have beer and pizza, and now she's telling a friend of hers about it. Nancy :

Agnes : Nancy :

. . . so a bunch of us went over, and there were three of us gals and five or six fellas. And then one of the girls had to leave, about half an hour later 'cause she had to go home and let her roommate in. And uh, one of the other girls had to leave for something. And there I sit with all these young fellas. I felt like a den mother. Are you the oldest one in the class? Oh by far.

What I mean to notice by 'identification reformulation' is that we have here an initial formulation of the population: " . . . three of us gals and five or six fellas. ' ' Then something happens, some people leave, and what we get is not a restatement of that formulation by reference to the now current situation, i.e. , "So now there was just one gal and five or six fellas," but a different formulation of the population: " . . . young fellas" and a "den mother" -like person. We want to see why a reformulation is done, and whether there is any basis for the particular reformulation. We might also see if we can say anything about the initial identification. Now, core to at least one sense of the situation is that while in the reformulation there are different identifications used of the various personnel, the personnel identified in that scene were all present in the initial situation and were already identified. It's not as if some new people arrived and now 1 The actual "first" consideration, of a phenomenon Sacks talks of as a ' constructed explanation' , has been omitted here. It can be seen in Spring 1 97 0 , lecture 6, pp. 263-6.

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a new set of identifications are employed to deal with the new people, where, e.g. , that calls for a shift in the characterization of earlier people as well. The people identified in the reformulation were all identified earlier. Each person was identified via the two classes, 'gals' and ' fellas. ' And we can offer some considerations about the usages of those initial identifications. The issue isn't simply that any way would have done to identify who went to the beer place, e.g. , "eight or nine people" or "a bunch of us students" or, in that these fellows later become "young fellas, " she might have used sex plus age: "Me, two young girls, and five or six young fellas. ' ' There are combinations, alternatives, and you could get a range of different sorts of things being used. We want to know why those particular ones were used. I would like to note two sorts of things. First, with respect to going off together to a beer place and with respect to being together in the beer place, then sex is a relevant way to characterize how these people come to be co-present. That is to say, 'gals and fellas' is a way of formulating people's co-presence for such a place; which is not to say that 'students' isn't also, but 'gals and fellas' may discriminate between being in this place together and, e.g . , being in the classroom together, which is where they started from. They started, then, as 'students' and they became 'gals and fellas. ' And that's not quite all, because the numbers matter. For the issue of their co-presence in the beer place, that they go out in the group as 'gals and fellas' is one thing, but also relevant to how they are together is the relative numbers. That there are three of one and five of the other, and not three of one and three of the other, is an important sort of fact for the report of what was happening - where we don't want to forget that she knows at the outset of the narrative how the evening turned out - in that three of one and three of the other, any equal number, can tum into pairs. The issue, then, of what could happen over the course of that evening, which is initially potentialled by the formulation 'gals and fellas' and would not be in the same way raised by 'eight of us' or 'a bunch of the students, ' is partially modified by the fact that there are three of one and five of the other. That is to say, under the circumstance of three gals and three fellas, the story would tum on the suggested possibility that pairing up is going to happen, and a natural history of the evening would then be a matter of how it is that I ended up with the one I ended up with. Three and five do not make pairing up a potential, i.e. , a natural historical, thing. Alright, then the two girls leave. Now the issue is that when the two girls leave, that she does an identification reformulation is not an incidental sort of fact. That is to say, that event occasions an identification reformulation for at least some possible reasons turning on that two girls having left, the issue then for her is how is it that she is still there. It's now just her and the five or six guys. Should she leave? If she shouldn't leave, how is it that she can find a way to stay? There are several things involved in this issue. One is that she can figure that if anything of a sexual sort was to be coming out of the evening, then that possibility has now been undercut by the potential sexual objects for the guys leaving. She may then be simply in the way of the five fellows, i.e. ,

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they could go out to do something else; they are in any event not going to do anything with her. There is also the issue of, two girls having left, how, specifically, is the evening to be brought to an end? There's now one and five or six. There clearly is not going to be any pairing off, unless it turns out to occur by virtue of the fellows drifting off and leaving her with one of them - where, then, she has either a pleasure or a problem as it may be. With the girls having left, is there some way of arriving at a way of finding where we are so that we can, having found where we are, find a way to end the thing? For example, we could find where we are in such a way as to have the thing end by leaving all together rather than, e.g. , the guys just drifting off. Another sort of issue is that when there are the two other females there is a crowd of an undifferentiated sort for, say, any observer. There's eight or nine people of various ages and sex, and she is in no distinctive relationship in that place. When, however, there is only her and the five or six fellows, then an issue which she can figure that others observing the scene are attentive to is the question, What is she doing with them? Where it is transparent that for combinations of people, members of some combination in some public place can be attentive to what any unknown observer figures that a person like them is doing in that collection. She can then be looking for some identification which could yield various sorts of results. She could, for example, search for an identification which yields a kind of legitimacy to this combination in this place. Now the initial identification had that kind of characteristic for some collection of people being in a beer hall. That they're 'gals and fellas' accounts fot their co-presence, makes their co-presence not a problem. The events that then happen have as contingent for them that she either can come up with such an identification as locates them as legitimately co-present, or she can leave and make that not a problem. Should she not leave, not having found an identification which makes their co-presence legitimate, and should some of the fellows drift off, leaving a pair, then, as a pair it might be noticeable as persons of cross sexes and marked age differences. In a place where they're not supposed to be, pairs like mother-son, father-daughter are noticeable. It's in that light, then, that "I felt like a den mother" is an appreciateable reformulation. Her reported feelings are not that she felt 'like a movie star' or 'like the center of attention, ' but "like a den mother, ' ' i.e. , someone who properly belongs with five or six young fellows when that person is female but not anything like the same age. And with that formulation also, if it was presented at the time, the event could be transformed into kind of a meeting, where, then, that everyone should leave together could be thereby implied. And she might perfectly well have presented her reformulation, e.g . , "God I feel like a den mother. " It's also worth noting that it's rather important that she would have presented that reformulation, i.e. , it would not be the sort of thing that one of the fellows could delicately propose to her, e.g. , "God it's like having a den mother here. " That is to say, their way of keeping her

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present would not involve that sort o f identification as the legitimatizing identification. Now it's really neat if it's the case that that is what she felt like. That is, she was not searching for some way to find, do I belong or don't I belong, but the product of a search which located how they could be legitimately co-present over those changes in personnel, just popped into her head. So, while there is a lot of work involved here, it is not work from which anybody gets sweated up. It is not a problem for which she has to particularly search out a solution; it is not a solution to a problem that she had in the first instance proposed to herself in order to see that she needed to solve it. But nonetheless you can find that on occasions of an initial formulation of a population, changes in personnel of that population will provide that people will go about reformulating that population. And they will do the reformulations in various such ways as to yield, e.g. , the continued legitimate co-presence of the people now present, or to find that "Gee, I'd better go. " Where one thing that "Gee, I'd better go" is dealing with is that they cannot find a way to rationalize their continued presence given the change in the personnel. And of course the very statement "Gee, I'd better go" is often treated as something like this: A request on the part of the person who said it, for such a reformulation as the other parties will offer, as will yield that the person should still stay. So it routinely happens at parties that some collection of people leave; somebody will say "Well we'd better go, " and then the host will say something like, "Now that all the guests I had to invite have gone, we can have a party with the people I wanted to be with . " That's a prototype of the kind of work one can do, and not any identification will do that kind of work. Let me turn now to another sort of matter. There's a place in the book Deep South, a wonderful ethnography of the south in the thirties, where they're talking about upper-class life. And one of the things they do is give a characterization of an upper-class party. The situation for this group that they're studying is that maybe five couples gather very frequently during the week at one or another's house for a party. They're all married couples, and pretty much all of the couples are having an affair - whatever that meant for those people then - with somebody other than their spouse. But they arrive with their spouse and leave with their spouse, though the evening involves them in not being with their spouse at some point in it. Now, generically there's a problem, but in that material it's a nicer problem; and that is, e.g. , a party having gotten going with something like everybody in the living room and one or some small number of conversations going, how do a series of multi-party conversations get transformed into two-party conversations of the right sort? I ask it that way because two-party conversations are an essential in-between stage for other two-party events. That is to say, if a given pair who haven't come together and who don't start off in a situation of him talking with her, are to end up in his car or their bedroom or wherever else, then arriving at a two-party conversation is crucial. The reason you have to end up with two-party conversations is that two-party conversations are stable in a way that multi-party conversations are

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not. If a two-party conversation is going, two people of the opposite sex, then nobody has the business of joining them. If a three-party conversation is going then anybody may be able to join it and also, anybody may be able to leave it. Furthermore, it's much harder for either parties in a two-party conversation to get out of it than it is for any party to get out of a multi-party conversation - or indeed, than it is to get into a two-party conversation. So, although if a two-party conversation is not cross-sex then others are not locked out of it, if you have a cross-sex two-party conversation then others are locked out of it. Furthermore, what is involved is not that these two persons arrive at a two-party conversation, but that the collection of people somehow arrives at two-party conversation. That is, given the various etiquettes involved, you just don't have eight people sitting around and then A and B, who are not married to each other but are married to others also sitting around, get into a conversation together or go off together. What that involves, I take it, is that for the study of the natural history of a party in which a collection of people end up in pairs - whether they came in pairs or not, but if they came in pairs they end up in different pairs - the organization of conversation is a crucial phenomenon. And the particular problem that the organization of conversa­ tion has for this situation is, how is that multi-party conversations can get transformed into two-party conversations. I have no particular good ideas about how those multi-party conversations get transformed into two-party conversations, but there are of course a collection of events that are relevant to that. One problem is arriving at appropriate physical arrangements with the person you need to have a two-party conversation with in order to get where you want to get eventually. And there are a series of ways that that can be done, which are not obviously just doing that, i.e. , a bunch of people are sitting around and somebody ­ characteristically a male - can get up and say "Anybody want a drink?" At that point, some other person, e.g. , the relevant female, could say "Yeah, get me a scotch. " Now when he gets the scotch he brings it back to her. That can then allow that he stays where he happens to have arrived. So that things like who accepts the offer to get a drink can allow that one is placed in physical proximity with another, in a quite random-appearing sort of way, i.e. , it just happened that that guy asked who wanted a drink and you just happened to want a drink; where, that he ends up in direct physical proximity to you, and that, e.g. , the various sets of persons eventually get into the right sort of physical proximity, can allow the peeling off into two-party conversations. And the various sets of persons can get into the right sort of physical proximity in that, e.g. , when somebody goes to fix a drink he leaves a spot vacant next to his wife, to whom somebody can offer a cigarette, and take that spot, leaving his spot available for someone else. Now, I don't have a Disney-like picture of them playing that thing, and I have no idea that they get cued in like that. But it seems plain that there are mechanisms that allow for people changing their physical proximities in large ways as compared to, e.g . , you're sitting here talking to three people and the right conversation emerges so that one of them is no longer interested and /

Lecture 8

131

they drift off into another conversation, so now two of you are in conversation. And obviously a key thing is that you have to arrive at mechanisms which are delicate, i.e. , you don't have a system which works simply by reference to somebody coming in, sitting down with his wife, and then getting up and walking across the room and having a two-party conversation with somebody else's wife in the presence of everybody else. Presumably in these southern parties, the simplest kinds of mechanisms were, e.g. , dancing, where, for a bunch of friends, switching partners in dancing is an appropriate kind of thing and allows for people to drift off, and at the end of any given dance the people who were dancing together can sit down together, etc. Then there are those places where people can go one at a time, though they don't necessarily come back from or end up in a place where only one person is, like, men can go to the bathroom and women can go fix their make-up, and those provide ways that people can disappear, without specifically going where it may well be that everyone knows that they're going. And there are a bunch of other ways that pairing offs can happen. Regularly, people discover who it is that wants them that evening by virtue of things that don't happen at all in two-party conversation format, but can happen by reference to just the ordinary multi-party conversations' features. So, if A tells a joke, who it is that laughs most, or specifically last, or specifically takes up some remark of his - somebody who isn't his wife - is somebody who could be telling him what's going on with them. And people apparently notice that, "Well it was right at the beginning of the evening that I said this, and she found it so interesting; she had had the same kind of experience. ' ' Where, then, two-party conversations can be set up by virtue of the fact that you say to the crowd, ' 'You know what happened to me the other day," and then a half hour later, standing somewhere, she says "You know what you said before? That happened to me also. " That is to say, the materials you drop out in a multi-party conversation can be things that are picked up by somebody for later use. And people will regularly pick up on items which weren't specifically directed towards them. It's a matter about which you have to be really sophisticated because people are vastly smarter than you'd ever imagine about these sorts of things. I offer you a sort of thing I found in my favorite magazine. Cosmopolitan. It's the most extraordinary magazine; it's been taken over by Helen Gurley Brown and turned into an unmarried girls' technical manual. And what I mean by sophisticated is advice of the following sort. How do you meet a rich guy in New York? A cheap way is, you put an ad in the New York Times for a slightly used Astin-Martin. You get phone calls from guaranteed rich guys, and you say, "Gee I'm sorry, I sold it, " at which point the conversation can go wherever the conversation goes. Now that takes ingenuity. So the kinds of sophistication that people can bring to bear on problems of pairing off may be quite something. Q : I don't see why they take such elaborate pains, if everybody knows what's going on. HS : Well, what everybody knows, and what everybody knows by virtue

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of that the others have let you know it, are altogether different sorts of things. What everybody knows, more or less, is different than if the people involved force it on you. So what's done here is that while everybody knows, everybody is also engaged in concealing the thing among themselves so that nobody among the group is behaving scandalously. And let me just note in that regard that the gossip is as important as the relationships. That is to say, the wives and husbands are utterly interchangeable. I take it that there's no interest in each other by virtue of the fact that Mary and Sarah discover at the same time that for each of them the other's husband is really the guy they were interested in in the first place. The interest is that it's somebody different, in the context of its being something they can occupy themselves with talking about among each other. So, e.g. , any two women can talk about the fact that a third woman is having an affair with somebody else's husband, leaving aside that either or both of them are. In such conversations, it is routinely the case that people will talk about somebody else's illegal behaviors though the two people who are talking are 'doing the same thing,' without their then saying "Well I don't see what's so odd about her sleeping with X, I'm sleeping with Y. " So there's this texture of keeping it somewhat under cover. And indeed, it's the keeping it under cover that operates to locate who you have an affair with. The law in America is that you have an affair with your best friend's wife, and vice versa. Because that's the only person you can routinely be with, without it being "What are they doing together?" And that's what set up all these people being routinely together and not having to acknowledge what's going on. Whereas, e.g. , if a guy brought home his secretary and her husband to a party, then it might be a thing for which his wife and the neighbors would have to consider what's going on. Q : The thing that puzzles me though is, in even an affair where two people are involved, four people are really collaborating, and there sort of has to be permission. HS : That's why this thing is so interesting, because, e.g. , you've got to end up without having somebody's wife sitting there by herself, or somebody's wife sitting alone at one end of the room and somebody's husband sitting alone at the other end of the room, with everybody else having vanished. In any event, parties are a great thing to study, and anybody who cared about making themselves a major reputation in, e.g. , sociology or anthro­ pology would find that's one ideal thing to pick up, for these reasons: First of all, one of the greatest of all sociologists did a study of parties. It's a rule of course in academic life as in sports, that if you can beat the best you thereby become their equal. So if you could write a better paper on parties than Simmel wrote on parties, that's one way. Also, one of the most famous contemporary sociologists attempted to study parties, and failed. There are a lot of people who tried to study the structure of parties and couldn't do it. So that if you wanted to pick a topic that, if you could crack it, would put you somewhere, parties are a great thing. And you should be able to see why they're interesting. They're ideal sorts of social objects in that they have an

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obvious organization though nobody knows what it is and it isn't laid out in advance. That is, one party is like another party and yet nobody knows how in the hell they move. Now, parties are obviously, manifestly, objects which should be studied as sequential objects. And the notion that the structure of conversation is relevant is possibly a way to deal with some of the sorts of things that sequentially happen in parties. Here's another piece of data: Louise : Ken :

He was defending you. Well he was defending certain rights that everybody should have, I mean- not in the way of driving across golf courses, I admit that was wrong, but certain- certain rights of uh being able to do what you want.

The interest in this thing comes up as follows. A guy is doing a dissertation on topic in conversation, focussing on the following sort of process. He's got a set of conversations in which he was a participant when he worked at an insurance company. He was trying to get people to engage in what he called 'abstract conversation, ' and found that it's terribly difficult to get people to engage in this kind of conversation. So, e.g. , he brings up the topic of draft card burning and he wants to get into a conversation in which they talk about, e.g. , the morality of draft card burning. But the conversa­ tion turns into one in which the issue is, do all the various parties have their draft cards in their wallet, and each one takes out his draft card and they discuss it, and then they go through the rest of the cards they have in their wallets. So the difference is between a discussion of the morality of draft card burning and a discussion of "Do you have your draft card?" "No I don't," "Yes I do, " "Here's mine, " "Look, I've also got a this card, " ' 'I've got a this card and a that card," "Do you have a that card?" "No I don't. " And he talks about that sort of difference as 'abstract' and 'concrete, ' where the shift in topics, when they are normatively concrete, would be different than the shift when they are possibly abstract. That is, the 'draft card burning' conversation would lead to a different sort of topic than the ' 'Do you have a draft card?" conversation. The latter could lead to other cards you have and the former could lead to other sorts of morality issues. So that was the problem within the context of which this material seemed to be interesting. And that may be seen quite directly, i.e. , what's involved here is that Al, the person being referred to, did some talk occasioned by something that Ken had done. Louise gives it a 'concrete' formulation and Ken gives it an 'abstract' formulation. My specific interest is in this question: Does it appear, at least for some sorts of things that can happen in conversation, that there are bases for it being difficult to have abstract conversation, and it being a rule-governed fact that concrete conversation is preferred, i.e. , takes place? The matter has an obvious large-scale interest in that if it were the structure of conversation that got in the way of having

1 34

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abstract conversation, then the unsuitability of conversation for abstract talk, abstract thinking, etc. , might be found. What are the sorts of things involved? We have here two alternative - and as it turns out, competing - formulations of the same event. Both agree that it was 'defending' that was going on. The question is what was that 'defending' about? Ken? Or rights that everybody should have. Do those formulations at all turn on the way in which the defense was constructed? I think that they are quite independent of the way in which the defense was constructed. If the issue somehow got going as to whether Ken was right in driving across the golf course, then AI could be seen to be 'defending Ken' without regard to the abstractness of Al's defense. That is to say, were AI to have said "I think anybody has a right to do anything they want, " people could nonetheless see that he was defending Ken and not defending anybody's rights to do whatever they want to do. So, even though AI formulated his defense abstractly it could be seen to be doing something concrete - though it might well be that had he formulated his defense concretely he might not be seen as doing something abstract, though someone else could propose that there's really an abstract issue involved, i.e. , if AI said "Well I think that Ken has the right to do that," somebody else could say "What he means is that anybody has a right to do things like that. ' ' It is not, then, a situation in which the formulation of AI' s defense, or its terminology, controls whether it will be dealt with as abstract or concrete. And ruling out that the terminology is criteria! has a lot of importance because the very issue of 'which one is abstract and which one is concrete' thereby poses some kind of question, whereas on the one hand, if we just had Al's statement, ' 'I think anybody has a right to do whatever they want, ' ' we might say "That's an abstract statement, " and on the other hand, it might be never understood that way except in isolation. It would perhaps be otherwise understood as a way to defend Ken's rights, or to formulate Ken's action as not wrong. Now one of the things we've learned is that a way people have of interpreting an utterance of somebody else's is in terms of what sequentially relevant action it is doing. Not only is that a way, but it's an obliged sort of thing to do. For co-participants in a conversation, what they want to find out is what, sequentially, is this fellow doing? It's their business to find that out. That's what they're obliged to find out. And they're obliged to find it out so as to use their results in an utterance appropriate to that one. So, interpretation in sequential terms is done and required. And one aspect of interpretation in sequential terms involves the issue of 'to whom is the action that the utterance is doing done?' Where the collection of co-participants defines the population of 'to whom it could be done. ' He's saying it to one of us, no matter how he may be saying it. And the question then is, which of us is he saying it to, and what is he doing to that one that he's saying it to? Those are the kinds of obliged problems that hearers deal with. That means that the initial formulations of actions are in terms of sequential objects, and sequential objects by reference to co-participants, without regard to terminology, i.e. ,

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135

they're initially transformed into that sort of phenomenon: Insulting Joe, complimenting Sam, etc. He may say "I've known lots of nice white people in my life. " The question is, who is he talking about here? What that may mean is, however abstract the terminology, arriving at that he is doing something abstract - if it's done - follows on a transformation of what he's doing into concrete terms. It's not, then, a matter of if it's an abstract utterance give it an abstract interpretation, but whatever utterance, give it that sort of concrete interpretation. Then maybe you could re-give it an abstract interpretation. So that finding that he's doing something abstract awaits finding what concrete thing he's done. Now I think you can go a fairly long way in establishing relative order in terms of what sorts of interpretations are done.2 And insofar as we use the terms 'abstract' and 'concrete,' the sequence interpretations are concrete - which is not to say that they are concrete aside from that issue of 'abstract-concrete. ' Once having arrived at the 'concrete' interpretation, the issue now is to see whether the utterance that you found to be this sort of thing should be considered also or alternatively something else. And that involves questions of whether in the ordinary course of affairs you need to bother seeing that, or if it's raised, how it's dealt with. It could be raised as it is done in the materials here, or it could be raised by the speaker himself, e.g . , by saying "I don't care either way about what Ken did but . . . " or "I don't want to be speaking in Ken's favor but I think everybody should do what they want to do. " One can then be attempting to give instructions as to how the action of their utterance is to be appreciated. And there the question is, are there any assuredly successful ways to bring off that it will be heard as an abstract thing? Some sorts of consequences of its being heard as an abstract thing are that the range of normal conversational resources are lost. It is not then something which locates somebody who should talk next, somebody to whom it's been done, etc. That is to say, there are then no selectional considerations - unless you could in fact get an argument going; then you can do agreeing and disagreeing. But the issue of getting it going is itself a conversational phenomenon with regard to the issue of whether you're doing that. And the question of whether you're doing that or not is one that has a natural sequential paradigm in the way that this one doesn't. And even when gotten going, the question is whether there aren't then routine ways in which it would just drop back into concrete talk. It's a terribly interesting topic for a variety of reasons. One of them is that abstract versus concrete has a lot of psychiatric interest. The inability to do abstract thinking and reasoning and talking is treated as a characteristic of 2 Here followed two discussions which were not transcribed. One was a consider­ ation of a mis-hearing of the word " agreeing, " where sequencing could be seen to determine the very hearing of a word . See Fall 1967, lecture 1 2 , in vol . I. The other discussion focusssed on sequence for understanding reference, vis-a-vis the phenom­ enon of ' intentional mis-identification. ' See Spring 1 966, lecture 2 1 , pp. 4 1 7-20 and Winter

1967,

March

9,

p.

544,

in vol . I.

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some kinds of psychiatric disorders. So, if that's a particular kind of defect, an extension of what is in a way, normative, rather than something that is really peculiar to those birds whereas everybody else does abstract talk, that's of interest.

Lecture 9

Sound shifts; Showing understanding; Dealing with 'utterance completion;' Practical mysticism The first thing I'm going to discuss will not very likely have its import clear, though I'll sketch it. I have a fascination with a difference in the way things that have 'you' after them, and the 'you,' get put together. Things like "didje" and "wantche. " There are obviously other instances, "wouldje" and "betche, " for example. Let me try to give some characterization of the problem to which these might be relevant. There are, in linguistics, theories that go by the name of 'transformational. ' What in its simplest way it involves is that in trying to account for the syntax of some actual sentences, where that sentence is part of a corpus of possible sentences, what's done is to posit the existence of a finite and relatively small corpus of alternative sentences, and then account for the production of the actuals - though the primitives can perhaps be actuals - by operations performed which combine and otherwise transform the primitives. So at least to some rather considerable extent any proposed set of transformations have a kind of hypothetical character to them. Nobody knows whether there are, really, some finite corpus of primitive sentences in people's brains, and whether or not they start out with one of them and then perform the operation on it. But there could be extremely convincing theoretical reasons for urging that some sentence was arrived at by some sort of transformations, or that transformations in general are the way that sentences are arrived at. That's the context. Now when I noticed this difference between "didje" and "wantche" as a class difference, it seemed to me that that phenomenon can be relevant to the status of the phenomenon of transformations in this way: Suppose we asked, what would be convincing evidence that people make some actual transformations? Or suppose we asked a related question, are there things to look at which are to be explained by reference to there having been a transformation? Then we might be engaged in looking at some phenomenon for how it might evidence a transformation having taken place. We'd look at it to see what it is the product of. And an obvious way to look at something to see what transformations it evidences having been done, would be to see if we could find in it residues of its earlier status. That's quite an obvious way to look at natural objects. If you're given a rock you might well find youself looking at it to see, not what its current state is, but to see evidences of its prior states. Now for things like a sentence, the 'earlier' would 137

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be something like a hopeful analogy, since the sentence itself doesn't have prior statuses. If you had a page which is partly ripped, you might be able to see the prior status, or inquire into its prior status to find what's missing and things like that, which are the kinds of problems that archeologists face when they're dealing with ancient fragments. But perhaps there are places where you could do that for actual talk. So the strategy is not at all arcane. The question is how could it seriously be applied to a piece of talk - and by that I don't mean, e.g. , a tape recording to find out what was erased. Now we have "didje" and "wantche, " and the way I operated was to notice this thing about them: Whenever 'did' and 'you' are not in the environment of each other, they have a particular form or a range of forms, i.e. , 'did' and 'you,' and 'want' and 'you,' and there are a great many places where 'did' is said and 'want' is said. And we also would say that when they get combined in adjacencies of "did you" and "want you," i.e., in adjacencies of that order and not the reverse order ("you did" and "you want"), you get "didje" and "wanche" (you don't get "je dij" and "che wan") And that holds for various other things and 'you,' and various other things and various other things. So we have what might be reasonably seen as an initial state or a normal state, and then another state which might be an end product. Now what happens when the two, 'you' and 'did' or 'you' and 'want,' are combined in the 'did' plus 'you' and 'want' plus 'you' order is that the combination yields, not a retention of their sounds but other sounds where, however, those other sounds are not new sounds but other sounds in English. The 'j' is used in, e.g. , 'judge' and the 'ch' occurs in, e.g. , 'church . ' So the 'd' plus the 'y' might be said to yield 'j. ' And the 't' plus the 'y' yields, 'ch. ' And that is an absolutely simple transformational argument: In the environment of 'd' plus 'y' where 'y' follows 'd,' the yield is 'j. ' If 'd' is followed by 'y,' say 'j. ' If 't' is followed by 'y, ' say 'ch. ' The question is, what kind of evidence would there be for that happening? Does the argument of 'originally' hold, i.e. , that 'j' was originally 'd' plus 'y'? Or is this just a different thing? I want to make the following argument about the evidence for transfor­ mation, by reference to the notion that you can still see, in the end product, features of the original item. That is to say, in the worn out stone that was a statue, you can see a smoothed down face and you can say it wasn't originally done as a smoothed down face, it was originally a full face but age, water, etc. , smoothed it down. Then what is it that these things might be said to preserve from the original although they are different? To make that kind of argument you need contrasts, i.e. , you need to have different cases so as to be able to see what is being aruged. That's why I picked two cases to use, and indeed it was noticing the two cases that set the whole thing up. I started with the case 'didje' and 'wanche' and noticed several diferences between them, and then constructed an argument to see what could be done with those differences. So what's preserved from the earlier state or the hypothetical earlier state or the possible hypothetical earlier state? What we want is that if things were different in the earlier state, that difference is preserved. Then we can say they

Lecture 9

1 39

got transformed, and they got transformed in an orderly way, and what differentiated them in the earlier state still differentiates them. And that obtains here. Among other differences between 'did' and 'want' is that they have a specific orderly set of alternative sounds, 'd' and 't, ' which differ in only one way: 'd' is voiced and 't' is voiceless. Now notice that 'j' and 'che' preserve that difference: 'j' is voiced and 'che' is voiceless. So you get the daimedly 'product' sounds preserving that there is a voicedjvoiceless difference, and preserved for the right cases, i.e. , the argument would fall apart if 'did' plus 'you' became 'didche' and 'want' plus 'you' became 'wanje. ' Another possibility, which would provide that the argument would never have gotten constructed in the first place is if 'did' plus 'you' and 'want' plus 'you' became cases of the same product, 'didche' and 'wanche' or 'didje' and 'wanje. ' Instead, the voicedjvoiceless distinction is preserved, and preserved for the right cases. Then you can see that there was an original sound, which in any event we know to exist - 'd' and 't' - and new sounds were picked, where the new sounds evidence the old sounds by virtue of having the voicedjvoiceless features in them, and in them in the right way. That pretty much holds for the range of 'd'j't' endings. So then, when you look at 'didje' and 'wanche' you can say that in the voiced/voiceless distinction you can see the earlier state evidenced in them, where i ( you were just going to have a new pattern of sounds there could presumably be any pattern of sounds if it weren't that the original sounds governed the choice. You can say, then, that there was an original sound and features of it governed the outcome. I stopped with 'didje' and 'wanche' but the point is that one can ask if there are other places to look, to find in some state of the materials a history of transformation. And sound shifts are an obvious place to have looked, since those people who work on the history of a language do specifically study sound shifts. That is, the way in which languages develop, the emergence of German from Indo-European for example, is found by positing a collection of sounds in Indo-European and seeing how they evolved. And they get, then, laws of sound change - which for all I know might have that 'dy' and ' ty ' were the original sounds and 'j' and 'che' emerged from them. The question of 'didje' and 'wanche' would then presumably be partially historical; it may be an evolutionary phenomenon that you got 'didje' and 'wanche. ' I suppose that the notion of sound transformation, with sounds being explorable for their status as the product of transformation, provides that talk is an obvious place to look at the phenomenon of transformation. The second little exercise concerns the utterance "You went up further · then" in the following fragment. A: B: A:

Didje have a nice time? Oh, wonderful. Goo::d,

1 40 A: B: A: B: A: B: A: B: B: B: A: B: A: B: A: B:

Part II

[ Good. Just wonder/ jful. Where'dju go: : . (0.6) We were in northern California, up- (0. 2 ) weh(hhh)- (0.4) way up in the mountains too. (0.4) Oh well we wen' up there oh: : about thr- 'hh I'd say about three weeks ago we was up at Maripo:sa, 'hh/ jhh Uh huh, -an' up in the Mother Lode country en we jj wen' all through those ghost tow:ns. ( � Oh: : I see, Well we were up uh 'hh intuh Red (0. 5 ) Red Blu:ff? (0.4) Oh: : . // ( ) You wen' up further then. Yes. Uhjjhuh, Uh huh,

One kind of issue that we could be interested in - though I'm sure it sounds peculiar to have an interest in it by virtue of these sorts of materials - is the phenomenon of understanding. I say 'peculiar' because we might figure that that's what talk is all about; one thing that talk involves is understanding; if understanding isn't there, then there's nothing much going on. Are there then ways that we could specifically justify the study of understanding; of how understanding is shown? It's in the light of that issue that I wanted to see what would be a simple, obvious way to begin to study the phenomenon of understanding. I began to locate some materials which are on point. The simplest direct instances which start us off are things like this: 1 A: B: A:

How long are you gonna be in town? Uh, til about Monday. Oh it'll be just a week then.

1 Those are not actual instances, but versions of the following two:

Goldie : jessie : Goldie :

HQw long are you gonna � he;re, 'hhhh Uh� it' s ( ' ) not too lo:ng. Uh: : Jgst until: uh: : I think MQnday. ( 1. 2 ) Til, o h you mean like a week tomgrrow,

Jessie :

y�

=

=

(')

Lecture 9

141

and A: B: A:

Where are you staying? In Pacific Pallisades. Oh at the west side of town.

Now the relevance o f those things is that when we take the third utterance in each of those fragments what we can see is that those third utterances specifically involve their producer performing an operation on the second utterance, and using some of its materials. In that we can lay out those operations, we can say that what's being specifically done there is 'showing understanding. ' And if it's so that people do that sort of thing, we can then say that a warrant for the study of the phenomenon of 'understanding' is that it's specifically a thing that is achieved, and it can proceed employing conversation, and have places where it gets exhibited, etc. We need not say we're interested in 'understanding' by virtue of, e.g. , some humanistic bias about the nature of conversation, or by reference to some theoretical supposition that people understood each other, but by virtue of the fact that one of the things people do in conversation, as they do 'questioning' and 'answering' , etc., is, specifically, 'showing understanding. ' Now one might figure there was a simpler procedure than performing some transformation operation on the initial item, e.g . , repeating. A: B: A:

Where are you staying. Pacific Pallisades. Oh. Pacific Pallisades.

That can work, but it's of interest to note that some repeating may well show understanding, but repeating is equivocal. Repeating does not guarantee that you thereby show understanding. The materials in point for that are: For the sort of thing the doing of which specifically involves repeating, that you understand can, for that thing, be questioned. And by that sort of equivo­ cality of repeating, I mean to refer to, e.g. , telling a joke. That you repeat it is of course crucial since, while there are some changes which would preserve the joke, many would not. And one may be seen to be 'repeating a joke one has heard' over a series of modifications one makes. The point is that jokes are specifically objects done as repeats, and they are specifically objects the telling

Goldie : Jessie : Jessie : Goldie : Jessie :

Now you tQld me you eh-uh-where are you . = Are you at uh: Puh-ih: uh: (0 . 4) eh-No in ah: : : : :uh: 0 't M!!rina del Rey. (0.9) Marina del Rey. = Oh Marina del Re t Y· Y!!h. =

C) Palos

1 42

Part II

of which does not evidence that you understand it. So, where there's an issue of whether a person understands a joke they tell, that they told it doesn't solve the problem. The materials on this are rampant, and a characteristic case is where somebody's 1 2-year-old son or daughter comes home with a dirty joke, and the recipient can find that he has no idea whether or not the kid understands the joke and may then engage in an examination to find whether the kid understands it and may find that he perfectly well doesn't understand it as the examiner figures it should be understood. Sometimes the kid has no idea why it's funny though he laughs, other times he may have a perfectly good idea of why it's funny although it stands as an alternative to what the joke is about. So, although there is a great range of things involved in the equivocality of repetition, it is the fact of repetition that is equivocal, though any given repetition may be fairly dear. That is, repetition doesn't tell you that they understand, but the way a repetition is done may tell you that someone specifically doesn't understand. In any event, that someone is doing a repetition may leave one as much in the air about whether they understand as one would have been had they not talked. Repetition, then, is not a 'simpler case' of showing understanding than the transformation operation under consideration. Notice that the operation on some prior utterance can fail; i.e. , it perfectly well can be that you produce an understanding utterance that involves that it is a misunderstanding, e.g . : A: B: A:

Where are you staying. In Pacific Pallisades. Oh in the center of town.

Then it can be taken that you don't know where Pacific Pallisades is. And, that understanding utterances can fail would seem to be related to the fact they could succeed. Now repetitions can fail also, but when they fail what fails is not the understanding but the hearing, e.g. : A: B: A:

Where are you staying. In Pacific Pallisades. Pacific Boulevard?

In that same data there are some nice little things involved in repetitions. Let me give you some discussion on it because it evidences something related to understanding: 2 B: A: B:

Now you told me where you are. And you're uh, Palos- uh, Uh no. In La Marina. La Marina. Oh La Marina. Yeah.

2 See p.

141,

n.

1

above for the actual fragment.

Lecture 9

143

B says "Palos-" as a rememberance of what she was told, and it's corrected. What she was originally told was "La Marina. " "Palos-" is the first word of a place in Los Angeles, 'Palos Verdes Estates. ' I think that may be fairly uniquely what it could be the beginning of, in that that's not the place that was told her. Nothing like that was in the name originally given her, i.e. , 'La Marina. ' However, if you were told La Marina and didn't remember that name, then you might well come up with Palos Verdes Estates as the place that was told you, by virtue of this sort of thing: If you're given a name like that, and you analyze out of it and preserve some features of what it names, then when you need the name again you use the features to find the name. Palos Verdes Estates is quite substitutable for La Marina, i.e. , they're both specifically Western Los Angeles beach cities, relatively snazzy beach areas. So if what you did when the person told you ' 'I'm staying in La Marina" was to say to yourself, "Where is that?" or "What is that?" then you would come up with such features as not only located it, but located it, e.g. , in contrast to where you live. So for B, who lives in a not very snazzy section of middle Los Angeles, such features would be distinctionally relevant. If that's what's happened, then the recovery operation, though wrong here, does exhibit that it was not the name that was remembered but properties of the thing named, i.e. , though it's wrong, it's also right in many aspects. And it specifically is not an error via sheer use of terms, i.e. , had B said "Mariposa, " then there is the issue of the 'M-a-' preservation. So in this case, where B has been given the name on the prior evening, it is not so much that she is now attempting a 'repeat, ' but that she is doing an operation of recovery from an analysis. And there is a range of evidence for the sort of thing I've proposed actually being correct. Over the years we've been collecting what we call 'gist preserving errors, ' where one is trying to recall something and finds that one recalls not just anything else, but something else which stands in a very nice relationship. Titles of things is a main area that we used, and we get things like The Yellow Rolls Royce when what was meant was The Solid Gold Cadillac. These are very common; an error-of-sorts in which you remember the features of the item and find another item with that collection of features, where the other item might well be the right one except that it happens to be wrong. This is the sort of phenomenon that, given one instance, you might figure it's a very rare case, but you could collect a bunch of them in a week. So, even the case of 'repeating' or 'redelivering, ' where we're talking about remembering in a way, can be rather more complicated than it appears. And even with local repeating you can get similar sorts of problems involved. Someone who does what they figure to be a 'repeat' having heard and understood something that was just said, will turn out to have heard something quite different than was just said, but what they hear is something that could have been said given, e.g. , what they were talking about. I don't have any instances with me, but I've collected some in which the thing heard bears no describable relationship to the thing said, where what may happen is that a conversation is going along; somebody in some way switches topic

1 44

Part II

without specifically signalling that they've switched topic - which can happen, e.g. , if there's a pause, or e.g. , if somebody notices something and talks about the thing they noticed - and what's heard is a perfectly okay thing to have said on the ongoing topic. Returning to the earlier materials, I want to focus on "Oh well we went up there oh: about thr-"hh I'd say about three weeks ago we was up at Maripo:sa. " I want to try to locate a problem for which this utterance has interest. One topic that is fundamental to the study of conversation is 'utterance completion. ' It is fundamental in a whole range of ways and I'll mention just a few. If you're going to have a conversational system which operates with speakers talking one at a time, and if you're going to have a conversational system in which not only do they talk one at a time but in which there is - as an ideal - no gap plus no overlap between adjacent utterances, and if there is not some specific definitive way that completion is signalled, e.g . , a particle that signals that the utterance is over, then there is a problem of completion which has these implications: A speaker needs to speak in such a way that others can see that he has not yet completed so that they don't start up so as to have him talking and them talking, and he needs also to be able to signal completion in such a way that they can see on its occurrence that it's happened so that you don't get his having stopped and they not having started. The question then is, what are the mechanisms whereby completion is signalled and recognized? The basic structural unit in terms of which completion is dealt with is 'possible sentence endings. ' And possible sentence endings are something that people can see as forthcoming so that on the occurrence of one they can start up. (The reason for saying only 'possible' sentence endings and not 'aaual' sentence endings is that perhaps any possible sentence ending but at least most possible sentence endings are also not necessarily sentence endings in that that sentence could be continued. ) Attention i s then directed t o employing 'possible sentence endings' which has a consequence that speakers go about producing, with exceptions (I don't mean exceptions in any given conversation, but that there are conversations which are exceptions), utterances of sentence-long length. And they do that though the utterance-sentence length varies considerably. That is, they may produce an enormously long sentence within an utterance or they may produce an enormously short one, but where, e.g . , the enormously long one is easily transformed into or is maybe a transform of a series of small ones, they nonetheless produce a long sentence rather than a series of sentences. And they may be said to avoid series of sentences, since if they have something they want to say, any possible sentence ending within the series could be treated as an occasion for someone else starting to talk. That means not only do they produce multi-clause sentences, but they also produce multi-claus sentences of one sort as a preference over another sort. That is, there are two sorts of multi-clause sentence; one that indicates right from within the first clause that it's going to be a multi-clause sentence, and one that doesn't indicate that it's a multi-clause sentence until some second

Lecture 9

145

clause occurs. Those are formally distinct in this way: I f somebody uses 'if ' in the first clause of an utterance then a hearer can see that the sentence of which this clause is a part will at least have another clause and can be monitored until the 'then' clause occurs, where the 'then' clause will indicate that it's the last clause. That can be compared with such a sentence as, "I went to the movies but I saw a lousy picture, " where 'but,' which makes it a multi-clause sentence, doesn't occur until after the first clause of the sentence is over. Were one monitoring the talk for first possible ending, intending then to talk, one could have started simultaneously with 'but. ' Now notice that you can get a transform of that sentence which will have this indication at the beginning, e.g, "While I was at the movies I saw a lousy picture. " Now there are reasons for doing the 'but'-type thing. These reasons are indeed relevant to the issue of a one-sentence utterance. One reason is, suppose you produce a one-clause, one-sentence intended complete utterance and nobody starts talking, where you haven't required that they start talking by, e.g. , asking a question. Seeing a pause, you may then take it as your task to continue talking or to start again. If you take it that it's reasonable that it's your fault that there's a pause, then a way to deal with that pause as not 'nobody's talk' but 'a pause within your own talk, ' is to tum what you say thereafter into a specific 'continuation. ' And when you make a specific 'continuation' you get certain other virtues, one of which is that the 'but' -clause provides that it was correct that somebody did not start talking. You also signal that when the 'but' -clause is finished you will have finished the utterance, and it will have been a one-sentence utterance. So at least it needs to be looked to see whether multi-clause sentences in which the signal of multi-clausedness doesn't occur until the second clause, tend to be done where a one-clause sentence has been done and there was a talk gap. If that's so, then these second-clause signals are not inconsistent with the argument that if you're intending to produce what could be a two-sentence utterance, then you can make it a two-clause, one-sentence utterance. Those, then, are the sorts of things involved in the ways that people go about dealing with the problem of signalling completion and incompletion, and giving that information as early as possible so that others will not see a possible completion when they shouldn't, or fail to see a possible comple­ tion when they should - where of course I'm suggesting that things like 'if ' are attended for their status as completion signals. So the mechanisms for dealing with completion and incompletion are quite delicate sorts of things, and the sentence-utterance we are examining here may locate a rather nice technique with regard to the issue of completion. I say "may" because I'm not altogether convinced that I have a finding here. Again, here's how it goes: B:

We were in northern California, up- (0. 2 ) weh(hhh)- (0.4) way up in the mountains too. (0 .4)

1 46 A:

Part II Oh well we wen' up there oh: : about thr- 'hh I'd say about three weeks ago we was up at Maripo:sa,

And we're focussing now on A's talk: "Oh well we went up there oh: : about thr-" and she stops and does a correction. Now, what kind of thing can that correction-occasion serve as? Why indeed does she need a correction here? Well, suppose that at this point - if not at the beginning - she sees where that utterance will go, i.e. , she sees that she's going to say something about Mariposa, in alternation to "up there. " If she were to do that in a grammatic fashion it would end up as two sentences, i.e. , "Oh well we went up there oh: : about three weeks ago. We were up at Mariposa. " Two sentences. I f she were to do it that way, then at "about three weeks ago" would be a possible completion and a possible point for the other to start talking. And the other might start talking by reference to the fact that it's not only a possible completion, but also a perfectly good return to her initial remark, and could occasion a number of appropriate returns, e.g. , "Oh isn't that a coincidence?" "isn't it lovely up there?" etc., etc. So it's not just a possible sentence, it's a possible utterance by virtue of its relation to what occasions it. And that's a problem. Now if, within the first sentence of your own utterance you start to do a correction, whatever sort of correction, you're still within that sentence. If you can produce such a correction as indicates that, from the correction on, now the hearer needs to remonitor for sentence completion, then what you can do is produce almost a complete sentence and start a correction that allows you to do now another complete sentence. Then you don't face the two-sentence problem. You end up having in effect done two sentences, but there's never been a chance for a hearer to find a first possible completion of the first. The correction allows for hearing that the sentence, and the utterance, is still open, and a first possible completion has again to be watched for. While I wouldn't dream of saying that this stands as a technique that one could use from the outset to produce two sentences without it having occurred that there was a possible completion between them, what it means is that having begun a sentence and having discovered in the course of it that you need two, you have a means for getting to do two without possible completion having occurred. Furthermore, she's gone far enough in the first so that it isn't just that she is replacing the first with the second, but the second adds to the first, since the first is quite available already as to what was said in it, i.e. , she didn't cut the first off in such a way as to provide that the first is simply replaced by the second in terms of what the first meant. By virtue of that, it would not do to just say that she's replacing a bad start with a good start. She is in fact here achieving two sentences without having any place occur in the course of those two sentences which could be seen as a possible completion. Turning to another matter, what interested me in the first place about this data was the sequence of places, in terms of, a place is named, then it appears that the other was there too, and then it turns out that they weren't in the

Lecture 9

147

same place. And questions come up like why pick 'northern California' in the first place? Why not pick what gets used eventually, 'Red Bluff? And, is there any lawfulness to such a sequence? I'll start off with a discussion of 'northern California, ' and try to give some characterization of its use. There is one obvious basis for it, they are southern Californians. A southern Californian knows what northern California is, i.e. , pretty much any southern Californian can tell another southern Californian "I was in northern Califor­ nia" successfully, i.e. , without the other saying "Where's that?" as compared to, e.g., "I was in Red Bluff " where someone might well say "Where's that?" And if you started with that and they said "Where's that?" then you're likely to say "In northern California. " Now if they were northern Californians they wouldn't say "I was in northern California, " they might say "I was up in Kern County" or something like that. The place name they choose turns on where they are, where they're from, and what they know about each other; at least in that they know each other is a southern Californian. You could extract a general rule from that, the general rule being: When you are doing a description (much more generally than places), in the first instance pick, if you can, such a description as you know that the other knows. Let me give now a really neat result of that. Here's the data: A: B: A: B: A: B: A:

I'm reading one of uh Harold Sherman's books. Mm hm, I think we read one, one time, about life after death'r something, Mm hm, And uh, this is How Tuh Make uh ESP Work For You. Mm hm, And it's excellent.

Let me here make a parenthetical remark. Lots of people are amazed at people's gullibility. "Imagine all these people who believe in ESP. " Now, one has to come to appreciate the way in which people believe in ESP. I want to introduce a term, and it's not to be heard in the way, e.g . , a title of a how-to book would be heard. The term is 'practical mysticism. ' What I mean when I say that people are 'practical mystics' is available as the talk goes on: A: B: A: B: A:

B: A:

And it's excellent. Well, when you get through II with it,­ And he talks aboutIs it yer book? No, Eloise uh brought it by, she was going away for a couple of weeks, and she brought it by with a note on, that s' d- it was a book she thought I would like, and uh, uh: : if I could, uh she'd like to have it back in two 'r three weeks. Mm hm. Uh I'll be through with it before she gets back.

1 48 B: A:

Part II

Uhjjhuh, But uh,

Then there's a bit of talk about the book, the author, etc. And then: B: A: B:

Is it an expensive book? I would guess it is, but the- the price has been dipped off of the cover, you know Mm hm,

Now, 'expensive' means 'expensive for a book, ' where 'expensive for a book' is grounds for not buying it but borrowing it. Now, imagine yourself a really serious believer in ESP, and then consider the sorts of uses that ESP would have; like obviously you could use it on the stock market. And suppose I came to you and said "You really believe in ESP, well here's a book, I guarantee it. I want $ 5 0,000 for it. " Whatever I asked, it would only set up the task of getting the money. For people who believe in ESP in the sense that they operate with it, they use it all the time, the way to see the special character of their belief in ESP is that a book about ESP is still a book, and you'd just as soon wait two weeks to borrow it than to buy it even if it was $ 2 .9 5 ; or if it costs $ 8 . 00 you'll get it out of the library. The lesson is that when you go about disparaging people who believe in ESP, you have to try to figure out what does it mean to believe in ESP. It's probably quite different than believing, e.g. , that the car that's bearing down on you doesn't see you. You don't then figure, e.g . , well what's it going to cost for an operation, but you jump. And I'm sure that these ladies would jump. That is, for things that anybody knows are practical, they'll behave practically; and indeed they behave practically with respect to ESP. Which is to say that while they say they believe in it and they talk a good deal about it and they go to meetings and they use it all the time, they're not staking any money on it. So, at least insofar as believing means putting your money where your mouth is, the character of their believing is obscure. Okay, returning to ' 'I'm reading one of Harold Sherman's books. I think we read one, one time, about life after death or something. " And by the way, the whole character of the state of religion in our day is evidenced by that "or something, " as though it could be about life after death, or not. What could the "or something" be? Anyway, the question I wanted to deal with was, why in the world does she say ' 'I'm reading one of Harold Sherman's books" ? It's not the way in which one would regularly identify a book, i.e. , one might say ' 'I'm reading this book, How To Make ESP Work For You. " However, if the rule 'pick some way of identifying an object which will permit the other to see that they know it' operates, then there is a real elegance to her selection. She finds a way to formulate that book which permits the other to see that the other knows, not that book but a book of the same class, i.e. , ' Harold Sherman, we read one of his books. ' That then locates this book in the way in which a title does not.

Lecture 9

1 49

That she goes through that kind of work to find a way to refer to the book is a most elegant sort of evidence that one does work at finding a description for something, and does have a preference, if one can use it, for building such a description as will permit the other to see that you know that they know what you're talking about. "One of Harold Sherman's books" specifically involves just that sort of a thing, and involves going out of your way to do it in a way that saying "northern California" doesn't. But 'northern California' is a simple instance of the same phenomenon, and it's in that way that one picks 'northern California' before 'Red Bluff. '

Fragment

Verb uses; 'A puzzle about pronouns' One kind of curious thing about some verb uses is, suppose you go to a luncheon and you meet somebody there who is serving. They are likely to describe what they're doing as ' 'I'm helping X. " That is to say, what you get is 'helping X' as an operation over a scope of jobs you could be doing. If X is hosting then you can be 'helping X,' if X is washing dishes you can be 'helping X,' etc., where what you report is how you come to be doing what you're doing; where, in a way it's obvious, I suppose, what you're doing. People can perfectly well see what you're doing; you're washing dishes or you're serving or you're doing something else. And what you report is how you come to be doing that, by reference to somebody else's responsibilities. In reporting what you're doing, you preserve who's business it is to do it, and just report your own actions by reference to that you're doing it for them. And it's of interest that those sorts of terms involve that a description of what you're doing is not, for example, observable by somebody who was to see you. That is to say, if you were to offer a description it would be "Yesterday I helped Mary" rather than "Yesterday I washed dishes. " Now that means, of course, that there's some complication in attempting to arrive at a description of what somebody is doing, by virtue of the fact that what they figure they're doing and what you can see them doing can turn out to be independent, in the sense that what they figure they're doing turns on their relationship to somebody else and what that other person is doing. Here's a same sort of thing. "Her house is beautiful, I'll take you up there some time. " The 'take' is a similar sort of thing. In characterizing what we're doing as Til take you up there," that preserves the relationship between me and that other person, and you and me, as compared to "We'll go up there some time. " If two people are together and they're asked what they're doing, they will often say, not, e.g., "We're going to the movies, " but one of them will say ' 'I'm taking X to the movies. " And that can be a point of humor, if you do a reversal on it. If it's a man and a little kid, then if the man says "He's taking me to the ballgame" or "He's taking me to the movies" or "He's taking me to Disneyland, ' ' that's just to say ' 'I'm taking him to Disneyland. " Which is also different than "We're going to Disneyland. " And I guess that, that the description is 'taking to, ' not 'going to' matters, since, e.g. , people complain, not that we don't go anywhere, but "You never This fragment was not among those Winter 1 969 lectures that Sacks decided to have transcribed. It just happened to be one of the few surviving tapes, and was transcribed after his death. One source of its interest is that it may represent the sorts of lectures that did occur but which Sacks didn't think warranted transcribing.

150

Fragment

15 1

take me anywhere. " We may 'go' a lot of places, but "You never take me anywhere" allows for a complainable position. So, for example, there's a point in people's lives at which X takes Y somewhere; that is, by virtue of 'X takes. ' Then there is a point at which they need no longer use that; if, say, they have a joint budget. Then X is no longer 'taking Y' somewhere, they're just 'going' to those places, and it apparently remains a complainable by reference to a past. That is to say, the romance is out of the marriage when they only go places together, he never takes her anywhere. X and Y going somewhere is not, then, necessarily equivalent to X taking Y somewhere. And of course X taking Y somewhere is not the same thing as Y taking X somewhere, whereas X and Y going somewhere doesn't make a choice on whether X is taking Y there or Y is taking X there. And those are obviously issues that turn out to matter, so that if X is in fact taking Y somewhere, and X is female and Y is male, then X may sometimes give Y the money to pay, rather than pay, so that it shouldn't be seen that X is taking Y there but will be seen as Y taking X there. That is, who turns out to pay is read by the cashier - or in the mind of the parties is read by the cashier - as who is taking whom, and that's something that they want to bring off right, for whatever reasons. And people will specifically go through a business of transferring money before they enter, or secretly transferriqg money, so as to have that end up the right way - though it's not anybody they know that's receiving the money, but it's nonetheless an embarrassable sort of thing. The problem is, of course, that romance is defined as something that operates in pre-marriage, where everything is 'taking to, ' so that if you want to preserve romance, you have to preserve some of those things which are hard to preserve. And there are, of course, a whole set of efforts that people go into, to preserve that sort of a thing. The movie Eight And A Half deals with one of the classical themes, that sex should be a lovers' relationship and not a married couples' relationship. And couples play at that all the time; that is to say, having their evening sex is something that came off as a seduction, and not routine. There's a very large orientation to that sort of phenomenon, and I guess people can become fairly adept at achieving for themselves the observability of that they're doing something other than just going to dinner, just going to bed, etc. Here's another sort of thing, that's of no large consequence, maybe. It involves things like "I imagine, ' ' "I guess, " "I suppose, ' ' and things like that. Where these involve not only the issue of whether you know or not - where they're saying that you don't know - but they also have a sequential import. If you say "I imagine" or "I guess" or "I suppose" and things like that, then you're characteristically inviting the other party to also take a position. That is to say, you get a differentiation when you use those things, where, if you say "I suppose," then the other will say, for example, "Yes, that's true" in distinction from, for example, just ' ' Uh huh. ' ' And they may be done, indeed, where you take it that the other knows something, as a way of getting them to tell you what you figure they know. Here's one:

152 A: B:

Part II

And it left her quite permanently damaged, I suppose. Apparently.

Okay, let me talk a little bit about "have to. " First of all, "I have to do X" is a way of making a rejection of something else, so that "I have to do X" relates X to Y; Y being something that somebody proposes: "Do you want to come over?' ' "I have to do X. " Now, "I have to" can, when it is being talked of, be referred to as "He says he had to" or " He had to. " And those involve how it is that you accept the excuse. If you believe the excuse you say " He had to do X" (or just " He can't come"). If you doubt the excuse you say " He said he had to do X. " And it's curious that a bunch of things are pretty much introduced as "I have to. " So you can perfectly well turn down a proposed evening's engagement by saying "I have to work," whereas you don't quite do the same thing when you say ' 'I'm sorry, I want to work. " Indeed, there are a bunch of things which are just not properly said with " I want to, " of which 'work' is one. If you want to achieve being odd, then you make that combination as a way of talking about certain things. Now it's of course the case that for any Y that you are invited to, while you may be able to say "I have to do X, " not any X will do. So when somebody sends you an invitation to a wedding on Sunday morning, you can't write back and say ' 'I'm sorry, I have to wash my car. " And if somebody calls you up and says "So-and-so died, the funeral is tomorrow, " you can't say "I have to go to class. " And that's relevant to how it is that certain sorts of formal situations operate to involve you in avoiding having to even say what's involved. That is to say, for a large class of engagements, 'prior engagements' - whatever they are - are offerable as excuses for turning down next engagements. One other small thing. Here's a line that goes "One night I was with this guy that I liked a real lot. " The only thing I want to point out about it is that it's not exactly clear, when "liked" is used, whether it means 'exclusively then, and no longer. ' It's one of those things for which there is a choice involved, such that one can use, though talking about a past event, " that I like a real lot. ' ' That is to say, for that sort of thing you can use the present tense. The choice of tense, then, can be informative, and you have, then, two options. There's an interesting parallel, in a way (this is a wrong thing to do, but it's a way of exposing a kind of ambiguity) . In English, for example, 'you' is obscure as to whether it's singular or plural. A phone call goes like this: A: B: A:

Hi Judy, Hi. What are you doing? Why don't you come over?

Now, in French it would be very hard to leave it to her to say whether she'll come over, or whether she and her husband will. As it happens in this case,

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she says "Well, we're going out," and then he says "Well, I thought you and your husband might come over. " Another minor sort of a point has to do with the use of 'do . ' It's a very interesting term in English, by virtue of the fact that it is one of the few things that are, in English, pro-verbs. Like pronouns. 'Do' is, quote, a substitute for other verbs. So there are a lot of things that you can say with a particular verb that you can also say with 'do . ' In some languages there are well-developed pro-verbal systems. In English, 'do' is supposed to be the most prominent, though I think, and others think, that there are other pro-verbs in English, of which 'say' is a prominent case; 'say' being, for one, the pro-verb for the 'performatives. ' But one small interest of 'do' is that it can be, for some things, a way of indicating that what it's being used as a substitute for is routinely done. A guy says, "One day some guys and I were doing houses. " Now "doing houses" is a way of saying "we were out robbing houses. " And you can say "One day some guys and I were out robbing houses , " where you make no indication of whether it is that you rob houses routinely or not. If you say "doing houses" then you're making a statement of a different order. And that usage is rather more general than that; indeed, I was surprised that it's there, because its main use in that routinized fashion is academic. That is to say, "They do philosophy" rather than "They're philosophers. ' ' The 'do' is a way of indicating a professional attitude, as I suppose "doing houses" is a way of indicating that you're at least not altogether amateur at robbing houses. The choice, then, of the pro-verb versus the verb may be non­ incidental. With respect to these performatives there are some things you want to differentiate, so that, for example whereas "I promise" does 'promising,' something like 'I mean" doesn't do 'meaning;' what it does is ' correcting. ' That is to say, when you say "I mean" you're asserting that what you're saying now stands in a relation to something you just said, and could stand as a correction to what you just said. And that can go with "he means" just as well. I'm sure there's a vast pile of further things you could say about verbs, but now let me give you a nice little puzzle about pronouns. Here's a quotation from the book The Development of Logic written by John and Mary Kneale (Oxford University Press). It's the authoritative, as they say, history of logic. It's really extraordinarily good. The quotation is from page 6 1 . The method of exposition in the Prior Analytics differs in two notable respects from that in the De Interpretatione. Prior Analytics is one of Aristotle's treatises on logic, and De lnterpretatione is

another, earlier of his treatises.

In the first place, Aristotle uses letters as term-variables, that is, as signs to mark gaps which may be filled by any general terms we choose, If P, then Q. Alright?

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provided gaps marked by the same letter are filled by the same term in any one statement. This is a new and epoch-making device in logical technique. It is used for the first time, without explanation, in the second chapter of the Prior Analytics, which deals with conversion, and it seems to be Aristotle's invention. In earlier works, generality is indicated by a rather clumsy use of pronouns, or by examples in which it is left to the reader to see the irrelevance of the special material. Both methods are used by Plato and Aristotle. An example of the former, from the Republic, is: "When things are of such a nature as to be relative to something, then those that are of a certain sort are relative to something of a certain sort. ' ' The latter is used by Aristotle in De Interpretation: "The denial proper to the affirmation, 'every man is white' is 'not every man is white; ' that proper to the affirmation 'some man is white' is 'no man is white' . " Plato's statement would be almost unintelligible without the illustrations which he adds, and Aristotle requires the reader to understand that the particular terms, 'man' and 'white,' are irrelevant to the point he is making. In both cases the use of variables would have given greater clarity and conciseness. For the statement of more complicated logical rules, such as those of the syllogism, their use is almost indispensable. The point is that at one point in the history of logic, generalizations are done by these pronouns. It was a great invention to replace pronouns with letters. Now, could we come up with some thoughts on why pronouns were used in the first place? Why they were a good first attempt? And why they then turned out to be lousy? It can't be solved just by logical considerations; you have to give some thought to the nature of pronouns as linguistic phenomena. There is a bit more about it on page 6 1 of Development of Logic, but they don't come up with an answer. In due course I'll give some thoughts on it.

Part III Winter 1970

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks © 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6

Lecture

1 Foreshortened versus expanded greeting sequences; Voice recognition tests; Reason for a call; 'My mind is with you;' Tel/ability My idea is to give a bunch of lectures under the title 'Overall Structural Organization of Conversation. ' The title names a type of organization of conversation which is discriminated from other types of organization that I figure conversation has. This type deals, roughly, with beginnings and endings, and how beginnings work to get from beginnings to something else, and how, from something else, endings are gotten to. And also the relationship - if there is one - between beginnings and endings. I figured I would first off do something that has two sorts of lessons to it. First, I would seek to give some idea that it's not the case that overall structural organization of conversation is at all the same thing as comprehen­ sive analysis of a single conversation and, in particular, that it doesn't pay to try, it isn't a pointed thing to do, to attempt a comprehensive analysis of a single conversation. Secondly, in contrast perhaps to the first point, it nonetheless pays to work at some single conversation as elaborately as one can. So I'm saying it doesn't pay to attempt a comprehensive analysis of some single conversation; I'm not saying pull out what you can and forget the conversation that you happen to have pulled it out of. I think it does pay to do as elaborate and extended a working on a single conversation as you can bring off. To instance those points I thought I would take some single conversation that I've spent some amount of time on, that I also think is kind of a simple conversation, and consider it here. There will be some discussion of its overall structural organization, but we'll see that there are a lot of other things. And maybe we'll see that the task of comprehensively analyzing some single conversation may not have any particular point to it. My strategy for suggesting the unpointedness of a comprehensive analysis of a single conversation will be to show the enormous range of disconnected materials that one gets into in studying some single conversation. So, for example, if you thought an analysis of a single conversation in book form would look something like The First Five Minutes, in which you have a running discussion paralleling the conversation, then I would hope to have you see that there Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks © 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6

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might be at some places discussions running to hundreds and hundreds of pages and other places that were thin, and that the connectedness of the parts would only be guaranteed by the way the pages were put together. Furthermore, for the sorts of problems that any piece of material in any conversation happens to pose, that piece of material is only incidentally likely to be the appropriate material for investigating the problem that it poses, and therefore you would regularly find that you want other stuff to do the investigation on. It would then be just slapped into the running commentary, and in no sense would you be able to say that some analysis developed on some fragment was developed on that fragment; it indeed had to be developed on something else and just put in here because the issue gets touched off in some fashion. On the other hand, a command of the intricacies of a particular conversation will permit all sorts of its parts to be dealt with much better than they would be if the fragment that you were interested in were simply isolated for consideration. So I'll be going through a range of things; some kinds of topics that were in fact generated out of a study of this conversation, some that might well have been but weren't, others that this conversation implicates but that were developed completely differently and I can't conceive of how I could have ever gotten them from this. There will be some awfully neat things and some things that are extraordinarily crude. Let me say a little bit about this conversation, to locate it by reference to some of the things I may then say about it. It's part of a three-part sequence in some serious sense, in which Estelle calls Jeanette, and out of that first conversation Jeanette comes to call Penelope, and in the third conversation, out of the second, out of the first, Jeanette calls Estelle. Each of the conversations runs about the same time, some two minutes, and they all more or less deal with the event at Bullock's department store that's talked of in the first conversation. I'll start with something which falls under the title of the course, and that is the beginning of the first conversation. 1 jeanette : Estelle : jeanette : Estelle :

Hello, Jeanette, Yeah, Well I just thought I'd- re-better report to you what's happen' at Bullocks toda::y?

I've been studying greeting sequences for a long time, and the characteristic ways that greeting sequences come off; by which I mean such sorts of things as: Greeting exchanges, name exchanges, then how-are-yous, then things coming out of how-are-yous. And there is a whole range of familiar things that we might bring to our minds as to how greeting sequences come off. A thing about greeting sequences - taking only what is perfectly obviously a 'greeting sequence; ' i.e. , without getting into any issues as to 'is that part of 1 The class was given copies of the transcript of the first conversation.

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the greeting sequence or not?' - is that they are characteristically not as brief as the one here. That is to say, a greeting sequence generally looks like a six­ or seven-utterance thing, and this one is then kind of brief. Given that kind of fact, I began to focus on this sort of question: A greeting sequence can be considered by analogy with a chess game in that it has certain sorts of at least simple features that are very similar to a chess game. For one, there is - and in an even stronger sense than in a chess game - an utterly normative first move, "Hello" (as compared to 'pawn to queen four'). "Hello" is, say, essentially universal with very very small special exceptions for telephone calls, e.g. , in an interrupted conversation or in an immediately returning second conversation (like in the third conversation here, which is a return conversation between the same two parties and is expected, the phone answerer goes "Yeah? " instead of "Hello"). Other sorts of exceptions have to do with business situations where an answerer will do some identificatory announcement (e.g. , the name of the business, a telephone number) instead of "Hello . " The brevity o f this sequence i s not at all the crucial thing, but i t permitted a focussing on what gets done within a greeting sequence, and how it gets done, and how that is related to moving from the greeting sequence to something else, like a 'first topic. ' I will eventually argue that the phenom­ enon 'first topic' is a part of the overall structural organization of conversation - or at least getting into a 'first topic' is a part. So that 'first topic' is not merely a way of talking about some topic that happens to be first, but is in fact a thing that we can give an analytic name to. And I'll develop bases for saying that in due course. Now thinking in terms of 'moves,' one could ask what kind of thing can be done at any given point to, e.g. , foreshorten the greeting sequence and then perhaps get into a position to do something else yourself, or extend it and leave open the possibility that the other party will do something else, or just allow it to go along and see what will happen. That is to say, one can think of the tactics in the greeting sequence as possible ways to, e.g . , control who gets a first chance to raise a 'first topic. ' And a first question that leads you to ask is, who among the parties - now differentiated into 'caller' and 'called' ­ has, say, the first opportunity to make such a move as does some sort of control of the length of the greeting sequence and its consequences, and who gets to do its consequences. And in that regard, then, if "Hello" by the called is normative, we would want to know whether the first utterance of the caller can be used to start a move toward making the first topic, and how they could do that. And if caller has first position to possibly start a move towards topical talk, then we could say that called only gets the possibility of doing that themselves if caller doesn't. That is to say, called's possible first position for moving towards, say, topic control, will only occur in the third utterance of the conversation - if it can occur there, depending upon what's happened so far. There is, then, a differential position with respect to getting a first chance to move towards getting into a first topic. I'll try to show some ways that callers can do it and some ways that calleds can do it if callers don't, and

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I'll also discuss some basis for neither of them doing it, or one, or the other, etc. The argument I'll develop will say that the sequence here is an instance of caller taking their first chance to generate a minimal greeting sequence; one that puts them in a position to make first topic. Now, there's the initial "Hello" as a required first thing. That simply gives the caller a chance to do something, for which there is a not very large set of alternatives: He can return " Hello, " do variants on "Hello" like " Hi," do things like called's name as is done here. If caller does the called's name, or at least some intended recognition of the phone's answerer, then that gets dealt with by a couple of variants. "Yeah" is obviously one, and another obviously is "Yeah?" with an intonation rise. I think those are quite different sorts of things in terms of the discussion I'm developing, i.e. , in terms of what that puts the caller in a position to then do. It's a difference involving that "Yeah?" seems to have as its import that it's caller's business to now, e.g . , identify themselves and not, e.g. , to move to topic beginning. So you might get: Jeanette : Estelle : Jeanette : Estelle :

Hello, Jeanette, Yeah? This's Estelle.

And then you go into another greeting sequence: Jeanette : Estelle :

Oh hi! Hi.

Or "Hi, how are you?" etc. We don't yet have any reason to say why somebody might be interested in not having the how-are-yous done, for example. For one, if they are arrived at, then, one how-are-you being done and answered, another is appropriate, i.e. , " How are you?" "Fine, how are you . " And there are - just to make the thing kind of intuitively plain - perfectly dandy reasons for avoiding how­ are-yous. Suppose you're calling somebody up to tell them that their husband died. You don't want a sequence including the caller saying "Hi, how are you?" "Fine," and then "Gee I'm sorry to tell you the bad news . . . " That is to say, there are occasions - and it doesn't have to be that dramatic at all - in which you don't want to elicit some such statement as "Fine" from a party you're calling. It may be that you have bad news for them, or bad news about yourself - and if you're going to deliver bad news about yourself, you might not want them in a position of having said "Fine; " i.e. , of having already been put in an embarrassing position relative to the news that you're now going to deliver. So at least in that way one can see that how-are-yous are possibly something to be avoided, and that there are perhaps then also ways that they can be avoided. And it's one way in which one can come to see the package of "Hello" and " How are you" and all the rest of that, as containing

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parts that people can attend the separation of and may have differential interests in the use of. Now, plainly enough the use of "Jeanette" as a first utterance by the caller does a series of jobs. It claims recognition of the answerer and, as well, informs that person that its user feels entitled to address them in the way they have just done. So that, leaving aside whether the called can, from its enunciation, recognize the caller, "Jeanette" is markedly different in the information it gives the called than would be, say, "Mrs Jones. " As is perfectly well known, names of address are not freely exchangeable and, leaving aside the issue of why names of address are used as compared to "Hello" or something like " Hello, " its use puts you in the position of choosing among such things as you can use with respect to the recipient. And by that choice you then inform the recipient about what you take it your rights are with respect to them, e.g. , that you know them well enough to call them by their first name; that you recognize who they are. And it's not only that "Mrs Jones" would be an alternative to "Jeanette," but it might come off with a question intonation, indicating perhaps that one is not even knowledgeable as to whether the person who picks up the phone is she. But at least for the beginning of phone conversations, not much later than first or second move, another altogether independent thing that's going on, besides these kinds of declarations of what my rights are with respect to you, or what my obligations are with respect to you, is the kind of information that the sheer saying of something gives to the other, i.e. , the chance to do a voice recognition of the caller. And let me introduce some parenthetical kinds of considerations about this matter of voice recognition. It seems to me that kind of an interesting question is, what sorts of investigations do people do of the properties of new institutions? Do they try to find out, e.g. , what its distinctive features are, what its distinctive virtues are? Under that general kind of a question one might bring the telephone to bear, to see a kind of neat thing: It seems at least plausible that while people have for a long time played recognition games with each other, until the telephone they could not perhaps have played voice recognition games with any seriousness (they might have been able to play some small versions of voice recognition games, e.g. , through a closed door). But a thing they came to do with the telephone was to use it as a vehicle of voice recognition tests. That is, we know that what a party has with respect to somebody over the phone is only their voice. And what they do is to employ this feature of the phone that you only hear the voice to build an institution in which they test out 'Do you recognize me? ' from the voice. A great deal of phone beginnings are, then, either specifically or in effect voice tests in which the other parry is now supposed to show that they know who it is where you're not telling them. And therefore the sort of thing that you say right off can constitute that sort of a challenge to them. And of course, furthermore, we've all encountered people who specifically make it a test, i.e. , who from right off will not allow you to go along listening and talking until you find out, but who will say "I bet you don't know who this is, " and then you've got to come across with a name.

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Rather elaborate other information gets developed as well, having to do with, e.g., the timing of a call. That is, call timings will get used by parties to exhibit their attention to each other as an intimate matter. Everyone will have had the experience of hearing the phone ring and saying to themselves or somebody else in the room that they know who it is, and then announcing to the person on the phone once they find out who it is, that they knew it was them. So that people also use the scheduling phenomena around a call as kinds of information. For each of them, the fact that the call occurs at some time permits them to have developed, and on each occasion to show, sorts of intimacies. Now, I raise that as I say parenthetically, only to say that it kind of suggests that an examination in which the modes of interaction were considered and the telephone's distinctive features were located, was then used to develop something that could deal with things like 'intimacy. ' It may well then be that institutions could get examined for their unique possibilities, and when their unique possibilities are found, they're employed. We might then look to other developed institutions for which we can have some handle on their history, to see the sorts of work done on them which have nothing particularly to do with 'what they're supposed to do' or anything like that, and which then get elaborated on to make them both formally analyzed and comfortable institutions. So in this case anyway, with "Jeanette" used in second position, we get something that is in effect a voice-recognition test by Estelle - she never does give her name. The use of "Jeanette" also does such things as claim that I know who you are, that I can call you by your first name, etc. It also has, apart from those sorts of jobs, the sequencing job of providing that the next piece of talk should be something like a "Yeah. ' ' That is, "Jeanette, " seen sequentially, is to be treated as a kind of a guess, and gets then some return which says at least 'that's correct. ' It can also get a return that says 'that's correct' plus perhaps a request for the name to be returned, as with "Yeah?" (And we can note that "Yeah?" leads us into a different sequence than "Yeah," i.e. , it leads to a recycling of greetings.) If you get "Yeah" after the name, then it's possible to move into a first topic if you care to - and I'm differentiating a 'first topic' from, e.g. , "Hi, how are you. ' ' So what we can say about the Name - "Yeah" exchange put right after "Hello" is that the caller's use of a name may constitute his first chance to possibly control the length of the greeting sequence and also control that he will be in first position to raise a topic. That is to say, "Yeah" will be coming in one or another form, and if "Yeah" comes as contrasted to "Yeah?" he can then move into a topic, i.e. , his first chance to do that will be in the fourth position. Thinking of the thing in terms of moves, then, what we want to see is that there is some strategy for getting into the first topic by the fourth position, i.e. , by the caller's second move. We can then look to see whether there are ways that a called can do that, or better. I have a sequence that goes something like this:

Lecture 1 A: B: A:

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Hello, Good morning. Where've you been!

"Where have you been?" in the sort of discussion I'm offering, seems to involve us in some rather elaborate sorts of things. For one, what's plainly involved is a use of a recognition of who it is that's calling, and also a move from a greeting sequence into some other sort of talk - here done by the called. Now, if I can just suggest that calleds are not in the first instance in a position to get to do first topic talk, then how and why calleds go about doing that would be something we would want to focus on, and I think I can say a bunch of things about why they would. That is to say, there are developable bases for "Where have you been?" being done in the called's second utterance - the first utterance they could have done it with. Roughly, at this point something like this is involved: A kind of fundamental thing for telephone conversations in particular, though it may sound on introduction to be nothing of import, is the distinction between 'caller' and 'called. ' A thing that called can hardly ever get out from under is that they are the called and the other is the caller, and that there are all kinds of things affiliated with that. For some sets of people it's a funny consequence of that each has free rights to call the other, each should call the other, that it's an embarrassment to the one who receives the call every time he receives the call, i.e. , I should call you as much as you call me, therefore every time you call me you embarrass me because I haven't called you. Now what something like that generates is that such recipients attend sometimes to see if they have the makings of transforming a call made to them, to a call that wasn't really made to them. And a way they do it is by right off, as fast as they possibly can, attempting to indicate that they've been trying to call the other party all day, all week, etc. , so that it's just incidental that you called me because I've been trying to call you, and let's just forget about it if we can, that you're the caller. So things like "Where have you been?" which might get followed by "I've been here, " "Gee I've been calling you all day," " Oh right, I was out for a minute" or whatever, are attempts to transform caller-called into something else, and those attempts are non-trivial. And aside from the possibility that they're done in special circumstances I think they're done by reference to the kinds of logic that I laid out. Among other ways that caller-called matters is for whole ranges of things that get done in the call. If, for example, I have some news that stands as grounds for my calling you, e.g. , I just got engaged, and I haven't called you, and you call me after some delay, and I deliver that news to you in your call to me, for all you know I'm delivering that news only because you called me and I wouldn't have called you to tell you. That is to say, there is a phenomenon which I will give a good deal of attention to, which I'll call 'reason-for-a-call call. ' I want to suggest that it's a very important phenom­ enon, in that there's a problem which that phenomenon will help us to solve:

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Somebody comes up to you and says " How's Joe?" Joe's some friend of yours, they know him more or less. And you say "Oh, he's great!" You say that in full confidence, and nonetheless you haven't talked to him in a month. Now how in the world is it that you can go about feeling full confidence in how Joe is though you haven't spoken to him recently (it might be only two days since you've talked, but that wouldn't effect the issue of how in the world do you figure that you know he's okay) . The answer to that may be something like this: If persons are in such a relationship that they know that as between them if there's a reason for a call then a call will be made, then the fact of an extended silence is as informative as some call. That is to say, they may have calls that come from time to time, but they know that if there are no calls, that means there's no reason for a call. And since the class 'reasons for calls' has known members (marriages, new jobs, binhs, deaths, divorces, etc.), then silence can tell you for somebody with whom you stand in a reason-for-a-call relationship, that no such things have happened and you can therefore know that they're fine. By vinue of that, it's a very tender thing for a call to occur and one of the panicipants have a reason that they haven't used. Because what that says is that there may be some things that we consider a reason for a call that you have not told me. And therefore I may not know what's up with you when we're not conversing. If somebody were thereafter to ask "How's Joe?" I might say ' Tm not sure," where it's not a matter of greater or lesser time elapsed, it's just that I'm no longer in a position to feel sure that you will call on reasons for a call. So if you catch people with reasons for calls that they haven't used, that's a criteria! thing for the status of your relationship and for your confidence in the fact that you know how all sorts of people are whom you haven't spoken to over varying lengths of time, for whom what you need to know is that they will call when there's a reason for a call. And that kind of thing can then be relevant to the types of beginnings in which calleds attempt to deal with that they are indeed the called, i.e. , if they can't say ' 'I've been calling you for days!" "Where have you been!" they will do a thing like "Isn't that amazing! I was just about to call you. I've got some great news!" And you can get elaborately detailed stuff like, "I was waiting for the prices to change on calls, so while it's eight o'clock in New York it's not time yet out here . . . " etc. In going through a thing like this I think it may be wonh pointing out that the explanation can be bought without having any feelings that it's intuitively correct for you that that's what's involved. That is to say, one doesn't have a feeling for 'an organization of reasons-for-call-type friends. ' You don't classify your friends that way. Nor when you're engaged in doing these kinds of strategies do you conceive of them as ways of dealing with that he would wander around later on feeling that I don't call him when I have a reason for a call. But I think you can come to see that there are two sorts of things, reasons-for-call-type calls, and also relationships which turn on the occurrence of reason-for-call-type calls. And once you have reason-for-call-type calls, and relationships around those types of calls, then you can begin to see what kind

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o f an interest there i s in the caller-called status, in attempts to change i t or weaken it or whatever, in the course of a call. Further, you can come to see the relationship between reason-for-a-call­ type calls and the strategies for getting from the greeting exchange to something else, where that candidate something else is at least for some calls the reason-for-the call as 'first topic. ' It can be done overtly, "The reason I called was . . . ' ' or there are other ways to do it. But - and now I'm going to make a weird argument - there can be attempts to avoid the occurrence of a 'first topic. ' What's weird about this argument is that I'm making a thing, 'first topics, ' and then saying they're variously dealt with, rather than taking it that whatever topic is done first is a 'first topic. ' So: There can be attempts to avoid the occurrence of a 'first topic. ' ' First topics' are special in a whole variety of ways, including that in reporting on a conversation in another conversation, some item from that conversation can be reported specifically as "The first thing he said was . . . ' ' Now, you don't have lists, preserving the sequence of things raised in a conversation, which you can use in other conversations, but you do have a preservation of 'first topic' status. So you don't say "The fourth topic raised when I was talking to Joe was . . . " but you do say "The first thing he told me was . . . ' ' So if there is interest by people in doing such things as taking items from one conversation and using them in subsequent conversations, then by putting something into first position you can thereby do something about its reusability in further conversations. That is, if you put something into first position, use it as 'first topic, ' then you can achieve some sorts of immortality to it or movement to it. You make it available for later use as a 'first thing he told me. ' But as well, we can come to see that a thing that people do in conversation is to provide that they do not have a 'first topic' item. So that though they indeed talk about a bunch of things, they avoid giving something as a thing to be so marked. There may be things one is willing to say, wants to say, but one may be unwilling to have any of those things be seen as the reason for the call or as something distinctly important. One way that is managed is to build up the beginning of the conversation in such a way as to have nothing in it markable as 'first topic, ' 'reason for call, ' etc. So, for example, in the 'how are you' sequence we can get "How are you?" "Fine" "What's going on?" "Nothing, ' ' where "What's going on can be an occasion for putting in the item of news which would then be treated as 'first topic, ' 'reason for the call,' etc. You can say "Nothing" and then later go on to say a bunch of things that are going on - where when you say "Nothing" it does not occasion hanging up. And there are bases for that: As there are reasons-for-call calls, and reason-for-call-type relationships, so, too - and in some ways they are the same people who are in relationships that involve them in being required to call when there is a reason for a call - are there people who may be required to call when there's no reason for a call. Persons are often in a position, when they are calling, to bring off that they're calling for no reason, "I just felt like calling. ' ' Now, you may also have news. And that can be a problem in this

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way: There are routinely occasions in which you pick up the phone, the party at the other end is identified, and you then and there know that there's business of some sort, i.e. , you know that they are people who only call you when they have business to do. That can become a problem as between some people if they know that they should have a relationship in which they call when there's no reason, but somehow they always get into a position of calling only when there is a reason. And such sorts of people can elaborately attempt to avoid the reason for the call being in fact placed as 'reason-for-call, ' but mentioned somewhere in passing, perhaps. And plainly you can achieve 'personality characteristics' by doing that, i.e. , achieve being 'phlegmatic' by, only well into the call and 'in passing, ' giving some announcement that others would figure that they would have made right off. Of course there is also the possibility that the candidate 'first topic' or 'reason-for-call' item, when it is put elsewhere, is seeable when it occurs as having been ' delayedly placed, ' i.e. , placing it elsewhere might or might not bring off that you don't think much of it; it might be seen as, that you're 'trying to bring off that it's nothing very much. ' So there are other possibilities than sheer issues of what kind of classifying you're intending to do, which have to do with how you bring off who you are with some item of news. Now when we have at hand things like 'first topics' and 'reasons-for-calls,' their positioning, how you get to them and how you avoid them, we can see that talk about strategy for handling a beginning is important, and we have real motivation for looking at the organizations of greeting sequences relative to these things. We want also to see that there can be differential strategies, since the two parties can have quite different interests in getting rapidly to a first topic, avoiding a first topic, having themselves control that first topic, etc. We can begin to think of somebody attempting to solve this sort of technical problem: The phone rings, I pick it up and say "Hello, " and the other party speaks, and now I know right then and there that it's somebody for whom I have a reason-for-call status to whom I should have made a reason-for-call call, and I haven't. How, right now, do I handle that? And then, what kinds of moves can I do to bring it off? And it's extremely important to see that when we do something like "Hello, " "Joe, " "Wow! I was just about to call you, ' ' that that solution is available at just that place, though presumably when in fact you're called, even if you were thinking of calling the person or just about to, it was not the last thing you were doing before the phone rang. So you want to think of the rather elaborate analytic job that they're doing to find the sorts of things that they have to do in a next utterance. It's an extraordinarily compact operation where, whatever problems you get as 'called, ' you're able to solve them within utterance time - which is extraor­ dinarily rapid within these first series of utterances. Now, in the middle of a conversation, we know well, in some ways, who it is we're talking to. And there are enormously elaborated ways in which we bring off that 'my mind is with you' - I use that rather loose sounding phrase and you might figure that it could get shot down, but we'll see in due course that people really can achieve showing that 'my mind is with you. ' And the

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question is, at the beginning o f a conversation, how rapidly can parties achieve that sort of a thing? Of course the question in the first place is, what sort of a thing is it? It's something as extensive as this: Let me give some non-phone-call kinds of things, to give some idea of the kind of job that's going on; a job we want to think of as an analytic task of sorts. Let's say someone visits your house some nth non-first time. And they walk through the house and say, "Gee that's new isn't it?" And you say "Yeah, I got it a couple months after the last time you were here," or "I just got it, " etc. Consider that as one of the ways in which, as between two parties, one goes about showing the other 'how much you're in my mind, ' i.e. , on any given occasion of looking through your place, I can see the sorts of changes that have been made since I last visited you, and show them to you. I can find things that have changed in 'our time,' i.e. , time that is only marked by our relationship. And you too can see, even though maybe lots of people come over to your house, that this item was purchased, not 'in February 1 9 67 ,' but 'after your last visit, ' whenever that was. And it's neat in all sorts of ways, since one doesn't say "Gee that's gotten battered since the last time I was here, " or "Gee you've gotten battered since the last time I saw you, ' ' and things like that, but one finds things like a new something-or-other. So you keep these kinds of calendars and objects in mind, and you can bring your mind to focus on that sort of a thing, i.e. , of all the houses you've been in in the last six months, you have them in such a way that you know what's in this one's house, and in that way you keep an attention to them. What you're doing, then, when you're 'bringing your mind' to somebody, is somehow bringing 'our file' to their attention. And in a phone conversation what's going on is that my mind, by a very early point in the conversation, is turning to the history of our particular relationship, and I have ways of showing you that. "How's your mother?" can be a thing done right off, as a way of saying I know who you are and I know that the last time we talked your mother was sick. You want to see things like the beginning of a phone conversation as that kind of 'bringing my mind to you. ' And you can then see all sorts of little things that you don't obviously attend as such; things equivalent to noticing the furniture, like noticing the voice, noticing whatever else, as products of an effort to 'bring my mind to us. ' And it's a thing done by the called without any available preparation, i.e. , the caller can in the first instance, in some way, bring their files to bear before they make the call. But the called is just there, waiting for people in the world to demand a focus on 'the two of us and our history, ' right off, by the fourth or fifth utterance. And people can of course do it with enormous rapidity even though they talk only occasionally, where the issue is that they're doing indefinite numbers of other interactions in between but they're able to keep those things separate. Now obviously they can mess up by asking something which reveals that it's not you I'm thinking of, it's somebody else. But on the other hand, they have ways of asking questions which can be heard as pointed though they're not; i.e. , they would work for lots of people, and if I don't remember yet - not so much who you

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are but what's up with us, I can throw out such remarks as will not reveal that, while I'm working my way into finding out. Again, I think it's difficult to appreciate the kind of job we're asking people to be able to accomplish within utterance time, which involves no gaps. So that although the called has been doing God only knows what before this call came, they are recognizing a voice, not just as a name of somebody in the world, but of somebody with whom they have something going, which they now have to bring to bear with enormous rapidity. To make the point in a slightly different way, consider that a bunch of people call you in series, with a 2 0-minute break between. A calls: "What's new?" "Nothing. " B calls. For B there's an item of news which did not at all pop into your head with A. For C there's another item of news which didn't pop into your head with B. That is to say, you're apparently able to keep the news items that you have around, in such a way that it's not that they occur to you and you censor them, but that they just don't come into your head in one conversation and become a first thing in mind in another conversation. You're classifying your experiences, then, by reference in some way to who potentially is to be told about this, so that they're immediately available for the telling to that one. And again, it can fail. We all have experiences, which you might now see the sense of, where you have a conversation with X, and after it you remember "Gee I should have told him such-and-such. " What is remarkable is that you are able to do the job as well as you do it, and over a series of calls, i.e. , it's not that you tell the first three people who call you the same item, but that for each call you have some items to use, and they're different. And how those things come to be picked tum on the ways you find what's for them and what's not for them; not necessarily what they shouldn't hear, but what would be of no interest to them. There is, then, this enormous amount of work that you're doing right off when you get a call, which you might even start doing when the phone rings. And that then makes it of interest how the initial sequences get handled so as to permit you to find, for the party at hand, if there is some first item that you want to use, that you should use, that if you don't use now it'll be too late later on, etc. , as compared to the caller who can already know that there's a first item for the called, and can begin right off to use the ways to get in a position to produce it. I'm hoping that these utterly bland sequences, like "Hello, " "Jeanette, " "Yeah, " can be seen by reference to the kinds of work that parties are engaged in when such a thing happens as that the phone rings. They're doing sorts of jobs that they can fail to do, do wrong, etc., and for which 'first topic' is a central object that they have to make decisions about, for which, if they're the called, they can't have plans about. We might consider what's been said now by reference to what is required for us to be in a position to do an analysis of the initial sequence. That is to say: To come to the notion that, e.g . , this is a 'minimal sequence, ' and a minimal sequence in which caller made a move to control its length and also to control her chance to get into first topic position, we need not merely a series of other calls in which we could, say, establish 'normal call beginnings'

Lecture 1

1 69

and then consider those versus 'foreshortened call beginnings, ' but we need also a whole range of analyses of later parts of conversation, which would tell us why in the world anybody would have some basis for attempting to do the moves which produce a 'foreshortened beginning. ' Further, we would need materials to tell us things about reasons-for-call and reason-for-call relation­ ships, no-reason-for-call and no-reason-for-call relationships, first topics, avoidance of first topics, etc., as kinds of materials required in order to turn this small sequence, "Hello, " "Jeanette, " "Yeah, " into the kind of objea I begin to have the idea it is. We also want to think of that particular sequence as really one machine product. That is to say, it's not this conversation as an object that we're terribly interested in, but we can begin to see machinery that produces this as a series of moves, and to appreciate it as a series of moves among the potential sets of moves that are otherwise to be actualized for some people - and we don't care who they are. In a way, our aim is just that; to get into a position to transform, in what I figure is almost a literal, physical sense, our view of what happened here as some interaction that could be treated as the thing we're studying, to interactions being spewed out by machinery, the machinery being what we're trying to find; where, in order to find it we've got to get a whole bunch of its produas. We can come to know that they can really be thought of as produas, and that we can really think of a machine spewing them out. We come to have the idea that there is this 'group mind' or 'culture' or whatever you like, that's producing these things. We come to some decisions that we're going to talk about things like a 'group mind' or a 'culture' producing events - when we don't have that at all to begin with. That is, we needn't at all suppose, to begin with, that these are other than two people doing some interaction, rather than the actualization of a series of techniques otherwise produced in other ways, etc. Where all of them can be considered as a sample of sorts, that can be comparatively investigated to find out that they're all doing something, and how they're doing it. And this would be another way to be interested in the whole thing as some actual sequence, i.e. , as an assembled set of parts that could be otherwise fitted together. Returning to the data, we in faa next find a reason-for-call announcement (which is also a first-topic announcement and a 'story preface'), "Well I just thought I'd- re-better report to you what's happened at Bullocks today. " Now there are ways to show that it's a reason-for-call, and more than that, it can be shown that Jeanette recognizes the status of this item. The argument will eventually be something like this: It's perfectly possible to produce what you figure is a reason-for-a-call item, and for the one you're talking to to respond to it as not a reason for a call. And that is a specific issue in a conversation, and there are ways of proving that you recognize and accept its status. In this case, the way that Jeanette goes about proposing 'I agree with your classification of the item as a reason-for-call' is, at about 4 5 seconds into the call, when Estelle says "so find out tomorrow and let me know, ' ' Jeanette says " Oh I'll call Penelope right now. ' ' Which is to say, 'You treated the item

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as the basis for a call. I show you that you were right by myself treating the item as the basis for a call. ' Now to see that that's so, and that the co-classification matters, one need only to refer to the second conversation where Jeanette calls Penelope (who is a co-worker of Jeanette's at Bullocks, and was there) . Penelope says that it was nothing, and makes a point of saying that in fact she didn't even say anything about it to her husband. And that's an important thing for Penelope to do in the second call, because she is, in a way, up against a problem. Jeanette, who wasn't at work today, has called Penelope to find out about this exciting event, which is to say that Penelope hasn't called Jeanette to tell her about it, though they are people who do that for each other. Penelope has then got to have some way of dealing with that she has not made a reason-for-call call when Jeanette figures that a reason-for-call call should have been made. And what Penelope does is not merely to say 'I didn't call you because I didn't think it was anything, ' but 'I didn't even tell my husband, ' for whom she doesn't even have to make a call to do it, i.e. , it was such a minor thing that it wasn't mentioned, where, coming home from work, anything you could get your hands on to tell about what happened in the day would be delightedly presented. We see, then, that reason-for-call status is a kind of contingent status that one can claim and that can be accepted or denied. We just happen to be lucky with these data, in that the reason-for-a-call status is specifically dealt with in these different ways, i.e. , it's accepted by the called, and accepted in the perfect way to accept such a call, i.e. , to say ' Til call X and tell them. " Next, it is rejected by a called, with a perfect rejection, i.e. , "I didn't even tell someone who was right here, not to mention making a call about it. " So, the status of "I just thought I'd better report to you what's happened at Bullocks today" as a reason-for-a-call announcement is one that gets verified in what would seem to be the right way to verify it, i.e. , use it in the same fashion as it was used. And not only is it so used, but it is told to the initial teller that it's going to be so used, where we want to differentiate between the use of some reaason-for-call item also as a reason-for-a-call, but not telling the party that offered it to you that you're going to use it that way, as compared to telling them that you're going to use it, which tells them that they did right by you, and they should keep doing just what they did. Reason-for-call status is not, then, something you assign to anything you choose, but seems to have normative classificatory importance. And we can see why it would, i.e. , people who are hysterical or lethargic about determining what is a reason-for-call are not keeping their correspondence in proper form, and people will either figure ' ' he only calls when something really terrible has happened, " or "he calls all the time about things that don't matter, " " . . . so I really don't know what's going on anyway. " That you in fact pick items that others will see as 'a real reason for a call' is a way, then, that you can show them that you're doing your job about, e.g. , keeping them in mind or watching the world for them, or watching for things that are properly told to others. And we can see from this sequence of calls that if you

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go wrong, people can even overtly make it their business to let that be known. In this case, Penelope specifically says "Tell Estelle I just thought it was stupid, " though when Jeanette calls Estelle back she doesn't tell her that Penelope thought it was stupid, but attempts to preserve Estelle's investment in the story, which, as it happens, Estelle is kind of sensitive about. It might be seen that these things are being treated as instantial for interactants, where their assessment matters for further considerations about their relationships, their conception of the party that they're dealing with, etc., so that one will be careful about making something a reason-for-a-call item or not. Now one thing we can ask is, are there components to a thing's status as a reason for a call? There are some sorts of obvious things, such as that what happened at Bullocks happened "today. " If you wanted to be altogether systematically naive about the matter, you might figure that "today" is just the name of a day, such that if it happened on some other day you could say ' 'I'd better report to you what happened . . . Thursday, last Wednesday, January 1 2 , 1 962 . . etc. " Those items are not exchangeable, and we get into some very important issues with this, which I will talk to somewhat. That is, we are happy to buy a picture of terms which involves that some term that is actually used should be treated by us as one among a contrast class of such terms from which it's chosen, such that, it's being chosen, we consider the set of terms to decide what features this term has and then ask why it was chosen from among the members of this set. That is to say, 'today' is a 'time reference, ' consider the set of time references. Why was this one chosen as differentiated from all the others? And there are whole ranges of things just like that. Just to give a trivial instance, at one point Estelle says "There was a policeman there with a great big long gun! He had it in his hand . . . and he was standing on the side so he could see everybody. " Now we could say 'standing' is a term, one of a contrast class with 'sitting, ' and that in saying he was standing she is also saying he was not sitting, and she picks 'standing' because . . . etc. One of the things I'm going to argue in due course is that whatever the merits of these contrast-class arguments are, a really deadly problem with them is that it turns out that where some member of a contrast class is usable, if another member was correct, that other member would not be used. It's not as though he's either standing or sitting; since he's standing I'll say he's standing. If he's standing I may be able to report it; if he's sitting it may not be reportable. So, to take a rather obvious instance, Estelle reports that the policeman was standing there and "he had a gun in his hand. " That may be reportable. If he had a gun in his holster, you might not even notice or report that he had a gun. And for things like the time, if the time is not 'today, ' then you may not report the time. Indeed, if the time is not 'today' then you may not report the event. So one doesn't want to suppose that what's being done is picking a term from a collection, the alternative members of which tell you what the picking of the term does. Each of the terms will have different conditions of use - at least under this rather narrow sense of 'contrast class. ' One might well work at a more elaborate sense, i.e. , semantic, in which you specified the conditions .

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of uses of terms and then tried to see whether they had some conditions of use which were alternative, i.e. , if either were correct, one or the other would be used. Though very characteristically their conditions of use are really independent, i.e. , if one could be used, the other could not be used if it were true; if the other could be used, the first could not be used if it were true. 'Today' is not, then, naming some day on which the reported event happened; it's doing a bunch of other things. For one, 'today' is not equivalent to the series of other days in the sense of being just some day. 'Today' in part constitutes the warrant for the report, i.e. , to say it happened 'today' is to claim it as potential ' news, ' if it's a newsworthy item at all. And that's a part of the way in which it's a reason-for-call item; that what I'm reporting is news. Now plainly there can be an item that's news today, in the sense of its being worth reporting in that it happened today, which would not be mentionable tomorrow, not because it's no longer new, but because unless you tell it today it's not 'news . ' I mention that because it has a n enormous consequence to it, which is, roughly, the following: A classical puzzle that we all more or less know about is, how in the world is it the case that people you talk to every day, you always have something to talk about whereas people you talk to every three months you have nothing to talk about. Why isn't it the case that if you talk to him every three months you have all the things to talk about that happened over the three months. The solution in part being that a whole bunch of things that you can mention the day they happen or the day after, are 'news. ' If you don't mention them that day or the day after, they're nothing. You can't then tell them to somebody you haven't spoken to for three months. What you tell such people are things that stand as worthy of mention over a three-month period. If you don't have them, you may have nothing to talk about. I have a friend whose solution to this was that although we only talk to each other every three months, when he talks to me he tells me what happened today. So it's as though we have a continuing friendly conversation over coffee. But by and large that is a massive sort of problem, and the 'today' aspect is a way of warranting that this is an item tellable at least for some sorts of people, e.g. , people who talk to each other all the time. The fact that it is tellable by Estelle to Jeanette by virtue of 'today' doesn't mean that it would be tellable, even if they were talking on the day of the event, by people who only talk every six months. In this particular conversation, 'today' happens to have a much more delicate use than merely claiming the tellability of the event. I'll try to develop how that works. We need some information: Jeanette works at Bullocks, Estelle does not. Jeanette has her day off on the day of the event and the call, and Estelle knows that Jeanette has her day off. Estelle also knows that the event is a newsworthy item, i.e. , at one point she says "So find out tomorrow and let me know. ' ' Now we could ask how in the world can she figure that it's going to be an item that will be talkable-about tomorrow? She shows this in a rather lovely way, by reporting later on, something she noticed which is

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on point to that, i.e. , that there was a crowd of employees standing around watching this event. In that those people were watching the scene, you can then know that they have an investment in telling about 'what happened at Bullocks' since any such organization as Bullocks is event-poor in certain ways, i.e. , not that many things happen at Bullocks that are reportable by Bullocks employees to any Bullocks employee, as compared to that somebody in the dress department can say something of interest to somebody else in the dress department by reference to, e.g . , the last customer who walked by, but that would not be of interest to just any Bullocks employee. Any event that can be figured to be one that makes us all Bullocks employees together, i.e. , that I can say to any Bullocks employee " Did you see that?" "Wasn't that amazing?" "Were you there yesterday when . . . ?" is an event that one can know will be used throughout the place - if you can figure that there was any noticeable number of people who saw it in the first place. So, knowing that there were a dozen people watching, you can figure that by tomorrow it will have spread throughout the store. The kind of argument I offer is that it can be seen as a Bullocks Event, reportable, then, between any Bullocks employees. The kinds of materials that are relevant are: For large institutions, occasions like this become events in which people who are co-located only as employees of the institution and otherwise not available to each other, can talk to each other about that event. The vice-president of Bullocks could perfectly well be engaged in conversation about that event by a janitor. And if you read through stories of disasters, tragedies, exciting events, then you'll find reports of just that sort of thing - people who otherwise have no business to talk to each other take these as occasions to talk to each other. Whereas, something happening, conceived of as having happened in the dress department, doesn't do that. So Estelle's noticing of the crowd was her seeing the initial cohort from which the news would be diffused throughout the place. The consequence of that is not just that Estelle is able to see that people at Bullocks will treat the event as news, but she's able to see several other important things relevant to the interaction. One of them is, she's able to see that if she doesn't call Jeanette today, then she will not be the first person to tell her. If she waits until tomorrow, Jeanette will have independent information about this story. For her to be the first to tell, she's got to do it now - though she may not even by now be the first to tell. And 'first to tell' is a special status with respect to news. And this begins to get at the following sort of question: If Estelle knows that Jeanette's going to find out tomorrow, why does she have to tell her? Why isn't it enough to know that Jeanette will find out tomorrow? For one, Jeanette might bring it up in a conversation with Estelle; "Oh you can't imagine what happened yesterday, I wasn't at work and all these exciting things happened . . . " then Estelle is in a bad position, i.e. , of saying "Yeah I know, I saw it. " Which is to say, 'I saw it and I didn't tell you . ' People can get annoyed if you don't tell them something that they nonetheless find out; they say "Well why didn't you tell me?" And if you say "I knew you would

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hear anyway' ' they nonetheless figure that you were somehow derelict, that you weren't monitoring the world for them as you should. There's another sort of thing with respect to her having seen the crowd, and it's utterly wonderful to behold. And it's quite unrelated to what I've been saying so far. Picture the scene: Here's Estelle driving by. She sees these events happening; she sees some cops and some kind of excitement about the cops. Now a kind of problem is getting some idea that what she sees happening is what's happening. A way that you have of becoming assured that what you think is happening is in fact happening, and of establishing it for others in the telling of it, is by seeing that there's a crowd there. The crowd serves to make the event the public event that you think it is. That a crowd is gathered means that they see what you see. Whereas if you're walking along and a bunch of people are walking along who aren't seen as a crowd, then one thing you don't know is what they're seeing. They're walking along minding their own business; they may be seeing things, not seeing things, seeing what you're seeing, or whatever, and you have no idea what's on their minds. If you see a crowd standing and looking, you're able to know that the thing you see as notable is there. The crowd's existence confirms for you that you saw something really happening. Conversely, people can become awfully nervous where they figure that something really extraordinarily notable is happening but nobody's looking at it, they're just passing by. And you get, then, a frantic attempt to get individual eyes, though you don't know the indivduals whose eyes you're seeking, to have them tell you "Yeah, it's really happening. " So the very characterization that something is happening, is aided by saying there's a crowd watching. It not only says that others saw it, but that it was what I saw it to be. I'd like to make a small comment about the word 'report' in "Well I just thought I'd better report to you what's happened at Bullocks today; " again, because we might have the idea when we think of word meanings, that if we could give a list of things that 'report' is synonomous with, then we'd get 'tell,' 'say, ' and things like that. I want to suggest that there's a class of what we could call 'co-participant verbs, ' where some word is a word that should be used as between these two. And in the doing of the activity 'showing I had my mind on you, ' a word like 'report' is relevant. Specifically, I 'report' to you things about which you are concerned, where it's not particularly in my interests that I'm telling this. Estelle might have seen cops and crowds in many places and not thought a thing of it, but this one matters to Jeanette because she works at Bullocks, and to her, then, the telling is a 'report. ' In the very smallest parts of Estelle's story about Bullocks, then, that she's telling it to 'you who work at Bullocks' is done. There are more than a few such terms which we can isolate out to see that they do some interactional job. And a list of 'synonyms' are not equivalent, at least when one focusses on that they may or may not have some interactional distribution.

Lecture

2 Conveying information; Story-connective techniques; Recognition-fype descriptors; 'First Verbs; ' Understanding; Diffe rential organization of perception I'm going through some of the matters that can be raised by a consideration of some actual conversation, treating it in a kind of unmotivated way, i.e. , whatever can be found in it is to be given some consideration, as compared to, e.g., dealing with the overall structural organization of conversation. I'm doing this to suggest that a comprehensive analysis of some conversation is not in point and that on the other hand it pays to subject any particular conversation you happen to have your hands on to investigation in any direction that can be produced off of it. The idea was that I would go through a range of such any-direction considerations for this transcript, 'Trio I ' , and then turn to the theme of the course, not particularly by reference to Trio I. Now, it should be apparent that the arguments developed or alluded to here wouldn't conceivably have been developed out of Trio I, but Trio I is relevant to them. That is to say, I had been collecting points about greeting sequences for lo these many years, and I had a large collection of rules for them, and I was kind of contented with the ways I had of dealing with greeting sequences. But essentially until I came upon Trio I and a couple of other conversations, I hadn't turned the analysis of greeting sequences into a tactical problem for parties. And I hope I've been able to suggest some of the ways in which the length and components of greeting sequences could be considered a tactical problem in which issues of how soon and who controls when you get out of a greeting sequence into something else, and to what, are in part handled within the greeting sequence. Now those sorts of things are obviously unavailable from just: J:

E:

Hello Jeanette 175

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1 76 J: E:

Yeah Well I just thought I'd- re-better report to you what's happen' at Bullocks toda: :y?

but require a consideration of some collection of greeting sequences, to consider them, e.g. , in terms of their rules for working, and then what can be done with a greeting sequence as a known-in-advance object that can be possibly manipulated. Where, then, an attempted comprehensive analysis of a single conversation will oblige you to study masses of other material to find how the sorts of things you've got work. Returning now to the data. Going on from the greeting sequence, I mentioned that the "Well I just thought I'd better report to you what's happened at Bullocks today" serves jointly as a reason for a call, a proposed first topic, and a story preface. Now we have this question-answer sequence: E: J:

'D you have the day off? Yeah

placed after "Well I just thought I'd better report to you what's happened at Bullocks today. " The question is, can we say anything about the placing of "Did you have the day off?" I want to suggest that the information conveyed in that question is important to have conveyed. That is, with respect to the issue of what Estelle is doing in making the call, if she did or did not ask the question, if she did or did not know the answer, then the call stands as a different sort of event. Let me try to explicate the differences. The situation is something like this: Estelle is a friend of Jeanette's. Jeanette works at Bullocks, Estelle does not. Estelle sees some event take place at Bullocks and calls Jeanette to tell her about it. Now if Estelle is calling not merely because she saw some events taking place at Bullocks which she figured Jeanette might be interested in, but because she saw these events and pretty well knows that Jeanette wasn't there that day, then she's doing something like informing Jeanette about events that Jeanette is interested in and could not have known about on her own, i.e. , she's specifically doing a favor, acting in the interests of Jeanette. In making the call, Estelle can then be acting in Jeanette's interest, as compared to, e.g. , simply telling Jeanette about something Jeanette probably already knows about, so as to get a conversation going about that something, which is quite a different sort of call. So that's one sort of difference; doing a favor or just talking about something. Further, Estelle can also intend that it be seen that she is acting in Jeanette's interest, as compared to, even if she figures Jeanette doesn't know about it, not making anything of that she is now giving her information. Now if it's Estelle's aim to show that she's calling not merely because she saw this event, but because she knows that Jeanette wasn't there, then a question is, how and where does she do that? She could simply say "I called because I know you had the day off, " in which case she would have made it overt that there is an obligation which Jeanette has to her, and Jeanette's

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business would then be to say "Why, thanks. " But Estelle might want to bring off that her action was motivated, without particularly giving Jeanette the chance to deal with the whole thing by saying "Why thanks. " And a way to prevent Jeanette saying that (while perhaps feeling grateful), is to not make an announcement but ask a question, since, while Jeanette could glean from the question that 'she knew I had the day off, ' the question form will tell Jeanette what to say in return to it, i.e. , "Yes . " It will not give her a free chance to say anything she might, nor require that she do something like "Thanks. " So, she ought to say "Yes" though she may have captured the information being provided, i.e. , 'I know you had the day off and I'm calling by reference to that knowledge as well as my knowledge of the events that took place. ' We could of course have a reverse sequence, i.e. , "Did you have the day off?" "Yeah" "Well I just thought I'd better report to you what happened. " That kind of thing would appear to make Jeanette's "Yes" answer the condition for offering the information, i.e. , if she were to say "No" then the news that's offered wouldn't be the sort of news it was intended to be. If she first indicates that she has news to offer and then places "Did you have the day off?" she can perhaps make it more apparent that she knew Jeanette had the day off. At this point things get complicated to pull out, and the argument I would make has this difficulty: "Did you have the day off?" must be treated via a consideration that, having done the question, contingent on its answer she might not have been able to do the announcement, and that in doing either a question or an announcement there's a decision as to which, and as to its placing. But the details of that argument aren't now givable. Its rough possibility, however, locates such things as: There can be a choice between making an announcement and using a question, where the question controls what the other will do in the next item, where your interest is to tell them something you convey in the question, which they are then placed in a position to not respond to. That isn't something you could necessarily pick up from this data, and my materials for it run something like this: A: B: A: B: A: B: A:

Hello, Happy Thanksgiving from Balboa. Why thank you dear, Did you just get up? Yeah, Did you get your newspaper this morning? Mac saw it out in front of your house and put it up on your porch. Oh, why thank you.

The basic thing here is that we have a technique, not for telling A how her newspaper got on her porch, but for saying 'My husband, whom you know left me, came home. ' And telling that in such a way as to not require that it be responded to right now. Just consider, it's not particularly a great favor to

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pick up a newspaper from the lawn and put it on the porch. But among the things that happened when B's husband was away was that A's husband would bring over their newspaper to B, in that B doesn't get the paper. So the newspaper and the husband have become affiliated in such a way that this announcement, burying the information that B's husband came home, but allowing for it to be picked up on, can be seen as really an elaborately designed event. So, a way was found to design a presentation of the information that the husband is back, without requiring that it be responded to, since responding could be kind of sticky and you may be willing to have the other person respond if they wish, but you may not want to require them to respond, i.e. , to make it then and there a topic: "Oh that's nice" "Yes it is" or "Well it's not so nice" or some such thing. Or, "When did it happen" or "How did it happen" and " So you're together" or "Are you together" or God only knows what. But in this sort of sequence the information is specifically buried, and in this case it gets picked up on later on, which is something that can be done with information buried like that, when A says "Well I'm glad to hear he came down . " I f one can accept the so-far unseen data and the sketched argument, then you can suppose that it's at least something like a routine possibility that one may use the technical sequential cons�derations to convey information that need not be immediately responded to, where the way you do it is to give them something else to respond to, while allowing them to see what you want them to see via a question, e.g. , "Did you have the day off?" which you would never dream of asking unless you knew about it in the first place. That is to say, a person may have one day off a week; you wouldn't figure that any given day is their day off unless you happen to know that that's their day off. And a similar sort of sense holds for the question "Did you get your newspaper this morning?" I offer these materials to indicate that there are large differences between things the call can be doing, turning on whether the person is, e.g. , saying 'I know you had the day off, ' or really doesn't know whether the other had the day off or not - where that's important to such a call. Let me just make a couple of remarks about the story itself, talking to the story as a unit in the sense of how its parts are bound together, and the way that a story can be designed to allow for various binding-together techniques to be used. One class of such techniques is used here, that class being set up by the initial formulation ' ' . . . what happened at Bullocks. ' ' Bullocks is a place. And the initial formulation of the story as being about something happening at a place provides that it is thereafter possible to mobilize a series of place-indexical terms (things like 'across the street, ' 'in front of the store,' 'on the other side,' etc.) which are read as applying to the initially named place. Such place-indexical terms are used in pretty much every utterance in the story: Well I got out to my car at five thirty I drove around and at first I had to go by the front of the store . . . And there were two police cars across

Lecture 2

1 79

the street, and a colored lady wanted to go in the main entrance there where the silver is and all the (gifts and things), and they wouldn't let her go in, and he had a gun. He was holding a gun in his hand a great big long gun . . . And then over on the other side, I mean to the right, of there, where the employees come out, there was a whole, oh must have been eight or ten employees standing there, because there must have been a- It seemed like they had every entrance barred. I don't know what was going on. Some kind of a killer was in there. So the story parts are arranged around these places, which are conceived as a collection of places for this named place, each one of which is to be read back to the named place. The terms have no particular reference, but there's an organized set of those things that can hold for large classes of such terms. That is, there is an organized set of terms like 'the front, ' 'the other side, ' 'the main entrance, ' which can hold for a range of things like stores, schools, stadiums, etc. , that can be used to organize a story now delivered as a story about the place. The story could be delivered 'about' quite other sorts of things than a place, but a place is a good thing to do a story about, by virtue of these organizational components being usable to link the story together as a connected series of events. Consider such a connection as "And then over on the other side, I mean to the right of there, where the employees come out, there was a whole, oh must have been eight or ten employees standing there, ' ' as a way to connect up the employees with what's going on in a just-that's­ the-way-they-are fashion. That is, the way to bring these other people and these other events into the story, connectedly, is to put them as being "on the other side' ' - as compared, perhaps, to not putting them in the story at all. So the place-indexical terms bind the story together such that whatever takes place in the course of the narrative is taking place in this story. Such techniques may not be required, nor may it be required that the technique be used as massively as this one is, but it's nonetheless a non-incidental sort of technique to use. A couple of years ago I did some stuff on place and memory, 1 and given those sorts of considerations, place is a kind of ideal object to use to hang a story together around, now having to do with the organization of memory. So that's a way that a story can be partially dealt with, i.e. , in terms of how does it have its organization built into it, as compared to its organization being found by some hearer. In this story it's built in, and built in via these place terms which are in pretty much every utterance. And such a technique can be contrasted with, e.g . , temporal narrative features, where you get stories held · together by temporal terms like 'and then, ' 'before that, ' 'after that, ' etc. As a kind of side issue, the place organization sets up some further rather nice possibilities which are exemplified in, say, such a fragment as: "and a colored lady wanted to go in the main entrance there where the silver is and 1 See Spring 1 968, April 1 7 lecture, pp. 7 5 9-60, in vol. I.

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all the (gifts and things). " Recall that this is told by Estelle to Jeanette, who works in the store. Now there's a format which exists and which, again, isn't found from this utterance though I think it perfectly well could have been found from this utterance, which I think can be coldly laid out. It involves that among the types of descriptions one can offer, are ' recognition-type descriptions. ' And the business of a recognition-type description is to get from its recipient something like a ' 'Yeah, ' ' where it will run on until it gets the "Yeah: " E:

]: E:

An'there was two p'leece cars across the street, anleh- colored lady wan'tuh go in the main entrance there where the silver is an' all the [(gifts an' things,) Yeah, And they wouldn' let'er go in,

That is to say, you can start with one characterization of an object, 'the main entrance, ' and keep elaborating until you get a "Yeah,' ' which says 'I know what you're talking about. ' And where, however, one can then put various sorts of information into that elaboration. This is routinely done on names: "I met John, you know, the guy who works in the office next to me, his wife just had a baby . . . " etc. "Yeah. " The neat thing is that in producing a recognition-type description when, e.g. , a place is used, you're enabled to put in information that has as its heard motivation that it enables recognition to take place, but where you can also put in information that you want to convey for the story. Now that's impottant in this story where you have " . . . the main entrance there where the silver is and all the (gifts and things). " 'The silver and all the gifts and things' is plainly an elaboration on 'the main entrance. ' Also, however, it now permits it to be suggested that perhaps the colored lady wanted to go in to where the silver is and all the gifts and things, where what is being suggested then is that she may have been involved in a robbery of the store. If you get the chance to put in what could be there that she could be interested in, then you've used the recognition-type description for the business of the story, i.e. , to convey that there may have been a robbery going on. And that can be done where you after all have no idea that the colored lady had any idea what was in behind that main entrance, or that she was going through the main entrance to get to what was right in the main entrance area - in contrast to, for all anybody knows she was going into the store, up to the second floor. After all, Estelle is sitting in her car across the street and watching this lady at the main entrance. She, not knowing the lady, can't know where the lady is going, even if she goes into the store. As it rums out in Trio II, Penelope in effect points out "That was no colored lady, that was an employee! " And it's not that she's trying to get into the store, she's playing around with the cop outside the store. But, in the building of the story, that she's a 'colored lady,' and that that's 'where the silverware is, ' can be put into the story by an elaboration on 'the main entrance, ' and can be done, not in a nasty fashion,

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but simply out of an interest in building a recognition-type description. Place features, with place-affiliated terms, are used, then, to convey information here about what's going on, that 'the main entrance' will not tell you. Here's another thing. There is no overt information in the data by which I can know that Estelle doesn't work at Bullocks. Aside from a general conviction that Estelle doesn't work at the store, my basis for saying it is that Estelle refers to "the main entrance there where the silver is and all the (gifts and things), " and 'gifts' is not a way, as it turns out, that Jeanette talks about them when she talks to Penelope who also works at the store. In that case she calls it "the giftware. " And that's a marked difference. 'Gifts' is the way someone who doesn't work at the store refers to what those who work at the store call 'giftware. ' I kind of figure that's enough basis for saying that Estelle doesn't work at the store, but that may be kind of extravagant. At any rate, it might be seen as a kind of co-participant term (recall the talk I did last time about 'report' being a 'co-participant verb') 2 which is used by reference to some formulation of who it is that's talking to whom; producing that term as the appropriate way of saying something that, the same sort of thing taking place between others, they would use another way of talking about it. Let me just note another type of organization; it has nothing much to do with stories but is present here: ' 'A colored lady wanted to go in the main entrance. " The term 'wanted to' is an instance of a class of terms I call 'first verbs. ' By that I mean, it having been used, it says that sequentially for this sentence another clause with another verb will come. That is, 'wanted to' is not used unless you're going to say something like 'and they stopped her' or 'they tried to stop her. ' It's not, then, just a 'first verb' but one that will indicate that she failed, i.e. , it tells that when the next clause comes it will involve that she failed. Now when you begin to talk about something like "She wanted to go in the main entrance and they wouldn't let her go in, " you can begin to really attend to the independence of the perceived sequence of events and the story structure. That is, the way in which the story structure is altogether after the fact even though it's delivered as a sequence of events, can be evidenced from the fact that a term turns for its use on the failure that's already known and is used to characterize a failure that has not yet been announced. And you don't get "she wanted to go in and she walked to the door and she went in. " It's just not done. If the lady got into the store with no problem it might simply be reported "and there was this colored lady going into the store. " So the sequencing terms do not reflect the perceived sequence of events; instead, they deal with things like the sequential organization of the format being used. So, for example, when somebody says ' I thought X, ' by and large they're saying 'I thought X and now it turns out I find it's wrong, ' i.e. , ' I thought X and then I realized Y' - though routinely when they say 'I realized Y, ' they didn't 'realize' it but they 'thought' Y and it turned out later that Y 2 See Lecture 1 , p. 1 7 4 .

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was correct, so that for the story, Y was 'realized. ' 'Thought, ' then, is another 'first verb. ' 'First verbs' have their interest in this kind of a general problem: A problem for parties talking in conversation is how they go about signalling that some utterance that they're producing will or will not be complete on its 'first possible completion, ' which is relevant to telling the other that they should or should not be prepared to start talking on a first possible completion, where by 'first possible completion' I mean completion of a first possible sentence. If there is a rule, as I argue there is, that says 'First possible completion can be treated as actual completion, ' then it's a problem for parties to produce multi-clause sentences. It's a problem that they solve by indicating within the first clause of their intendedly multi-clause sentence that this is but the first clause, that a second clause will follow. A way to do that is to use in the first clause a 'first verb, ' to indicate that more follows, that this is just a clause not a sentence. And it's not particularly a syntactic phenomenon because, e.g. , "A colored lady wanted to go in the main entrance" is a perfectly good sentence. But hearers know that 'wanted to' is going to be followed by something else, e.g. , an account of her failure to get in. Having gotten onto a bunch of small items, let me talk about ' ' . . . and they wouldn't let her go in. " Conventional grammatical analysis would say that 'they' is a plural pronoun. It's plain, however, that in this case, and commonly, 'they' does not have to be used to refer to more than one person. "They wouldn't let her go in" may not mean that several people stopped her. Some one person could have stopped her and 'they' can perfectly well be used. A typical instance of this is you're driving down the street and a lady driver cuts you off and you say "They always do that. " Where that you're talking about that woman is perfectly hearable, where the point is that by using 'they' you make that sort of categorization of the person that says I'm talking about that person as a member of a class. And in this case the 'they' presumably refers to that single policeman who stopped her, being characterized as 'a policeman. ' 'They' is in principle a pronoun not for plurals but for categories (cops . . . ladies . . . etc.). It can work as a pronoun for categories indepen­ dently of working as a pronoun for plurals. Let me go through one more technical thing about the organization of conversation as it comes up in this material, which we're just lucky to have tum up in this conversation, as it's of really large import for other sorts of things. The material is as follows: E:

]:

E:

J:

E:

J:

E:

U(h)h h(h)uh so fin ' out tomorrow an' let me kno::j jw. Oh I'll ca:ll Penelope right no:w. ehh/jheh heh heh heh Call Pen an' call me ba: :ck. Ye:h heh, Tell'm- 'r a:sk 'er if they fou:nd the ki:ller: : , Wha'/ /time was thi:s. heh! (0. 6)

Lecture 2

J:

We: :ull, ih wuz- -- (0 . 7) -- twunny (tuh) five minnits tuh s1: :x, Oh this e:vening.

E:

Wel I told you I 1- I leave at fi:ve thirdy,

E:

183

(0. 6)

M y interest i s in the sequence from "What time was this. " Recall that some temporal indication of the event was given right off with "Well I got out to my car at five thirty. " I raise there having been an earlier mention of time so as to get into what happens here. And that is, after the agreement that Jeanette will make a call to Penelope, Jeanette asks "What time was this" and Estelle now produces an answer, "Twenty-five minutes to six. " I take that answer to have been produced by reference to her figuring that Jeanette asked the question remembering that Estelle had said 5 : 3 0 . In that light Estelle now produces, not just a repeat, but a 'better' time reference than she had given before, i.e. , a 'more precise' time reference. Her problem is, 'What in the world is Jeanette asking? I told her the time already. ' Since the time that she told Jeanette, 5 : 30, can be conceived as a 'merely approximate' time, Estelle can find that Jeanette must therefore be asking for a more accurate time than she'd been given. The issue is that the time Estelle gave, 5 : 30, is not the same sort of time that "twenty-five minutes to six" is. Estelle didn't need a clock in order to say it was 5 : 3 0 , that's her way of saying 'when I got out of work, ' i.e. , 'approximately 5 : 3 0 . ' Now there are 'approximate' numbers and 'precise' numbers, one sense of which is if you were to say to someone ' 'I'll meet you at five twenty seven" and you arrive at 5 : 29 they might well say "You're late. " If you say ' 'I'll meet you at five thirty" you may well arrive at 5 : 40 and they won't figure you're late. Or, if you tell them you'll meet them at 5 : 2 7 they might ask why you're being so precise - where, in terms of just a series of numbers, 5 : 30 is no less precise than 5 : 2 7 . It's just a different class of object. But 5 : 3 0 in this case is not merely that sort of approximate time, it's also saying 'the time I got off work. ' So, in the light of that approximateness feature of 5 : 3 0 , Estelle can produce an answer to "What time was this" as a 'corrected' time, involving that the prior time was 'approximate' and what is wanted is the 'exact' time, where, then, she doesn't hear that Jeanette forgot. And it's important to stress that in her natural thinking about the question Estelle hears it so as to allow Jeanette to be one who hasn't yet been found out to have forgotten. She hears it as a correctly asked question, though it takes work to do so. And that will tum out to be a fundamental kind of thing, hearing the 'best sense' of someone else's utterance, i.e. , that they have in mind all the things they should have in producing it. Now, following Estelle's 'best sense' answer, Jeanette performs an opera­ tion on it; one I talk of as ' showing understanding' of the answer. In this case it turns out to show she misunderstands the answer. But it is specifically produced to show understanding, and it's a routinely done thing. A typical instance is something like this:

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Part Ill

How long are you going to be here? Til Monday. Oh, just a week.

All that's done is to process the answer in such a fashion as: From today to Monday is a week. Then announce the product, which is a way of saying 'See, I was able to perform that sort of operation so I heard and understood what you said. ' And that's what "Oh this evening" is. The problem is that "Oh this evening" shows that if that's all she got out of "twenty-five minutes to six" then she in fact forgot that Estelle told her it was 5 : 3 0 before. That is, she shouldn't have gotten " Oh this evening" out of "twenty-five minutes to six" if she had asked "What time was this" in the light of the earlier mentioned 5 : 30 . And Estelle's re-producing the 5 : 3 0 in her next utterance, "Well I told you I leave at five thirty," indicates that she did do the work of trying to find how Jeanette could have asked the question in that light, thereby produced an answer, and then was able to monitor Jeanette's 'show of understanding' to see that Jeanette hadn't produced the question in that light. Seeing that Jeanette failed to remember that fact, Estelle becomes queasy about the whole thing and now goes through the whole story again, Jeanette's failure to remember the time being apparently sufficient to her to raise the possibility that a good amount of the story was forgotten. Now this matter is of some interest in a bunch of ways, one of which is that it tells us that we can re-look at Jeanette's techniques for showing that she is hearing the story - her "Yeah"s, etc. - and say that they are perfectly well usable though the story is not being registered, i.e. , she can make it through the story without Estelle knowing that she wasn't registering. But now Jeanette has taken on the business of retelling the story to Penelope, perhaps finds that she doesn't know it, and has a way of trying to get Estelle to retell it. But it can be seen that her initial responses are absolutely not to be read as saying 'I understand what you said, ' but are to be considered some other kind of object, like understanding that a place for comment has occurred. So that the operation directed to showing understanding, "Oh this evening, " becomes a central focus for the retelling of the story, in that the operation flunks - though the way it flunks is separate from the way Estelle works to find an answer that is a good answer given that Jeanette remembers 5 : 3 0 . And that piece of business of Estelle's is, I suggest, monumental in its import, in terms of how, e.g . , people suppose that what we've been talking about all along, you know in the way I told it to you, and I suppose that in producing any next thing I say. And without thinking about it, the work I do is to find for any item you say - no matter how grossly it misunderstands what I say, how well it understands what I say. Now let's look at the materials in quite a different way, keeping the events in mind, thinking out what was happening and playing around with the talk by reference to some way of considering what was happening. I have in mind something like this: When Estelle interprets the events, she interprets them so as to find how, that the cops were there involves that they were legitimately there. And we can notice that at least nowadays that's become kind of a

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distributional phenomenon, i.e. , whereas Estelle is able to use the presence of the cops to find what was going on - where the cops belonged there, others might see the same scene with the same parties by reference to that the cops were doing something which they had no business doing. That is, if this took place in a black neighborhood, watched by black people, then 'the very same scene' would perhaps tum into, for the perception of the parties, an altogether different phenomenon. There are places where the cops can count on the presence of two of their cars to provide for their visible, legitimate presence, such that others will then search the scene to find what the cops might be doing that they should be doing, and, e.g . , pick up on that someone is 'trying to get into the entrance where the silver is' or that they can imagine a killer is in there, though they of course can't see into the store. Whereas there are others who will not at all see the events in that way, but, seeing two cops on the scene, may now look to see what kind of bother the cops, by being on the scene, are producing - as compared to what kind of bother they are properly responding to. That sort of differential organization of the sheer perceiving of an event is of considerable importance for, e.g. , the way in which the fact of the police on the scene tells people that although there is a trouble things are okay - or that they're not at all okay. For example, that this lady can drive right by the scene knowing that things are more or less well in hand, that something is happening but that the cops will take care of it - rather than that something is happening and the cops are making it happen. A rather different sort of thing, but again having to do with the status of the thing she sees, is that which particular scene Estelle has seen is relevant to that she could have paused to watch it and could have reported it. That is, it's not that we have a scene seen and described independently of the actual scene. It's by virtue of the fact that it takes place in a public street, involving officials seeable as such at first glance, seeable as doing their business, that Estelle could pause to watch and then report it, as compared to the bunches of scenes that, catching them out of the comer of one's eye, one knows that he sh011ldn't be watching. It's none of your business, you shouldn't be watching, you shouldn't have seen it. To have captured it in your eye is to already have embarrassed yourself, and you'd better not tell anyone you saw it because they might well say "Why the hell were you looking?" or "What kind of person would notice that?" "Why are you so fascinated by that sort of thing?" etc. So one of the things that the features of the scene described in the report tells the hearer is that what was seen was something that the person who saw it had rights to see. It's not that she saw a scene and described a scene, but that the described scene carries with it the legitimacy of her having seen it. And in that regard, Estelle is perfectly comfortable as a witness to the scene. Yet you can perfectly well imagine how she wouldn't see herself as a witness at all. In her report there's, e.g. , no hint of any interest in stopping and helping out, or getting worried about what's going to happen. More importantly, there's no hint that she had any fear that somehow, e.g . , that policeman was about to tum to her and ask her what she was doing there. The

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massive comfort in her innocence, and in that legitimate audience status that she has, is something that we should give real attention to, in at least this way: It's the kind of thing that we know can be readily shaken. There are times and places where some Estelle would not feel all that comfortable, but, passing such a scene - and you can readily imagine it - she would figure "Oh my God here I am, the first thing that happens is they're going to figure I'm involved. " And that never dawns on our Estelle. And until it dawns on her she can have no sense of an empathy with, e.g. , a kid in the ghetto. Her sense of innocence affects the whole way she sees the scene. There's no fear on her part at all that anybody's going to mistake her for a party to the scene - though she's perfectly willing to assign others a non-witness, party­ to-the-scene status. And again, there is no feeling on her part that she ought to do anything, and pretty much nobody would figure that she ought to feel that she should do anything. And that sort of trust in the ability of the cops who are there, to handle whatever needs to be handled, and that they will handle it well, is another aspect of the way in which, being a witness she can sheerly be a witness. And one might consider, when one is doing being a witness to a scene, the conditions under which your witness status could be transformed in a series of different ways, one of them being into someone who could be seen by others, e.g . , the lady in the car next to yours or the man across the street, not as a 'witness' but possibly as a 'car moving away from the scene, ' i.e. , as the escaped robber. Or, not that you're a witness to a scene which is being ably handled, but you're somebody who is callously passing it by. I raise these possibilities because if you read the story you can feel utterly sure that no such issues crossed her mind. You can then think of scenes in which you or others have been involved, in which such issues do or do not emerge, and then focus on what are the conditions that would lead somebody like Estelle here to at least have it cross her mind that somebody else might see her and wonder what in the world is Estelle doing there, or that when the cop turns around with his gun he's going to shoot her or tell her to halt. Given the markedly distributional character of that sort of phenomenon, you ought to learn to appreciate the difficulty involved in groups talking to each other where each of them figures that all they did was to see what was happening. That is, the notion of there being arguable issues involved is unavailable to either group by virtue of the fact that all they're doing is scanning a scene to see what's happening. They're not arguing anything, they're not imagining anything. They're seeing the scene in some organiza­ tion. And to tell them that they're imagining it or that they're making a case - since you perfectly well know what was there to be seen by virtue of what you saw - is to put them in a position where they could not readily come to understand what you're talking about. That turns on the fact that each group is specifically committed to a trust of vision, without any conception of what they understand by 'vision. ' This lady is not designing a right-wing report. All she's doing is reporting what she saw. And to tell her that it isn't what happened is to attack a kind of trust that

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she has, and should have, in what she simply sees. It would be undermining something which an enormous mass of, say, Western ideology has led her to believe she should in fact trust. The point is, roughly, that it's a culturally and temporally distributional thing that people do or do not trust their eyes, and even such people as those academics of sorts who figure that they are attuned to the 'ideological foundations of perception' may not use that sort of attuning to come to appreciate the distrust of vision that some cultures have - which they see as a kind of anti-empiricism. It may not at all be anti-empiricism, but that in the light of the kinds of troubles that people get into when they take a culturally-ordered orientation to vision seriously, a focus on other senses might seem to pay off better. And the fact that people systematically distrust what they see might well be approached, not as " How in the world do they survive with that magical view of things?" but as a perfectly empirical position.

Lecture 4

Greetings.· Adjacency pairs; Sequential implicativeness; The integrative function of public tragedy I'm going to talk about 'greetings' in conversation. I guess this is my second or third report on greetings, and the basic new thing I learned about them, that occasions the relevance of saying something more about them, is that whereas in the past I thought that greetings begin conversations, I now think that has to be modified to say that greetings begin the beginnings of conversations, and that they are the initial part of the beginning sequence in conversations and by no means the whole part of the beginning sequence. And it's by virtue of their status within the beginning sequence that a good deal of their interest lies. I'll begin the discussion with a restatement of sorts, of some facts, problems, interests, etc. of greetings, starting with some initial sorts of orderlinesses one can observe about greetings - and now we're talking about . "H"1 , " etc., o r "] oe.! " "H"I1 . , " " M"k thmgs l"k 1 e "He11o " "H e11o, " "H"" 1 1 e.I " "Harry!," etc. If anyone has an interest in what I have to say about greetings, they can look at a paper called 'Everyone has to lie. ' I won't by and large go through stuff I've dealt with there. A first thing about greetings is their placing. They go right at the beginning of the beginning. Though that may sound like nothing of any interest, it can be turned to a bunch of interests. Putting that into productional terms we could say that for greetings their placing is of highest priority. And greetings have highest priority for initial placement in a conversation. Among the things that means is that when we look at the beginning section of a conversation - and it remains to be seen what the 'beginning section' consists of and what sorts of things, if they're not part of the beginning section, should nonetheless be done early on into a conversation - it can be seen that a whole bunch of things that look like part of the beginning section are movable relative to each other. For example, an exchange of 'how-are-you's might be considered a normal second part of a begining section. However, how-are­ yous are movable and can be placed later into a beginning section. Now a central question about the organization of the beginning section concerns what are required parts of it and what sort of ordering do they have. There are a bunch of variable things that can go into a beginning section and, Lecture 3 of Winter 1 9 7 0 was not transcribed.

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if and when they're used, we want to know if there is some ordering for their relevant placement. For example, a variable part of the beginning of a conversation is something like "Where've you been!" Taking something like that, as compared to an exchange of how-are-yous, "Where've you been" can precede or succeed how-are-yous, and we want to know if that's open to all parts of a beginning section, or are there fixed parts of a beginning section. We also want to know how fixed are the fixed parts, i.e. , if you take the closing sequence of a conversation, we find that the final parts, e.g. , things like an exchange of 'goodbyes, ' need not occur adjacently but can be separated by some other utterances, whereas for an exchange of greetings it doesn't appear that they are separatable but should be placed adjacent to each other. We can then ask why are they unmovable as compared to other things which are movable; why are they unseparatable as compared to other things that are separatable. So, to say that greetings are placed at the beginning of a beginning section of conversation is to say something other than the sheer inspectional fact that, e.g. , "Hello" - "Hello"s occur at the beginning of the beginning. We are saying something analytically about some sorts of objects. We then want to know, e.g. , if we could classify as 'alike' the beginning of the beginning section and other things. So, for example, I would say that greetings are instances of a class of objects which I call adjacency pairs, and while there are ways in which greetings are quite the same as other adjacency pairs, it seems to be that the other pairs have separatable parts, e.g. , for question-answer there are lots of things that can be inserted between the question and the answer, and I've already mentioned the separatable character of an exchange of goodbyes, whereas that doesn't seem to be so for greetings. And that gives an order of relevance to such a question as, Does the first greeting pair item have a fixed place? And then, Given the first, is it the business of somebody to do a next pair item right then and there as compared to using the slot to do something else and then later doing the next pair item for the greeting? So, placing is one sort of transparent inspectional orderliness which nonetheless needs a lot of work on it to find out what exactly is involved, and how general to other things is that sort of a feature. A second, which I've sort of mentioned, is pairing. Greetings come in pairs. The pairing of things matters in various ways; for one, that by virtue of the pairing conception, ' first greetings' and 'greeting returns' are different objects. It's not that there are two greetings, but there is a first greeting and a second greeting, and they're quite different. A simple way to see that is, whereas a first greeting gets a second greeting, a second greeting does not work in the way a first greeting does, to get another greeting in return. The observation that that point plays off, I found in Goodenough's monograph on property among the Truk, where he observed about some phenomenon that it's different than letter writing among Americans where, if you write a letter and someone returns a letter then you owe a letter to the person who returned your letter. That is to say, letters are chained in an indefinite fashion. And there are other things that operate that way, i.e. , where you give them one and they

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give you one in return, but the one they give you in return sets up that you owe them one. Greetings don't work that way. (To this there is at least inspectionally contrary data: " Hello," "Hi Joe," " Hi!" And in a telephone situation one routinely gets that sort of thing - but there is something else going on. The 'third' greeting item stands as a way to recognize who's done the second item which then serves as a first to the third; the first item simply being the formal thing that a telephone answerer does.) The fact that greetings are paired has implications with regard to what we can then do by looking to the ways in which the class of adjacency pair objects work. That is to say, we can then cull out features of adjacency pairs and see whether such features, considered programmatically, hold for greetings. If they don't hold for greetings we might, e.g. , consider that greetings are not precisely adjacency pairs. But, roughly, among the features of adjacency pairs are that they are organized in such a way that the first item of the pair selects a class of return items to it, from which some return can be selected. It does not necessarily select only a single class of return items; rather, given a first pair member, a second pair member should be selected from the class of alternative second pair members. And a party who speaks second to a first pair part, by doing an appropriate second pair part, exhibits, among other things, that they see that a first pair part was done. An interesting part of the work of greetings, then, is that there are a series of different types of organization involved. Adjacency pair organization partially handles some of the things that greetings do, and we can say things about adjacency pairs and locate such objects. Then there's this other thing about greetings, having to do with their placing, i.e. , that greetings go at the beginning of the beginning section, which is altogether independent of adjacency pair organization and has to do with a different type of organization for conversation, i.e. , the overall structural organization. And in those terms there is no information in adjacency pair organization about where the first part of the pair should go in a conversation. Now there may be, as another thing, the organization of the beginning section of a conversation. For this, the issue is where, relative to the various parts that can be put into that beginning section, should various parts go. And given the possible relationship between the beginning section and what can follow from the beginning section, it may be that the greeting sequence is not determinative of how you get into other than the beginning section, where what can follow from the beginning section turns on the sorts of things that are done after a greeting sequence. That is to say, a greeting sequence may be fixed and irrelevant - or it may not be. It's plain that other things are quite relevant to moving from a beginning section, e.g . , the use or non-use of a how-are-you can be enormously relevant. Obviously a how-are-you can elicit a piece of news, e.g . , "Fine! I'm getting married" which moves one into topical talk right then and there. And, e.g. , I've heard conversations which start out "Hi how are you?" "Oh, not so good" "Why?" then a 2 0-minute discussion, the parties part, and the other as he's walking away, says "Hey! By the way how are you. " So that how-are-yous are massively separable, and a

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second how-are-you may not come in the beginning section at all, whereas I don't think you get hellos separated in that way, with a second hello placed somewhere other than the beginning section. So we have these series of different types of organization for conversation that greetings are objects in, and they're all involved in bringing off the greeting section of a conversation. Now we said that the greeting pair is fixed in its placement and also is fixed as an adjacency pair, i.e. , that the second should go right after the first. That turns, for its working, on a series of other inspectional properties of greetings. For one that in a strong way an initial greeting - and a second greeting also - can be produced and treated as an adequate complete utterance such that the utterance can be treated as complete when the greeting has occurred. " Hi Joe" is treatable as a complete utterance right then and there such that the other party should start talking. So if somebody produces what could be a complete greeting, like " Hi Joe," and, e.g. , starts to say as well, "how are you?" then you can get an overlapping return greeting. Like, in the GTS data we have " Hi Jim, II come on in, " where "come on in" is overlapped by Jim's return greeting. One relevance of that is that for considerations of the occurrence of 'interruptions, ' one wants to know, about as many sorts of interruptions that you can find, do they have some orderly base? Can you say how it happens that the other party starts up where they do start up? And in the case of, e.g . , "Hi Jim I I come on in" there is an orderly basis for the occurrence of the interruption. Now we have this rule that says given a first, a second should be done, and given that they're pairs, what should be done on the finding of completion is specified by the pair organization, i.e. , some second member should be done. Recognizable completeness matters, then, by virtue of the rule that says completion is transitionally adequate, because on the completion a second should be done, such that if it's not done it can be seen to be absent. So, for example, if somebody says "Hello" and there is no return on its completion, a repeat can be done quite directly. And returning a hello to a repeated hello is a different thing than returning to an initial hello and can involve, e.g. , offering some excuse as to how come you didn't answer the first. Now that completeness feature for an utterance is, for other things than greetings, massively problematic. For all sorts of utterances it's a complex question as to how its completion for transition purposes is to be achieved, and how it's to be responded to. But for adjacency pairs in general, given a first pair member, on the recognition of a possible completion a second pair member should be done. And that an utterance containing a greeting is recognizably complete when the greeting is done, has various importances. Greetings are routinely done by people who are otherwise unacquainted, and are done before any monitoring can be done of what, for this person, constitutes a complete utterance. Added to these features is that greetings are specifically heard as directed to somebody, and they select the somebody they're directed to, to speak. So it's not just that somebody should talk and should do a return greeting when a first greeting has been done, but the greeting selects the somebody to whom

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it's directed as its recipient and as the next speaker, i.e. , the speaker of the return greeting. And plainly it can be a technical problem as to who's been selected, and you routinely get reports like, "I was walking along and this gorgeous girl is coming towards me and she says 'Hi!' with a big smile, and I looked over my shoulder to see who she was talking to, and then I realized it was me. " Now completion and directedness have to do with what can be called the sequential implicativeness of an initial greeting. To say, for example, that a greeting puts one into a state of talk or begins a conversation, could be heard as saying that a greeting puts one into a state of talk because it's an instance of a state of talk. The matter is much more pointed than that, by virtue of the fact that a greeting not only involves talk in itself, but it gets more talk - at least another greeting. And if one is doing a beginning section of a conversation, then the second greeting should get something further, but not another greeting. Earlier I mentioned the issue of greetings having highest priority. A second place where greetings go is on the entry of some party into a conversation that's already ongoing. And to see the sort of priority status greetings have in such a scene, one might look at materials like the following: Tony :

Matt : Tony :

The head of these United States' gotta be a dynamic person. Forthright. Very forthright person. Can' be- can' be a meek person. Gotta put his cards on the table. See, the guy that puts his cards on the table is- Russia an' all these other countries, Russia an' all these- uh, Hi Matt! Hi. Russia an' all these other countries . . .

That is to say, a party will do a thing like interrupt their own utterance - aside from that parties will interrupt others' utterances - to do a greeting. And note that the insertion is of a greeting sequence, not just that the speaker says "Hi Matt" and continues. And we could ask for what sorts of things can an utterance that one is engaged in have something inserted into it that is otherwise adequate. Greetings may be among a small class of such things. And that would be a way to see the kind of priority it has for conversation. (It's interesting that this entry-of-a-new-participant thing is kind of parallel for the ringing of a telephone, i.e. , if two or more people are sitting and having a conversation and the phone rings, then routinely someone will stop in the middle of their utterance and go answer the phone.) Returning to the fact that greetings go at the start of the beginning section, a question is, do greetings invariably begin a conversation or are there some conversations in which greetings don't go at the beginning? Also, do greetings mean the beginning of a conversation, definitively? The answer to the second is obviously 'no. ' It's obvious that people do simply exchange greetings and don't have more interaction than that, so the fact that greetings have been done doesn't mean that a conversation will take place. One kind of interesting

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feature o f the accomplishing o f greetings-only interactions, where parties are approaching each other on a street, in a hallway, etc. , is the way in which parties are able to withhold doing greetings until they reach some space relative to each other such that they can do greetings and have passed on its completion. Now if one party starts a greeting at such a distance from the other as to involve that the other returns the greeting while they are still approaching each other, then more than greetings will perhaps have to be done. And there is more-than-a-greeting which can be done, i.e. , an exchange of how-are-yous, but apparently you can screw up on that by starting greetings at such a distance that the how-are-yous are finished and you're still approaching. But for the most part, people do it very well, engineering that thing so that they do not pass each other face to face having ended the interaction, but the interaction is over when they pass. With regard to the issue of do greetings invariably begin a conversation, I used to have a rule that said 'greetings are ahistorically relevant, ' i.e. , that no parties' history of interaction removes the relevance of greetings. I was thinking about that in comparison to, e.g., things like introductions where, having been introduced to somebody once or twice, introductions are no longer appropriate, whereas greetings remain usable between parties as a way to begin their conversation though they've seen each other every day for 30 years. And while some such thing as that may be so, there are specific historicalizing techniques which permit the beginning of conversation to take place, as a specifically historicalized conversation, without greetings. That is, a way to say, e.g. , we are now doing the second conversation this afternoon, or we are now doing a continuation of a conversation that had closed, is not just to begin without a greeting but to specifically connect this conversation with the last, e.g. , " Oh you've put up your hair" as an entering remark on returning to somebody's house having been there earlier, or other such noticings. Or things like "He said no, " "She can't go, " "She already did it, ' ' etc. Such beginnings specifically connect a possibly-newly-begun conver­ sation with a last. And that stands as a particular technique for doing a sort of thing that is done - if not in the beginning section then early on in conversations - which is, bringing this conversation into relationship with past conversations. I talked about the business of 'turning your mind to us' as a thing one does at the beginning of a conversation (and that's not merely turning your mind to the other, but to 'us'). Now, among the ways you go about doing the job of 'turning your mind to us' in the beginning of a conversation is focussing on its distance from the last, or some business by reference to the last, e.g. , "Where've you been, I haven't seen you for three weeks!, " "You're looking a lot better, " "How's your mother?, " "I want to thank you for the lovely dinner, " and a whole range of such techniques. (Some of those things should be done specifically in the beginning section of a conversation, e.g. , an inquiry about the health of somebody who in the last interaction was reported to be ill.) So, early into a conversation you use some way of showing that you've found at least that part of 'us' that is involved in our last interaction. And it's

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always a last. If you deal with interactions prior to the last one you work your way through the last one to the others. That sort of technique is a way to connect up two interactions such that the second is done without a greeting sequence, i.e. , it can just begin off with those items I've mentioned, "She wouldn't go, " etc. , those sorts of things that have to be understood by reference to whatever we were talking about when we last ended. At this point there's a whole thing that fits in; a type of conversation that begins without greetings, indeed without a begining section. There is a phenomenon that's been widely observed: In times of public disaster and tragedy people in large cities who otherwise do not talk to each other, develop 'comeraderie, ' talk to each other. That will turn out to be involved in this issue that we've just gotten to. We have to try to develop some sorts of explanations, characterizations, of why that happens. In order to arrive at such a characterization a lot of clearing up has to be done. For example, it's reported that strangers now talk to each other, where strangers don't talk to each other in cities. Now there's a way in which that is plainly nonsense. People who are strangers to each other talk to each other all the time. Not, however, as 'strangers. ' That is to say, 'cab drivers and fares' talk to each other; people talk to cops, to salesladies, to all sorts of people, and they don't encounter that they're 'talking to a stranger' as a problem they have to overcome, nor one that the respondent treats them as dealing with. So, the characterization of 'stranger-stranger' interaction in a city is equivocal and turns on, for its relevance, that the parties who are now interacting in a time of disaster are specifically interacting as 'strangers' and not as 'cabbie and fare, ' 'saleslady and client, ' etc. We'll just play around a little bit with the problems involved. In the first instance, one needn't treat the matter as ' how do people overcome their (acquired) natural unwillingness to talk to strangers, ' but one wants to know why they would feel that they want to talk to strangers, such that they have to overcome that they shouldn't or don't. That is, one doesn't want to suppose that people are dying to talk to strangers all along and now they have an occasion to do it, you have to find out why, for this situation they want to talk to strangers; and also, why do those who are approached as 'strangers' allow themselves to be talked to. Initially, then, the problem isn't as simple as 'how do people now get a chance to talk to strangers. ' Let's consider some things about the situation of 'strangers' in the streets of the cities. In lecture 1 I mentioned the status of the crowd outside of Bullocks, and said that a thing about the occurrence of a crowd around, say, a possible crime, is that somebody who sees the crowd and the crime, sees what the crowd is looking at, whereas otherwise what anybody is looking at in the streets is not available. With that, we can achieve a small part of the sense of what is called the 'integrative function of crime, ' i.e. , in such a situation you know what's on all these people's minds. We can in similar fashion get at the integrative function of disaster and tragedy. That is, it is otherwise routinely nobody's business on the one hand, and perhaps unsolvable on the other, what's on the mind of the person who's

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passing you. Furthermore, it's your business to not make it their business as to what's on your mind by doing something which would cause them to wonder what's on that person's mind, e.g. , by crying in the streets. Crying in the streets is not a thing that somebody encountering somebody doing it can solve - except classificatorily, e.g . , they can say it's some private problem and it's something you shouldn't cause them to try to solve. But at least one facet of the integrative status of public tragedy is that somebody standing on the street can cry, and the set of persons who pass him, who don't know him, can know what he's crying about, i.e. , he's crying about that public event. Your mind is, then, made available to the anonymous persons who encounter you, who otherwise have it as not their business to figure it out, and who otherwise can't. So, a sort of thing that happens in public disasters is that persons can express emotions in public places, and those emotions are available to others, who need not avoid looking at the person who's sad, and also can figure that they know why he's sad. And the major thing is that this is for people who are unacquainted, i.e. , 'strangers. ' Now that operates in a rather pure fashion as compared to crying in front of your friends about, e.g., the death of Bobbie Kennedy, where, in interactions with your friends you find that the account is not sufficiently ' 'I'm crying because Bobbie Kennedy died" but, that, plus 'how come I in particular care. ' When people talk among their friends about how they were affected by a death like Bobbie Kennedy's, or Jack Kennedy's, or Martin Luther King's, etc. , then they give not just the fact of the death as their account, but their involvement in the life - however small that involvement may be. Whereas for strangers, the fact of the death is all you need display and it's sufficient. You are crying as a member of the public, with public motives and explanations as sufficient. And no one is interested in inspecting, say, the irony of your crying; that you of all people should be crying, after all you hated the guy. Public tragedies, then, make persons' emotions publicly available and publicly explainable to anonymous parties. Also, persons can express emotions in public without having that they are doing that treated as something embarrassing, something they shouldn't do, etc. Another sort of thing is somewhat off the topic but may be relevant to it: A feature of 'stranger-stranger' interaction in the city apparently serves as a way to show that the initiator is specifically, while talking to the person he's talking to, not 'beginning a conversation' with him. And that is that techniques other than greetings are used to begin the thing. Those techniques consist of such a first utterance as solves the question of how come I'm talking to you; things like "Excuse me, could you tell me where the subway entrance is?," "Pardon me but do you have the time?" etc. Such a 'ticketed' first utterance is plainly a 'beginning, ' but is such a thing as when it has been returned to the interaction will be, if not complete, completable with a 'thank you-you're welcome' exchange. As compared to starting with a "Hello" where, for conversations that begin that way the ending is not foregiven, these sorts of things, when they are done as a beginning, announce also what it will

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take to bring that interaction to a dose. So that people who, if you say " Hello" to them will ignore you, will answer, I take it, if you say "Pardon me could you tell me where the subway is. " So, 'stranger-stranger' interaction can be done in such a way as to indicate that I'm not starting a conversation with you. It will turn out to be a relevant sort of fact because at least one reported way that 'stranger-stranger' interaction in disasters takes place is the following, from the New York Times. Yesterday they kept asking for news; any news of Kennedy's condition. "How is he?" people would ask a taxi driver, soda jerk, or policeman and they didn't even think of saying who "he" was. What you get, then, as a conversation beginning is "How is he?" It's a conversation beginning that could perfectly well be done where you're doing the historicalized beginnings, i.e. , that sort of thing as connects two conversations. But in this case it has a series of ideal properties to it. It says as between us, interacting as 'strangers, ' my business with you is that public matter that you and I ought to have on our minds and nothing else, such that what I come to be doing with it can be brought under control. It also says that it's a matter solvable by an 'anybody. ' Now, the character of 'intimacy' in any event - leaving aside intimacy between strangers - is that one can do firsts like this which are not tied to prior matters. That is, if one can say to somebody "How is he?" without a 'he' having been talked of, then that's a way of doing 'being intimate. ' And a way of doing 'being intimate' with strangers turns on that we have an item that we can do it for with strangers, i.e. , something like a public disaster. And it may be that the intimacy, the friendliness that exists in the cities during such a disaster does not more readily permit a conversation that begins with "Hello" "Hello. ' ' That is to say, the non-use of a beginning section may be a specific part of this kind of interaction. And that then assimilates it to standard 'stranger-stranger' interaction and distinguishes it from 'ordinary' conversation. So, when you have an item like " How is he? , ' ' "Isn't it awful?," "Will they ever go on again?, " etc. , as first items usable for anybody in the city, you now have ways of beginning a conversation with a stranger, which announce to the stranger the terms of interaction. And any sort of public event that can be assumed to be on the mind of any other party you happen to encounter can be used that way. But perhaps only such public events as can be assumed to be on the mind of the person you interact with can be used that way. The question of why people will respond to it deserves altogether separate treatment. Of course on the one hand they know the terms that they're being invited into, and they can know what it will take to bring the thing to a close; that they're being addressed as a member of the public and not as some exploitable object (or they can suppose that until they find out otherwise). But also, if they are correctly found, what happens is that they have an answer occur to the them - as compared to this being a puzzle - and they can offer

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the answer, and in offering it they do thereby show their membership; that they are indeed reasonable citizens. You could figure it might not matter very much. Why in the world does somebody care that a stranger thinks well of him, or thinks that he's a reasonable person. Why should he care that a stranger not think "this guy doesn't give a damn" about something that this guy in fact doesn't give a damn about. Why should he care that somebody think he does give a damn when he doesn't. And yet there are enormous masses of material that tell us perfectly well that people are subject to that sort of embarrassment, i.e. , that people care enormously - or enough - what anonymous people think of them. Consider the difficulties of, e.g. , having a fight in a public place, deciding that you're going to refuse to stand up for the Star Spangled Banner at a football game (where you might be afraid of being beaten up, I suppose) but there's plainly no issue in principle about people's concern to have the anonymous public think well of them in the terms that the anonymous public has available to use for them, on them, about them. So, without regard to whether you think it's a good thing, a bad thing, or nothing, if indeed you have an answer to "How is he?" you can find yourself offering it. In any event, my main point is that the reported type of beginning such as "How is he?" with its structural character of requiring some other, in particular a stranger, to know what in the hell you're talking about, and with its feature of not making them have to figure out what kind of interaction they're getting into - as with the "Hello" beginning - is not an incidental sort of way to begin such conversations, and that how these conversations begin is part of the solution to the problem of how it is that comeraderie develops in the cities during disasters. So the lesson is, if we want an answer to the question 'How does comeraderie develop in the cities during times of disaster?' then the organization of conversation is relevant to an answer. To return to our initial focus, the fixed placing and adacency pair status of greetings at the beginnings of conversation. Plainly enough a problem about them that what we've so far said does not deal with is, how is who goes first determined? It turns out that that sort of a problem has a bunch of diagnostic interests, turning on that lots of cultures find that sort of problem a thing to play around with. And where you have a situation where there is some thing that involves an order as between the parties, and involves that they go one at a time or two at a time but behind each other, etc. , you have that situation mobilized for other sorts of structural uses. You will widely find, cross­ culturally, solutions that do not just somehow or another solve the one-at-a­ time, who-goes-first problem, but solutions which allow other sorts of organizations to operate. I refer to things like, in jungle tribes a characteristic sort of problem is that a trail narrows so that only one person can walk at a time after, say, having been able to walk in a group of five, and now they have to arrange themselves to manage it. Also, trails involving one person at a time where two people are approaching from opposite directions. Those sorts of problems, like the problem of getting into a greeting sequence, are mobilized for other uses.

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They are characteristically solved by a rule that says 'high ranking person goes first' or '-last. ' It doesn't matter which, since there's a theory for each way, such that going first shows high status or going last shows high status. And that's a thing that's done for conversation beginnings, i.e., to some extent this formal problem is mobilized for such considerations as, e.g. , in the pre-Civil War South a slave should always greet a white person, or a slave should never do an initial greeting but only a return greeting, etc. Children should always give a first greeting to adults. Now the telephone poses some sorts of problems, since answerer goes first and then caller. But caller can be talking not to called but to somebody other than called, so you end up with situation of caller talking before called, and then such things as caller waiting for called, i.e. , "Hello," " Is this X?, " "No, hold on a minute. ' ' And for some parties, waiting for another party is a status problem. There's a set of people who have developed procedures for managing that so, e.g. , when I get a call from the Vice-Chancellor I never get a call from the Vice-Chancellor, I get a call from the Vice-Chancellor's secretary, and the Vice-Chancellor doesn't come on the line until I'm on the line. So if my wife answers the phone she's got to bring me to the phone before the Vice-Chancellor's secretary will put him on the line. And it's now being reported that really elaborately delicate battles go on in the upper levels of organizations, in businesses and bureaucracies, when both parties to a conversation are parties who do not get on the line until the other party is on the line. But I assume that the same sort of thing takes place upon entering the magical hut in a tribe, crossing trails, etc. Indeed, pick up any ethnography and you'll find that who goes first gets routinely assimilated to status hierarchies. So the fact of a fixed problem of this sort is of interest for the ways in which people go about devising solutions which allow it to be used for some other set of purposes. The point is that somehow it's been found out. It's not just a fact in the world that researchers discover and it happens that conversation has this character or that trails have this character, etc., but it's been diagnosed and a solution has been achieved which allows it to be used for various other purposes. It's of interest of course that in some cultures, e.g . , the Burundi, the whole organization of conversation can be put at the mercy of other interests. And, for example, in the pre-Civil War South, there was a rather total organization of white-slave conversation in which what the slave did and what the white did was fixed for utterance after utterance after utterance to some very considerable extent. Here is a fragment: Negroes, for example, usually agreed with any statement made by a white person, so that in many instances they were accused of evasion if not deceit. "Tom, " said his master pointing to Y, "This is my brother. ' ' "Ah master and very like you . " "You did not know that I had a brother, did you Tom?" "No master, him very good brother. ' ' "And Tom, " pointing to us, "These are my cousins. " "All your family, master. " "Yes Tom. " "All very like you master, what a family you have

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master. " I need hardly remark that four persons more unlike could hardly have been brought together. So, for example, saying "Master" at the completion of every utterance was a required thing. Agreeing with any utterance that could be made was a required thing such that that set up games of trying to get a slave to be found to disagree - where disagreeing essentially could be treated as a capital offense, i.e. , because it could be seen to be accusing the other of being incorrect, lying, etc. So the conversation system was massively put at the service of the slave system. There were some negative consequences for the masters, in that they could never find out what they wanted to know. One other aspect of the kind of fixed status of greetings is that it's available for use as a specific pair of items within a conversation that can be occupied emotionally. Imagine there's a place that you can put something into, and you have this item to put into it, where it's also an item that you can fully use for some other job. And while you can put emotions into lots of places in conversation, you can specifically do an emotional beginning for the range of emotions. You can say " Hello" such that somebody will say, e.g. , "What's the matter?" That is, you can show with "Hello" that you are high or low, where " Hello" is a specific place to do that. As compared to the fact that you can, I suppose, ask a question glumly, " Hello" is a place for somebody to listen to see that you're doing some mood with it.

Lecture 5

Foreshortened} normal} and expanded beginning sequences; joking relationships; First topics}· Close offerings We've been talking about 'greetings' and arguing that they are the beginnings of beginning sections, not the whole beginning section. Before going on to consider some aspects of the further organization of beginning sections I want to amend some of the remarks I made last time. For one, I said that the first place where 'called' has an opportunity to move for first topic control is in the third utterance, and therefore 'caller' has a prior opportunity because caller can do it in the second utterance, e.g. , to "Hello" they can say "Jeanette" which can get "Yeah" and provide for movement into first topic control by caller. There are perhaps ways in which called can make a topical control move before that. It turns on bringing together that issue with something else I said last time, that "Hello" is 'emotionally occupiable, ' i.e. , one can present an emotion in it and parties are prepared to listen to " Hello" for its joy or its misery, etc. Now considering that sort of possibility it's easy enough to see that called can do their first "Hello" in such a way as to have it elicit "What's the matter?' ' or such a thing, which would then put called into a position to, e.g. , offer their troubles. Or they can do a big happy " Hi!" which could elicit "My, you're sounding chipper this morning, what's up?" In fact, that discussion can be made rather more general than just for "Hello"s, and here I'm referring to work that Schegloff has done on greeting sequences in, I think it's the October American Anthropologist. Borrowing on his work I just want to note that it's routinely technically done that first utterances of calls are topically controlling of a conversation, presumptively. That is, the presumptive topic-type that the first utterance sets up can work itself out via the control provided by the first utterance called makes. It can also be altered by other techniques. We might think, then, of uses of first utterances which we can say give a candidate typing or a candidate signature to the conversation. Such things as "Morgan, Paint Department, ' ' "Police Desk, Haynes speaking, " etc. , which say ' T m going to listen for your business relevant to the identification I make of myself ' such that it's your business now to state your business. And if a call is going to be otherwise, then that will have to be achieved. And Schegloff has found that it can be rather 2 00

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an elaborate task to transform a called-defined business call. He has material which goes something like: A: B: A: B: A: B: A: B:

Police Desk, Who's this. Sergeant Brown. Do you know Sergeant Smith? Yes, Well I'm a friend of his, I think we met once. I'm Bill Jones. Yeah, I think so, Well look, can you give me some information about . . .

where the caller takes it that he couldn't get the information that he wants if he just started out with " Could you tell me . . . " And they happen to be correct routinely, i.e. , when people call to a police desk and just say "Hello I'm calling to find out about . . . " then they don't get it. And they know that the way to get it is to transform it into some sort of private interaction. So the sheer use of "Hello, " or some identification can initially, candidat­ edly, signature the type of conversation that's taking place, such that given "Police Desk" a person begins by stating their police-relevant business. If they don't, they try to get the identity transformed so that it's now 'one friend to another, ' or that they have special rights, or they're not calling the police desk but somebody who happens to be there who is obliged to answer that way - either the one who has answered the phone or someone who now has to be found by the one who answered. Those calls have very thin beginnings. There are interactions that have much more elaborate beginnings. A: B: A: B:

Hello, Vera? Ye:s. Well you know, I had a little difficulty getting you.

B: A: B:

First I got the wrong number, and then I got Operator, Well. And uhm

B: A: A: B: A: B: B: A: B:

I wonder why. Well, I wonder too. It uh just rung now about uh three ti/jmes. Yeah, well Operator got it for me. She did. Uh huh, So jj uh Well. When I- after I got her twice, why she --

( 1 .0)

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A: B: B: A:

-(telephoned)-tried it for me Isn't that funny? Well it certainly �Must be some little cross of lines someplace hh Guess so. Uh huh, Uh, Am I taking you away from yer dinner? No: : . No, I haven't even started tuh get i t yet. Oh, you (h)avelln't. hhheh heh Well I- I never am certain, I didn't know whether I'd be too early or too late II or riNo: : . No, well I guess uh with us uhm there isn't any - Yeah. -p'gcular time. Uh huh, Well I- I wannid to say I enjoyed your class so this morning, and too, Wei Ill, thank you. Uhm Will one of - - where- are those records going to be uh available. I don't - -

A:

I don't know yet . . .

A: B: B: A: B: A: B: B: ---+ B : A: A: B: A: B: A: A: B: A: B: ---+ B :

( 1 . 0)

If we're able to say what sorts of things are still part of the beginning section of, e.g. , a telephone conversation, then, if we take it that "Are you busy?" is a candidate part of the beginning of a telephone conversation - and there's lots of information usable to argue that - we can note that in a call like this one, a version of "Are you busy?" i.e. , "Am I taking you away from your dinner?' ' comes some 2 5 lines into the transcript, and another 'beginning item' occurs some 1 3 lines after that, "Well I- I wanted to say I enjoyed your class. ' ' Among the things I alluded to earlier was the relative placing of these sorts of 'beginning items' ("Well you know, I had a little difficulty getting you," "Am I taking you away from your dinner?, " "I wanted to say I enjoyed your class"). I want now to go through some of the types of ways that beginning sections run off, and I'll initially consider three sorts of things: Foreshortening techniques - ways of shortening a normal beginning sequence, the use of a normal beginning sequence (and I'll say what I mean by that), and lengthening techniques. And we're talking about them as techniques relative

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to some first-topic or non-first-topic topic (and I've talked about what I mean by 'first topic'). I already discussed a foreshortening technique in the first lecture when I went through the "Hello," "Jeanette, " "Yeah" series, where use of called's name by caller set up that caller would like to move directly, with a minimal beginning sequence, into first topic, and that she would begin first topic, and where called can accept that being done by, e.g. , saying "Yeah! " or reject it by saying "Yeah?" which will involve an extension of the beginning sequence, at least such that the caller will now offer their name and called will recognize that person and perhaps do, e.g . , "Oh hi! How are you?" requiring, then, further extension, after which they can move to the 'body' of the conversation. I also discussed foreshortening involved in the called's strategy of, after, e.g. , "Hello" "Hello, " doing "Where've you been!" where that involves called attempting to deal with the caller-called relationship and things like that. And now we can add the possibility of called doing one of these 'emotional hellos' which generate caller responding with an offer to called to say what's up, good or bad. And that's leaving aside the signatured business conversa­ tion. Treating as a normal sequence one which involves an exchange of hellos plus an exchange of how-are-yous, one thing is that the how-are-you sequence can specifically provide a first topic by reference to the sorts of responses that come, e.g . , "How are you?" " Fine! I got a raise, " where that announcement is turned into first topic. And that possibility turns, for one, on the fact that how-are-you exchanges don't have to be placed adjunctly, and are not infrequently rather widely separated. Where "How are you" has among its businesses that it says "Give me such information as will involve me in asking you what it is that's of some substantial news as between us. " That is, you don't have to say "Fine, I got a raise, " you can say "Wonderful! " and it's now the business of the recipient of that to say "What happened?" and you can say "I got a raise, " they can say "That's wonderful, how much?" etc. Obviously you can have news to deliver which you don't want to deliver as something attached to "How are you?" and you can just say "Okay" and not get the asker saying "Gee, how come?' ' People don't say " How come?" for any reported state, but, e.g . , perhaps just when you report something as an 'exceptional' state. This is all in that 'Everyone has to lie' paper. Now, given that in the first instance one doesn't have to use "How are you?" but can do one of those foreshortening techniques, the sheer use of "How are you?" is a way of saying "I have no immediate business that I want to offer before giving you the chance to offer something. " A way to think about the how-are-you exchange turns on considering who does "How are you?" first. You might think of some of the problems involved in that as something like being an invited guest for dinner in a restaurant. The issue there is that you will definitively order before your host, but in picking out what to order you want to find out what they think is a reasonable item, so you want to find out, e.g . , what they're going to have. You get, then, this elaborate negotiational thing when people take other people to dinner, in

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which they all discuss "What are you going to have?" which has nothing to do with the sequence in which people will make their orders. That is to say, the waiter can partially decide who's going to order first; in some restaurants women go first, children next, and male adults third. But women may well be in a position of not wanting to announce what they're going to order until they find out what the host figures is a reasonable thing, and if the host doesn't do that, e.g . , if they don't give a hint like "The steak is great here," then there are a series of procedures available with respect to a menu, e.g. , you can pick some medium item on the list and say "I wonder how X is, ' ' hoping to get some suggestion as to whether that's too much or too little from the host. From the discussions about "How are you?" in the ' . . . lie' paper which I mentioned briefly in an earlier lecture, we can see that there are problems involved in being the first to answer a "How are you? " That is, assuming you have no business, it may be better to try to be the first to ask "How are you?" - assuming also that you don't know something that you want to tell the other which would affect their answer if they knew it. Clearly it would be the business of somebody with awful or great news to not put the other in a position of having to answer first, and one way to do that is to indicate 'I want to talk first, ' which can be done by caller with " Hello" "Jeanette" or by called with, e.g. , a woebegone "Hello: : " "What's the matter. " And then, e.g., they need not be in the position of saying something that would mutually embarrass you in that their fortunes are up while yours are down or vice versa. Later on you can say "Things always get better, look at me. Yesterday nothing, and today I'm on the top of the world. " And that would be a way to ease their troubles. But otherwise it's better to give them the obligation to answer first so you can then produce your answer to fit theirs. Like, are you going to be intimate this time or distant this time? You may have sometimes had intimate conversations, but this time you know something's been going on with them and you also know that they might just say, to your "How are you?" "Okay, " where, then, you don't want to start off telling them about what's intimately going on with you. And of course there's a use of "How are you?" on the stray chance that some topic will be found by reference to it. I show that I have nothing much to say and might try to latch on to anything you'll give me and make talk out of it. So the negotiations about who does "How are you?" are to be watched with care, and also the series of alternatives to its use which we perfectly well might think of as obliged. That is, we want to think of a package of alternatives; not just that there's a possibility of you doing "How are you?" first or they doing it first, but there's a possibility of no one doing " How are you?" And these kinds of considerations might give you an idea that you can look at these incredibly nothing-happening beginnings of conversation and see really interesting mechanisms going on. Now there are a collection of lengthening techniques, i.e. , ways to extend the conversation past an unsuccessful " How are you?" , i.e. , one that goes " How are you?" "Okay how are you?" "Okay. " At that point we're still

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nowhere, and neither wants to take this chance to produce a first topic - and I've talked about reasons for not wanting to do a first topic, e.g. , you have some news but it's not first-topic status news, and you don't want them to think that's what you think is first-topic news. There is a topic that can go after, say, an unsuccessful how-are-you sequence, that is a non-first-topic first topic, and that has very similar features to "How are you?" in that it may produce another topic - and that's in the first place the interest in producing this one - and also it can be used for any conversation in which "How are you? " can be used. It has separate features in that it is 'transitional' in the specific sense that at pretty much any point into it, it can be dropped in favor of something that happens to come up, whereas topics don't ordinarily have that kind of character. The topic is the weather. I'm proposing that the weather is a 'false first topic, ' and specifically a 'transitional' first topic. And it is used in just the way "How are you?" is used, e.g . , if you say "What a miserable day," that can do the same thing as answering "Lousy" to "How are you?" And people can pick up on that, e.g. , "Yeah isn't it. Makes you feel really crappy. " Yeah it does. I do. " "Oh, what's the matter?" Or, "Isn't it glorious out! Just the day to go shopping. " "Yeah, let's do that. " I'm not going to go on with further points about weather talk; I only want to notice about the use of weather that its placing after a how-are-you sequence is only after certain sorts of how-are-you sequences, and that its ends can be very similar to the ends for how-are-you sequences, and that with the weather we find something that we can really call a 'transitional topic, ' a topic that is uninformative about what's on your mind and has 'exchange' features, in that even people in fairly local juxtaposition can exchange weather reports. Let me tum to a topic of interest about the beginnings of begining sequences, and that is that insofar as it seems plain that some signaturing or typing of either a relationship or an interaction or both can be done there - and not only such things as "Police Desk" or "Morgan, Paint Division, " but also things like "Hello" "Jeanette" do some typing of the relationship and perhaps the conversation they're going to have - one can ask what sorts of relationships can be - perhaps should be - signatured right at the beginning of a conversation; what sorts of relationships are interactionally relevant in some way, over the course of the interaction. And that leads you to look for things that are called 'types of relationships' to see whether they can be made operative from the beginning of a conversation. Here is a fragment which is of interest in that way. Jay enters a lunchroom where Sy and George are eating: -+jay : George : Sy : Jay : -+jay :

Alright s:Sy why d'nche [stop( , �right.) Where'v yuh been Jay, I haven' [seen y'fuh three, weeks. -y'know, making, -making love tuh that chair over-over there,

Part III

206 -+-George : Sy : Jay : jay : Sy : Jay :

There 'e is, with iz psychedelic tie. (pause) Yeh(hh)hehh hh ((clears throat)) Yuh: : : , - - my good I- ((attempted Irish accent)) MY GOOD IRriSH TAH YIHKNEOW, (pause) So: : . (pause) All yih need now's a tietack tuh hold ih down when yuh, have a date . (pause) Mm hm,

Jay's remark to Sy and George's remark to Jay constitute that they are doing, that they have and are now engaged in, from the beginning, a 'joking relationship. ' That's not one of my made up terms, there's an enormous anthropological literature on 'joking relationships. ' Considering the productional aspects of it makes the thing kind of interesting. Jay is arriving on the scene, and bringing off, on his part, that the joking relationship can be used to start off, involves him in inspecting the scene to find the sorts of materials he can employ to bring off a crack - as George is in return doing the same sort of thing, inspecting Jay for what kind of crack he can make. The gross point is that joking relationships may be such a thing as not only involve an exchange of cracks between parties here and there in the conversation, but involve people in bringing an orientation to it to an interaction, such that they're starting off with that as a specific way of getting into the conversation. We can then look for whatever types we figure might exist and might be interactionally relevant, and see whether there are some ways that those things are brought to bear at the beginning of an interaction. It ought to be noted about the above conversation that it takes place in the cafeteria of a place of business, and that may be relevant to the doing of a joking relationship. That is, if any of the parties were to approach each other in the office, at their desks, with some business, they might not do this sort of interchange. Now, there are no 'kin' relationship issues here, or anything like that, and I'm not prepared to develop what about these people provides for them finding themselves in a joking relationship, but I want to note that there are some sorts of possible characterizations of a social-structural sort that might be involved in that these people have a joking relationship, other than that they happen to joke with each other. I've made some suggestions about why someone might want to do a ' first topic' and said that there are ways to classify some item as a 'real' first topic, and I've mentioned such issues as the saying of some item before someone gets a chance to say something else which might be troublesome for that item, and things like that. I want to introduce another sort of consideration that is involved. Here's the data:

Lecture 5 Margy : Agnes : Margy : Agnes : Margy : Agnes : Margy : Agnes : Margy : Agnes : Margy : Agnes : Margy :

207

Hello: : , Hello Margy? Ye: l s, 'hhh We do pai: :nting, a:ntiquing, I(hh)s that ti;_ght. Eh!hh [ hhh: : : : : hnh hnh hnh nhh hnh hnh! 'hh 'hh -keep people's pa'r too: :ls, Y(hhh)! hnh hnh I'm sorry about that that [I din' see t�·tat;. Oh: : : he d1dn t need 1t,

What's involved is something like this: Agnes' (the caller's) husband borrowed a power tool from Margy's (the called's) husband, said he would bring it back in a couple of days, and Margy's husband said not to worry about it he wouldn't need it. And then he turned out to need it, called up to get it back, and it was brought back. But having to make a request for a return is altogether different than having the thing returned without a request. There is in general a difference between requests and offers, a preference for offers over requests, and people will go out of their way to get the other to make an offer. And Agnes is plainly embarrassed that a request had to be made, and wants to do an apology. The question is, how is she going to bring that apology off? If she can do it in such a way as to have the other committed to the lightness of the issue before the other knows what the issue is, then she has a way of bringing off the apology with a minimum of embarrassment for both. If Agnes can get Margy into this topic in a giggly mood before Margy knows that they're into this topic, then, e.g. , Margy won't prevent Agnes from making the apology, and will be in a position of being committed to accept the apology without making anything of it. And that's what she does here. She gets Margy to be 'laughing along' before she knows that the list will be extended to include reference to the power tool that Agnes will be apologizing about. Making it a first topic is not so much a matter of, say, getting it over with then and there, but if it's a first topic then Agnes can control how it comes up; she's able to design its presentation, whereas in the ordinary course of conversation she may have to deal with it, without having control over how it came up. It's not that she might not get a chance somewhere in the conversation to bring it up just the way she wanted to, but that perhaps before that point, a spot that stands as a 'natural' place for it to occur will have occurred, and she won't get a chance to do it the way she wanted it. E.g. , the conversation might be going along and Margy might mention people borrowing things and never returning them, which gets said lots of times, especially when such an issue is on someone's mind, and Agnes might be

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saying "By the way I'm really sorry about that." (And if we find it hard to empathize with the particulars of this conversation, we might imagine other sorts of things that one can be embarrassed about, need to apologize about, and that you would like the other to be in a good mood about before they knew what you were doing, e.g. , " . . . and dent other people's fenders, " " . . . and bring undercover agents to other people's parties, " etc.) So that's another kind of basis for doing something as a first topic, i.e. , the one who introduces it can control how it gets developed, whereas for topics routinely, they are not 'introduced' but, e.g., affiliated to last topics. Here's another issue. A way to see that you're doing 'content' kinds of considerations, a conventional sort of semantics, would be to focus on a thing like "Well I wanted to say I enjoyed your class so much," "I wanted to thank you for inviting me to the party, it was lovely, " etc. , and give a discussion involving that what that does is a piece of etiquette; specifically, that what that does is to say something about the other event, etc. , rather than that what such a remark does, and how come it's routinely placed at the beginning of a conversation, is that it says 'whereas in our last interaction you were the party who did the thankable thing, in this one I am. ' And indeed it's responded to with "Well thank you. " So when people put in thank-yous at the beginning of a conversation for events in a last interaction, they're bringing to the other's attention specifically that last interaction and its relation to this, with this interaction specifically as something they are doing. What you want to be asking, then, is what are they doing in this interaction, rather than what are they doing relevant to some other interaction. It's a parallel problem to that when somebody says the sky is blue, saying they're making a remark about the sky, rather than that they're doing something in this particular conver­ sation. And these kinds of arguments partially would be used in making a case for things like "Well I wanted to say I enjoyed your class this morning" as part of the 'beginning section. ' That is, insofar as they, e.g . , involve part of the procedure whereby who we are relative to each other is established, which then sets up the talk that we can do. We are then in a position to see that this is 'yet the beginning' although it's the 2 5th utterance. And then of course we can get at the relative placings of these beginning-section items, where some of them are movable down into the conversation and some are not, such that if they're not done right there then they can't be done later. "Hello" is not movable. And "I had difficulty getting you on the phone" goes at the start and nowhere else. I haven't encountered a call where that gets put in later into the call. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't, but that has to do with the fact that I don't know what it's doing. But whereas I used to figure that for "Are you busy?" and "How are you?, " since both have to go immediately after the greetings you could only do one of them, it turns out that each of those items can be placed later on into the conversation; indeed, later on into the conversation but still in its beginning. We want to see which, of a series of items, are movable. And the issue of their relative placement is a real research issue, e.g . , we see that greetings have high priority such that a person

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will interrupt himself to do greetings, but it may be that that doesn't extend to how-are-yous. Now there's a bunch of things of which "Are you busy?" is the most characteristic, which are beginning items, which announce that their user has something to talk about. Routinely the caller does them, though occasionally I've seen them done by the called in circumstances where caller calls with specifically a one-topic conversation and called may then say "Are you busy?" indicating that they have something to talk about as well. It need not be done right at the beginning of the conversation, where you might well figure that if you're going to use ' 'Are you busy?' ' you'd better use it right up front. And it's not even guaranteeably part of the beginning sequence but can occur well into a conversation, since it can say "There's something more I want to say. " Indeed, it also has a status as a close offering in the sense that if it's answered in the affirmative, then perhaps getting into a closing is obliged. And as a 'close offering' and a 'beginning' it serves to collect the following sort of materials: "Are you cooking your dinner dear?" "I had just gone into the kitchen to start it. ' ' Then the conversation can go on, and the one who asked it in the first instance can then close by saying "Well I'll let you get back to your cooking . " So they can save the answer that allows them to continue, for use in closing later on. And there's a neat difference between "Are you busy?" and "Am I taking you away from your dinner?" apart from transparent sorts of things that the latter can involve, e.g. , that I'm attending your schedule, etc. It has to do with that if you say "Are you busy?" and the other says "No" then the formal use of the item as a preface to something or as a close offerer is all that it can bear. If, however, you say "Am I taking you away from your dinner?" and they say "No, " you can treat the item as topically generative. You can, e.g. , go on to talk about your dinner. So, we get a thing like the following, after an exchange of greetings: B: A: B: A: B:

(This is Rhoda Blair.) Well, howareyuh. Fine, how are you. Well just fine. Were you eating?

A: B: B: A: B:

Some grapes, ehh [hheh heh! heh! I was just lookin' at mine, ehh heh heh heh heh It's so hot.

( 1 . 0)

And here's another, at two and a half minutes into the call: B: A:

Are you cooking your dinner dear? I had just gone into the kitchen to start it.

2 10 B: A: B: B: A: B: A:

Part III

Uh huh. Well, I was hungry when I got home, an' I just finished I mean my main - [[Yeah. Uh - ­ -entree. Mm hm, And I'll have a little ice cream la[ter. Yeh.

Now my feeling is that these sorts of things are used not merely when you are signalling that you have something more to say, but to indicate that the thing you have to say is something you planned to say, as compared to things that happen to come up in the conversation. It may be that in such a way you mark that an item is something you had as, say, a reason for calling, if not the 'reason for the call. ' This distinction between something that somebody had in mind before they began a conversation and something that came up in the course of it is a muddy one in lots of places. But forgetting about the perfectly obvious instances where somebody says, right after "Hello," "Look, I called to tell you something, " a way to see that there is a difference and that the difference is attended turns on such materials as the offering of invitations in conversation. Apparently people have ways of detecting that an invitation that somebody offers, they decided to offer in the course of the conversation. And a way that they can indicate that they see that is, not that they turn it down, but, e.g. , as in the following fragment, they make a counter offer. This call was only partially recorded, so we don't know how far into the conversation they are: B: A: B: -A : -B : A: B: A: B: A:

. . . Monday? Ye[ah Yeah he usually comes home but that doesn't matter, Well you wanna come out and have lunch with me? No, let me take you to lunch, some [time. OOOHHH! No. No Come on. Come out uh uhh say you get out here 'bout uh twelve thirty. Twelve thirty. Don't fix very much though, I just 1- uh I eat very light anymore, I'm tryina get slim. Yea:h? [[ hehh heh hh hh hh You get slim, my heavens. You don't need to get any slimmah,

And another option, which we also see here, if the first one says "No, you come here" one can say "Alright but don't fix much. " Whereas for invitations that are heard to be planned before this conversation, you absolutely wouldn't do that. If someone invites you for Christmas Eve dinner you don't say "Don't fix much. " So they're plainly attending to 'interaction-

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ally generated invitations' and 'invitations that generate an interaction' as markedly different things which get different responses. Where, then, even though the matter could be awfully muddy about some items, we can say that a difference is attended, though it may not be attended everywhere.

Part IV Spring 1970

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks © 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6

Lecture

1 Doing 'being ordinary' Usually I start the course by doing what I do in the course, without any programmatic statements, without any indication of why it should be of any interest to anybody. But - and this may be unfair - the course will tum out to be much more severely technical than most people could possibly be interested in, and some good percentage will drop out, and usually that has the consequence that they get nothing out of the class if they last one time. So I decided to spend the first time telling people something that I take it could hardly not be of interest to them. Then, when they drop out, they'd at least have gotten what I figure would be worth the price of the course. And I guess I should say if this isn't absorbing, you could hardly imagine how unabsorb­ ing the rest will be. Now, this is in many ways nothing like the way I'll proceed throughout the rest of the course. In the course I will be taking stories offered in conversation and subjecting them to a type of analysis which is concerned roughly to see whether it's possible to subject the details of actual events to formal investigation, informatively. The loosest message is that the world you live in is much more finely organized than you'd imagine. As well as that loose message, there are some really specific things about how stories work and why they work the way they do. I'll do that from next time on. But in this lecture I won't be studying the organization of telling stories in conversation, and I won't be attempting to prove anything. I'll be saying some things about why the study of storytelling should be of interest to anybody. But people don't have to stay around after that to have caught that message, and to have been armed with some materials that would permit them to wander around noticing things that they might not have noticed, and find them ghastly. I've been studying the organization of stories, how they work, for some time. And one sort of issue is, what do people make stories out of? In particular, given what they might make stories out of, what do they make stories out of? It wasn't of particular interest to me why anybody else should be interested in such an issue, but the question arose and now will constitute the business of this lecture: What sort of large-scale interest does what people make stories of or what they don't make stories of, have? A good deal of what I'll say has its obscure intellectual source (I say 'obscure' because if anyone were to read the book it's not likely that they'd find that it says what I say, but with some consideration they might see how it is that I owe what I'm saying to this source) in a novel called Between Life and Death by a French novelist, Nathalie Sarraute. The book is absolutely not assigned; I'm just citing a debt. Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks © 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6

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A kind of remarkable thing is how, in ordinary conversation, in reporting some event, people report what we might see to be not what happened, but the ordinariness of what happened. For whole ranges of things that you might figure to be kind of exciting, something like this will be offered (the following sorts of things are not made up but are actual) : Somebody talking about a man they met the night before might say "He's very nice. He's very very nice. " Or if they saw a movie they might say "It was really good . " If they went away for a weekend, they say something like "We went to Palm Springs. Bud played golf with the guys and I sat around the pool with the girls. ' ' The reports do not so much give attributes of the scene, activity, participants but announce the event's ordinariness, its usualness. We might figure that lots of these things could be stories, but they're not made into stories. And if you think of literature or poetry you can perfectly well know that out of any such event as is passed off as "It was a nice evening. We sat around and talked, " really elaborated characterizations are often presented. So I've been wondering about the non-production of stories. Now I come to the central sorts of assertions I want to make. Whatever we may think about what it is to be an ordinary person in the world, an initial shift is not to think of an 'ordinary person' as some person, but as somebody having as their job, as their constant preoccupation, doing 'being ordinary. ' It's not that somebody is ordinary, it's perhaps that that's what their business is. And it takes work, as any other business does. And if you just extend the analogy of what you obviously think of as work - as whatever it is that takes analytic, intellectual, emotional energy - then you can come to see that all sorts of nominalized things - personal characteristics and the like - are jobs which are done, which took some kind of effort, training, etc. So I'm not going to be talking about an 'ordinary person' as this or that person, or as some average, i.e. , a non-exceptional person on some statistical basis, but as something that is the way somebody constitutes themselves, and, in effect, a job that they do on themselves. They and the people around them may be coordinatively engaged in assuring that each of them are ordinary persons, and that can then be a job that they undertake together, to achieve that each of them, together, are ordinary persons. The core question is, how do people go about doing 'being an ordinary person'? In the first instance there's an easy answer: Among the ways you go about doing 'being an ordinary person' is spending your time in usual ways, having usual thoughts, having usual interests, etc.; so that all you have to do, to be 'an ordinary person' in the evening, is turn on the TV set. It's not that it happens that you're doing what lots of ordinary people are doing, but that you know that the way to do 'having a usual evening' is to do that. It's not just that you're selecting, "Gee I'll watch TV tonight, " but you're making a job of, and finding an answer to, how to do 'being ordinary tonight. ' Some people, as a matter of kicks, could say "Let's do being ordinary tonight. We'll go watch TV, eat popcorn, ' ' etc. - something they know is being done at the same time by millions of others around.

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We can see, then, that it's a job. You have to know what anybody/ everybody is doing; doing ordinarily. And you have to have that available to do. There are people who don't have that available to do, and who specifically can't be ordinary. If, for example, you're in prison, in a room with no facilities at all - say, it has a bench and a hole in the floor and a spigot - then you find yourself doing things like systematically exploring the cracks in the wall from floor to ceiling over the years, and you come to have information about the wall in that room which ordinary people don't have about their bedroom wall. It's not a usual thing to do, to say "Well this evening I'm going to examine that corner of the ceiling. " Of course it may be that prison walls are more interesting than other walls, since among the other things prisoners are occupied with is leaving information on the wall that they've been there, so there's things to read on the walls. But it's perfectly available to anybody to spend an afternoon looking at a wall. You could choose to do that. If you take drugs you're permitted to do that. But unless you take drugs you would not find yourself allowed to do it, though nobody's around. That is to say, in being an 'ordinary person, ' that's not a thing you could allow yourself to spend the day doing. And there is an infinite collection of possibilities, of things that you couldn't bring yourself to do; not out of boredom, though that's one way you could formulate it, but in the midst of the most utterly boring afternoon you nonetheless would rather live through the boredom in the usual way - whatever that way is - than see whether it would be less or more boring to examine the wall or to look in some detail at the tree outside the window. There's a place in Freud where he says, "with regard to matters of chemistry or physics or things like that, laymen would not venture an opinion. With regard to psychology it's quite different; anybody feels free to make psychological remarks. ' ' And part of the business he thought he was engaged in was changing that around, i.e. , to both develop psychology and educate laymen, co-jointly. So that the laymen would know that they don't know anything about it and that there are people who do, so that they would eventually stop making psychological remarks as they stopped making chemical and physical remarks. I raise this because while we all can see that that's quite so, there's a related and in a way much more interesting thing that I doubt we've noticed. If one were to pick up the notebooks of writers, poets, novelists, you're likely to find elaborated studies of small real objects. Like in the notebooks of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins there are extended naturalistic observations of a very detailed sort, of, e.g . , cloud formations or what a leaf looks like, looking up at it under varying types of light. And for some novelists what you have is extended character observations. Now, my notion is that as it is for chemistry and physics, so it is for making distinctive observations about the world and its persons. That is to say, that's the job of novelists and poets and not an ordinary person. It's just a thing that, in being ordinary, you don't do. For example, considering the situation of the Palm Springs weekend described as "I sat around the pool with the girls, " you don't get, from somebody doing

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'being ordinary, ' a report of what the wind did to the water in the pool, or some character observations other than "She was nice, " "She was not so nice, " "She's getting older, ' ' of the people with whom the afternoon was spent. And I think it's not only that one doesn't make the story but does perhaps make the observations, it's that the cast of mind of doing 'being ordinary' is essentially this: Your business in life is only to see and report the usual aspects of any possibly usual scene. That is to say, what you look for is to see how any scene you're in can be made an ordinary scene, a usual scene, and that's what it is. Now plainly that could be a job; it could be work. The scene doesn't in the first instance simply present itself, define itself, as insufferably usual, nothing to be said about it; it's a matter of how you're going to attack it, what you are going to see in it, what you are going to see in it that you can say about it. Plainly, people are monitoring scenes for this storyable possibility. I'll give a gruesome instance of it, from a book called An Ordinary Camp by Micheline Maurel. She reports the first day in a concentration camp. The first hours are terribly horrifying, and then there's a lapse. Little by little conversation sprang up from bunk to bunk. The rumors were already beginning to circulate. Luckily the news is good. We'll be home soon. We'll have an unusual experience to talk about. A way in which this event was dealt with while it was taking place - and which, for an experience which might leave one utterly without hope, we can see as wonderfully relevant for being able to survive it - was that in the end it will tum out to have been a good story. And we've all experienced being in scenes the virtue of which was that as we were in them we could see what it was we could later tell people had transpired. And there are presumably lots of things which, at least at some points in people's lives, are done just for that, i.e. , it seems fair to suppose that there's a time when kids do 'kissing and telling, ' that they're doing the kissing in order to have something to tell, and not that they happen to do kissing and happen to do telling, or that they want to do kissing and happen to do telling, etc., but that a way to get them to like the kissing is via the fact that they like the telling. It seems plain enough that people monitor the scenes they're in for their storyable characteristics. And yet the awesome, overwhelming fact is that they come away with no storyable characteristics, where presumably any of us with any wit could make of this half hour, or of the next, a rather large array of things to say. But that would take a kind of effort that could make one feel awfully uncomfortable. So, there's a business of being an 'ordinary person, ' and that business includes attending the world, yourself, others, objects, so as to see how it is that it's a usual scene. And when offering what transpired, you present it in its usual 'nothing much' fashion, with whatever variants of banal character­ izations you might happen to use, i.e. , there's no particular difference between

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2 19

saying "It was nothing much" and "It was outta sight. " That is to say, we've all heard the usual characterizations of 'our Protestant society' or 'our Puritan background, ' which involve that ordinary people/ Americans/Europeans are built in such a way that they are constrained from doing lots of experiences that they might do, were they not repressed. And we think of the kinds of repressions that people have that are sociologically based, i.e. , the Puritan ethic involves spending most of your time working, holding off pleasure, etc. , which we think of as definitively what it means to be a usual person in Western civilization. Though that's manifestly important, it misses an essential part of the thing, which is: Were you to have illegitimate experiences, the characteristic of being an 'ordinary person' is that, having the illegitimate experiences that you shouldn't have, they come off in just the usual way that they come off for anybody doing such an illegitimate experience. When you have an affair, take drugs, commit a crime, etc. , you find that it's been the usual experience that others who've done it have had. Reports of the most seemingly outrageous experiences, for which you'd figure you'd be at a loss for words, or would have available extraordinary details of what happened, turn out to present them in a fashion that has them come off as utterly unexceptional. So we could perfectly well remove the Puritan constraints - as people report they're being removed - and our utter usualness, the ordinary cast of mind, would nonetheless be there to preserve the way we go about doing 'being ordinary. ' My guess is that we could now take that point with us, and, watching ourselves live in the world - or watching somebody else if that's more pleasant - we could see them working at finding how to make things ordinary. And presumably it would be from such a sort of perceived awareness of, e.g. , the ease with which - after practice - you see only the most usual characteristics of the people passing (that's a married couple and that's a black guy and that's an old lady) or what a sunset looks like or what an afternoon with your girlfriend or boyfriend consists of, that you can begin to appreciate that there's some immensely powerful kind of mechanism operating in handling your perceptions and thoughts, other than the known and immensely powerful things like the chemistry of vision, etc. Those sorts of thing would not explain how it is that, e.g. , you can come home day after day and, asked what happened, report without concealing, that nothing happened. And were you concealing something, if it were reported it would turn out to be nothing much. And, as it happens with you, so it happens with those you know. And further, that ventures outside of being ordinary have unknown virtues and unknown costs, i.e. , if you come home and report what the grass looked like along the freeway, that there were four noticeable shades of green some of which just appeared yesterday because of the rain, then there may well be some tightening up on the part of your recipient. And if you were to do it routinely, then people might figure that there's something odd about you; that you're pretentious. You might find them jealous of you; you might lose friends. That is to say, you want to ask what are the costs, and if people have checked out the costs of venturing even slightly into making their life an epic.

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Now it's also the case that there are people who are entitled to have their lives be an epic. We have assigned a series of storyable people, places, and objects, and they stand as something different from us. It may be that in pretty much every circle there's a somebody who's the source andj or the subject of all neat observations, as there are for the society in general a collection of people about whom detailed reports are made; reports that would never, not merely be ventured about others, they'd never be thought of about others. The way in which Elizabeth Taylor turned around is something noticeable, reportable. The way in which your mother turned around is something unseeable, much less nonreportable. The question is, why in the world should it be that it's almost everybody's business to be occupationally ordinary? Why do they take on the job - it's not that others do it for them - of keeping everything utterly mundane? I'm not going to answer that question, but I guess it has some diagnostic interest, i.e. , there are presumably a really large collection of what seem to be serious changes in the world - changes in governments, economies, religions - that would not change the business of being ordinary. Across such changes it is enforced on pretty much everybody that they stay, finding only how it is that what's going on is usual, with all their effort possible. And it's really remarkable to see people's efforts to achieve the 'nothing happened' sense of really catastrophic events. I've been collecting fragments out of newspapers, about hijackings and what the airplane passengers think when a hijacking takes place. The latest one I happened to find goes something like this: "I was walking up towards the front of the airplane and by the cabin I saw the stewardess standing, facing the cabin, and a fellow standing with a gun in her back. And my first thought was he's showing her the gun, and then I realized that couldn't be, and then it turned out he was hijacking the plane . " And another; a Polish plane is in the midst of being hijacked, and the guy reports, "I thought to myself we just had a Polish hijacking a month ago and they're already making a movie of it. " And a classically dramatic instance is that almost universally the initial report of the Kennedy assassination (the first one), was of firecrackers. Just imagine rewriting the Old Testament in its monumental events, with ordinary people having gone through it. What would they have heard and seen, e.g. , when voices called out to them, when it started to rain, etc. There's at least one place in the Old Testament where that happens. Lot was warned of the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah, and given permission to bring his daughters and sons-in-law out. ' 'And Lot went out, and spake unto his sons in law, which married his daughters, and said, Up, get you out of this place; for the Lord will destroy this city. But he seemed as one that mocked unto his sons in law . " And they stayed behind. Here I'm only giving specifically dramatic sorts of things, as compared to seeing the interesting possibilities in an event that can also be seen to be ordinary - which is really a much more fundamental kind of thing. And when we start considering stories, at least one tack we can take is to treat the overwhelming banality of the stories we encounter - in my data, in our own

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22 1

experiences - as not so much something that, e.g. , allows for statistical analysis of variation, or that makes them therefore uninteresting to study, but as a specific feature which turns on a kind of attitude; say, an attitude of working at being usual, which is perhaps central to the way our world is organized. Now there are enormous virtues to seeing the usual in a scene. It perrnits all kinds of routine ways of dealing with it. Also, if you're dealing with an utter stranger, e.g. , somebody in an approaching car when you're about to cross a street, it seems to be awfully useful to know that what he sees, looking at you, is the usual thing anyone would see, with its usual relevancies, and not God only knows what. You do not, then, have to make an each-and-every­ time decision whether or not you'll be allowed the right of way. So, then, I'm not saying let's do away with the ways in which we go about being ordinary. Rather, if being ordinary is the sort of thing I'm suggesting it is, then we want to know what importances it has.

Lecture

2 Stories take more than one utterance; Story prefaces I'll be working with this utterly bland fact: Stories routinely take more than one utterance to do. It's conceivable that one could come away from this discussion thinking that that's what I'm asserting as the interesting thing. The whole interest of what I say has to do with what's done with such a fact as that a story takes more than an utterance to do. There is also the obscure issue of how you come to find such a bland fact as can be made something of, where there are lots of bland facts, bunches of which it might be difficult to make things of. So it's not quite as bland as it may appear in the first instance. Nonetheless the interest is in what's done with it, not its assertion. The subject matter of the course is storytelling in conversation. A question that one eventually comes to raise is: Although something may be callable a 'story,' is it recognizable as a story? Is it produced as a story? Specifically as a story? And is there some relationship between its production as a story and its recognition as a story? And why should it be produced and recognized as a story? For pretty much any object it turns out there are various things we could call it. We want to know, not so much is some name correct, as how is it that that name is relevant. And we know that the names that are assigned to particular objects, or on particular cases, can matter for all sorts of treatments of them. Now if, forgetting about conversation, I asked what is referred to with the name 'story, ' what one would think of is some achieved historical thing: ' 'An instance of a story is . . . ' ' and one might name a story or give a story. And, for example, with that kind of attention what might then be partially relevant to calling the thing a story is the way it ended, and one might not at all focus on the kinds of problems that occur in conversation when someone specifically tells a story. If, e.g. , some hearer didn't hear that a story was being told he might cut it off before it came to an end, and then, had you the intention of looking at the whole thing to decide whether it was a story, and to use the end as one partial criterion, you might not have such an end so as to decide it was a story. The issue of the production of a story might involve that anybody's determining that it is a story is relevant to its coming off as a story. If assigning the name 'story' to some production is an issue, then it may be an issue not just after the thing is done, but perhaps to the teller before he starts and perhaps to the hearer somewhere early on into it. So we don't want to in the first instance suppose that we can examine historical instances of stories to see 222

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what the productionally or recognitionally relevant features o f it are. We also want to know if it is relevant for a story's occurrence that, that it might be a story is something that a teller projected. After all, a teller could tell what might tum out to be a story without any specific attention to that he was telling a story, and a hearer might perfectly well hear what's being presented without hearing that it's a 'story. ' Is the fact that it might be a story something that matters? I want to insist on that as a criterion of using the name 'story,' and if it just otherwise happens to be that you could call it a story then it's of no particular interest. We want to see: Is the fact that someone is telling a story something that matters to the teller and the hearer? How can it matter, and why does it matter, and of course when does it matter? We're assigning the candidate name 'story' to something for which that name is provably war­ ranted, provably relevant to the thing coming off as a story. If it isn't provably relevant then it's of no particular interest that it's a story or not. So we have at hand the question: Does it matter that a story is produced to be recognized and that it is recognized by its production? With that, we are in a position to examine - not stories but candidate stories, to see whether it appears that that matters. And we look for some way to find that it might matter. What sorts of facts about candidate stories can be found, in terms of which a demonstration of the relevance of that the thing is a story can be done? And what I'm offering as such a fact is that bland fact that stories take more than an utterance to produce. I want to devote some time to seeing what that fact means. Why do they take more than an utterance to produce? And why is it that if they take more than an utterance to produce, it's relevant that somebody finds out that a story is being told? In order to make something of the fact, some rules about conversation in the first place are required. I'll deliver these in an informal fashion, and a lot of what I say will be relatively obvious once it's been said. The question is, why do stories take more than an utterance to produce - where the word 'utterance' is equivalent to a tum at talk. We want to look at some rules having to do with turns at talk, and I'm going to give a general character­ ization of the rules regulating people's turns at talk in American conversation. First of all, the rules regulating turns at talk are occupied with, have as their business, preserving certain features for conversations that conversations have. A central such feature is that exactly one person - at least one and no more than one person - talks at a time. Now the rules regulating turns are a way that that is brought off. And some of those rules are concerned with achieving such a thing as: At the end of someone's tum, where, say, three or four people are present, that somebody starts talking and not more than one person starts talking, i.e. , the rules are, among other things, concerned with getting next speaker selected. And, again very grossly, there are two general sorts of rules which stand in an orderly relationship to each other, i.e. , where the first is preferred over the second in the first instance - though they have a more complicated relation­ ship. The first rule is that current speaker can select next speaker. And a routine way that when some party stops another starts is accomplished, is that the patty

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who is stopping has selected a next from among the set of possible nexts. There is a very large collection of particular techniques whereby one currently speak­ ing selects another - while one might think right off of using their name, addressing them, that's hardly anything like a small part of the story. The second general sort of rule for next-speaker selection is that a next speaker self-selects himself. And the rule for that is essentially that the first starter has rights to speak. Now obviously those rules have to be in some orderly relation, i.e. , 'current speaker selects next' and 'next speaker self­ selects' are not equivalent options, or else the first would be systematically undercut by the second. The second operates when the first hasn't been used. And that poses a problem: When can it be determined that the first hasn't been used? Can a party just keep talking indefinitely and as long as they haven't selected somebody they keep going? Plainly that's not so, and the question is, what sort of a 'when' is it that governs when somebody can decide that they're going to start talking, no one having been selected? Essentially the situation is that the completion of an utterance for transition purposes, i.e. , for the possibility of a next starting, is available on what we could call its 'next possible completion. ' And what I mean by 'next possible completion' is that if you considered, say, roughly, an utterance as composed of sentences, then if somebody has produced a sentence and has now gotten into the second sentence, then, though you might have been in a position to treat the completion of the first sentence as a first possible completion from the beginning, if you hadn't done that and started talking there, you wait until the next occurrence of a sentence end. So the possibilities run in terms of sentences as the building blocks of utterances, with the points of possible transition being at any next sentence end. If you miss one and the speaker continues, then it's not free room to interrupt him anywhere in that next sentence, but as that next sentence comes to completion you get a next possible place to start - if he hasn't selected anybody. If he has selected somebody, then the business of the selected party is not to talk up as soon as he discovers he's been selected, but upon first possible completion after the selection, i.e. , the next sentence ending after the selection. The way that works to handle the two rules ('current speaker selects next' or 'next speaker self-selects') is that if current speaker intends to select a next then he's got to do it within the current sentence he's producing, or, not having done it, he can be treated as not having selected, and somebody can start up upon his completion. That is to say, he can't figure that he's going to get a series of sentences to speak since he hasn't selected anybody. So you have that second rule operating to constrain the length of utterances that can be produced if only the first rule were considered. Current speakers don't and can't go on talking indefinitely via not having selected a next speaker, and that turns on that the second rule operates at any point of possible completion of an utterance, which is, roughly, at sentence ends. That is then to say that if you are planning to produce an utterance about which you know that it's not going to take a sentence, it's going to take more than a sentence, and you don't know how many sentences it's going to take,

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then you face a problem. You can clearly, if you get the floor, produce a sentence-length utterance. But at the first possible completion somebody can start up talking, and if you haven't selected someone, then whoever wants to can start up. And they then don't, say, at the end of their sentence-length utterance, have to give the floor back to you; they can, e.g., select somebody else to speak. You might find, then, that intending to tell in an utterance, some bit of talk that lasts longer than a sentence, you can't do it, but that others start up and they give the floor to others, and it takes a while before you get a chance again. We could then imagine a situation in which, intending to tell a story of, say, some n length, you would be dropping fragments of that story into some conversation in which people are talking around, across, through, your story. But storytelling doesn't work that way. So the situation is, then: If, for conversation, the circumstance is that what you can be assured of if you get the floor is that you can talk in everybody else's silence for a sentence-length utterance, then how do you deal with a situation where you want to talk for more than a sentence-length utterance? How do you do that methodically? That is, you could obviously always get a chance to produce utterances of indefinite lengths as long as nobody happened to start up, and routinely, of course, people happen to talk for more than a sentence in an utterance where it's not just that they didn't plan to, it's often that they didn't want to. That is, they produce what they figure is a perfectly good sentence-utterance, and, nobody having started talking, then they find themselves 'continuing' so as, in part, to deal with the fact that a silence had emerged - where, under the more general rule of the turn-taking techniques we're dealing with, silence is a terrible thing. The turn-taking rules say that somebody should be talking all the time; not more than one person, but somebody. So a currently-completing speaker, finding no one's starting, may make it his business to keep off silence by going on, and then may turn out to produce much more than a sentence in his utterance though he did not have that as a project. Our problem is, how does one produce more than a sentence-length utter­ ance, as a project? An obvious kind of methodical solution would be if speakers had some way, within the first sentence of some projected coherent piece of multi-sentence talk, to say that they wanted to talk for more than a sentence. And of course the kinds of solutions there are, are not the kinds of things that anybody goes about inventing, but there are ways of doing it. I suppose the simplest thing that would come to mind is that they say ' 'I'm going to talk for more than a sentence" and then continue. That isn't the way things get done, and there are lots of reasons why, but it is the case that when more than a sentence is specifically projected, one does in some fashion signal that right off. One doesn't exactly say that one is going to talk for more than a sentence, one asks for the right to produce a more-than-a-sentence-long coherent bit of talk. Now, involved in how you go about making the request is something like this: Insofar as talk is going along in terms of planned one-sentence utterances (which allows of course for more than one sentence utterances or less than one sentence utterances) then, built into that system is a requirement - not as a

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matter of a rule that is enforced on you from the outside, but a rule that is internal to the system - that everybody more or less must listen. Among the reasons for that are, e.g . , on the one hand, any current sentence-utterance might select you to speak next, and you have to listen to find out whether you've been selected. Alternatively, you might find that, no one having been selected, you're going to get a chance to self-select yourself, and to know when you could start up if you're self-selecting, you have to listen. So, listening is built into the willingness of parties to talk if selected, and to their interest in choosing to talk if no one else has been selected. But that only holds when they know that at any given sentence completion it might be their turn. If you lift the requirement that it's possible that on the next sentence completion they'll have to talk, then you're also lifting a basis for their listening. So if what a party wants to do in producing a more-than-one-sentence coherent bit of talk is not just to have a chance to produce it, but also to keep the others listening, he may have to do more than announce that he wants to talk for a while; he may have to have some way, in that first sentence that engages in saying ' 'I'm going to talk for more than one sentence" to also say "and what I'm going to say may oblige you, if you're going to talk after me, to have listened. " That is to say, there may be ways of nonetheless building in a requirement to listen, for somebody who is going to talk, not immediately but eventually. There may also be ways of saying that what's going to be said will be interesting. The two jobs I've introduced - saying ' 'I'm going to talk for more than a sentence" and keeping people listening, where listening is otherwise only built for one-sentence utterances - are both jobs that should be done in the first sentence. If the first job fails, you may not get the chance to produce the multi-sentence utterance; if the second fails, you may get the chance but lose your audience. Now, how do you go about finding that you have a right to talk and an audience? A way is to build such a first sentence-utterance that will on the one hand arouse them and inform them that that's what you're intending and that it may be interesting, and also will tell you at some point that indeed it's okay and they're interested. The consequence of that is that one produces, for what turn out to be stories, what I'll call a story preface. It is an utterance that asks for the right to produce extended talk, and says that the talk will be interesting, as well as doing other things. At the completion of that 'interest arouser' if you like, one stops, and it's the business of others to indicate that it's okay, and maybe also that they're interested, or it's not okay, or they're not interested. If one looks at stories one finds that prefaces of this sort are present. For example, there are sequences with an initial utterance such as "I have something terrible to tell you" followed by some other party saying 'say some more' via such specific obvious technical things that can be done as "What?" which returns the floor to the last speaker with an instruction to say some more. That is, a promise of interestingness is made in this sort of thing, which doesn't tell it, and one can, if one buys the sort of discussion I've offered, see, e.g . , why people produce such things in the first instance rather than starting the story that will turn out to have been "something terrible" and, e.g. , hoping to force

Lecture 2

227

their way through over people's taking chances to talk - or taking it as a time to rest. So, two features of stories as extended coherent bits of talk are that they're begun with a story preface by the teller, and on the completion of the story preface a recipient of it indicates that he sees that a story is being ventured. They do, e.g . , "What?" as compared to, e.g. , saying whatever they wanted to say before the storyteller got a chance to start, where they might well have had something they wanted to say before that, e.g., continuous with what was going on before. But they either tell the storyteller to go ahead or tell the storyteller that they're not interested ("Something awful happened to me today," "Big deal"). This place is for acceptance or rejection of the request to tell a story. And there are of course specific utterance types which simply announce stories, e.g. , "You want to hear a story?" "You want to hear a joke? ' ' etc. Others are designed with more or less the particular story in mind, i.e. , "I have something terrible to tell you" is, while widely done, done only for stories that it can preface. Earlier we asked a set of questions: How is it that telling a story is relevant to the talk one does? How is recognition that a story is being produced relevant to the hearers? Why does the possible fact that a story is being told matter for the telling of it? I think we developed kind of an answer to that set of questions, which involves that if the talk you're going to do might take more than a sentence to produce, then you need some way to get the floor for more than a sentence, and story-preface building is one class of ways that you can accom­ plish that. And what that involves is that in order to get the floor for that extended bit of talk, you take the floor and do something that involves giving it away to get it back to tell the story. The fact that stories take more than an utterance to produce involves that tellers should in the first instance see that they're intending to tell a story, and that it might take more than a sentence to produce, and, seeing that, they turn it into at least a two-utterance thing in which they first say they're going to tell a story, get permission to do that, and then tell the story. So it's a systematic occurring fact that stories, taking more than a sentence to produce, turn out to take more than an utterance to produce. And it's not that it just happens that they're taking more than an utterance to produce by virtue of people's happening to talk in their course. If you look at a story, it isn't just that somebody happens to talk up at some point in the telling of a story; they are specifically invited to talk up, where plainly that could be a problem in that having given the floor to others you might not get it back. In storytelling you give them the floor to give it back to you. A sort of orderliness, then, is not just that it takes more than an utterance to do, i.e. , more than two people talk in its course, but that's specifically intended by the teller and collaborated in by the recipient. Which is to say that the recipient's talk at various places in the story is talk that deals with the recognition that a story is being told. We've talked about some coherent bit of talk, some number of sentences. The question now is, how does it happen that the teller is able to show that the story is over, and hearers are able to see that the story is over and can show

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that they see that the story is over? The usual constraint - next possible sentence completion - doesn't hold. Everyone knows it's not going to be any next possible sentence completion, it's going to be something else that tells you that the story is over. How do tellers inform hearers what it will take for the story to be complete? Again, you could imagine that they'd say "Now it's over. " Among the things that wouldn't give a chance for is that the teller could see that the hearer sees that it's over. If, among the things that a teller could do is make it the business of the hearers to show the teller that they see it's over, then they're building in motivation for hearers to listen. It turns out that among the jobs of the story preface is that of giving information about what it will take for the story to be over. And there's an obvious rationality to putting information about what it will take for it to be over, right at the beginning so that people can watch from there on in to see when it will be over. Just taking the type of preface I've given you, "I have something terrible to tell you," then in stories that have characterizing adjectives like "terrible, " the business of such a term is not just to arouse interest but to instruct hearers to use that term to monitor the story - when they've heard something that it could name, the story will be over. Apparently that is not only used to monitor the story, but to indicate that the hearer sees that the story is over, i.e. , "I have something terrible to tell you," a bunch of talk, and then at some point, " Oh how terrible, " i.e. , some utterance by a recipient that has something synonymous with the character­ izing adjective used, to say 'I see the story is over. ' And there are problematic sequences which involve, e.g. , "Something really wonderful happened today, " "No kidding, " Story. The recipient at various points in the story goes, e.g. , "Uh huh, " "Uh huh," and after some "Uh huh" the teller says "Isn't that wonderful?, " i.e. , you missed that the story was over. And a story preface can be more specific than that something was terrible or wonderful, e.g . , next time I will consider a fragment in which a story preface directs the recipient to listen for something that could be 'news' on the radio or the local newspaper. You can look at the parts of the preface, then, and decompose it into a series of jobs that it has for the story as a sequenced object. Of course this set of jobs of storytelling are specifically jobs of storytelling in conversation, with no particular place in writing, radio, etc. , except for such issues as, e.g . , arousing interest. 1 1 Attached to this lecture is the following note: The materials in this lecture were presented with an interest in accessability for the hearerjreader, and are therefore in a crude form which does not reflect the state of research on these issues. For more detailed consideration, see Pre-draft, chapters l through 4, of Aspects of Sequential Organizati on in Conversati on. The projected book did not materialize. The first chapter became obsolete as Sacks' considerations of its materials and issues developed. Sacks distilled the remaining chapters into a 1 2 -page draft entitled ' An initial characterization of the organization of speaker turn-taking in conversation, ' which was later augmented and became 'A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation. '

Lecture 3

Story organization; Tel/ability; Coincidence, etc. I ' m going to discuss in some detail a particular story. 1 The business of the lecture will be to give some idea about what is involved in seeing how a story works. I'll be talking about some types of organization and how they are achieved in the story. Here is how the thing begins: A: B: A: B:

Say did you see anything in the paper last night or hear anything on the local radio, Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura yesterday, Mm hm And on the way home we saw the: : most gosh awful wreck. Oh: : : :

An initial type of organization is that the story is fitted into what I'll call a 'request format, ' i.e. , the teller of the story tells it by virtue of using it as a way to get some information which she asks of the other. She's requesting information, and to get that information she has to tell the story. The story will provide some information to the other on the basis of which the other can satisfy the request or announce that she can't satisfy the request. Fitting the story into a request format, telling it by virtue of the request for information that the telling permits the resolution of, does some sorts of jobs for the teller and imposes some sorts of jobs on the recipient. One transparent job that it does for the teller is to provide an occasion for telling the story, i.e. , the story has to be told to give the recipient that information whereby the recipient can satisfy the request. It's not just being told as 'here's an interesting story do with it what you like,' but 'here is a story I'm telling you so that you can then tell me something. ' Now one thing involved in the use of the request format for this story is that the teller, in using it, will have indicated that she's done some determination of who it is she's talking to, which determination allows her to figure that the other might have the information she wants. Now I have to give some information that's not in the story itself. The teller and recipient live in Santa Barbara, and it's from there that the teller went to Ventura and to there that the teller was returning when the accident took place. The 1 Attached at end of this lecture.

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reClptent, living in Santa Barbara is, then, local to that area in which the accident took place and might have been reported, such that if this thing were in the newspaper or on the radio she would have been able to have heard it. And it's by reference to that that the recipient has been selected to hear the story via a request about an instance of 'possible local news. ' It's perfectly imaginable that the story itself, of the seen accident, could be told to somebody who was not local to Santa Barbara, but if it were told to such a one, then the use of such a request would be senseless, or just not occur. The request for information is designed for somebody who's been identified by the teller as somebody local to where the event took place, and in that way it can be seen to have been designed for the recipient, for some identification of the recipient. And the use of the request tells the recipient that in some way the storytelling has been designed for them, for an identification of them that the teller knows. We will see that it is utterly routine for stories, that tellers have ways of showing their recipients that the telling of the story is done with an orientation to who it is being told to. In this case, at least the request is used to do that. Producing the story within the request format has other interests, some of which were partially developed last time: In producing the story via a request, a basis is given for the recipient to listen to the story. That is, it's now the recipient's business to follow the story so as to be able, on recognition of its completion, to satisfy the request; to say "Yes I heard about it" or "No I didn't hear about it. " And also, as I mentioned last time, it provides that the recipient is able to listen so as to know when enough has been presented to decide that they can or cannot satisfy the request, i.e. , to decide when something that could conceivably have been 'local news' has been told. It's of interest that the information presented in the story is usable by the recipient even though the recipient didn't hear the story on the radio or read it in the news. It might be one sort of a problem for the recipient if what they had to do was simply to see if they'd heard the story, then when they recognize it they can say "Yeah I heard it" as compared to if they haven't heard it, how do they know when it's been told? But the recipient here is able to say at some point "No I haven't heard that, " i.e., to at least indicate that they recognize that the candidate news event has been adequately presented, which is in part, then, to recognize that what was proposed to be a possible news event was a possible news event, since it could be recognized independently of having found it in the news. Now that request format is an altogether independent rype of organization from the organization of the story itself. The request could be used to do other things than telling a story, and, as well, other ways of getting to tell a story could be used. One could then collect various other ways that things like indicating that I designed this story's presentation for you, why you should listen, what you should do when the story is over, etc. , are done. Some of them, like the request, congeal those jobs in a specific technique, as compared to those things being separately dealt with. But we can say about this request format as it's used here, that it specifically is designed for interactional aspects

Lecture 3

23 1

of the storytelling, i.e. , as between the parties the jobs they should do, etc . , for each other. Now to say that it's independent is not to say that it has no relationship to the story that's being told. There are ways in which the sort of request made may effect the way that a story is told, or what's told in the story. The sort of thing that I mean is, if the request is with regard to a 'possible news story, ' that sets some restraints on how the story is to be reported so as to be recognizable as a story that might have been reported on the radio. She might tell the story about the wreck she witnessed in such a way, say by reference to the kind of experience it was for her, as to not permit the one who heard about it on the radio to see that this was the story they heard on the radio. But she also might, as she does here, locate such things as approximately where it took place, that there were some deaths, etc. , which can be used by the hearer to compare to some story she might have heard. Doing it as a request by reference to its possible news status can, then, effect the story that's being told. Told in some other format, the story might be presented in quite a different way, e.g., without the somewhat objective information being included within it. She might well tell the story of the wreck in terms of the way in which the glass was patterned on the freeway macadam and what that did to her, which wouldn't particularly give a hearer such information as would allow them to say "Yeah I heard about that on the radio , " by virtue of the fact that they don't report stories on the radio that way. And it needn't be as far out as that - if that's far out. A second type of organization that the storytelling contains is that the story materials, i.e. , the wreck, are fitted into some course-of-action report of the teller's circumstances. What we have is that the story events are fitted into talk which deals with a course of action that could be reported independently of telling this story or any story. The course-of-action parts of it are: "Ruth Henderson and I drove to Ventura" . . . "on the way home" (we saw a wreck) . . . "We were parked there for quite a while . . . "I was going to listen to the local news and haven't done it" . . . "I was listening to the blast off, you know, the astronauts. " That is to say, there's a series of teller actions which are in some ways a sequence, which bounds the story. Obviously the wreck could be reported apart from the presentation of this course-of-action sequence the teller employs, and that course of action could have other features to it than the ones reported. That is, it begins with ' 'Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura" but it could presumably begin somewhere else in some course of action that the teller was engaged in. She could make a long story of it, e.g . , that a week ago we decided to go to Ventura and we were going to go Thursday morning but it turned out we couldn't because Ruth had another appointment come up that morning and instead I did this and that . . . and then finally get around to "so we drove to Ventura yesterday, " and then what we did in Ventura, etc. Or it could begin with "we were driving up the freeway and saw the most goshawful wreck. " And it could end in various sorts of places, assuming that a teller-course-of­ action is being employed to give that sort of organization to it.

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But the course-of-action organization has a great deal to do with the kind of coherence the story has, i.e. , that we're still within a course of action at various places, such that, e.g. , saying "on the way home" is a way for the teller to require of the hearer that they've kept in mind that she had gone to Ventura. That is, the course-of-action organization involves employing a technique which makes it obligatory on the hearer, if they're going to understand the story, that at each point that a new feature in the course of action is introduced, they organize that new feature by reference to what they've already been told about where she is, what she's doing, etc., because the later parts in the course of action are not done in such a way as to bring one up to date with the earlier parts. It's not said, "Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura yesterday and on the way home from Ventura yesterday we saw this wreck. . . etc. . . . and when I got home from going to Ventura with Ruth Henderson yesterday and having seen the wreck . . . etc. " But those sorts of things are done in such a way as to make it the business of the hearer to keep in mind the sequential status of what's being said. The hearer's business, then, is not to be listening to a series of independent sentences, but to a series of connected sentences that have that connectedness built in such that it is required for the understanding of any one of them. And a course-of-action telling is a perfectly routine way to do such a job of requiring that if you're going to understand it at the end you've got to keep in mind what's been told earlier. The story is thereby built in such a way that it is coherent if you do that and isn't coherent if you don't. Let me just note a sort of thing that might be so, and is checkable out. A course-of-action report will not involve that at any point in the course of action the story is likely to come up, but at some point in the course of action the story is likely to come up. What I'm saying is that the phrase ' 'and on the way home" says 'right now the story is about to come, ' i.e. , that sort of a phrase will not be used in a story unless the story is going to come then. And you will routinely find that in the most abbreviated form of a course-of-action report, it will go "On the way home from work this afternoon . . . " And if there is some rather long presentation before the story, then 'on the way home" is one way of saying 'listen now, the story is about to come. ' That has to do perhaps not only with a convention that "on the way home" is the way you do it, but in part by virtue of the fact that "on the way home" is otherwise nothing to report. "On the way home nothing happened. " I don't know if that's so. It seems to be so, but it may not be. I'm going to say more about this course-of-action organization, particularly with respect to its relationship to the story of the wreck. But first I'd like to tum to the story of the wreck itself, then we'll come back. I want to argue that the story that's told is found, and that an appropriate story has been found to tell, of the possible stories that could be told. Also, that regardless of the fact that she tells the story as something witnessed, one doesn't want to think that it's told by virtue of its being witnessed, and that what she witnessed is what she told, and what she told is what she witnessed. It turns out that that sort of argument, which needs to be made in general, can be made rather nicely

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for this story. I t has importances which involve that if what happened was that from the things she could have made a story of, she found what she should have made a story out of, then we can see that of the possible events there are specific 'storyables' which will rum out to matter for, e.g. , how the story events are then characterized. My argument is briefly this. If we read the thing over we can see that she in fact encountered a wreck aftermath, i.e. , she came upon an occurred auto wreck. She didn't see an accident, she saw an accident aftermath. She doesn't tell the story of an accident aftermath. She tells the story of an accident. Indeed, she has to do a bunch of work to make the story a story of an accident; work involving, e.g. , that she constructs how the accident could have happened - that one car hit a car and then another car hit that one. Now she could perfectly well, if she were telling what she witnessed, tell a story about a wreck aftermath. But on the one hand, wreck aftermaths are not particularly news stories - maybe in the human interest section of a newspaper you'd have stories about the aftermaths of wrecks - and on the other hand she doesn't particularly seem to notice that what she told is a wreck-aftermath-used-to­ find-the wreck story. Seeing the wreck aftermath she looks for the story of the wreck. Encountering the scene of the smashed car and the bodies, she's not looking for what is it that, coming on this thing now, is of interest with regard to its state now. Her mind is so organized that she knows that what's to be found is the story of a wreck, even though she didn't see the wreck happen. And she looks at the scene in front of her to find how it took place, and tells that. It can then be seriously said that she finds the story. And that she needs to do some work to find the story. That is, coming on some scene which was a story a moment ago, you may be told "you missed all the excitement" and walk away with really nothing to see and tell about it, though having come a moment earlier you would have had a story to be told. But what she's able to do is to tum the coming-a-moment-afterwards into a chance to nonetheless have a story to tell; that story being the story of the wreck itself. So when we want to move to suggest that the story is put together by her, we have this kind of initial information: That she had to find it, and that she found, not what was available then and there in terms of what's happening now, but what, from what's available now, can be gleaned about what happened. And that plainly should be a natural sense of 'working to make the story. ' We could then ask, is it perhaps the case that in finding the story of the wreck from the scene of the wreck aftermath, she's finding what is tellable in what she saw. There may then be some collection of findable stories such that one exhibits, e.g. , some sorts of competence at observing the world when one correctly finds one of such stories, even if one has to find it as compared to saying "I saw this great wreck aftermath, it was among the more interesting wreck aftermaths I've ever seen. " Where, though people collect wrecks, it doesn't strike us that people collect types of wreck aftermaths. And we can start, now, to see that reliability is restricted such that there are reliable parts of events. And we can begin to get an idea, then, about how it is that not

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anything is a story, and that people don't figure anything is a story, and see that even in a scene where there is a story, it's not just any story that could be made out of it. In some ways, then, we get to the theme of the first lecture; at least in terms of the restricted storyability of the world under a competent viewing of it. Plainly enough somebody could tell an interesting story about a wreck aftermath. Plainly enough it's not much done. And whereas it takes seemingly no work to have seen the wreck in the wreck aftermath, it would take special work to see the wreck aftermath in the wreck aftermath. Let me make a passing remark having to do with just the course of making findings about such sorts of things. I'd been working on this story for a year and a half before I happened to notice that in fact she didn't see the wreck, and to see that she had found the wreck story in the wreck aftermath. I'd been focussing on the story as a witnessed story - which indeed it is, but it's witnessed in a different way - and the obviousness of the wreck story is such that even with rather extended, careful observation it just wasn't noticed, at least by me. Now I want to say some things about the way the story works. There are several sorts of problems I want to deal with. One of them concerns the descriptors in the story, i.e. , the talk about the bodies "laid out and covered over on the pavement, " and of "the worst wreck I ever saw," "I never saw a car smashed into such a small space, " etc. What sort of work would they pose for the recipient in dealing with them, and correlatively, how does the sort of work they pose for the recipient pose work for the teller? It might at least be a kind of mildly interesting fact to consider that recipients can apparently decide that a story was correctly told without having to go out to reobserve something the story reports, to see that that was the way to have observed it so as to tell the story that it contains. We might at least imagine that a recipient is given some description of what happened, and in order to know whether that's what happened they would have to see if they could themselves see what happened, and that what they themselves saw was what it proposes. But we know that no such thing needs be done; that instead, a recipient hearing some description can see that 'it must have been like that,' and given some other description can figure, and sometimes assert, 'that isn't the story. ' I have materials where, in the first minute of conversation between strangers, some report being presented, the recipient will say "You're lying," where all they've been given is that report. That is to say, recipients do not feel at the mercy of the teller for what the world is about. And apparently tellers need to employ ways to produce a story that is recognizably correct, or at least possible. Again we are returning in a way to the observable story, the possible story in the event. Now, instead of thinking of the descriptors in a story as things that simply happen to be so, that the teller saw and that the recipient has to deal with by deciding that it's logically so or not, or by reserving judgement in that they weren't there, we might think of them in another way. And that is, that what a teller presents as a descriptor, a recipient can use as an assessable criterion for deciding whether any such thing happened. We can

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then begin perhaps to get at the kinds of ways that descriptions might be put together, and that recipients make determinations. So, a presented description is dealt with by its recipient as something to use to decide whether a correct story is being told. It may contain information about the competence of the teller to say what he says, e.g. , by being utterly conventionalized in the sense that he says such a thing as anyone knows happens - whether it happened or not is another question - or by some other sorts of means. And I'll talk a bit about some other sorts of means that are used in stories, and in this story, for the teller's bringing off a competence to have observed a wreck that is a tellable. There are a series of measures used in the story, e.g. , the size of the car in the wreck ("I've never seen a car smashed into such a small space") and, e.g., some way of referring to the duration of the traffic jam that ensued ("We were parked there for quite a while"). Now what I will suggest is that what those things are, are terms from types of measures that people employ, in the employing of which they can exhibit their competence at observing scenes . They are types of usualness or normalness measures. Each such term comes from a package of terms which are specifically used to characterize a scene so as to say that the scene was as it usually in, or that it wasn't what it usually is but some variant of what it usually is. And what the terms report are large variances and small variances, where the specific thing that constitutes what it 'usually' is, is something that is presumably known by the recipient, so that they can see that a usualness measure is being employed. That is to say, there can be various ways to characterize how long you were stopped in a traffic jam - "just for a second, " "seemed like hours," "quite a while, " and various things like that. When you pick one of those instead of saying, e.g. , "We were stopped there for 2 5 minutes," then what you're doing is involving the other in appreciating that the how long you were stopped there was known by reference to how long people are stopped at various sorts of traffic jams. And when you say the car was "smashed into such a small space" what you've done is to pick a way of characterizing the impact of the accident in terms of observations people have presumably made about how accidents affect cars. So by virtue of the fact that you employ these usualness measures, you're asserting that you know how to watch wrecks. And by virtue of the fact that the other is figuring out what you're telling them, they will have been required to also employ such sorts of information such that they can see that you're possibly competent at observing wrecks. It's not like you're telling the story of the first wreck you've ever seen, and are now seeking out ways to characterize it. That you know how to characterize a wreck is something you can show from the way you describe one, and if you show that you know how to describe one, then the recipient can take it that you've possibly correctly characterized this wreck. That is to say, it' s perhaps not incidental that one doesn't get a 'more precise' characterization of how small a space the car was smashed into, or how long we were parked there. It is, in a fashion, better to not use those 'more precise' characterizations, which can be equivocal in the sense of is that

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a long time for a wreck or is that a small space for a car? Instead what one does is offer the product of what can be seen to have been specifically done as an educated analysis, and thereby be seen to have been done by someone who knows how to look - if it's told to someone who knows how to hear. So that this possible 'vagueness' of the report - "quite a while," well how long was it? - is not a defective kind of vagueness but is the way to show that you measured the thing in an appropriate way to measure, e.g . , being caught in a traffic jam. I want now to start to focus on some ways that various parts of a storytelling other than the reported storyable itself, e.g . , the course of action parts of it, are designed for the story that is put into them. What I'll particularly focus on is "Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura yesterday. " Now that needs to be seen as at least possibly something put into the report by virtue of the story it begins, as compared to how what Ruth Henderson and she were doing would be conceived of for some other story, or for no story, but, say, the event projectively. That is, two sorts of things are involved. One is that when she and Ruth Henderson were deciding what they were going to do, then it may be that 'driving down to Ventura' was not the way they formed up the project of the day. What they figured they were doing might have been something altogether different. They might have been 'going shopping, ' incidentally to Ventura; 'going to visit' someone who happened to live in Ventura; 'spending a day together' and ending up in Ventura; 'going to Los Angeles' but the weather got lousy so they stopped in Ventura, etc. And, however they projected what they were going to do, when they did it or until the story came up it need not have been that what we did was to 'drive' down to Ventura, i.e. , they might not have particularly focussed on that they were 'driving. ' Of course they were driving, but that wasn't part of the way that they conceived the event they were doing. The other sort of thing is, it's equally well relevant that however they did project the day, however they did describe the day until they came upon the accident, it's a way to have projected a day or to describe a day, independent of the accident, i.e. , "Well let's drive down to Ventura" or "We drove down to Ventura. ' ' And it's terribly useful in the telling of the story that "drove down to Ventura" gets said - both that we went down to Ventura and that we drove down, because while a course of action is being delivered that comes off as kind of independent of the story that then happens, it sets up where the event took place, i.e. , on the freeway or something like the freeway between Ventura and Santa Barbara - which never has to be said in the storytelling. Saying "Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura, and on the way home . . . " locates where the thing took place. Now there are ways in which both those sorts of facts matter. For one, we will find in due course that a massive economy is achieved in stories. What this involves is that parts are put in for use with regard to the particular story, where, then, some of them may be characterized in one way in one story and in another way in another story. And what one absolutely doesn't have is that if a story contains a sequence, then if you were to have stopped events at any

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point in the actual sequence, the reports of the events to that point would be as they are in the story. Instead, you can see in stories that while a sequence is employed, that sequence sometimes could not have been known by the teller in the way they report it, and other times they could have known it but then again they might not at all have thought of it that way. A sort of thing I mean is that you often get things like the following. In telling the story of a missing car a fellow reports, "I came outside and my car was gone. At first I thought somebody must have stolen it. But then I realized that it was towed away. " Now I want to suggest that at least two aspects of that, "at first I thought" and "then I realized, " are not sorts of things as report how it is that the person understood the events taking place when they were taking place. Instead, when somebody says "at first I thought" or even just "I thought, " then that's routinely used to say 'it turned out I was wrong. ' And on the other hand, when they say "I realized, " it isn't as though, upon it occurring to them, they knew they were right. What they're saying is 'I thought this next, and then found out I was right, ' i.e. , they called up the police, asked Did you people take away my car, the police said Yes, and they went down and there it was. So that the terminology is terminology for the story in which the events have already happened. The terminology is set up for the way in which it turned out to happen. And you can specifically tell crazy stories by making rather small modifications, like by saying "at first I thought X and I was right, ' ' or "I realized X and turned out to be wrong. " And in this story we have something like that, when she says "I was going to listen to the local news and haven't done it. ' ' When she says "I was going to listen" you can be sure that she'll say that she didn't. You don't get reports, unless they're slightly odd, which say "I was going to listen to the radio and I did . " Sq there are lots o f parts o f stories which, while they're placed in a sequence, bear a needing-to-be-determined relationship to what anybody would have or might have reported as events were occurring. They're not a narrative characterization of reality, the narrator telling the story, e.g . , into a tape recorder on a day as he's going along, and now simply replaying it in, say, a capsulized version. And plainly "Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura" is a lot of use in the story. It tells you where and when the accident took place, at least in a somewhat sufficient way. Now the following may or may not come off right. I give it in part for methodological purposes, and it has a kind of weird status to it. There's a phenomenon that's utterly familiar to us that the foregoing materials bear on. The phenomenon is that for some stories that happen to a person, in thinking about it, telling about it, etc. , they come to see and say such things as "Gee isn't that a coincidence that that happened. " Things like "I hardly ever go to Ventura, isn't it coincidental that the day I went there, there was a hurricane! " or "I hardly ever go to Ventura, you hardly ever g o to Ventura, isn't it coincidental that on the day I went, you went, and we met." We know of all kinds of stories in which, what it turns out is that participants to it see a striking coincidence. I want to see if we can get at the beginning of an answer to how we come to see these coincidences. The interest in the beginning of an

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answer is not so much in whether it's an answer - I don't have any idea whether it's an answer - but in some way that the answer is built. A reason for bringing this thing up now is that it's at least my suspicion that a possible such 'remarkable coincidence' is in the offing in this story though it doesn't come out in this conversation, where that possible 'remarkable coincidence' underlies the search that's going on, perhaps, on the part of the teller. And that is, to find out who died in the accident. The reasons have roughly to do with 'local news, ' and the way in which people see freeways. That is, the accident having happened near Santa Barbara, it can be imagined by her that, as she was "on the way home" to Santa Barbara, so, too, were the people in the accident. Now, even though people on the freeway could be going anywhere, there are places where one figures that people on the way to some particular place are. That's specifically observable. Simple enough evidence for that is, e.g . , on a Saturday afternoon if you're on the Harbor Freeway in downtown Los Angeles, you can look into the next car and say, "Looks like everybody's going to the ballgame. " People you don't know, in another car, are seen to be going to some specifiable place by reference to things like where they are on the freeway, and other things like their age, etc. But people attend freeways in part by reference to where people are going on them, and they can make guesses about it. So if the accident happened near Santa Barbara, then it's possible to her that it happened to somebody who lives in Santa Barbara, and that then sets up this great possible coincidence, i.e. , that she was a witness to the wreck in which somebody she knows died. And that's perhaps the thing to tell and think about, ' 'Oh my God, there I was at the wreck in which so-and-so died. ' ' So the discussion about coincidence, while it doesn't wholely turn on what we absolutely know happened here, bears on what might be going on here. I want now to suggest a series of possibilities, and again, the texture of the argument is of neat possibilities, not of anything sure. We've at least asserted that things like "Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura" are characterizations built for this story in some independence of whether they were projected - i.e. , what they, beforehand, thought they were going to do - or what they conceived they were doing while they were doing it. A possibility is - and this, I think, is something we could work out rather sharply - that although people design large parts of stories for the story they know to have happened, independently of the way they'd conceived any part of it on its partial occurrence, they don't know that they do that designing. They're not aware of designing the parts for the story. So, for example, they design it in an extremely economical way, i.e. , the story is extremely spare. Any parts put in can be used by a listener to find what further is going to happen. Nothing is just mentioned. Let me say something about spareness. In a beautiful discussion of it having nothing to do with storytelling in actual conversation but having to do with conventions in fiction, particularly in theater, in a book on Gogol by Nabokov, he's talking about one of the things that Gogol did to Western literature. And that thing is that before Gogol, if, when the curtain rises,

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there's a gun o n the mantelpiece, you can be sure the gun will g o o ff before the end of the play. Or if one of the characters says at the beginning of the play, "I wonder what happened to Uncle Harry, he's been in Africa all these years, " you can be sure that Uncle Harry will turn up. That is to say, that's an aspect of the spareness of the theater. Now what Gogol did was to introduce characters into his fiction who were mentioned in a paragraph and never appeared again. And if we think of the development of the literature of the absurd, then part of it is that sort of de-economizing, where events occur that have nothing to do with anything except that they occur, and you can't, then, latch onto anything to know if you take good account of this - e.g . , taking a detective story as an idea - then i t will matter. And i f you watch stories in conversation, at least for the people whose stories I study, then that economy phenomenon remains and has enormous usage in the telling of stories. So we have this designed economy which is, however, unknown to the teller who does not see that he's constructing the parts by reference to the story he's telling. What happens is perhaps something like this: Consider, e.g. , the people who meet in Ventura, where "I never go to Ventura and you never go to Ventura, and here we are in the same place, isn't that amazing. " Again, for each of them, until they meet in Ventura, neither of them particularly conceive that they were 'going to Ventura; ' one was going one place, one was going someplace else. When they meet what happens is that the strangeness that they find turns on the formulation of their mutual projects as 'alike' although they didn't figure that they had such alike mutual projects. And again, they don't even see that what they did was to formulate them so as to have them alike. So there's this organized economy without any specific knowledge that that's what's being done. Such that when a story comes off, and it has an observably marked organization and economy, the very teller can be struck by that. What the teller sees is " My God look how elaborately elegantly organized this is" - but not how 'this story' is, but how its events are. Seeing that, he can be struck by "Isn't that oddr ' that it all came out so neatly. And that will have turned on that the organization is achieved by him without his seeing that that's what he was doing. Seeing the product of the organization, what he notes is that gee, it's extraordinarily organized; by virtue of the fact that he had no idea that he organized it. And then he can be struck by the coincidentality of the fact that its parts fit together so nicely. So the argument is something like that the observed coincidentality of stories turn on that they're designed for an organized economy for some purposes; that that design is unseen by the designer; that the designer however can perfectly well encounter its organized economy and be struck with it; and that that's what they're then puzzled by. Now I said that the form of the argument is interesting. What I mean by that is that if you took the initial fact that people are sometimes struck by the coincidentality of stories, of the stories they are participants in, and asked how does that happen, then you would be led to think, I think, about why people are interested in coincidences, see

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coincidences etc., rather than to, as I did, not be focussing at all on that, but to be engaged in the construction of something altogether different, i.e. , the design of story parts to do a range of jobs which ends up providing that they have a striking economy, an economy that the doer doesn't see that he's done. To put it another way, one of the things that Irvine people spend a lot of time doing in social science is building models. Among the ways that people go about building models is to start with a product and then try to find how that product was achieved, where it's the achieving of that product that the machine is designed for. And there are those who do it rationally or irrationally, but the basic focus is that starting with the product you go backwards and try to build a machine that does that. As a kind of a counter strategy, suppose something like this: Most of the things that we treat as products, i.e. , the achieved orderliness in the world of some sort, are by-products. That is, there is machinery that produces orderly events, but most of the events that we come across that are orderly are not specifically the product of a machine designed to produce them, but are offshoots of a machine designed to do something else or nothing in particular. And it stands to reason in a way, that if there are some number of machines and some number of products, then by and large we're not going to find things that are indeed products, but things that are probably something else. It's a much weaker kind of assumption, to suppose that most of the orderliness we ever encounter is by-product orderliness rather than product orderliness. Then let's see if we can build by-product machines, i.e. , machines that explain something but had no particular interest in explaining it. As, for example, when I set about to explain why stories take more than one utterance to produce, perhaps I could have built a model that had as the specific project of the machinery, getting more than one utterance in a story. Instead, the model that was built had no particular interest in that; it had an interest in preserving something else, and as an offshoot of that, it achieved this. And the same thing goes for coincidentality - and here what's happened is that the coincidentality is coincidental in, now, a double sense, i.e. , a machine is designed to do a bunch of other things which happen, as a by-product, to yield this observable coincidentality. Now, without regard to whether my explanation of coincidentality is correct, or whether my explanation of why stories take more than one utterance to produce is correct, the endeavor of some extended interest is to see how you would go about building much more conservative types of explanations, i.e. , those that explain events without having been built to manifestly explain just that event. The issue is: You have the orderliness to start out with, and it's easy enough to build some sort of model that, having that orderliness to start out with achieves it. It's much more interesting to have the product and then to build a model which seems to do a lot of other jobs, which we know works to do those other jobs, and happens to do this one as well. Then you can see at least a sort of thing that's going on, where you can be fairly weak in your conception of what it is that the world is trying to do.

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24 1

Following is the relevant segment of the 'auto wreck' fragment. A fuller version is attached to Fall 1 968, lecture 1 . A: B: A: B: A: B: A: B: A: B: A: B: A: B: A: B: B: A: B: A: B: B: A: B:

Say did you see anything in the paper last night or hear anything on the local radio, Ruth Henderson and I drove down to Ventura yesterday, Mm hm And on the way home we saw the: : most gosh awful wreck. Oh: : : : - we have ev - I've ever seen. I've never seen a car smashed into sm - such small space. Oh: : : : It was smashed from the front and the back both it must've been in - caught in between two cars. [[ Mm hm uh huh Must've run into a car and then another car smashed into it and there were people laid out and covered over on the pavement. Mh We were s-parked there for quite a while but I was going to listen to the local r-news and haven't done it. No, I haven't had my radio on either. Well I had my television on, but I was listening to uh the blast off, you know. Mm hm. [ The uh ah - I I astronauts. Yeah Yeah And I - I didn't ever get any local news. Uh huh And I wondered. Uh huh, No, I haven't had it on, and I don't uh get the paper, and uhm It wasn't in the paper last night, I looked. Uh huh.

Lecture 4

Storyteller as •witness;' Entitlement to experience This time I have two sorts of things tQ say, that bear obscurely on the story. 'Obscurely' doesn't so much mean that it takes effort to relate them, but that it takes effort to see that they bear on it. I'll start off kind of simply, talking to the teller's status as a 'witness. ' I'm going to talk about this 'witness' status insofar as I can with the use of this story, and over the rest of the course I'll occasionally say things about the status 'witness. ' That is, it will come up as materials seem to require or allow it as a topic. It's kind of a terribly important topic, independently of any interest in the technical considerations in the course. The initial point I want to make is that in using the fact that she was a witness, for the telling of the story, she employs a way of identifying herself which articulates two types of organization involved in the story: the course-of-action organization that bounds the story, and the story of the wreck. That is to say, the 'witness' identity relates those two things. It's by virtue of that, that the course of action gets into the story, and that the story is tellable as something seen. Notice that 'witness' could be contrasted with, say, 'reporter,' where the reporter of a proposed news story would present it without the use of a course-of-action characterization as to how he comes to tell it. And there could be course-of-action characterizations which generate the story within them that didn't use 'witness' as the way to get at the story. As I suggested last time, it is of particular interest to see how the separable types of organization get meshed, and at least one way that those two things get meshed is via the use of this 'witness' status. A way we presumably think about being a witness is, having been a witness you can report what happened as what you saw or what you inferred from what you saw. And it turns out that people sharply differentiate how they come to know things, and they make a point of making it known how they come to know something, where that distinction - what you saw and what you inferred from what you saw - is a used distinction, one that is used in this story. The teller makes a difference between what she reports as what she saw and what she didn't see. The way she does it is to say about some of the events, that they "must have been" - "must have run into a car and then another car smashed into it" - where the meaning of 'must have been' is 'what I'm saying, I didn't see. ' And that connects, in part, to what you saw. So, we think of the 'witness' position as allowing you to tell what you saw, etc. But another way to think of presenting something via being a witness is, 242

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using the wimess position to treat that of what happened that is storyable as that which was wimessed, where perhaps not any possible thing one could have seen just-as-one-sees-it would be storyable. Rather, as in this case, she found the storyable thing in what she wimessed, where the storyable thing is something storyable independently of that she happened to wimess it this time, i.e. , it's a known story, 'a wreck, ' which is delivered as 'another wreck story. ' What I want to be noticing here is that one could present a story, the events of which one in some way wimessed, without having what one wimessed be what one told. Instead, one could, e.g. , report what one felt on some event's having happened. And I want to shift a little, to talk about having experiences; entitlement to have experiences, where, now, I'll be continuing some of the things I said in the first lecture, about doing 'being ordinary. ' I want to suggest that in having witnessed this event, and particularly in having wimessed it and suffered it as well in some way, like having had to stop on the freeway in a traffic jam by virtue of it, she has become entitled to an experience. And that she is entitled to an experience is something different from what, e.g. , her recipient is entitled to, or what, e.g. , someone who otherwise comes across this story is entitled to. Now one may think of 'entitlement' as a matter of having or not having rights to it, but that's only part of it. It's also not coming to feel it at all, as compared to feeling it and feeling that you don't have rights to it. In part I'm saying that it's a fact that entitlement to experiences are differentially available. The idea being that encountering an event like a possible · news story, and encountering it as a wimess or someone who in part suffered by it, one is entitled to an experience; whereas the sheer fact of seeing things in the world, like getting the story from another is quite a different thing. A way to see the matter is to ask the question, what happens to stories like this once they're told? Do stories like this become the property of the recipient as they are the property of the teller? That is, the teller owns rights to tell this story, and they give their credentials for their rights to tell the story by offering such things as that they saw it, and that they suffered by it. And now the question is, does a recipient of a story come to own it in the way that the teller has owned it, that is, e.g. , to tell it to another? Plainly enough, the recipient doesn't then have the story to tell in the way that the teller has it to tell, and in that way it either just dies or is preserved by the teller for future occasions. And there are materials for that in this story sequence, where the recipient of the first story offers an experience of the sort that the teller of the first story had, that the second storyteller had independently, and that she already told the teller of the first story. Or, for example, a question is, does the recipient of story come to own it in the way the teller has owned it, e.g., to feel for it as the teller can feel for what the events were? For example, you might, on seeing an automobile accident and people lying there, feel awful, cry, have the rest of your day ruined. The question is, is the recipient of this story entitled to feel as you do? I think the facts are plainly, no. That is to say, if you call up a friend of yours

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who is unaffiliated with the event you're reporting, i.e. , someone who doesn't turn out to be the cousin of, the aunt of, the person who was killed in the accident, but just a somebody you call up and tell about an awful experience, then if they become as disturbed as you, or more, something peculiar is going on, and you might even feel wronged - though that might seem to be an odd thing to feel. And we can notice in this story sequence that what the recipient of the firstj teller of the second does is to indicate that she had similar experiences by telling a story in which she was involved as the teller of the first was involved in this one; she doesn't just latch onto the experience of the first and borrow it for her own emotions. Now one reason I raise this whole business, and a way that it's important, is that we could at least imagine a society in which somebody having experienced something, having seen it and felt for it, could preserve not merely the knowledge of it but the feeling for it by telling others. Instead of a feeling happening to some random X, if this person X driving along a freeway encounters an accident and feels for it, then anybody they could tell it to could feel for it. Then plainly that stock of experiences that anybody happened to have wouldn't turn on the events that they happened to have encountered, but could turn on the events that anybody who ever talked to them happened to encounter - as we think of a stock of knowledge that we have. That is to say, if I tell you something that you come to think is so, you're entitled to have it. And you take it that the stock of knowledge that you have is something that you can get wherever you get it, and it's yours to keep, but the stock of experiences is an altogether differently constructed thing. In order to see that that's so we can just, e.g., compare how we deal with a piece of knowledge and how we deal with someone else's experience, and then come to see that experiences get isolated rather than are themselves anything like as productive as are pieces of knowledge. And of course there's no reason to restrict the matter to misery; plainly it holds for joy as well. And plainly it's specifically an attendable problem that joy is not productive. Somebody having such an experience as entitled them to be high, telling it to another they can feel "good for you" but there are rather sharp limits on how good they can feel for themselves about it, and also even sharper limits on the good feeling that they can give to a third with the story. That is to say, if A calls B to tell her a wonderful thing that happened to her, B could feel good for A, but B is not in a position to call C, where, e.g. , C doesn't know A, and have C feel as joyous as B felt hearing a story about A. C might feel mildly good that B had a mildly good experience, a lot less good than B felt, and nothing like as good as A felt. And again, if we think about it we can perhaps just see that that's not intrinsic to the organization of the world, but is a way we somehow come to perceive and feel about experience - or the way we're taught to do that - which is altogether different than the ways we think about knowledge. And I presume if one wanted, one could develop some historical discussion in which somehow knowledge was able to achieve a status for itself that is different than experience. And one could presumably find bases for attempts to do that for experience, which

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have failed. Obvious instances are attempts at universal religion, for example, which are attempts to preserve a kind of feeling that somebody once had encountering something or somebody, and where the whole history that we have is that it hasn't worked. It's extremely difficult to spread joy. It's extremely easy to spread information. Now that obviously matters a good deal in all sorts of ways. One of the ways it obviously matters is that if having an experience is a basis for being aroused to do something about the sorts of things it's an instance of, e.g . , the state of the freeways, the state of automobiles, the state of whatever else, then plainly the basis for getting things done is radically weakened where those who receive your story cannot feel as you are entitled to feel. And there are obvious virtues to that sort of situation. Here I'm thinking of the following sort of thing. If a trouble occurs in the world somewhere, then a characteristic way it's dealt with is to, e.g . , find which family's trouble it is, and, it being some family's trouble it's nobody else's trouble. Sometimes it turns out not to be satisfactorily formulatable as a family's trouble in that it might turn out to be a neighborhood's trouble. But if it's a neighborhood's trouble then it's nobody else's neighborhood's trouble. So, e.g. , crimes are by and large historically treated that way. A gets robbed or injured and that's a problem for B and C, but is nobody else's. And thereby, of course, one is not then constantly swamped with the troubles of the world. Instead, it turns out that people can be thankful that the troubles occur elsewhere. Occasionally a situation is given a kind of abstraa status. Occasionally, e.g. , when someone gets raped, instead of the rape being seen as the rape of so-and-so's daughter and thereby nothing for anybody else to worry about, it gets formulated as the rape of somebody's daughter, and perhaps it can bode for other people's daughters and maybe my daughter, and then from a rape it turns into a national arousal at rapings. This isn't all that current right now, but the story of a famous rape case years ago, that of Caryl Chessman, essentially involved that the way in which Chessman was gotten to be electrocuted eventually was that people across the state were able to be turned to seeing that rape as the rape of anybody's daughter, and to feel that something had to be done to this guy. That is to say, it was successfully transformed into a general thing while preserving the power of its feeling in each family. What was able to be done was to have the kind of anger, etc . , that can be felt in each family for an occurred rape, felt for somebody else's occurred rape - as compared to it's just being a matter of general public concern - "Isn't it awful" - or only a matter of some private concern. That's rare, and enormously powerful when it works. The only parallel that I can readily bring home this issue with is that an attempt is being made with the Vietnam war, to turn the deaths of soldiers into a something that would give it such a status. It turns out that a major way that a war comes to hurt the government doing the war, is by it happening that people from small places die. Not only does it, as we say, 'bring home the war' for the people in that place, it does much more than that. It's about the only way that they can come to seriously feel about it. For

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one, if everybody knows the parents of the person who died, then everybody has occasion to be told about it, to talk about it, and in talking about it come to talk about the war. It happens that our military is organized in such a way that even the relatively small groups that go into battle have a good chance of having a series of people from a fairly local place on a same team. And a consequence of that is that now and again, say in an ambush, four guys from the same town get killed. And when those towns get small enough, then what happens is that half a high school class has been wiped out. And suddenly, then, 'what the world is doing to us' becomes a thing that people get enormously aroused about. And over time, that happens to a lot of villages, where, then, a lot of villages which were otherwise completely inaccessible to, say, anti-war movements, are found to be writing letters to the President saying "our kids shouldn't be in this war" - our kids, not so much American kids - "you should stop sending our high school kids to this war. " And all over the place, then, people who had no particular interest in the war, the theory of the war, etc. , come to be involved by these local deaths. They are then available to seeing that the local deaths in their town are something like the local deaths that are occurring elsewhere, and, in that they have their own, they could also feel for the others. Without having their own, their feeling for the others is not anything like what it could be. There are ways, then, whereby the isolating character of experiences can nonetheless get undercut - if what one is dealing with is that there are others who have the same experience. Then, you can have more extended experience than you would have had if only you had had it, or you can see a pattern to experience other than the one you would see if only you had had it. So, if we're talking about the ways in which the feelings that experiences generate can get amalgamated, then, on the one hand if you haven't had an experience you're not entitled to feelings, and on the other, if somebody tells you an experience you're not entitled to feel as they have, but on the third hand, if you've had an experience and now you're told a similar experience by another, then you can make very big generalizations from it and feel more than you would have felt in either of the prior two cases. Now that's one order of thing, i.e. , introducing aspects of the distributional character of experience, and just raising what the import of its distributional character is for troubles and joys in the world, in sharp contrast to knowledge and its distributional character. You might figure it would be a severe enough kind of fact with regard to people's rights, abilities to have experiences, that they were restricted to those experiences that they had some such connection to as that they witnessed them. But that's not yet the full story of the kinds of constraints that are set on the possibility of having an experience. The second sort of constraint, that deeply relates to this story, is that if you're going to have an entitled experience, then you'll have to have the experience you're entitled to, i.e. , that ordinary story which can be seen to have taken place, which can be, e.g. , presented as a piece of news. That is to say, you could figure that having severe restrictions on your chances to have

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experiences, which turn on, e.g. , that some important thing, even if only in a mild way important, e.g. , just an accident, happens to cross your path or you happen to cross its path, well then you're home free. Once you got it you could do with it as you please. No. You have to form it up as a thing that it ordinarily is, and then mesh your experience with that. The rights to have an experience by virtue of encountering something like an accident are only the rights to have seen 'another accident' and perhaps to have felt for it, but you can't turn out to have a nervous breakdown because you happened to see an automobile accident, unless it turned out that, e.g. , the accident involved people who, though you didn't know it at the time, matter to you. Or unless you can somehow form it up as there but for the grace of God go I - "If I hadn't been in this lane it would have been me that it happened to. " That is, you can't make much more of it then what anybody would make of it. We can, then, think of the way that you're entitled to an experience as that you borrow for a while that experience that's available, as compared to that you now invent the experience that you might be entitled to. But in that you are so sharply restricted with regard to the occasions of having an experience, then presumably people are happy enough to take them as they come. You're not going to get very much surprizing new feelings or whatever out of this experience, but it's the only experience which you have any chance to legitimately have, so you might as well have it. You might as well form up this wreck story as an ordinary wreck story rather than attempt to make it into something that would occasion such comments as that you're really reaching for experiences. And of course people are readily seen to be reaching for experience with something that anybody knows is 'just a wreck, ' 'just an X' and they make it into a life's work. In that regard, there are a whole bunch of ways that the teller of this story tells us how she went about bounding this experience. What she made of it is not just told in the story, but it's told in other ways in the telling of the story. Among the ways that she goes about locating the kind of experience this story was, is that she doesn't tell it right off in the conversation, but she tells it somewhere in the conversation. And you'll find that stories are specifically differentiated in terms of their importance to the teller by reference to where the teller places them in a conversation. So, for example, among the ways that a teller can make out a story as really important is to tell it right off. And a way to make it even more important than that is to call to tell it when you figure the other isn't available to hear it, i.e. , to call them up in the middle of the night and say "I know you were sleeping but . . . " where it's not that they happen to be sleeping but you call them when they're sleeping, in that if you don't call them then, if you call them when they get up, you've already told them something about the story, i.e. , it's not as important as you might otherwise want to make it out. So, stories are ranked in terms of, and express their status by, the placing of the story in the conversation, and the placing of the conversation in people's lives. Clearly if this teller had been injured in the story's event, she wouldn't have told the story well into the conversation; indeed, it would have served as

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grounds for making the call; indeed, for making the call despite whatever the other person might have been supposed to have been doing when the call had to be made. Then of course in the story itself, aspeas of its importance are told. For example, while it was an important enough experience for the teller to say to herself I'm going to listen to the radio, other things got in the way of that. She isn't embarrassed to say that instead of that she watched the astronauts ­ which obviously for some other story would be altogether perverse. But for this story it's perfectly okay, and is a way to locate how the events matter, i.e. , to produce the story while indicating that if it came down to trying to find out more or watching the astronauts, I watched the astronauts. Aside from that, we are told that she could go home and go about her business, as compared to, e.g. , "I went home and went to bed," or "I had nightmares all night, " or that it in other ways interfered with the life that she was engaged in when this happened. "I was coming home, there was the accident, we were stopped for a while, and then I went home and watched the astronauts. " That's plainly a way to locate how the story matters, and is plainly an appropriate way for this story. Had she said it ruined the rest of her day, she was shaking, she went to the doctor, she had nightmares, then her friend could say "Well, you're just oversensitive. At least the initially blandest kind of formulation we might make, then, is that while lots of people figure that experience is a great thing, and apparently at least some people are eager to have experiences, they are extraordinarily carefully regulated sorts of things. The occasions of entitlement to have them are carefully regulated, and then the experience you're entitled to have on an occasion you're entitled to have one is further carefully regulated. And, insofar as part of the experience involves telling about it, then that's one of the ways in which you lay yourself open to having, e.g. , made too much of it, experienced it wrongly, not seen the thing you should have seen, etc. The telling of it then constitutes one way in which what you might privately make of it is subject to the control of an open presentation, even to what you thought was a friend. That is to say, your friends are not going to help you out, by and large, when you tell them some story, unless you tell them a story in the way anybody should tell it to anybody. Then they'll be appropriately amused or sorrowed. Otherwise you'll find that they're watching you to see that you're, e.g. , making something big out of something you're not entitled to make big, or something small out of something that should have been bigger, etc. , or missed seeing something you should have seen, which could be deduced by virtue of the way you requiredly formed the thing up. What we come back to is that of all the things that could have happened on the day that this event took place, this was what she was entitled to bring away, and she did.

Lecture 5

'First' and 'second' stories; Topical coherence; Storing and recalling experiences Basically I'll be continuing talking off the materials we've been working with, the sequence involving the automobile wreck. There are two initial, unrefined, altogether unsettled observations that I'll take off on. They obviously hold for this conversational fragment. First, that stories come in clumps, and second, clumped stories have an apparent similarity between them. In the case at hand, it's apparent that the similarities involve such sorts of things as that the second story or story fragment or referred-to story involves, as the first does, an accident, and involves also as the first does, some supposition, assertion, about the expected news status of it.

A:

Boy it was a bad one though. Well that's too bad. Kinda I I (freak)You know, I looked and looked in the paper- I think I told you f­ for that uh f-fall over at the Bowl that night. And I never saw a thing about it, and I I I looked in the next couple of evenings. Mm hm

B: A:

Never saw a th- a mention of it. I didn't see that either.

A: B: A: B:

( 1 . 0)

So that we have a slight refinement on the second observation, i.e. , there are not just some apparent similarities, but some apparent similarities of the sort that grossly can be said to be topical. Both stories have similar topics. What I want to do first is to use these initial observations to get some problems, and then to develop a solution to the problem. If clumped stories have a characterizable sort of similarity, then perhaps it's the case that the similarities are projected, i.e. , that the teller of the second is in some way concerned to produce a recognizably similar story to the first. We'll try to develop what might be bases for that interest although our main concern is if we can suppose that the teller of the second has such an interest, how does he go about satisfying it? Are there some procedures which the teller of the second uses in order to get such a second story as has for him, and perhaps recognizably for the teller of the first, a similarity? That's a central problem that we want to solve. 24 9

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Let me just note that I've already been talking about a ' first' story and a 'second' story, and that raises the possibility that for clumped stories there's some organization as between them so that we can say that one is specifically a 'first story,' that being now a class as compared to it just happening to be a story that came before the other. So that there is a specifically produced 'first story' and a specifically produced 'second story, ' where, then, if you look at a sample of clumped stories, we'd find that we could use the classes 'first' and 'second' stories across the sample, i.e. , there would be features of 'first stories' and features of 'second stories' that turned out to be somewhat systematically present. At least two interests of that possibility are: First, harking back to the lecture on stories taking more than an utterance to produce, it's kind of plain that that assertion, though it has some gross obviousness to it, doesn't in fact characterize all stories. Not all stories take more than an utterance to produce; indeed, there's a bunch of stories that take only an utterance to produce. And a problem which carries over from that discussion is, then, are there ways that we can cut into the group of stories left over, so as to find that they're not stories that simply happen not to have the feature we considered, but that there's a class of stories which may not take more than an utterance to produce, and in not taking more than an utterance to produce nonetheless don't raise trouble with the argument we offered about why stories take more than an utterance to produce. Where one sort of interest we have is that perhaps these second stories don't have the sort of basis for taking more than an utterance to produce that obtains for first stories. Our second interest in the differentiation has to do with that while we propose that first and second stories within a clump have similarities that may be projected, if we say that there's a class, ' first stories' and a class, ' second stories, ' then we may be in a position to begin to deal with some aspect of another correlative obvious fact. And that is that within a clump of stories, first and second stories also have dissimilarities. Now, we're asserting and being concerned with the similarities between the stories. But the similar stories are also different. That could either mean we'll focus on the similarities and forget about the dissimilarities, or we can perhaps also begin to look at some differences they have. And at least one possible source of some dissimilarity, which doesn't conflict with our argument that they have similarities, is that some of the dissimilarities perhaps turn on that the clumps are ordered into 'first' and 'second' stories; 'first' being a type, having some features and 'second' being a type, having some features, and thereby at least some of the dissimilarities will have been handled. Returning to the problem of how it is that a second teller might go about getting a second story to tell which shows a similarity to the first, let me kind of say why I'm interested in solving it. The problem was gotten in something like the following fashion: There are striking similarities between first and second stories. Are those similarities due to chance, or is it not a matter of chance that with regard to within-dump stories, across clumps - across, that is, a variety of topics, tellers, etc. - one finds that second stories are similar to

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whatever first stories? If that's not a matter of chance, then perhaps it's something that is achieved, projected by a second teller. Now that would lead us to ask whyjhow they do it. But just because we can ask whyjhow they do it doesn't mean that we're going to ask it, i.e. , to put any effort into trying to solve it. There are lots of questions we might ask where we don't figure there's any particular interest in solving it, i.e. , as a matter of where I'm going to devote my work. Now there are reasons for choosing to work here. And the reasons exist before it's known that there is a solution. One reason is something like this: It obviously would take some sort of work on the part of the second teller to achieve a similar second story. That work would obviously involve such things as some sort of attention to the first story, some sort of analysis of the first story, some sort of use of the analysis of the first story in building a second. And the variety of types of work that would seem obviously to be involved - before you know indeed what work is involved would seem to have interactional aspects to it. That is, a second may, in telling a similar story, be doing something to the first, telling the first something. And in the first place, in listening to the first to get a second, he may be doing some sort of interactional attention. So there's a kind of direction to what the solution would look like - if there is a solution - that would involve some sort of interactional technology. And that possibility of work of an interac­ tional sort, which may be also rather generalized work, is what provides the attraction of the problem. What I want to be constructing descriptions of, are procedures of an interactional sort. When I can see such a possibility from some posed problem, then that's the place where I'm going to work. So that's one sort of basis for the interest in this problem. A second and related source is this: Among the plainest kinds of problems there are in dealing with people talking together, engaging in conversation, is coming to be able to say what somebody heard. There are lots of supposables about what they might have heard, but one specific interest is in coming to say what they heard. And if a second story exhibits some similarities to a first, then in examining how the similarity is achieved we may be in a position to say something about how the first was heard - perhaps indeed, something about how the second was heard; something about how people listen to each other. A third sort of interest is rather more elaborately technical. I'm interested in doing provings. For example, provings of what somebody heard, or provings of that a story is similar. In consequence of that, I'm looking for problems that can have provable solutions. Now let me amend that in a way I intend as altogether general to whatever I say over the course. I don't ever intend to prove that so-and-so heard such-and-such, or that so-and-so produced a similar story. What I intend to prove is that it's possible that that's so. I won't always say that, but for me 'possibility' is an extremely strong kind of relationship, and it's the strongest relationship I will ever be intendedly proposing. I want to prove possibilities, and I take it that proving a possibility is other than asserting "Well it's possible that, " i.e. , I don't intend to be using "It's possible that" as a way to say anything I please. I intend the proofs to

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be weak in the sense that they only prove possibilities, but where that takes some sort of proof. The interest being in proofs, in looking for things that look like I can prove possibilities with them, let's suppose that while some stories had some sort of similarity to them, we couldn't develop that the similarity was, e.g. , projected by the second speaker, but, so far as we can tell, they just happened to have some similarities. In contrast to that, consider the possibility that there's some assertable interest of a second teller in, e.g. , showing that he understood the first story - to put it even more strongly, proving that he understood the first story. If the job of the second teller, as he takes it, is to prove that he understood the first story, and he has ways of proving that, then perhaps while he doesn't offer his proof procedures but instead offers some product of a way to show he understood, i.e. , exhibits something which proves the understanding, we might be in a position to examine how he does the understanding, as something provable. So, insofar as it looks like what the second teller is interested in is proving something, then perhaps how he does it can be characterized, and that could then, say, be a proof of how he proves. And in the instant type of case there are assertable interests of a second teller in proved relationships between his story and the first story. Proved relationships are attended by parties as systematically different than other sorts of relationships, e.g. , claimed relationships. Things like, e.g. , at the end of some first story a recipient says "I know just what you mean . " Period. We can say that that's a claimed understanding as compared to having some way to produce some materials that exhibit an understanding. And there are other sorts of things that have a similar sort of attended differentiation. For example, if someone tells a story that has a point, or states a certain opinion, then a routine thing that somebody who receives that story or opinion does, is to say "I agree. " Again, we could say that that's a 'claimed' agreement. And people are perfectly well aware that though he said that, he might not mean it, and in any event so far as they know, he's just saying it. That might be contrasted with some procedure whereby a party does what can be said to be 'achieving' or 'proving' an agreement. And there are, say, a variety of things that parties can do that are manifestly stronger than claimed agreements. For example, they might say, after some opinion, "I was just telling so-and-so that, myself. " Or, stronger yet, "I told you that a week ago. " Or, e.g., in the course of a developing opinion, a second chimes in and finishes it off. And insofar as claiming and achieving are different, we can at least propose that there may be an interest of parties in proving some relationship between what they say and what another says; relationships like 'proving that I understand' or 'proving that I agree. ' With regard to 'understanding, ' which seems transparently involved in these story dumps, I fix on that as a possibility because I already know from other work that there are nice sorts of means for proving understanding, and that some seemingly obvious sorts of means are not treated as good means. So that, e.g. , repeating what a person says is sometimes treated as not a good

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indication of understanding. It's known that one can repeat without under­ standing. I have no idea whether that's true or not, and we're not interested in that, but to give you an instance of its being known, in a conversation a fellow tells a dirty joke that his 1 2-year old sister told him. Talk then gets around to 'did she know what she was saying, ' and it's proposed that the fact that she told it doesn't show that she knew what it meant; she may just be repeating it. Alternatively, simple ways of showing understanding in some senses are exhibited in such a sequence as: A: B: A:

How long are you going to be here? Til Monday. Oh. Just a week.

Here, A took the announced day, and maybe the current day, and performed some operation on it which yielded an utterance that has done a transforma­ tion on "Til Monday. " Whatever else they're doing, it shows that they've caught that. That is to say, they do some sort of analysis of it and use that analysis in producing a next utterance. A fourth reason that I'm interested in achieved similar relationships between stories has, like the third, some elaborated technical interest to it. In other work it seemed obvious that sorts of organizations that were very fine and transparently methodic - or if not transparently methodic then showably methodic - could be established for small sequences. Two-utterance sequences, for example. Like you can build more or less elaborate method­ ologies which describe how it is that there is some organization between the two utterances "Hello, ' ' "Hello" or the two utterances "Goodbye, ' ' "Good­ bye" or between "What are you doing?" "Nothing, " and various types like that. One specific interest that I have in dealing with stories is to see whether there can be an order of expansion in the length of sequences that can be subject to methodical characterization. And an initial thing I presented about stories was that they take more than an utterance to produce. They take at least three to produce. And there was an attempt to characterize, say, a specifically three-utterance unit. Then we tried to extend things to types of organizations that stories have, which didn't specify how many utterances were involved but only involved that they weren't a particularly small number and might be a very large number, and the number might be irrelevant. Now when we come to deal with dumped stories we're further yet expanding the size of utterance sequence that we can hope to give systematic characterization to. And that plainly is an obvious aim that one would undertake in attempting to characterize the organization of conversation. So there's a bunch of reasons why the problem of achieved similarities between the members of a clumped story group was attacked. Now we'll proceed to consider the problem. We already know from earlier discussions that the recipient of a first story listens in a variety of ways to it, and can use the listening they do to come up with utterances. For example,

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they can use the listening to see a 'preface' and produce an 'acceptor' that says 'go ahead and tell the story. ' For example, they can use the initial request to listen to the story to be able, then, to satisfy the request. Now does that delimit the kind of listening they do, or do they do other kinds of listening as well, other kinds of listening that we can prove is possible by reference to things that they say? Let's begin to do a partially suppositional, partially hypothetical consider­ ation of sorts of similarities so as to find such sorts of similarities as would be involved in a hearerjsecond teller's procedures for constructing a similar story. There is, e.g., the fact that second stories are topically similar to firsts. Does that mean that, e.g . , what we want to do is construct a rule that says 'Listen to the first story in order to find the topic and then use the topic to locate a second story'? And if we constructed a rule like that, what sorts of stories would it yield, and what relationships would the stories it would yield have to the sorts of stories that tum up in second stories? I want to propose that while topical similarity is present, on the one hand it's an overly weak feature and on the other hand its overly weak status has to do with the way topical organization operates independent of stories, but also for stories. 'Topical similarity' is overly weak although the following sorts of attention to topic do hold: It appears that people make it their business to attend the topical coherence of a next thing they say to some prior thing someone else said. The evidence for their attention to that is extremely extensive, turning not merely on the fact that they often obviously produce same-topic talk, but that they have a variety of ways of indicating that they're going to produce same-topic talk and that they are now producing same-topic talk, and they use them. For example, there are ' topic markers' which say 'what I'm saying now is on topic with what somebody just said. ' And by 'topic marker' I mean something that is a kind of formal object that simply says 'same topic' or may say 'different topic. ' An obvious complex of topic markers is, e.g. , a beginning like "I still say though, " where that involves, particularly focussing on 'still' and 'though,' that current speaker is saying: ' It's relevant to what I now say that I am speaking at least third in a sequence on some topic, where I spoke before on that topic and took a position, and somebody spoke after I spoke, and I know they disagreed with me, and nonetheless I am now reasserting what I asserted before. ' Where the business of those particular topic markers, aside from signalling 'still on topic, ' is to say 'I know I'm being stubborn. ' That is to say, the particular action is 'intendedly being stubborn' and its mechanism involves using topic markers to do that by locating where in a sequence one is producing it. Another sort of instance of a 'topic marker' is when, for example, you begin an utterance with an appositional 'anyway. ' It can be engaged in saying: 'Without regard to the topicality of the last utterance, returning to the topic talked about before that, I have this to say. ' If one wanted to think of it in logical terms, 'anyway' can be conceived as a right-hand parentheses, i.e. , it proposes that there was a topic, it was moved off of, it's being returned to.

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There is, then, a bunch of business around topical coherence, and people of course note about an utterance that it's 'not on topic, ' that it's 'off the subject, ' etc. And o f course while I ' m saying that topic similarity doesn't work, an initially noted similarity was topic similarity. We started with an observation about similarity and refined it into partially topical similarities. Now we're engaged in an attempt to further refine it, and here topic similarity becomes overly weak. The reasons for its over-weakness are that the question of whether there is topic similarity can't proceed by listing the set of topics that the first story had and then seeing, 'does the second have one of those?' Topic similarity is something that the second story can exhibit, though you wouldn't have thought from the first that such a second would be a coherent topic with the first. That is to say, the relationship 'topic similarity' is one in which the second is crucial. Given the second you can see that they're topically similar. And an enormous range of produced utterances can turn out to have some sort of topical similarity with the first. In this case, for example, the first story's topic can be conceived to be ' an auto accident' as compared to just 'an accident. ' But the second story leads us to see that the first is about 'an accident' in that we thereby see that the first and second are 'similar' as compared to seeing them as topically dissimilar by virtue of the first being about an auto accident and the second being about a fall. We could, in fact, be in as much a position to say about these two that they're topically dissimilar as that they're topically similar. It's obviously, then, our decision to focus on how to make them topically similar that leads us to say that they're similar, when under topical considerations we could say that they're dissimilar, where, then, we couldn't figure that the producer of the second intended topical similarity with the story of the fall. So we'd already had to suppose similarity. And that aspect of the procedure for attending stories - that you try to find similarity - is terribly relevant to the way a second teller can proceed. Second teller has as a resource that he knows that a hearer of a second story will be looking for similarity, so that extends the range of things he can do to get it. Now, what other features of stories can be used to construct a procedure that will yield observable similarity? One sort of thing that lots of stories have is some bunch of characters. That a first has some bunch of characters could be used by a listener who operates under a maxim that says: ' Examine a story for its characters and use them to get you another story - where you can get another story that's similar if you find one that has the same characters in it. ' For example, for the stories we have, the first involving, say, a witness and victims, then one might collect its characters and produce - if you could find one - a second story that also involves a witness and victims. You'd have, then, a way of looking at a first to know what to pull out of it which you could use to find another. Where that other would have such features as would permit it to be seen that you had used the first to get a second, and that the second was 'similar. ' A next sort of feature, sticking within 'character similarity' shifts our ground slightly and shifts it in a way that I would obviously find attractive.

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And that is that a notable thing about some first stories - and reasons for its being in lots of first stories can be thought up by reference to, e.g., the last lecture - is that the teller appears as a character in the story. It's a routine feature, particularly of first stories, that the teller appears as a character in the story. Possibility: If the teller is a character, find a story in which such a character appears and also in which the teller of the second is a character. Finer relationship: If teller is a character, then look for such a story as has that character, and in which you play the same character. The business of the hearer of a first story might then be: Examine the first for whether the teller is a character. If he's a character look for a second story in which you appear as the same character. Now that could be a procedure; one that has an extraordinary generality of use. That doesn't mean that it will always succeed, but it has an obvious formality to it, such that anyone could try it. They might fail, but they could try it. It tells them how to examine a story to get another. And one fascination with it is its generality and its simplicity - as compared to, e.g., having to do some job of collecting and organizing a set of characters, since often the teller character's features will yield some other characters as affiliated with it, as a witness will be a character for stories involving some determinate kinds of other characters. But not merely that. We've now shifted from story features to story-telling features. That is to say, it's an analysis in which the hearer of the first figures he's attending the telling of the first and not just the first story. And there is, then, at least that kind of obvious interactional character to the production of the two stories, i.e. , that the second party feels with the told character of the first, in producing the second that he tells. When we get there, we can examine some permutations on it to notice how much they matter. Consider an initial story like this auto accident story, and consider the slightly weaker version of our rule that involved teller appearing in the story, but as any character in it, not necessarily the same character as the teller of the first. Then you could get sequences like this first story in which A was a witness to an auto accident, and some second story in which a witness and victims also appear, but where the teller of the second is a victim. And now the second story might run, "I was in an auto accident, I was lying on the pavement, and here were all these people standing and gawking at us. " That is to say, the comment the second story might be making about the first would be something about, e.g . , the immorality of the kind of thing the first reported he had done. By shifting the characters that the two tellers take, one can systematically get that the first and second are not merely similar or dissimilar, but that the second agrees or disagrees with the first, and a variety of such sorts of interactional features. If, then, a second teller is not so much interested in achieving 'similarity, ' but in achieving some feature that similarity can let him get, like 'agreement, ' then the relationship between the characters and the tellers can be quite crucial. If, e.g. , it were the business of a second story to deal with the uniqueness of the experience of the first, then again that the tellers stood in similar or different character statuses in the two stories would be relevant to, e.g., the non-uniqueness of ca first's experience

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being exhibited. And again, in the story we start with, the issue of whether it appeared in the news and perhaps why it didn't is something that the teller of the second can deal with. 1 Now the procedure we've offered involves the hearer of the first monitoring it in terms of the teller being a character in it, and using that to find a story in which they also appear and are the same character. In order to use that procedure to produce an observably similar story, it's not enough to use it and get a story that can be told sometime. Part of the way of achieving a similar story turns on discovering a candidate within a rather sharply delimited conversation time. That is, the second stories that are observably 'similar second stories' go right after the first story. And that has a kind of a large import to it. Finding a story to place right after a first involves remembering a story, where the story that is remembered may tum out to be something remembered from an extraordinarily divergent sort of past. People will routinely tum up with stories, delivered precisely on the completion of a first, which involve them in remembering events from ten, rwenty years before. What that tells us is that it's not just that people can put their memories to the service of a conversation, but they can put their memories to that service and get results within this remarkably short time period. And with regard to showing that you're attentive to the other party, which is a general matter relating to the sorts of things we've been talking about, it may be that there isn't a better way to do it than to show that the things they say have a full control over your memory. That is to say, you put your memory utterly at their service and it yields results of this speed. Not, e.g. , ' 'I'll think about it and come up with a story and next week I'll tell you what it reminded me of, " but within the constraints of close to next utterance, a story is produced. That's a kind of way of saying ' my mind is with you,' where it's also known that the mind that I'm saying is with you doesn't produce its remembrances at will, but just produces them. It isn't a self-conscious search for stories, you're not looking to be accommodating, they simply pop into your head. And if one wants to know what the ways are that a conversation can be shown to be ' absorbing, ' plainly it would be hard to find better ways of showing that than that one is able to dredge up stories that you figure you haven't thought of in some indefinitely long period, at the spur of this sort of moment. And that we do it is at least one sort of evidence for the fact that one is engaged in these kinds of analyses, using them to find things to say. Let me make a side comment that I figure is sort of important. Suppose we were going about designing the way minds should store experience. And suppose the experiences we're thinking of are those in which people appear. Now we can think of kinds of rules we might impose for the ways that minds should store those experiences. Obvious possibilities would involve, e.g. : Store the information in terms of what anybody would say was the most important 1 There follows "an excursus on the import of reliability" consisting of matters dealt with in Winter 1 9 7 0 , lecture 1 , pp. 1 63-4 and 1 69-7 1 . It has been omitted here.

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aspect of it or the most important figure in it. Then you'd have a situation where, say, the experience would be stored in terms of collections of different characters selected in terms of interest, importance, whatever else. Now one neat and possibly general way to have experiences stored, though it's one that could create lots of difficulties, is to say: Whatever experiences you have, store them in terms of your place in them, without regard to whether you had an utterly trivial or secondary or central place in them. And that might have the virtue of providing a generalized motivation for storing experiences. If it's your part in it that you use to preserve it by, then it might lead you to preserve lots of them, simply in terms of the idea of experiences being treatable as your private property. People can then collect a mass of private experiences that they then, by virtue of their generalized orientation to 'what's mine,' have an interest in keeping. You might, then, design a collection of minds, each one storing experience which is to be used for each others' benefit, though you couldn't necessarily say "Remember all these things so that you might tell them to somebody else. " You have to have some basis for each person storing some collection of stuff via some interest like 'their own' interest. Where, then, you get them to store experiences in terms of their involvement, but have them be available to anybody who taps them right. Anybody can get the story if they ask in the right way. And the right way is to tell one just like it. You have, then, a bunch of stuff stored, that persons have an interest in storing, that's nonetheless available to anybody else who, e.g., has such a problem as wanting to know, "Has anybody ever suffered from this trouble that I suffer from?" In that I organize my experience in terms of my position in it, and don't know that that's an organization I do, I may only find that I suffer from it and don't know that obviously lots of people suffer from it. That is, though I could have formed it up in some other way, I organize it in terms of 'my experience' and that can lead me to wonder whether anybody else has it. If I tell it to somebody else, they having organized experiences in the same way, I produce a response in them which yields that they now will pop up with such a story if they have one. That is, I simply find that there are such, each one having been stored in terms of a 'my experience' focus, but being available to any analytically similar situation. So that though I start with a possible sense of uniqueness I can solve that uniqueness problem by just telling somebody else the story - not even specifically asking them for another - and they will simply come up with one if they have one. And not only will they come up with one if they have one, they will often know one that somebody else has come up with. The consequence of that is the familiar phenomenon of "Until I had this trouble I didn't think anybody had it. When I had it it turned out that lots of people have it. " One finds, when something happens to one, that whole ranges of things you never knew existed exist, and that lots of people tum out to be in exactly the same situation. Which is to say that something happens to you, you tell somebody about it, and it turns out that that's an occasion for them to tell you that

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they're in the same situation - though all you know in the first instance is that it's your situation. So again, the kind of simplicity in the organization of experiences for the remembering that's involved in focus on 'your position' can be accommo­ dated to a general availability of those experiences to anybody who knows how to get them. And knowing how to get them involves that people store them in the same way and tell them in the same way, such that if someone produces one, you will come up with another and tell it - or feel awfully frustrated if it turns out that you had it and didn't know it, and remember it the next day. And it's kind of interesting that the commitment to the proper operation of your memory in conversation time is sufficient to make you feel miserable about yourself when you remember a story ten minutes later. It's a way to see that your mind is treated by you as properly at the service of others, such that it's mis-serving you when you have a story to tell and you don't remember it fast enough. If something like the procedure I've suggested is in fairly general use and is fairly general with regard to the way it exhibits understanding, then we might look to whether there are special places where it doesn't hold, and whether those special places have special problems. That is to say, what we don't want to do is to just ask if there are any counter-examples to this. We want also to ask if there are any systematic non-operations of this, and if those systematic non-operations yield expectable problems. Obviously I have something to say on this. An obvious place in which the procedure is specifically not used - obvious once you think of it - is in places like psychoanalysis and other sorts of psychiatry. That is, it is absolutely not the business of a psychiatrist, having had some experience reported to him, to say " My mother was just like that, too. " Now, while that's kind of obvious, if the procedure we suggested is kind of generally used in an automatic way, then it presumably takes specific training for it not to happen that a psychoanalyst has occurring to him as he hears some story, how the same thing happened to him. Some systematic revision of how his mind operates has to be done. Now, to not be reminded is an offered rule. I can give a direct quote from a book called Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy by Frieda Fromm-Reichman, used to train therapists: What then are the basic requirements of the personality and professional abilities of the psychiatrist? If I were to answer this question in one sentence I would reply, the psychotherapist must be able to listen. This does not appear to be a startling statement, but it is intended to be just that. To be able to listen and to gather information from another person, in this other person's own right, without reacting along the lines of one's own problems or experience, of which one may be reminded, perhaps in a disturbing way, is an art of interpersonal exchange which few people are able to practice without special training. To be in command of this art is by no means tantamount to actually being a good psychiatrist, but is the prerequisite of all intensive psychotherapy.

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And maybe at this point we can have some idea of why what she says might well be so. That is, at least why it is that it would take a considerable amount of training to be able to do not listening in the ways that I characterized as the ways we listen, which specifically involve finding one's own experiences. It's not just that it happens that people find their own experiences, it's their business conversationally, to do that. It's not that they're lost in their own fantasies, but that they're absolutely at the service of the person they're talking with when they are lost in their own fantasies, i.e. , their own remembrances of rather particular sorts, i.e . , of just the son of thing that the other person just told them. It's perfectly possible that if this is the son of thing that psychiatrists have to acquire, its acquiring could have consequences. Like, that being prevented from coming up with the sorts of things one might come up with and say, one finds what other people say boring, for example. Now a classical problem that psychiatry had systematically to deal with was that of psychiatrists falling asleep during sessions. And I wonder whether that they fall asleep has to do with that they know they can't say any of the things that are interesting, that they might think of when somebody might tell them something, and therefore they have no good way to listen to find anything interesting. A correlate is the problem psychiatrists have of showing people who have told them their problems that they understand the problem they've been told, where one best way of saying "I understand what you've told" is to say ' 'I've been through it myself. " And patients have it as their business to say "Well I know you're healthy now, but when you were younger didn't you have the son of problem that I have?" Patients also routinely complain about the way that psychiatrists might attempt to show that they understand, e.g. , where somebody would tell a story in response to the story, a psychiatrist might say "Ah hah. " And patients specifically attend the miserableness of "Ah hah" as an attempted indication of understanding. And of course precisely the son of help that can work for some people who find difficulty in things like psychotherapy is that son of help which involves exactly that a collection of people get together and tell a series of stories, one alike to the next, i.e. , places like AA involve a series of stories where we come to see that we're all in the same boat, and people figure that they're understood and that they're not alone - where among the problems present in therapy is that for all you know, given that the therapist doesn't respond with telling you he had the same experience, nobody had the same experience as you. And in that nobody may have had such an experience, maybe you damn well are crazy. That is to say, the way you find out you're not crazy is that people who you figure aren't crazy tell you that they've had exactly the same experience you had. Now they may say "lots of people had it, " but that's quite different than saying " I had it and here's the�way it went. " That's the difference between claiming it and showing it.

Lecture 6

Hypothetical second stories and explanations for first stories; Sound-related terms (Poetics); uwhat I didn't do" I'll continue talking about second stories. We talked about the relationship between first and second stories and went through some discussion of how it is that a person finds, i.e. , remembers, such a second story as they might tell. Now, that procedure might order a considerable amount of the clumped stories one can encounter - as I find in my materials, as I hear in the streets - and I want at this point to introduce another type of evidence for the second story phenomenon, and also for one facet of its interest, i.e. , the kinds of attention that hearers give to first stories. I'll be turning to a slightly variant use of the attention they give to first stories, having to do with the following: A thing that people do besides telling remembered second stories is, roughly, producing hypothetical second stories. And by that I mean materials of the following sort:

J: G:

J: G: S: G: G: G:

Wuhdidju think of, when Romney, came out with his statement thet he w'ss urn -- thet 'e wz brainwash/ jed I think he wa:s ( 5 . 0) In in uhm what sense. (2 .0) I don'know, b't if he says he wz brainwashed, (7.0) He's one a' these Romjjoey c'd do no wrong types. hh He's an honest man. This much I do know. En whether' r not he was brain-brainwashed, he believed 'e was, so - - that's why he said it. ( 1 4. 0) --

--

The term 'poetics' doesn't occur in the leaures; it is used in this and several subsequent lecture-heads to capture such phenomena as 'sound-related' terms, puns, etc.

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G:

]: G: G:

It's like the uh - - woman who wen' to the doctor 'n - - she wz having marital problems. She said uh "My husband always tells me that I henpeck 'im b'd I don't henpeck 'im. " And the doctor says "Now waida minute" 'e said "let's call yer husband in" So 'e calls the husband in, an' says uh "Y'wife tells me yer henpecked are yuh?" He says "Yes" En so he turned t'the lady en says "He's henpecked. " - - Cuz if he believes it then he is. So evidently he got the wrong impression of something. If he believes 'e wz brainwashed - - then he was. Ez far as he was concerned. B'd you're thinking that perhaps uh -- hh in effect he wuss not. Exllcept thet he believes it. No. I'm not saying one way or another. I don't know the facts.

And the following. K: R: K: R: K: R: K: R: K: R: K: K: R: K: R: K: R: K: R: K: -R :

j : R:

I had a very intellectual talk with my father. Ah how pleasant. Yes. And it turned out very good. (From) the old man's viewpoint? No! In my viewpoint. He- agreed. For once in his life. He agreed with what? Oh, I don't know I just­ heh (He II agreed) hehh He-he grounded me 'cause of my grades, see. I-I know, I deserved to be grounded, so­ No you I I don't! II did though. With two fails? You- you're bound to be averaging to be- youBut chu don't wanna be grounded. I sure do, because -- uh well w-we starting talkin' II (an' he said-) Oh you want him to control. No. No. He-he says uh are you mad at me because I groundedju? an' I said no, he said uh are you sure? s'd yeah, ehheh heh He sez uh --( 1 . 0)-- Well then what are you so hap- or w- uh unhappy about? heh I I You know what he reminds me of ? I go Oh, no good reason, II y'know, IY'know what he reminds me of, when the warden takes the guy to the gas chamber he sez yer not mad at me personally hehh Hell no! hehhh

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hhhhh It's the same type of da(h)mn situation hehh I mean it's not my fault that the society couldn't - I want also to consider the constructing of explanations for a first story, where producing a hypothetical second story and building a constructed explanation for a first story have some closely similar aspects. The construction operates under very similar constraints in some ways, to the telling of a second story. Basically, that it has to be done within conversation time, i.e. , done right then and there. And that it's done right then and there may tell us things about how it could be done; what kinds of attentions to a first are used. I'll be focussing on the following fragment. K: R:

B: A: B: B:

A: B: A: B: A: B: A: B: A: B: A: A: B: A: B: A: B:

A:

B: -+- A : B: A:

! hev a gurripe. hhhnh! What's the grllipe dear. And oh boy hhhnhh heh heh heh hhh! Well, eh-eh The trai::ns, Yuh know Theh-the-the people.hh Uh-why: : : , eh dizzat- do not. They. hh respec' . The so called white ca:ne (bohk). In other words, if they see me wih the ca:ne, trav'ling the city essetta, hh why do they not give me, the so called right of way. Etcetra. Well they probably II do, once they see it. Wah dintenehh Uh, The I I trouble is­ No they don't Brad. Ha' d'yih know. Becuz I've been on th' trai:n before en they don't care whether I live 'r die hh hh Well, [[ Uh­ May[[ Yihknow­ Maybe[[ Dear wait wait wait, wait? ) ( [[ Wait. Go 'head. No:w. N: d-d[[ Okay. Don' ask a question 'n then answer it. Go 'head. Uh: : , You see what happens, with- specially with New Yorkers, i:s? thet they get a: :ll preoccupie: :d with their own problum: :s [[ Yes. -with the::- fallout an' the pollution, en the II b-en the landlord,

Part IV

264 B: B: A: B: A: B: A:

Yeah mm hm, Yeah. [[ And they don't( ) Nuh waitaminnit, Lemme finish, Guh 'head And they don't notice. (pause) -

This is from a radio call-in program in New York called the Brad Crandall Show. B is a lady caller and A is Brad Crandall, the guy who takes the calls. Now supposing that Crandall comes up with his explanation right then and there, one wants to see what kinds of attention he has given to the story to come up with the explanation. We note that what he has to do is to solve the problem posed, 'Why don't people give a blind lady with a white cane the kind of treatment they're supposed to?' And you could give all kinds of explanations. Or you could give no explanation, i.e. , he could commiserate with her: "People in New York are miserable, thanks for letting us know, I hope they do better. " He comes up with an explanation and I want to focus on the magnificent delicacy of the relationship between the story-problem she poses and the explanation he offers. A virtue of that relationship is that we can see some of the ways in which the second-story phenomenon operates - here in a particularly eerie way. What I mean to point to is, first of all, the way in which vision conceptions or terms kind of pervade his explanation. For example, in the sequence just following her presentation of the problem: "Why do they not give me the so called right of way, " he says "Well they probably do, once they SEE it. " Then her denial, and then his question, " How do you know?" which is after all directed to someone who is supposed to be blind, and isn't then 'how do you know' in the sense of 'go ahead and tell me how you know, ' but 'how do you know, in that you couldn't see whetherjwhat they see. ' Again, let me note that, that "they probably do, once they see it" is constructed by him, i.e. , he is making this up now. And were she to have said to it, "How do you know?" she would be in just as good a position as he is. But he's using some of the information she's given him to start out to construct an explanation, and he's already so satisfied with it that he can use a ' 'How do you know?' ' in that strong position, i.e. , 'if you can't see, how do you know?, ' where, as I say, how does he know is something that is just as well askable. Then I guess he gets a little bit of time to begin to play around with producing an explanation, and he produces one that has, as I hope you'll see, this kind of real eeriness to it. He constructs some New Yorkers in the train. Now that's kind of interesting because though indeed it takes place in New York, and the people on the train could be conceived of as 'New Yorkers, ' plainly enough, for lots of them, at any given time that they're on the train going somewhere, their identities as they're travelling may only incidentally be 'New Yorkers' - aside from the fact that a lot of them aren't New Yorkers

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in any event. But 'the city' and 'the trains' are among the data that he was given, and so now he constructs ' New Yorkers. ' Not only does he use the data to find a population, ' New Yorkers, ' but he also uses it to locate some class of problems that tum on their identification being 'New Yorkers, ' i.e. , specifically ' New York's problems. ' Whether anybody has such a problem, has such a problem when they're on the train, is another question altogether. But, having located this type from the materials given - and it's a talked-of type - he's able to turn that into 'a New Yorker with New Yorkers' problems. ' Now what he does is not just to find New Yorkers with some New Yorker's problems, but to give them the character of these-problems­ preoccupied. The character of 'preoccupied' here is more delicate than I think I can confidently say, so I'll just notice it. The term 'preoccupied' bears some kind of sound relationship to something like 'having something in the way of your eyes, ' i.e. , there's a thing like 'ocular' that seems somehow to be involved here in the picking of 'preoccupied' - given, in any event, the way in which he's using visional conceptions here. That is to say, people could perfectly well be 'preoccupied' with a problem without it affecting what they see; particularly they can be 'preoccupied' with problems without it affecting that they see somebody is blind. But there's a wonderful argumentative relationship here. Talking to someone who's blind, ttying to bring them to appreciate the problems of others, a best way to bring them to that appreciation is presumably to find some such problem of others as does to them what yours does to you, i.e. , that others face problems which lead them not to see, as you face a problem which leads you not to see. He could, after all, have come up with any number of reasons why they don't happen to give her the right of way, but what he does is to find a parallel problem to hers; some matters which, as a sheer abstract argument, have this parallel to her situation: 'You have some problem that leads you to not be able to see. And now you're complaining about others. Well why don't you then be a little bit more thoughtful and realize that they also have problems which prevent them noticing. It happens that what their problems prevent them from noticing is people who can't see. ' Though again, when we take it apart it's not clear that there is any such person, 'the New Yorker; ' that if there are 'New Yorkers' that whatever they're occupied with when they travel the trains are specifically ' New Yorkers' problems' , as pollution is a 'New York problem. ' A given person travelling on a train may have some problem in mind, but for this package to be brought off it turns out that they have 'New Yorker's problems. ' And of course furthermore, while they could have all sorts of problems on their minds, that their problems would lead them not to notice something is another question. And in any event, if they have those problems that lead them not to notice something, that their problems lead them not to notice a blind person is an altogether different thing. Now the eeriness of the thing is the way in which the explanation is built on the spur of the moment. And perhaps that's the only way this explanation

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could have come to be built. That is, doing it on the spur of the moment provides for the kind of examination he makes of what she's done. And that then leads him to produce, using what she's done as his data, an explanation that should satisfy her by virtue of the kind of complaint she has. 'Why don't people notice somebody's seeing problem?' 'They have them of their own ­ as you should know better than anybody. ' 1 So in a way, not being really prepared to have an answer, you might be in a perfectly good position to build a convincing - and perhaps altogether too elegant - answer, given some problem. One kind of question is, after all, how do people go about coming up with answers to the questions they get, right off, just like that? People are asking people all kinds of questions, posing problems of this sort. And they have answers. Do they have answers or can they just use the problem to get themselves answers? Having more time, he might well not have come up with so elegant an answer. But being strapped for time, it's not that he can't find a solution, it's maybe that the solution he finds will be radically parasitic on the problem, as this one is. Of course it may well be that there's some kind of filtering that has somebody who can operate on what people give him, with this kind of rapidity, being specifically virtuoso for this job or jobs like it. But one wants to think, then, about what kind of virtuosity it is, and whether having rapid answers of this sort is a virtue that would yield good solutions. And I have no idea whether people who heard it, or whether he or she, felt any of its eeriness. I wonder, because I guess at least on some occasions one feels that the conversation was kind of eerie, and if things are going on like those that are going on here, then you might have some way of seeing that there's some kind of systematic basis for the feeling of it being eerie. The gross point, then, is if people don't have a second story they can make one, in just the way they come to find one, i.e. , by using a careful consideration of the first story to construct it. A constructed second may work better than an actual second, an actual second, being perhaps somewhat more constrained by what you remember, being, then, less free to being fitted to just what you've got. And I doubt that it would be good theater - it's not too believable. I'm going to talk now to the following fragment. Louise : Ken : Louise : Ken : Louise :

I've got a back house a guest house in the back a' my house? Mm hm, It's uh you can't hear anything it locks it has a bedroom a kitchen and a bathroom. It's a real nice place also a TV. Mm [hm And a radio. (2 .0)

1 In an earlier consideration of this phenomenon , not included in this edition (omitted from Winter 1 969, lecture 8), a student comments, " Something like she's blind to their problems. " Sacks responds, "Right. It's at the edge o f overt punning, i n his usage of her materials. "

Lecture 6 Louise :

Ken : Louise : Louise : Ken : Ken : Louise :

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Jo and I go out there some- you know, ( 1 .0) and I've- ( 1 .0) One night- ( 1 . 0) I was with this guy that I liked a real lot. An' uh (3 . 0) we had come back from the show, we had gone to the ( 1 .0) Ash Grove for a while, 'n we were gonna park. An' I can't stand a car. 'n he [has a small car. Mm hm, So we walked to the back, an' we just wen' into the back house an' we stayed there half the night. ( 1 .0) We didn't to to bed to- t'each other, but- it was so comfortable an' so [nice. Mm hm, Mm. Y'know? There's everything perfect.

The way I go about getting myself a problem is to see, e.g. , what sorts of orderlinesses, similarities, are noticeable in some fragment. Having noticed them, then I can try to see whether there's something about them that could be explained. And when I say some sorts of orderlinesses or similarities, that's kind of different than some of the things one might initially ask, proceeding in the ways one proceeds in the first instance, e.g. , to say "Why did he do that?" for something you see him doing: "Why did they pause there?" "Why did they put this word in?" Now at least a reason for starting with some observations, and some observations which at least tentatively locate some sorts of orderliness, is that if you have some observations in the first instance, then it may be that even though your initial formulation of a problem needs to get rejected, doesn't turn out to be solvable, etc. , you have nonetheless seen something going on in the fragment that you might be able to find in something else, or you might at least have an observation which needs to be turned into a problem. There are some instances of that here. As a lay matter, it's initially noticeable about Louise's story that she seems sort of defensive about what she did. And in noticing her defensiveness I'm noticing things like: In the first instance, she says 'what we didn't do, ' "We didn't go to bed . " And I have at least an initial interest in a report in a story, of something one didn't do. Why does she say 'what we didn't do'? And for that interest I have a kind of generalized analytic basis which is: Unless there's some discriminativeness with regard to things you didn't do, then, if you're allowed in stories to say things you didn't do, you could put in zillions of things. And I guess we kind of have this feeling that lots of things that you surely didn't do, that you could propose for some stories that you didn't do, would make the reporting of them an absurdity. Now I'm trying to construct a technology for building stories. So I'm looking for any part of a story that I can pull out and say this part has a technology for getting done, for unspecified people telling unspecified stories.

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What I want are the most limited sorts of constraints on an item that would nonetheless preserve its observable features. Like, that in a story that says in an obvious way that it's about 'something I did once, ' there is sometimes something in it that says 'what I didn't do. ' If I can isolate that facet of it, then I may be able to see how that thing is built into stories as a technical part of them, without regard to which stories or which 'what I didn't do. ' If so, then we have a gross orderliness, and we can then begin to picture a kind of answer to the question, how do people go about picking some 'what they didn't do' to put into a story - leaving aside the issue of why they put it in, which I initially focussed on in part by reference to the sense that the story is a bit defensive. So I focus on 'what I didn't do' in order to see, when something is reported as not having been done, whether there's some systematic relationship to the story that's told. If there's any discriminativeness for what you formulate as what wasn't being done, then one could initially suppose that an orderliness I'm going to find in stories is that if there is a 'what I didn't do' part, it will bear closely on what was reported in the story, such that if I took a set of stories each one of which had a 'what I didn't do, ' I couldn't exchange them sensibly. And that is to say, there would perhaps be a way of specifying what the story is about, to tell you what sorts of things would go in a 'what I didn't do' part. So, e.g. , when you think about it, you kind of immediately figure, well, in a story about sex, that they didn't go to bed with each other is a wasn't-done thing specifically reportable for that story. In a story about something else, something that stood in a similar relationship to 'we didn't go to bed with each other' for a story about sex would be used as a 'what I didn't do. ' You could see, then, that this was a technically picked thing, for which, e.g. , you didn't have to specify very much. That is, you wouldn't have to know who these people are in very much of a way. [Here the tape

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Lecture 7

•what's going on' in a lay sense; Tracking co-participants; Context information; Pre-positioned laughter; Interpreting utterances not directed to one One of the ways one can attempt to deal with conversational materials is to engage in figuring our what's going on in a kind of lay sense. Obviously 'what's going on' can be dealt with in various sorts of detail, with various sorts of information that you might happen to have about the people involved, or about what they're doing in their talk - in this case, in the following story. I think it pays to try to see what the events might have been in the reported story, and thereby to get some idea about what the various people were doing withjto each other. Indeed, it might have been a good idea to spend some time with the materials I've given out, before I started talking about them; thinking about such matters so as to not have what I say about them be either 'obviously correct' or 'Well, it might as well be that as anything else.' Let m e give a litde background on the data. Agnes and Portia are sisters, middle-aged ladies. Portia is more or less long-time separated from her husband, and she went away for a couple of days to visit Kate, a friend of hers. Kate is kind of recendy remarried to Carl, a very rich man. Portia has just come back, and she and Agnes are talking on the phone about, among other things, the trip. Now, the facts I give to context the fragment, I obviously picked as relevant to what's going on, and I suppose were something else going on, I might have offered some others. So, which facts, that I have from other conversations or from other parts of this conversation, tum out to be relevant, tum in part on getting some idea about what's going on. Agnes : Portia : Agnes : Portia :

Where'djuh have dinner: : with them. 'hh Oh, we went down tuh, Ravina. Oh . . .jj. Et the El Grande, en this Frank thet ownsa place, course Carl's built all these placiz y'jjknow 'n God 'e knows everybojjdy. . .

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270 Agnes : Agnes : Portia : Agnes : Portia :

Agnes : Agnes : Portia :

Agnes : Agnes : Portia : Agnes : Portia : Agnes : Portia : Agnes : Agnes : Agnes : Portia :

Agnes : Portia :

Agnes :

Part IV

Mm: :hm, Mm hm, He- Oh: : God whatta guy, that guy is absolutely go(hh)rgeous 'hh en so last night, they were, feelin' pretty goodj jje know, Mm hm, They had quite a few drinks et home en then when we went down there tuh eat they ad jj quite a few drinks 'n this fella, Frank thet ownsa place, he goes tuh, downa Rancho Cordova, so we adda lot in cojj mmon yih know, Mm-hm, Mm: :hm, 'hhhh So he w'z kinda feedin'm drinks en so finally (hh)he­ 'hh his uh, wife thet died's name's Ellen (hh)yih(h)know'hh (h)en hheh 'hh so 'e sez "Well now Ellen? uh you jus' (hh)be quiet" en s(h)he s(h)iz Kate (h)yihknow en she's so funny 'hhh jj she siz "Okay Ted, " hhhj jhah ha:h! ), ( She- Oh did she, 'hhh en Carl is a �nn'lmun yihknow = ) ( - [ oh he doesn't like anything like that = = [ n::No. course Kate, she- she watches 'er Ps 'n' Qs jj you know, Mm hm, (0.9) He's crazy about 'er, (0.6) 'hh/jhh Oh: : God, en I told im, eh so when she wen't' the restroom I sez "Boy there goes a great gal" 'n 'e s'z "Boy I sure l:love 'er 'n I hope I c' n make 'er �py' ' so, when, 'hh we came home why he wen'tuh bed 'nen we went swimming again 'fore w'w(hh)en'tuh/jbed-'hh Oh: : God, isn'at fu: :jjn? Ahheh! Yeh. So, 'hh I told Kate 'e said 'at 'e sez y- "Oh yer a liar" I s'z "Well no: : at's he said the: : : they- he said that to me" he s'z "Well 'e never tells' me" en I sez " 'e said that­ tub/jme" Mm hm,

Put kind of straightforwardly, what I figure is going on is that as Portia sees it, an event took place on this evening which she, at that time, saw as being possibly dangerous for Kate's relationship to Carl. And at that time she took steps, both to check out whether indeed a dangerous thing had happened and whether she might do something to help Kate's position in the situation. That

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27 1

is, she thought then and there that Kate might have done something that embarrassed, maybe angered, annoyed, Carl. She then proceeded to tell Carl how good a person Kate was, in some aid of Kate. Now that's an altogether informal, unproved, perhaps unprovable, per­ haps irrelevant to prove it, characterization of what took place. And it's just the sort of observing that, when it appears in a student's paper, we thoroughly discourage. However, it is one legitimate and fruitful way to approach materials, for the initial observations themselves, and in that that sort of sophisticated lay observation of a scene is one way that you come to find items that can be extracted and developed quite independently of the observations one initially made, where the initial observations need not, then, be presented. One needs to see if those sorts of observations, that sort of a discussion, can lead to something that could perhaps transcend it and tum into some sort of serious statement, other than the statement I offered, which perhaps Portia herself could offer. So, for example, a kind of thing that one could notice in stories is that at least some of the time a teller will keep track of the co-participants to the conversation at various points in it. It is done several times in this story, i.e. , when Portia reporrs ' 'and I told him, eh so when she went to the restroom I says . . . " she provides for the absence of Kate. Then, when she reports that she told Kate about what Carl told her, she provides for the absence of Carl: "when we came home, why he went to bed and then we went swimming again . . . so I told Kate . . . ' ' What she told Carl, then, she told him in the absence of Kate, and vice versa. Moreover, she tells Agnes that she told each one in the absence of the other. And in that regard, we can note a kind of routine thing: When she reports to Kate in Carl's absence what Carl said, she doesn't tell Kate what she had said that got Carl to say what he said. She says "I told Kate he said . . . " and not "I told Kate that when I said X, he said Y. " So, Portia having done a compliment about Kate, Carl returns a compliment about Kate, but when she reports to Kate, she can report just what Carl said and not what she said that got him to say it - or for that matter, why she said what she said that got him to say what he said. Having noticed that tracking of who is present in reported talk in this story, we can find that it is a kind of recurrent feature in stories. Here's another instance. Kim : Bob :

What's even funnier is, his father said, "Well, after 2 5 years, I don't think we're gonna give presents. " And that's just ridicu­ lous! It's just that, becuz presents are so important to her, and so, he uh she was involved in this teamsters strike that went on that really cut into their resources cuz they'd also my mother went to Florida twice and my father had to go to New York. So jeez! they were pretty low! And so my father, you know, was being very rational about it. "Well you know we just haven't got much. Let's get things for the kids and you and I'll forget it,

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you know. " So, the day before, Christmas afternoon, we were over there, and, Kim was in talking to mother. And then Kim came out to me and said that my mother had gotten my father just scads and scads of presents. And she said that, uh, and Kim said that my mother was afraid that my father hadn't gotten her anything. So I was supposed to go out and feel out my father to see if he'd gotten her anything. (laughs) So here's a situation where it's reported. " Kim was in talking to mother. And then Kim came out to me . . . So I was supposed to go out and feel out my father. " It's not just that a series of exchanges are reported, but who was present for each exchange is reported. And it's plain that each of the exchanges reported were two-party matters for what is being done with them. It may then be that stories serve us as a resource to see ways in which people take it that, e.g., who is present, or the number of persons present, matter for what's being done with some piece of talk. And these may overlap, i.e. , at some places it might be who's present and for some things it might matter not merely who's present, but that only two people are present or that more than two people are present. At least the initial materials from stories that are relevant to such considerations are that people keep track, for single utterances or utterance exchanges, of who was present. And the question could then be raised as to why they do that in stories, and whether that tells us about ways - not in stories but in the events the stories report - that they attend such matters. Let me focus on some other facets of the materials; that remark of Portia's, "I told him, eh so when she went to the restroom I says 'Boy there goes a great gal' . ' ' An initial question is, can we come up with some consideration of a then-and-there which will be relevant to why she said that, or to what she's doing with what she said? Not knowing any of the the context, not knowing much about it at all but what one can glean from the fragment, she seems to be offering a compliment. And if we know that she's offering a compliment to the husband of the person referred to, then that's a reasonable recipient of such a compliment. And plainly, to offer the compliment in the presence of the one being complimented can be doing something a bit different than offering it on their absence. That is, to have produced some such compliment in Kate's presence, then at least one kind of difference involved would be the way in which it could affect what Carl could say in return - not that Carl couldn't say what he says here, but perhaps he couldn't say negative things. And, e.g. , though it was addressed to Carl, it might well require that Kate say something also. In any event, the presence of Kate would plainly shift the sort of thing that Portia is doing. And the compliment is plainly designed for the fact that Kate is leaving for the moment, i.e. , it picks up on that 'going.' Presumably she's walking off when " Boy there goes a great gal" is done. Now, forgetting about what's happened so far, and at this point not knowing whether Frank, the guy that owns the place, is still around, the

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situation i s now perhaps one o f Portia and Carl and Frank, or o f Portia and Carl sitting there by themselves. And if it is Portia and Carl there is now an issue of what are they going to say to each other, or what are they going to do with each other in the time that they are by themselves. For one, Portia could have some interest in, say, making her position plain that all she's going to do is get into such a conversation as involves Kate and Carl and not Portia and Carl. And also of course, if she figures that Carl might have been embarrassed by or annoyed with Kate, then she now has an occasion to check that out. Indeed, if she doesn't say something about it right off, then he might. That is, he might, finding this an occasion when Kate's not there closely after the scene that's taken place, find it necessary to apologize to Portia for the way Kate behaved. It's possible, then, that Portia is not only intending to pick the topic that they'll talk about while Kate is gone, but to take a position on that topic, and perhaps, then, to indicate that she wasn't bothered by what happened and that she hopes he wasn't bothered, and in any event he shouldn't be bothered by reference to her being bothered. That is to say, what took place, took place in her presence, and in that she is something of an outsider to that couple, then a routine kind of thing is that a party of the couple can feel that the person present was put in an embarrassing situation and feel the need to apologize, which he could have done right then and there. So there may well be bases for Portia waiting for Kate to leave and then offering her compliment so as to, e.g. , check out things with Carl and to state what she made of it to Carl - and also to bring that up as soon as Kate leaves, if what she's doing is connected to what's transpired. Now whereas if we only had a transcript of what took place we might only figure that that might be so, the way the story is told makes it rather more plausible. That is to say, these are the events presented in the story. And that's important in this sort of way: The usual sorts of connectednesses we can set up in dealing with a transcript of something like the events that this story talks of, are most easily done when the talk that's being examined is very closely adjacent talk, i.e. , when one utterance follows another directly or connectedly. It's very difficult to establish conneaednesses between utterances that are fairly distant from each other. And that kind of problem is particularly touchy. As a technical problem, it will weaken analysis by virtue of the fact that there are some utterances which are intendedly connected, which cannot be done directly upon what they're connected to without losing their effect. If the exchange between Kate and Frank took place: "Well now Ellen? uh you just be quiet," " Okay Ted, " and then directly thereupon Portia were to offer to Carl some such compliment as she offers here, then plainly she would be doing a connected remark which would have to be seen as attempting to do something to a scene that's emerged. The fact of the connectedness would be transparent, and would then locate the sorts of things that Portia could be doing. Her offering a compliment about Kate right then and there would indicate that she figures Kate has either done something bad or will be seen to have done something bad. That is, although she does it

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because of what she saw Kate do, or what she thought Carl might think of what Kate did, she can't have it be seen by Carl as being done by reference to what happened, or being done just by reference to what happened, if it's to be at all effective. And if she can wait to do the compliment, then that occasioning of the compliment can be lost. But that of course will pose problems for us when we pick this utterance up two or five minutes later into the talk. It's precisely a kind of burying job that she's trying to do. And stories can give us access to the fact that such things are done. Not that we don't know it in some way, but perhaps in stories we can isolate types of things that get done at a distance and see whether they can be connected as, say, instances of A in the presence of B and C, doing something that embarrasses B, and at some specifiable point thereafter but not directly thereafter, C doing some­ thing which is directed to raising or lowering the status of the embarrassing person. Obviously it doesn't have to be a compliment, it could perfectly well be a dig. And, as well, the effectiveness of a dig would be different depending upon its placement. There is, then, a kind of large gain that the organiza­ tion a story has gives us for problems that are otherwise difficult to get at. Here, a connectedness between utterances that may be minutes, perhaps much longer, apart, but which are specifically intended to be connected in some way, while also having their connectedness not directly available in other ways. We're lucky for other things that the story has, that we don't have in a transcript of the story's events. These turn on the ways in which stories may be designed for their listener, now not simply in the sense of what their listener knows and doesn't know in general, but what their listener might or might not have in mind at the moment, over the course of the story. One of the things that Portia is doing throughout the story is, in various ways, dealing with relevancies that she knows of that turn out to be important for the last thing or the next thing said. It's not just that sometimes a fact might be asserted which the other party doesn't know, but that whether the other party knows it or not, the issue is would they use it now. So what we have is a sense of context being employed by the teller, which involves fitting to the story, in carefully located places, information that will permit the appreciation of what was transpiring, information which involves events that are not in the story sequence at that point. An obvious sort of thing is, e.g., the pre-assertion of who Ellen is, before any Ellen gets mentioned. It's a thing that, having been said by Portia she can apparently figure that Agnes will hold it for the moment, assume it to be relevant, but not worry right then and there "Well why mention Ellen?' ' Sometimes such bits are stuck in in advance, and sometimes, like the remarks about Carl's being a gentleman, they're stuck in afterwards. I think there are some reasons why these kinds of context information designed for the listener are used, and that is, to keep them attentive to how to read what they're being told. And there is reason for those things to be put directly before or after. In considering the matter, I think I've come up with a partial answer to a question that was asked last time: Why do people do

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these "hehh"s. 1 I think an answer is something like this. Let me give another instance from the same conversation. Agnes is asking about the house. Agnes : Portia :

I bet it's a dream, with the swimming pool enclosed huh? Oh God, we hehh! we swam in the nude Sunday night until about two o'clock.

Now what I take it that "hehh!" is doing, and what I take it a bunch of "hehh"s are doing is something like this: Something is about to be reported which the teller takes it that the hearer should know what the teller's attitude towards it is. The kind of event being reported could be specifically equivocal as to whether it is something awful, embarrassing, serious, non-serious, etc. And there are ways for the teller to let the recipient know which the teller thinks it is, so as to guide the recipient in figuring out what's happening, and also in figuring out things about the teller's participation. So, for example, in the report about swimming in the nude, by using "hehh! " before reporting it she's saying "I took it lightly. " Where it could be read as a kind of obscene event, it is rather to be treated as something light-hearted. It was funny. Where it perhaps could be important for the teller to have the recipient know or believe that the teller thought it was that sort of thing. And it's important to put the "hehh! " beforehand so as to not have to await the recipient's response to it. That is, the recipient could, if you didn't put the "hehh" in there, laugh themselves and then you might laugh, and then the recipient might figure that although you laughed when they proposed it was funny, you may not have thought it was funny. That is to say, you awaited my response to do your own appreciation of it, and had I given another response to it you might have gone along with that, too. Or, if you don't give the information, then the recipient might well figure that it was something else that happened, and that you're not such a good person as they thought, or whatever. We can notice that in this story Portia is rather elaborate in doing these sorts of things. She knows damn well that it's equivocally a chuckleable sequence, she thinks it's a kind of dangerous sequence, with her remark about Carl's being a gentleman who doesn't like anything like that. But she starts chuckling right off, and before offering Kate's remark she specifically says "and she's so funny, " which is to say ' hear this as funny as compared to hear it as something a vulgar person does. ' She can do that here, as part of her argument about what took place, and presumably she could have done it on the occasion of its happening, i.e. , laughing in the hope of bringing Carl to see that it was funny, or at least to see that she thought it was funny and not something that engendered simply her silence. And in the telling of the story, she doesn't put Agnes into quite the same situation as she was in, where the funniness of it was something that she could try to achieve after it, but which was specifically an issue - for Portia, anyway, i.e. , she has no idea about what Carl indeed felt. 1 Not in the unedited ttanscript of lecture 6.

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S o the "hehh"s i n stories may have some bunch o f jobs that they specifically do, and one of them can be of the same sort as asserting things like "she's so funny" and " Carl's a gendeman, " i.e. , directing the recipient's hearing of some next or prior story item. And then presumably tellers could offer other classifications of something they report than that it was funny, e.g . , b y sighing or other sorts o f sounds, o r b y asserting it. Let me now address the particular question of why Portia sees what happened as something that would embarrass Carl. An exchange takes place between Frank and Kate. Neither Carl nor Portia are recipients of either of its utterances. The remark is directed to Kate and the return is directed to Frank. The question, then, in some generality is: In various conversations there are more than the people who are direct recipients of an utterance present, and they are engaged in making out what's happened. Do they use some procedure? What we see here is that for Portia it's not simply a situation in which Kate and Frank are talking and she and Carl are listening and each of them is freely entided to just see what happened and make of it whatever they want as an audience to it, i.e. , they could see themselves as an undifferentiated audience, each one hearing the thing as an independent party listening to what has happened. Instead, in this case Portia seems to take it that in order to see what's happened, her business - whether obligatory or optional - is to see what Carl made of the event. And she figures what Carl made of the event is not only relevant, but is something that, e.g . , he would do in a different way than she would That is to say, at least it wasn't in the first instance Carl's problem to figure out what she might make of it. But her view is that Carl would make something of the event, and that she would make something of the event by reference to what Carl made of it. And while it may be a problem to figure out what Carl made of it, that she should figure out what Carl made of it is something she accepts. Of cause that's a fairly simple possibility, that of the two listeners who are legitimate listeners in that they're parties to the conversation, one of them makes it their business to figure out what's happened by reference to an attempt to figure out what the other made of it. And the more general question is, again, are there procedures whereby, for any size conversation, the various parties in it go about deciding - not only what's happened, but what's happened that's relevant for them. That is to say, Portia isn't just abstracdy examining the thing as "Well, what did Carl make of it?" she's using what she thinks Carl made of it in order to herself do something in the conversation. Now let me try to begin to propose that there is a format for parties interpreting utterances not directed to them. Thereafter I'll go on to what some consequences of that format are. In this case it's kind of simple. You have Frank, the owner of the place, and Kate and Carl, husband and wife, and Portia, a friend, present. Frank is 'feeding drinks to them. ' Kate is presumably getting very loose. Frank then rebukes her, maybe jokingly maybe not. The rebuke doesn't quite come off, but it is something that, while

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it elicits a return from Kate, could perfectly well have elicited a return from Carl, i.e. , his wife being rebuked, though the utterance was directed to her, he perfectly well could come back with something to Frank. It plainly is an occasion for a non-recipient to talk up, when someone has insulted his wife. A presumable attention of the parties to the interaction could then be to whether Carl is going to have a chance or be given a place to respond to what Frank said, i.e. , to tell Frank to lay off his wife. So that while Portia can see that what Frank said is not anything that will occasion her saying anything then and there, she could be attentive to a way that Carl will hear it as an insult to his wife, or a rebuke or a rebuke-insult to his wife, that he might respond to it, and that in any event his way of hearing it can be presumed to be by reference to what's been done to his wife by somebody. Alternatively but relatedly, it can also be that with Frank being perhaps a friend of Carl's and Kate being a new wife of Carl's, Portia could imagine that what Carl sees is that Kate is being embarrassing to him by having to be rebuked. He might then have something to say to Kate. In any event, right upon the first utterance Carl becomes a possible talker. And Portia isn't. And it might be her business to be attentive to possible talkers since she has to know, e.g. , if she herself has something to say, is now a time to say it? That is, attending the organization of talk in which turns are assigned so as to see whether, e.g. , there's a free space to talk, any party to a conversation can and should analyze an utterance in order to find out who should speak next. And a way to do that is to find out if anything has been done to somebody that would involve them in speaking next. One 'anybody' who would be looking for such things is Portia. Simply out of an interest to see whether she can or should talk, she would then see what's been done and to whom and thereby can see that a rebuke was done, was done to Kate, so that in the first instance it's at least Kate's business to talk and not Portia's. Now I want to suggest that if we can suppose that one kind of question that any parties to a conversation can have for any utterance in that conversation is "What's been done with that utterance to me?" then there need be some systematic ways that anybody can solve that question. And that doesn't involve simply a matter of looking at a rebuke and saying "There's a rebuke in the room, ' ' but using to whom a rebuke was done as a first step to then finding out "What's been done to me?" That is to say, the first step to finding out what's been done to you is to find out what's been done to whomever something's been done to - i.e. , that person who is a recipient in the first place - and then applying, say, relationships that one has to the recipient, to find what's been done to you. That sort of sequence will account for one class of things that happens in conversation: Some party is the recipient of an utterance that does something to them, and somebody else talks up, where among the things that that somebody does is to deal with "What's been done to me" via what's been done to the person who's been talked to. Transparent instances involve series just like this one where somebody insults a wife and a husband talks up to the

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insulter, or where a little brother is threatened by somebody and a big brother talks up to indicate "If you want to fight with him you've got to fight with me. ' ' So that a secondary parry hears an insult to somebody they stand in some relationship to and uses their relationship to find themselves speaking up and, say, defending the spoken-to party. In an instance that occurs in one of the group therapy sessions the therapist rebukes one of the fellows, who has gotten into a brief conversation with another about some outside business. So we get "Ken, why don't you make these arrangements out of here" at which point one of the others, not in the outside conversation, says "Yes teacher. " I take it that he is, for one, seeing that the sort of thing that was done, was done in such a way as to pull rank not merely on the fellow on whom rank was pulled, but on any of such people of which he, himself, is one. So that this kind of sequence in which any party tries to find who's been addressed and what's been done to the addressed party, and uses that to then see 'what's been done to me, ' tells us something about when some people come to say something though they haven't been addressed - specifically, to say some­ thing which deals with what's happened. And if there is some kind of formality to the way in which relationships are used to find 'what's been done to me' for secondary non-recipient parties, then, e.g . , it's no particular surprise that Portia could do that, without regard to whether she should do that. Now let's shift the consideration around somewhat. Just as it's the business of secondary parties to use what's happened to recipients to find what's happened to themselves in some chain that can get variously elaborated, so it turns out to be the business of speakers in producing an utterance, to attend not merely its consequences in terms of how it affects the person they're addressing it to, but also to attend how it affects others. In that there are these non-recipient parties, and in that they have the business of analyzing an utterance to see what's been done to them, it is, then, the business of a speaker in producing it to know not merely what it's doing to the one it's addressed to, but what it will do to others who will analyze it by reference to what's been done to them through the party to whom it's been done. And that is plainly done in conversation, i.e. , it's plain that parties design their utterances not merely by reference to who is receiving something they're doing, but what it's doing to third parties. A favorite sort of thing I have for this is a phenomenon I call 'safe compliments. ' By that I mean that if you're engaged in building a compliment to some party present, in the presence of others, then a problem you face is how to build a compliment to that one without thereby doing something like a denegration to the others. If, e.g . , you say to one person out of four or five who are present, "You're the smartest person I know," then you're saying to the others that they're not as smart. There are ways of designing 'safe compliments' which involve, e.g. , finding a characteristic that no one else present has, so that in seeing what's been done to them they don't find that they've been put down by the compliment to another. So, compliments and other sorts of things can be designed to handle just that sort

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of issue. To take another simple, obvious sort of thing, if three parties are present and A flirts with B, then A can be flirting with B in order to tease C. Though not interested in flirting with B, A has a possibility of doing ' flirting' in order to be 'teasing,' by virtue of the way in which C is going to be seeing what's been done to B in order to see what's been done to himself. And plainly parties will attend how they do their flirting by reference to who else is present in the conversation. And, for that matter, possible conversationalists will attend features of the conversation to decide whether they should become a party to it, by seeing what would happen if they did. That is to say, if, e.g. , at a party, people are more or less paired off, then you can figure that any pair you happen to latch onto is going to spend some amount of time doing things that you will find unpleasant for you, or that you're going to be engaged in pushing someone else out. Now if it can be supposed that a speaker will have attended what he's doing to third parties who will find out what's been done to them by reference to what's been done to a second, then you could begin to have rather complicated tasks, mutually involved, as the size of a conversation goes up. That is to say, the sheer fact of number could begin to impose rather elaborated tasks on any given speaker, who could be held responsible not merely for what he's doing to B, but what he's doing to C through B, or to D through C through B, or to E through B, etc. And that procedure we've been considering, which may work in three-party conversations, and might work in four-party conversations, could work for any-sized conversations. It may be a procedure in which any party feels entitled to figure out what's been done to a recipient and then use that to find out what's been done 'to me, ' and then hold it against the speaker as someone who should have known what he was doing ' to me. ' And it may further be required that one consider not merely what they're doing to the one they're talking to, or to some particular other, but to any of the others that happen to be present. To that sort of fact some other sorts of facts need to be added, e.g. , that the relationships that are used to find these sorts of things out can change in the course of a conversation. (Not that, e.g. , Carl and Kate will get divorced in the course of the conversation, but that some utterance will make it not relevant that Carl and Kate are husband and wife, but relevant that they're rich or that Carl's rich, or that they're guests, or that Portia is a guest, or that Portia is unattached, etc.) When that is added we begin to have rather technically awesome problems involved in a situation of, say, an ordinary five-party conversation. Further, add this sort of fact: When a conversation reaches a size of four it can split into twos, i.e. , as the number of parties increases, the number of possibilities for split-off conversations increases. There is then a chance for the fifth, sixth, and seventh person in a conversation to move out of it - where they also have to be held into it by having things happening to them, and unless you're talking to things that they could be kept interested in, i.e. , things that they can figure that something's been done to them, they're liable to move out of it. One begins to see, then, that for the mechanisms that work in two- or three-party conversations, it may well

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become altogether inconceivable that they could be in operation as soon as the conversation gets slightly larger. It may be unreasonable, may be known to be impossible except under special circumstances, for parties to do what they do and hold others to do what they ought to do in two- and three-party conversations, in much larger conversations. What you might then get is a kind of transformation of the structure of the conversation. It may no longer be a matter of each person standing in their complex relations to anybody else, i.e. , it may be that parties no longer can or do attend what happens as happening 'to me, ' and speakers do not have to worry about what they've done to some such parties. Rather, some much simpler splitting now takes place, in which you have current speaker(s) being engaged in some sort of performance for others who simply treat themselves as an audience, and who appropriately so treat themselves, even though they may come up for talk. Then you could get a kind of talk taking place between the two parties in which neither figures that the people are talking to each other, and they can do things to each other that could otherwise be delicate, since not only is it that the rest of the group is an audience, but they are audience to each other as well. That is to say, in a seven-party conversation it might perfectly well be that this kind of exchange could take place without it ever passing through Carl's mind that his wife had been insulted. Rather, the two of them, Frank and Kate, were staging something - though that, too, could bother Carl. I'm suggesting that you cannot simply expand the kinds of considerations that operate in two- and three-parry conversation and suppose that they hold in five-party conversation. It may not be the way in which conversations operate, simply by virtue of such a fact as that the mechanisms requiredly operating in two- or three-party conversations, while they could conceivably be managed in larger conversations, couldn't in principle be imposed on people's minds. Now that may be a kind of theoretical argument, but there are some sorts of evidence that they do proceed differently. Then of course, among the ways that we conventionally run conversations, the numbers don't increase relevantly when the numbers increase, i.e. , three couples could still be something like a three-party conversation if, e.g. , a rule which assigns women the job of laughing and not talking were preserved. So the idea was roughly something like: There's a legitimate and required sequence of interpretation that parties engage in. If, e.g . , Carl didn't do it then he could be taken aside afterwards by Kate and complained to about how come he didn't defend her, and if he says he didn't hear what was happening, that's no excuse, it's his business to be attentive to what's happening to her. But that business plainly becomes an extraordinarily complicated thing when the size of the conversation becomes large. And that's not merely in the sense that Carl couldn't do it, but supposing that Carl could do it, do we have grounds to assume that Frank should have done that sort of consideration? That is to say, the rules of conversation are designed for anonymous parties, i.e. , people can perfectly well conduct a conversation who have never met before. Then, the kinds of general tasks that can be built into it may well rum,

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not merely on what somebody could do, but on what anybody could reasonably be expected to do. This sort of line has a variety of interests to it. One is that one might suppose, having found what seem to be central mechanisms for conversation, that those mechanisms would of course hold over various numbers of parties involved. And that may simply not be so. The number may well be a specific consideration. There is, e.g . , that number from which conversations can split off. Three people are locked in together - one can leave to be sure, and the conversation continue, but that one can't get into another conversation off of this one. So the problem of speakers to keep a third party in is less then that of a four-party conversations which, if it turns into a two-party conversation, permits the others to drop out; where, then, some amount of talk is designed to keep people who are not talking, in. So, taking as an initial tack trying to find out what someone like Portia is doing, can pay off if you extract and construct the procedures whereby they come to do what they're doing and attempt to give those procedures a general characterization. Then you can arrive at the general conditions under which everybody and anybody in such positions could do that job and under which anybody could find what's being done to them. That is, you will be finding and characterizing general organizational, relational, etc., features of interaction.

Lecture 8

Asking questions; Heckling The bulk of this class was given to back and forth discussion. Eventually one of the students complains about a lack of honesty and responsibility in the question-asking of other students. That generates the following.

You seem to have the view that question-asking as a students' skill is something that they could perfectly well do, just by trying. And I might behave that way. But some people figure that you perfectly well could make it your business to do one of two things: spend a lot of your time showing people what might be questions they could ask, or finding how the question they ask is a question to ask. Now, I don't see the sharp break between questions and other things said, in which, say, you're educated about one thing but the other is natural. And I think that you may not make the effort to find what sorts of ways people might be trying to find out how to do whatever they're trying to do, like treating a question they have as, 'Is this an instance of a question? Let me hear what I say in order to find out whether it's something somebody would say. ' And I think that that's utterly a reasonable thing. You could always figure if it's on your mind it's on other people's minds. It's like a fly that's moving around the room and now it's on your shoulder; it just happened to settle there, and nobody's going to say it unless you say it, so go ahead and say it and then we'll see whether that's something to have said. And unless we see whether it's something to have said, nobody's going to know it isn't, because they will have thought it and then not said it. There's a real virtue to asking anything while you're around, just as there is to thinking anything at some point simply in order to know what people are thinking. And that could be as much a responsibility as the other, because I'm sure that everybody has had the experience of saying something and thereafter finding that it was a weird thing to say, but you wouldn't have that experience had you not said it and heard somebody say it. So I think that a plenty good case could be made for being responsibly irresponsible. And it would take as much inner strength if you like, to ask an absurd question which pops into your mind, which you might know is absurd but which you know a lot of people think, yet you know you might get laughed at even though everybody feels that way. And some people are able to do that. Aside from which, for an expert answerer there's a range of ways to deal with questions, in which an answer shifts the question so that nobody knows but that the answer was the answer to the question. And indeed the person who asked it could feel that. There's a nice instance in a conversation between four or five guys who work at an insurance company. One of them, George, 282

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in response to a crack about what's he trying to look like, has said "I try to look like what I am. A liberal. ' ' And the others are saying things like ' 'You're going to have to work a little harder to make it, " "I think you're trying to look like a hippie, " "Not with the crew cut. Now if you had long hair, " and he says: George : jay : George :

(Sy) : George : (Sy) : George : jay : George :

Didju hear that fella on Les Crane show las' night I only saw the very beginning. -- But 'e innerduced some uh, -- producers? of TV s-shows, -- en one of 'em was a h!ppie. Uh huh, Can' remember his name. The others weren't. But uh there were four producers. -- An:d, he quoted this h!ppie ez s-saying when 'e wz, when the hippie w'z asked a question by the, by the, news media, if it came to: : , whether, he c'd keep his jo:b, as a producer, Yeah. in television, -- or, -- or keep his, bea:rd. In other words would 'e shave off his beard tuh keep his job. Yeh. And he said I would shave off my beard, my eyebrows, my head, -- and my arms. tuh keep my job. (pause) Mm hm, mm-hm, How 'bout that.

Now the hippie producer is asked an extremely conventional question, where the news media is doing their job of having integrity in a kind of peculiar way, i.e. , it's a question that everybody wants to know the answer to, in the sense that after all it's because he's a TV producer that he can afford to be a hippie. And when such people claim that in that they're hippies they're free, and show the world that they're free of kinds of constraints, they're only free of the constraints because of other circumstances, and therefore to flaunt that on the rest of the world is unfair, since if they were in other circumstances they wouldn't be free to be free in that way. So it was really an elegant question, which is why not only did the news media ask it, but it was quoted by Les Crane and then quoted by George to his friends. That is to say, it was really fitted nicely to what people wanted to hear, and George uses it to say that that's why he keeps his hair cut short. Because he has a job in an insurance company and would get fired if he wore it long. Now this is without regard to whether that's the reason he doesn't wear long hair; it's also that, that he's embarrassed into a position of feeling that he ought to wear long hair in order to be a free person, he needs a reason not to wear long hair though he'd just as soon not. So it's a very neat question, though it's in a way also a very nasty question. And its focus is on the beard. The answer, however, works over the question, and answers a rather different one. What it answers is something like: 'If a job

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required it, would I not merely give up my hippie-like beard, but would we not do utterly unreasonable things, like shave our eyebrows and all the hair off our head, as you, too, could be asked to do. If they required that of me, might not they require that of you . ' So he focusses off of the particular hippie-attribute aspect of it to the more general facet of it - that things like jobs set constraints on how you can appear. And it may well be that people hearing that answer now see the question for the way in which it's partial or unreasonable. Where, in the first instance when you're asked a question like that, you can't say it's an unfair question. You can try to say it's an unfair question, but that does other sorts of things. The question is, how can you, by an answer, make it an unfair question, or teach people that the question is one which, while it doesn't seem to implicate them, does so. The answer can do that, and thereby affect the question. And that's a used procedure; one that can change the question that had been in the asker's mind, and change the question that had been in the audience's mind. I'm going to talk now about a thing I haven't talked about this quarter, and that I'm not going to say very much about here, but I've been giving a very partial account of storytelling in that I've been mostly focussing on tellers and not other parties' activities during stories. And that involves as a consequence that I haven't focussed on the really obvious fact that often in stories the listeners talk up, apart from things like "Mm Hm" and responding to a preface and appropriately responding upon the story's conclusion. Where it will radically misformulate what happens in stories to not appreciate the fact that listeners may and do talk up in stories, with regard to the way that, that they may talk up in stories affects the way stories are told. One thing to focus on then, is the phenomenon of 'heckling' stories, which is kind of common. We can take as a characteristic kind of thing, the following, from a group therapy session. They're talking about self-concepts and plans. Ken : Roger :

I mean I'm thinking about what someday I'm going to be, and stuff like 11 that heh Wh(hh)en I grow up! heh hhh hheh hhh hh

That "heh When I grow up heh" stuck into some ongoing talk is the kind of thing I'm talking about. It's enormously common that people do such sorts of things, not at the end, but in the course of a story. And without giving even the beginning of an extended consideration of what heckling can do, I just want to say some things about it. Recall that the chance to tell a story is a chance to do a rather more elaborate package of things than one otherwise gets a chance to do. Now that fact can get employed in a specific way, to get a chance to do what you couldn't otherwise do. An instance of that occurs immediately following the hippie-producer story.

Lecture 8 George : Sy : jay :

Jay :

jay :

George : jay : Jay : �jay :

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How 'bout that. (pause) Very honest ma:n, Well, uh, I c'd see that if he really, wanted that job, 'n' if he felt he c'd do much more goo:d er -- y-y 'know fer 'imse:lf, er d'world, uh, doing that. I w'z having this kinda discussion with, this, friend of mine. -whose, so:n, recently turned, in, his, draft card.

A:nd uhm, -- oh he turned it in s:sorne, some weeks ago, -­ a:n', he hadda deferment. He 'adda Two S k- uh, classification 'e w'z a studen' in Pennsylvania. -- A:nd uh, -- en she w'z in conflict yuh know, -- uh, aboud it, -- y'know at, one point y'know she, she realized thet he 'ad certain principles thet, y'know he felt he had to uphold, -- en the other s- h-uh, on the Qther s- hand, y'know, she w'z, concerned. about y'know the trouble she would- she would get into. -he would get into. (pause) So: : , uh: : :m, -- in any case it turned out that the uh Selective Service, returned, uh, the draft card. Now what he expected was thet they were g'nna return the draf 'card, but take away his deferment. Give 'im One A staytus. Yah but they, they only threaten that, they never do II it. TheyWell they didn't, in this p'ticular case �nyway. (pause) And uh: : : , -- any case that got us intuh conversation about -­ uh: : : many of the young people. Against the war, -- uh: : : , -­ uh, -- going tuh� On-on that account or, for the­ n-o-demonstrations or for, turning the draft card or burning the draft card'n so on 'n so forth. Uh, on- on that principled basis. A:n' I was saying, y'know, it would be a pity, y'know fer this guy. -- -tO,Spend, uh, a half a year, a year, what have you in jail. -for something like that. When 'e c'd be so- much more productive. -for his principles.

For a bit of context, the guy who tells the story is among those guys in the business of getting into conversations about the war. And the others don't particularly want to talk about it. Now what he does is, the hippie story having come up, involving perhaps something about people and their principles, he then tells a story in which he can offer what he had as his opinions - not as his opinions now, but as opinions that he can put into the story as opinions he told somebody. So that the story gives him an occasion

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to tell his opinions in a way that preserves them from immediate criticism. They can be told by reference to 'what she said, what I said, ' etc. , without having to deliver them in such a way that at each sentence-end in an opinion he could be quarreled with. So what he can do is have one occasioned conversation about the war, and thereafter deliver his views about the war as a story of something that happened, which then allows him to tell his views without interruption. Now that's the kind of thing you can get to do with the story form. Plainly that's a considerable amount of power for storytellers, since at the end of the story no one is in a position to counter the opinions offered in it, in the way that those opinions were delivered. Somebody could try to argue, if they happen to get first chance to talk, but their argument is subject to different treatment, i.e. , at every utterance-end they could be argued with. They don't get two minutes when he had two minutes. They get an utterance, then they can be argued with, etc. And of course by delivering the other person's opinions, he can already have shown story recipients that some of the opinions they might offer are not too good, etc. Not only do stories allow for this kind of packaging of opinions, but they allow for packaging of events in terms of, e.g. , a view of what happened which, if offered otherwise, could be put into various sorts of doubt. The sheer organization of descriptions in stories is another kind of packaging that the storytelling possibility provides. So there's an enormous amount of power in the packaging that a story has. The question is, then, is it the case that recipients are in no position to do anything about the kind of packaging power that the story form has? In which case, of course, storytellers would expectably employ such kinds of techniques for all sorts of purposes, unrestrictedly. So it's important to see what kind of constraints there are on storytellers putting whatever they might please into a story. And it's in that interest that the 'heckling' phenomenon should be looked at. Because, for one, perhaps the possibility that heckling can be done can serve as a constraint on the story that will be told. A key sort of thing is that plainly a listener is in a different position with respect to the other parties if he is constrained to offer his view of what's been said after the story is over, than if he can, not simply offer his view of what's been said while the story is going on, but talk in such a way as to show the other listeners how to listen to the story. If a listener can, by inserting cracks into a story, not simply have made a joke, but have pointed up how to listen to what's being said in a way other than the teller intends, then a kind of power is given to listeners that a storyteller would have to take account of. Now one kind of thing that heckling specifically deals with is pointing up ways that things have been said, which focus on them differently than teller intends. The gross break is that whereas the teller has said something intending it to be utterly serious, a listener can by his remark show other listeners that the teller said something funny. Not that the listener who interrupted has said something funny, but that the listener has pointed out that something the teller said was funny. In the case at hand, "I mean I'm thinking about someday what I'm going to be and stuff like that" is intended

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as a perfectly serious remark, where "When I grow up points out a conventional and funny-in-that-way aspect of what was said. And that that's done in the course of the story provides that with it the heckler can affect the other listeners. Now, things like a listener laughing might not sufficiently do that, since people might not know what he's laughing at. But by finding a thing to say that points up that something was funny, he can bring other listeners to find what else is funny, and thereby begin to weaken the kinds of power the teller has. And thereby, in that that's then a known capacity that listeners have, tellers have got to be aware and perhaps design their stories so as to not invite heckling, or to be in some way invulnerable to heckling as a possibility. And they thereby may do, e.g. , less controversial or less conventional stories. So a kind of central thing about the heckling possibility is what it can focus on. You could imagine that if it were perfectly well agreed upon by everybody, overtly or not, that what the teller was talking about was serious, the teller would be in an invulnerable position. That is to say, if he were talking seriously on a serious subject, then he couldn't be heckled. It turns out that a marked separation is attended between a serious subject and the way a thing is being told, where you can heckle the way it's being told without affecting the seriousness of the subject. You can heckle that it's being told too seriously for the subject, or that it's being told in an utterly conventional fashion, so that you're heckling the how-it's-being-told, and not implicating the what's-being-talked-of. So one use of heckling serves as a kind of check on the sort of seriousness that a story gets delivered with, such that any disproportionate seriousness put into a story can be heckled out of it, and it can be brought back to some view of the appropriate way to tell that story. So, e.g. , a teller does not have the power to deliver something serious as though it were the end of the world. The heckling possibility which monitors the how-it's-told can keep storytellers in line with anybody's view of the subject they're telling the story about. And I think one can find that when tellers try to build it up more, that's a thing they get heckled down about. Now one wants first of all to treat the fact of heckling as something that is to be seen not only for its actual occurrence but for its possible occurrence, where stories can perhaps be designed so as to avoid heckling, and being designed to avoid heckling they might be different than were they built without fear of heckling. At least one way to see that would be to imagine, say, some possibly controversal story being told to audiences of different characteristics. When, say, some political figure is telling a story to an audience that he knows is altogether with him, he may tell it in an utterly more extravagant way than when he tells it to an audience he figures may be hostile. The sheer design of it may be affected by such a possibility as that he could be heckled down to a reasonable position. So you don't want to treat heckling sheerly for its occurrence. I'm suggesting that people heckle in the course of a story as compared to making remarks at the end of it so as to affect other listeners' hearing of the

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story, and in doing that, affect the teller; to indicate to the teller that he doesn't have the kind of control of the way the audience hears things that he can suppose he has if he has no hecklers. In that way, the heckling job can be an utterly serious kind of job, in which the storyteller's view of his story, e.g. , that it's serious, that it's this serious, is something that he wins or doesn't win. It isn't that a story told as serious is serious, but that if it comes off as serious it's a matter of the others acknowledging that, or not arguing it.

Part V Winter 1971

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks © 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6

February 1 9

Poetics; Tracking co-participants; Touched-off topics; Stepwise topical movement Portia :

Agnes : Portia : Agnes : Portia : Agnes : Portia :

But we wen' in, uh the Billy Michaels place on the way back, en uh, had- uh, they had en after dinner drink God there wasn't a soul in we were the only ones et the bar en there w'z about two parties in the II dining roomYeah En I didn' wanna say- eh: : Kate said she always wanduh see it so, "I never said anything but- uh Carl said t'day he sez "Wasn' that the dirtiest place?" [[Yeh. En I said "Yihknow? I felt the same thing? But I didn' wanna say anything to yuh, but I jis' flleltYah. -dirty when I walked on the �et.

Portia has just come back from a vacation and is talking to her sister. She has been visiting a friend of hers, Kate, and Kate's new husband, Carl. Let me just point out a few things. We can notice the "they" in "But we went in uh the Billy Michaels place on the way back, and uh, had- uh THEY had an after-dinner drink" as a curious sort of thing, where a specific point is being made. If she were to say "We went in on the way back and had an after-dinner drink" she would not be necessarily making any statement about herself drinking. To say "We went in . . . and they had a drink" is to specifically mark that she didn't. Another thing. Looking at the occurrence of " . . . God . . . soul . . . only ones . . . " in " . . . God there wasn't a soul in we were the only ones at the bar . . . " one might say - after having it pointed out - Well, we're just playing with something that really has no orderliness to it, it just happened that "God" and "soul" are closely juxtaposed here. There's no import to it. There's no real relationship in terms of how the talk was produced, i.e. , there's nothing that would have involved "soul" being produced by reference to the fact that "God" was said. Not to mention the utterly absurd relationship between "soul" and "only", in the s-o-1-e sense of the word. But all I'd like to get at is this: When you have such an investigative aim as mine, which is to try to discover sorts of detailed relationships that might tum out Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks © 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6

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to exist, then, when you notice these sorts of juxtapositions of things that are otherwise known to have semantic relationships, the question is then to be asked, Well, is there anything to it? Does "soul" get used somehow by reference to the fact that "God" was used? And does "only" get used by reference to the fact that there is this ambiguity between s-o-u-1 and s-o-1-e? Then you can just pull it out, and say, Well, who knows? Noticing it, you get the possibility of investigating it. Laughing it off in the first instance, or not even allowing yourself to notice it, of course it becomes impossible to find out whether there is anything to it. In particular, we're trying to find out things we don't know about how delicately people use their language. Then, any possible extended delicacy is something to look into. And I certainly can say at this point that I find an awful lot of such things. And usually, once I find an awful lot of something I wonder if there isn't something to it, and begin to develop an account of how it would happen. Finding one, you could just say, Well, I'm just being artful in finding it, there's no reason for it to be. Now there is a tremendous temptation on the part of people doing social science in general, to not notice a possible fact unless they already have an explanation for it. And in a way, of course, that's awfully silly, and it's plainly of rather more interest to get in a position to be able to notice possible facts for which the question is, then, what in the world could explain that? Where you don't know why it's there, but you can see if there were a recurrence of that sort of a thing, then you would be able to describe it as a fact of some sort. So we can point this one out just to see whether, having noticed one, others can be noticed. And what can happen is, you might, for example, find that there is some kind of not universal but common recurrence of a relationship between, not the use of ' ' God' ' and ' ' soul, ' ' but between the use of something that "God" is and some other word that occurs. What I mean is, "God" is used as a kind of an expletive. And there are a lot of other expletives, of which some are related semantically, like "God! " "Jesus! " "Heavens! " and others of which are not, e.g . , "Shit! " "Wow! " "Gee! " and lots of others. And you might then say, Let me look at the environment of expletives and see if there aren't, within that enviroment, words that stand in some interesting relation­ ship to a particular expletive's use. It might tum out that the relationship isn't always semantic; you might begin to find out that there were other ways in which expletives were related to later words - and not merely somewhere later, but within a rather close environment. They might be related in such a way as: Bob : Oh, GOD! Christmas has GOTten so damn painful!

Where, for "God" and "gotten" there might be some kind of sound-sequence relationship, and you might begin to be able to see that perhaps there's something to that. You might begin to notice that there are often sound

relationships between expletives and words around them. If you collect your ' ']esus"s and your "God"s and your "damn"s and your "gee"s, then you might be able to put together a package of relationships between them and some rather closely placed other words. So that expletives, which are after all

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selected, might have some relationship to other things in the talk that can be gotten to. There might be a family of relationships; sometimes semantic, other times sound. And you could begin to see a kind of loose but not ineffable not-to-be-explained thing happening with the use of expletives, which says that they may have some position in an utterance in relation to other parts of an utterance, other than that this is the particular expletive someone happened to use. And in that regard, picking out an expletive is not just picking a word, but is picking a word that has free occurrence. Expletives can occur in lots of places, independent of the syntax of the utterance they're in. So that in terms of which one can occur, they're not constrained by the talk around them. We can then begin to notice that sort of fact: There's a special freedom. Now, in that they have a special kind of freedom, and in that there are a bunch of them, are there any principles to their selection? Where we can observe that there are other words or word-groups that you couldn't subject to that sort of treatment. But in the first place all we did was start out by saying "God . . . soul" is there anything to it? Then the question was how to find if there's anything to it, where the key thing is there's no particular reason for these things being related. That makes it of interest to ask if there is some possible relationship. And you can look at a whole range of them and find that more than you might expect, it turns out that there are connections between words like "God! " - now call them 'expletives' - and words around them that have no reason to be related. Again, sometimes it's a semantic relation, other times it's a sound relation. And then you could ask if there is anything about this kind of a word which suggests that it could take such a relationship. You get, then, to this 'freedom of occurrence' where, of a list of alternative expletives one or another of which could get used and it wouldn't matter particularly for the course of the talk which of them were used, "God" or "Hell" or "Boy" or whatever else, it just happens to be that one of them was used. So the task is to find bits of orderliness where isn't any reason to expect it here. And that's also what puts one off about it. There not being any reason to expect it, you might find yourself embarrassed to have noticed it or congratulating yourself on your artfulness, but not convinced that it could be a matter of some real event that you are in a position to be noticing. Turning now to another sort of thing, I want to notice the word "parties" in " . . . we were the only ones at the bar and there was about two parties in the dining-room. " It's rather special, and there's an instance of it in the materials called Trio that have been handed out. 1 It could be seen as giving away a piece of information, or as a way in which an identity of a person overcomes the topic of the talk. Portia talks about two "parties" in the dining-room. She happens to be a waitress. The usage "parties' for the people in a restaurant is something that a waitress or somebody like a waitress will do but other people don't particularly do. And in Trio, in the first 1 See Winter 1 9 7 0 , lecrure 2, p. 1 8 1 .

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conversation the caller, who doesn't work at the department store, says ' ' . . . and a colored lady wanted to go in the main entrance there where the silver is and all the gifts and things. " In the second conversation, the two women talking both work at the department store, and talk about it as " . . . where the giftware is. " " Giftware" being a term that people who work in the place will use to refer to it, and not a word that the purchasers would use. So, terms like "parties" and "giftware" are technical terms, and it could turn out that, having an habitual way of referring to something, people might use it in other environments. Another point of interest is the following. Portia says "Kate said she always wanted to see it so I never said anything, " Kate being Carl's wife. Then she goes through an exchange she had with Carl the next day: . . . but Carl said today he says "Wasn't that the dirtiest place? And I said "You know? I felt the same thing? But I didn't want to say anything to you, but I just felt dirty when I walked on the catpet. Now, you have a sequence reported: Carl comments on the dirtiness and she agrees. Okay, there are many such sequences: A does something - a question, a greeting, whatever - and B does something. But here you also have some other sorts of things. One is that she reports "Kate said she always wanted to see it so I never said anything, " and the other is she quotes herself as saying to Carl, "I didn't want to say anything to you. " What I want to deal with is why when this sequence occurs, it occurs in the way it does as compared to, e.g. , Portia coming out on that evening and saying "God this place is dirty" and Carl then saying "Yeah, isn't it?" In either case we have some remark and an agreement, and yet there are bases for the sequence occuring in just this way and not the reverse way. One of the issues I have in mind for this conversation is related to a sort of thing going on in a conversation we will be looking at next time: Bob :

. . . so, the day before, Christmas afternoon, we were over there, and, Kim was in talking to mother. And then Kim came out to me and said that my mother had gotten my father just scads and scads of presents. And she said that, uh, and Kim said that my mother was afraid that my father hadn't gotten her anything. So I was supposed to go out and feel out my father and see if he'd gotten her anything.

Where you have a report of a sequence of conversations, each one accompa­ nied by some indication of who was there, i.e. , Kim had a conversation with mother, Bob wasn't there and father wasn't there. Kim came out and told Bob, in the absence of mother. Bob was to go out, in the absence of Kim and mother to talk to father, and then Bob and Kim and mother would get back together again. This is not simply a report of who happened to be there; it's that who happened to be there was relevant to what was happening. And

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29 5

when reports like that occur they signal specifically that something delicate interactionally is taking place. There is a similar sort of tracking at another point in the Portia conversation. One evening Kate had said something which might be an embarrassment. Then we get: Portia :

. . . en I told him, eh so when she want to the restroom I sez "Boy there goes a great gal" 'n he says "Boy I sure love her 'n I hope I can make her happy' so, when we came home why he went to bed 'nen we went swimming again before we went to bed . . . So I told Kate he said that, she sez "Oh yer a liar" I says "Well no: : that's- he said that to me" she says "Well he never tells me" en I says "He said that tuh me. "

Again, what Portia says to Carl, she says in the absence of Kate, and what she says to Kate she says in the absence of Carl - and these details are selectively reported. And we have a conversation where a woman is describing meeting a man at a gathering. There is a rather elaborate accounting of who was where at any given time, ending in a situation where the two of them are together outside. And in that case what you have is a way in which things get managed so as to have some particular grouping. It goes roughly like this: 2 A recently divorced lady is invited over to an older friend's house because the friend's husband hasn't been well and he's grumpy and doesn't want to talk, so the friend feels lonely. When she gets there she finds that another older woman is coming over to get some business matters taken care of, and her nephew is driving her. The recently divorced lady says something like "Why didn't you tell me, I wouldn't have come" and her friend says "I wanted you to come anyway. " And it turns out that the nephew is, say, an eligible male for the recently divorced lady. Okay, everybody's there. At some point the nephew, Rick, says "That's a real cute car you've got" and asks if he can go out and take a look at it. She very naively tells him to go ahead and look at it, which he does. And she stays inside. After being out there "quite a while" he comes back in. But about an hour later she gets into an argument with her friend's husband Kevin, about a 6,000-mile service requirement on her car. And she's insisting that it says such-and-such "right in my owner's manual. ' ' Then: Nancy :

So finally I said to Kevin well dammit I'm gonna get up en I'm gonna go out' n get that manual, out of my glove compartment 'n I'll sh- tell you. what it sa:ys yihknow or you c'n read it. 'hhhh So I went out 'n GQd the first thing I knew there's Rick. right ahh huh huh 'hhh right behind me

2 The following description is taken from Spring 1 9 70, lecture 8 , (D) pp. 1 5- 1 6; a back-and-forth discussion not included in this edition.

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Part V

And he asks her for a date - where, as she says, after all he couldn't do it in front of God and everybody. And in the fragment we started off with, there may be something like that going on. It may be that Kate was not present when Carl said to Portia, today, "Wasn't that the dirtiest place?' ' And on the other hand, there could be a connection between Portia reporting "I didn't say anything, " and that Kate may have been present when Portia could otherwise have said it, i.e. , at the restaurant. Where what we have is, Carl is the "host," Kate is his new wife, and Portia is a 'guest. ' Now it's a curious feature of the adequacy of local collections of people ­ and that means whoever just happens to be together on some occasion - that even when one is doing things like talking about something else, an initial issue is: What is it that's being done about the current collection of people? So, to take an example I routinely use, it's an extra special person who, having gone to a restaurant with some set of people, and having found that the meal was wonderful, would make it his business to go tell the chef. Instead what people do is tell whoever it is that brought them there that the meal was wonderful. And that's not heard as something to be relayed to the chef, but is heard as a compliment to the person who brought them there. So it's not merely that you compliment or complain to the ones that you're with, but that compliments or complaints about anything can find some co­ participant(s) as the correct and adequate recipient. And they are then in a position to feel good, or whatever. You can perfectly well imagine that last Tuesday morning there were lots of people who, having guests in their houses, would have been apologizing for the earthquake. And on the other hand, there were people who, being guests, found themselves saying, e.g. , "Oh that's alright, I don't hold it against you" or whatever. That is to say, without regard to the earthquake's just happening, nonetheless it happened while people were in such a position that one was responsible for the other. And there are a large number of events of that sort, where you can get the credit for taking somebody to see something that somebody else did - an art show, a restaurant, a movie, whatever else. And on the other hand, you feel a need to apologize, and they know that you have to apologize and they hold you responsible when it turns out that the earthquake, the lousy movie, the fire, the rain, the automobile accident, whatever else, happened while you and they were together and you were in the position of being 'host. ' And what's involved in this fragment is, perhaps, that while everyone suffers the dirtiness - or it's perfectly possible that nobody suffers the dirtiness - there's a complex relationship involved between the speaker, the host, and the host's wife which is relevant to their treatment of the dirtiness. So, the host see the dirtiness. Now to say that the host sees the dirtiness is not to make it out that the host is somebody who is sensitive about dirt. If he went out there by himself, maybe he wouldn't notice, or if he did, he couldn't care less. But having guests in tow, he's now viewing the place by reference to how the guests would make it out - and, making it out, how they would make him out as a host. I also don't mean that while he isn't sensitive to dirt, he knows

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that the guests are sensitive to dirt. You could have a situation where the host apologizes and the guests accept the apology, where neither of them care about the dirt. It's just that the host has to look at the place now, to see it by reference to that he's carrying somebody to whom he's responsible. And the guests on the other hand, are involved in acknowledging the attention that the host is giving them. A way, then, that the host looks at the carpet - not even in his own home - is a function of that he's bringing somebody there. The carpet is now a something that, it somehow happening that we got to this place, a restaurant I've never been in before, somebody told me about it, nevertheless I could blush as though it were my own home. So, e.g. , it could happen that in the course of some meal at a place they've never been, a person will start apologizing for the food - that indeed they like. So there's that. But there's also that the host is bringing this guest to this place at the suggestion of his wife. It's not, then, merely that he's bringing the guest here, but that if she says anything to anybody about the place she's commenting about Kate. So that she can choose not to mention the dirtiness by virtue of the fact that if she did she would be embarrassing Kate in Carl's eyes. And now, though she doesn't care about the dirt, she could come away feeling terribly good-natured about not having said anything about it, by virtue of the fact that not having said anything about it, she's done a good deed to Kate. So here's a way in which, nothing having occurred, nonetheless someone can feel generous about not having made something of a thing that is structurally available to be made something of. But, then, it is the very fact that she withholds her activity of mentioning it that leads Carl to have to make the remark. That is, if Portia could have noticed and been bothered by the dirt on the carpet but isn't mentioning it, then it's Carl's business to mention that dirt and apologize for it, lacking which he is seen to be some sort of clod. And at least a facet of Portia's agreement is that it's a way for her to tell Carl that it wasn't a mistake of his to have made the apology, i.e. , that inded an apology was appropriate. Again, then: We have a sequence here where there's a complaint about a place and an agreement. And you could have the same sequence with the parties turned around. But for Portia to have done the first part of the sequence, the complaint, would be an altogether different event than it was with Carl having done it. In doing a complaint about the place, Carl is apologizing to her. If she did the complaint, she would be complaining to him about him or about Kate. So her agreement to his complaint is a rather different thing than her doing the complaint in the first place. And in that regard, then, which sequence they do it in matters. What we're talking about a good deal of the time is, does the sequence that people do things in matter? My position here is that the same sequence, i.e. , 'complaint-agreement, ' is altogether different and has altogether different bases for occurring, if Portia does the complaint and Carl does the agreement. And, again, what her views are and what his views are about, e.g. , the dirt, can be altogether independent of what they happen to say.

298

Part V

Now here's a major problem for working out any research. If all you had was, e.g. , Carl saying "Wasn't that the dirtiest place?" and Portia saying "Yeah," you could mark it down as a sequence of 'complaint'-'agreement. ' But materials like ours give you some way to get a rather more elaborate charaaerization of what is involved in some particular sequence, among those which are all similar in the sense of having a first part which is a 'complaint' and a second part which is an 'agreement. ' And you can begin to have concepts about which such particular sequences can occur or do occur. But you have to rum the relationship of such things as "I didn't want to say anything, " "Kate said she always wanted to see it, " "The next day Carl said to me . . . ' ' to use, to see how those things permit you to elaborate on the transparent complaint-agreement sequence. We can also pull out a more general thing, which is to get an idea of how it is that for the different collections of people walking into a room, the inspectable features of that room are a function of who happens to be with you. Let me shift now to some other materials. We have a conversation involving a young couple being visited by their parents. They talk about food for a good deal of the conversation. At some point we get the following. Bill : Lori : Ethel : Lori : Lori : Bill : Ben :

Bill : Lori : Bill : Ethel :

Bill : Ethel :

The other day we were goin t'the library en we just happen'ruh get there- just et the r- time thet the DAR wzserving lunch .t' everybodyYeh I I weOHH khhHAHI IHAH! hnh! En' weThen so we hadda frI I ee, We hadda free lunch. Yuh did?

They had some nice things they even had like chicken liver. Y'know chopped chicken liver . . . I tasted it, it wz really horrible 'n Lori said I better not eat it becuz, ) I didn't I I trust them II ( -they proballbly ( )Lori en Bill I have something ruh tell you you probably heard about it already but just in case you haven't, you must not use any'v the pottery you picked up fer any- tuh cook in. Or fer anything edible, -- haven'tchu heard the news? ) -from Mexico I I ( Becuz uh they have discovered, thet the coating, the glaze is so thin . . .

She goes on to describe the possibility of lead poisoning. Now, the juxtaposition of the talk about the DAR's chopped chicken liver and the

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Mexican pottery have a kind of interest to them. It is not at just any point in the conversation that food is being talked about, that the Mexican pottery comes up, but where food going bad is being discussed. Now this raises an elaborately interesting issue which has to do with the general topic of the way that people can rely on the natural course of conversation to bring them to remember things they wanted to say. Here is an item that Ethel, the motherjmother-in-law, has wanted to warn them about - leaving aside that she didn't immediately call them up and tell when she happened to find out about it - i.e. , they have the stuff and they shouldn't be using it. It was able to be kept in mind in such a way as to have it placed when the conversation kind of brought it around. And people can apparently allow items that they ought to say, want to say, etc. , to be kept in that kind of storage that will be elicited by the conversation rather than, e.g. , going to it with a list of things that need to be said, and saying them right off. This is a way in which, on the one hand memory can be trusted, and also that the natural course of conversation can be employed to tum up occasions to say certain things that you had wanted to say. That's kind of an interesting thing about the uses of conversation. Anyway, they get to talking about this Mexican pottery. In the course of that, Ben, the fatherjfather-in-law begins to talk while Ethel is still talking, which for a while involves two separate conversations, Bill and Ben, and Lori and Ethel. Ben says "I was gonna make some chile sauce but I didn't have time . . . I worked last night . . . I was up all night fighting fires so I went to sleep when I got home. " (Ben is a fireman.) Bill says "You had a fire last night?" Ben says "Yeah" and they talk about it a bit. Okay, so in the course of the talk about Mexican pottery, Ben announces "I was going to make chile but I didn 't have time. " Hold onto that for a moment and consider the following, from a point later in the same conversation. Lori and Bill have had some trouble with vandalism. Ethel : Have the kids harrassed you er anything lately? Bill : No, Ethel : That's good. Sam : Didju put a sign out 'don't touch'? Bill : [ [ Mmheh Lori : Nehhj jno. Ethel : So you put up yer timer you said en it worked? Bill : Yeh but the, the photo cell is on that light, an' the timer is on the

outside light.

-

Ethel : Oh. Bill : Then we have the burglar system too, Lori : [[ Muhhh! Ben : hhh! Bill : En the alarms en the uh, 'hh Sam : I bet if you put a sign out ' 'beware of dog, ' ' Bill : We had one,

Part V

300 Ben : Bill :

That doesn' I I (do anything) But they, look et he:r

They have a tiny dog Bill :

But they, look et he:r and y' (h) know

Bill : Ben : Bill : Lori : Sam : Ethel : Ben : Ethel : Bill :

We aftuh get one a' those phony signs 'hh I I uh, "This place is protected by photo scan" Yeah, or I1 uh Really? What is II that. Some new kinda thing? They'll tear the wires out. Yeah, thaiIt's a, Surveillance by photo scan which is y'know a television camera Whatchu sh'd get is jus' d- a li'l baby ti:ger hhmh! hmh! 'n t(hh)ie it oul l(h)t there, hnhh

Ethel :

Don't ferget tuh watch Born Free tuhnight.

=

=

( 1 . 0)

In both cases you have a situation in which the way topic moves, which is stepwise, is used to make a jump. That is to say, in the first case, the party who mentions the chile is engaged in getting the conversation around to talk about his fire-fighting. And in the second case, perhaps, the talk about getting a baby tiger is engaged in bringing up the reminder to watch Born Free. Now, the character of the stepwise movement for topics is that if you have some topic which you can see is not connected to what is now being talked about, then you can find something that is connected to both, and use that first. So that the chile is in some way on topic with talk about the Mexican pottery and food, and can be used in an utterance that it becomes a first part of - in this case, via a structure 'I was going to do X but I couldn't for reason Y. ' And utterances can be built in such formats, starting with something connected to the prior topic, with, then, the second part using something else which is connected to the first part of the utterance, not to the prior topic. So there is a routine stepwise movement, which is to say that any next utterance is built in such way as to be on topic with a last. That then becomes a thing which can also be used to make jumps. But to notice that a way of making jumps is via using the steps, is one way to see how the stepwise movement operates in general, and also provides for tasks which are in some way charaaerizable. In that conversation where Nancy talks about meeting a man, the first talk is about her friend Agnes' toe operation. As the toe-talk comes to a dose, we get:

February 1 9 Agnes : Nancy : Agnes : Nancy :

Agnes : Agnes : Nancy :

301

Ah: : , it's not worth it tuh be on my feet. [ [Yeah. Yihknow. Right. Uh huh? "hhhhhhh Wul ! wz just out washing windows, uh-a:nd uh, my mother called, so I came in I thought "Well while I'm in here," I looked et the clock 'n eleven thirty en I thought "Wul, they're-" "hhhhh "they're un-" "surely they're up" yihknow, I knew it I I w'z kind of a, 11 sleep in day, Yeh. Uh huh, But uh I didn't get home til, "hhh two las' night I met a very, very, nice guy.

What she does there is to start in a way which is not connected with what went before. But she gets to her topic via setting up a chain that, when the topic is arrived at, it is arrived at in ways that connect it to earlier parts of her own utterance. So she can build something at the end of which she is where she wants to be, and which by its elaborateness has made up such a kind of stepwise movement. Now the stepwise kind of movement is the most routine thing, and ordinarily involves nothing particularly noticeable. But the way you build a jump is to produce elaborations which often have to do with the standard construction techniques for utterances. For example in the above case there are the standard components "I was just out washing windows and my mother called, " where a routine sort of thing for telephone conversations is that a party - characteristically the called, not the caller - can volunteer or be asked what they were doing before the call. In this case caller does it, but notice that the way caller does it is to turn herself into a called. In any event, 'what I was doing' is a sayable. And, roughly, she is involved in the following: She is offering something now which might well have been a first topic but which she passed on, and something else became first topic. By that I mean that at the start of the call, asked how she is by called, she doesn't say, e.g. , "Great! I met a very, very, nice guy. " What we get is: Agnes : Nancy : Agnes :

HI: HONEY HOW �RE yIluh. Fine hQw'r you. "hhhhhhhhh OH: I'm pretty goo::d I h�dda Iiddle operation on my toe this week

They then come to making arrangements for getting to maybe go shop­ ping. And arrangement-making is a way that you end conversations, and of course the topic which has been involved in that conversation. So, via making arrangements it is at least available that the toe topic is coming to an end:

302 Agnes : Nancy : Agnes : Nancy : Nancy : Agnes :

Part V

W'l l!sten I'll �ll yih what I could do: dear, uh: if G.!!)' goes to the boat h� c' d drop me off et th' tr!!!ler. "hhhhhh Hey now th!!t's en idea? "hhh A:nd uh I j!!_st'm not gonna walk around a lot bejjcuz uh No: : : : . No: : . H!!h/ juh. Ah: : , it's not worth it tuh be on my feet.

Now there is an issue about how does she go about introducing the date. She could just say "By the way, I met a man. " Or she could make a new topic of it. And what it looks like she does is, again, to treat it as though it were in first-topic status. She goes through a 'how I came to call, ' which then gets to her topic: "I was out washing windows, my mother called, I looked at the clock . . . ' ' which brings us in a sense back to the point where the conversation began. So it looks like she's redoing this thing as first topic. And in order to get it into this first-topic status, she has to get back to the making of the call. Now, in part, you have got to get at the detailed workings of this utterance in some independence of the question of why in the world would she do it that way. And although it might look over-elaborate, it may turn out that it is no more complicated than other things she or anybody else might do.

March 4

Produced similarities in first and second stories; Poetics; �Fragile storiesJ ' etc. Bob :

Ted : Kim : Bob :

Kim : Bob : Ted : Bob : Kim : Bob :

Oh, god! Christmas has gotten so damn painful! You know there's always this great no one likes what they're getting. You know what I mean? So you say, "thank you," and like my mom, "shit, when's that guy gonna learn that I don't want an electric skillet, I wanna coat, or I wanna sweater, " and uhWell, doesn't she make any attempt to even hint, or evenWhat's even funnier is, his father said, " Well, after 2 5 years, I don't think we're gonna give presents. " And that's just ridiculous! It's just that, becuz presents are so important to her, and so, he uh she was involved in this teamsters strike that went on that really cut into their resources cuz they'd also my mother went to Florida twice and my father had to go to New York. So Jeez! They were pretty low! And so my father, you know, was being very rational about it. 'Well you know we just haven't got much. Let's get things for the kids and you and I'll forget it, you know . ' So, the day before, Christmas afternoon, we were over there, and, Kim was in talking to mother. And then Kim came out to me and said that my mother had gotten my father just scads and scads of presents. And she said that, uh, and Kim said that my mother was afraid that my father hadn't gotten her anything. So I was supposed to go out and feel out my father and see if he'd gotten her anything. (laughs) We should've just left everything alone! No. I'm glad we didn't. But, my father'd gotten her a lighter. (laughs) a little Zippo. (laughs) At least it was for her use. Yeah, yeah. She liked it, sure. [ So we went outSo we went out and bought her a bracelet. And then, we had this tremendous problem of how, now we don't want my mother to know that we did this, but how are we gonna give it to my father without hurting his feelings? Oh, shit! And we finally got it to him. I don't know, we spent about an hour and a half trying to figure out, "Now, how the shit are we gonna manage this thing?" I don't know how we did, but3 03

304 Jan : Ted : Bob : Ted :

jan : Ted :

Bob : Ted :

Part V

He probably knew. I know just what you mean. We go through this thing every year. My father said, "No gifts. " And we tried to analyze what­ Does "no gifts" mean no gifts, or does it mean more gifts? No, he, he gave us one reason why "No gifts. " And I was questioning the reason. I didn't think it was his a legitimate reason. I don't think it was his real reason. He said, "Well you know how the Christmas, all the stores, uh well, make such a big killing over Christmas, killing, and Christmas is becoming commercialized, and therefore I don't wanna be sucked into this thing. I'm not giving gifts this year. " "You spend your money and buy something you really want. And I'll spend my money and buy something I really want. " But we figured there must be somethin' deeper, because if a guy is aware of, that Christmas is becoming very commercialized. Uh must he submit to this idea and reject it entirely and end up giving no gifts, or is it because he really, doesn't, he's not a person that likes to give anyway? Yeah. And this is just a phony excuse for not giving. And finally, I think we figured out it must be some kind of a, a combination, and he really isn't that stingy.

Last time we dealt with some of the things involved in these data. This time I'll deal with a different range of problems. Let me just first note that aside from what's kind of obvious, that the two stories or reported conversations, one told by Bob and the second by Ted, have as similarities that they are about Christmas presents and problems in the family, there are a variety of other possible relationships or similarities between the two stories that are much finer than that. For example, you might note that the quotes of father in each story have him saying "Well you know: " Bob :

So jeez! They were pretty low! And so my father, you know, was being very rational about it. "Well you know we just haven't got much . . . "

and Ted :

No, he, he gave us one reason why "No gifts" . . . He said, "Well you know how the Christmas, all the stores, uh well, make such a big killing over Christmas . . . "

And the two stories kind of come to a conclusion in both cases with something having to do with "finally figured out . . . : "

March 4 Bob :

3 05

And we finally got it to him. I don't know, we spent about an hour and a half trying to figure out, "Now, how the shit are we gonna manage this thing?"

and Ted :

And finally, I think we figured out it must be some kind of a, a combination, and he really isn't that stingy.

In both stories the father is, on some occasion at least, referred to as a "guy: " Bob :

And like my mom, "shit, when's that guy gonna learn that I don't want an electric skillet . . . "

and Ted :

But we figured there must be somethin' deeper, because if a guy is aware of, that Christmas is becoming very commercialized. Uh must he submit to this idea and reject it entirely and end up giving no gifts, or is it because he really doesn't, he's not a person that likes to give anyway?

That's leaving aside a collection of other sorts of things, having to do with Christmas presents, etc. So there's a beginning of a possible surplus, if you like, of detailed relationships, beyond what might be expectable in telling similar stories. We'll see what such finenesses can add up to - if they are indeed to be given any attention as possibly produced similarities. If there was one, then you could say, "Well, that could just be a coincidence. " When you start to add them up, then perhaps its's not that, e.g. , "Gee they've had remarkably similar experiences, ' ' but that the second one is heavily sensitive to the way the first was told, just in terms of the words it uses. And that raises a kind of question that has been alluded to, anyway: In what way does the occurrence of some word, at some point in talk, set up possible future uses of it. I've pointed out that there are these short, local sound sequences in which it looked like, if they were to be found with any reasonable regularity, perhaps the selection of words was history-sensitive for a conversation. Not simply in terms of things like, that a word previously occurred, but that the sound of some word could be used to find words later which had similarities in sound to it. That's one thing. Then there is the contrast-pair phenomenon, where one could begin to make some kind of prediction of the sort that if a term from a marked pair of contrasts occurred, then, forgetting even about semantic considerations, it becomes at least weakly expectable that its contrast term or one of its contrast terms would occur close by. And when I say forget about semantic considerations, what I mean is that when somebody says "I got up this morning and went down to the market, " then 'up' and 'down' are contrast-pair terms, but not semanti-

306

Part V

cally. It's not the same as "I got up this morning and lay down again, " which would be a semantic contrast usage. But the sheer use of 'up,' a term which has a marked contrast term, sets up a use of its contrast member where that member can be used, though other ways can be perfectly well found for saying "I went to the market" . Now obviously ways of checking such things out need to be discovered. And a preferred procedure for me is too see if things found in the materials can then be extracted and used as possible rules. For example, here you have: ' 'Oh, God! Christmas has gotten so damn painful . . . no one likes what they're getting. " And when you get the sound-row "God . . . gotten . . . getting, " you wonder is there anything to the use of, say, "gotten" in terms of the prior use of "God," or for that matter the reverse, i.e. , it's known that the story is going to be about "gotten" and "getting" and things like that, and maybe "God" was used by virtue of its being found as an expletive via the tale that was about to unfold. A neat kind of relevant material might be the differences and similarities between that fragment and one that occurs later: "all the stores, uh well, make such a big killing over Christmas . . . and Christmas is becoming commercialized" In the first place, "is becoming" is as perfectly well usable in the first instance as "has gotten" is usable in the second. So, you could perfectly well say "Christmas is getting commercialized, " bur between "big killing," "becom­ ing" and "commercialized" there is again a kind of relationship that's similar to that of "God" and "gotten" and "getting. " Another environment for developing a consideration of such things which has a systematic basis for exploring it, can be found in the sequence that goes: "She was involved in this teamsters strike that went on that really cut into their resources cuz they'd also my mother went to Florida twice. " You might notice that there's this "really" and "resources. " Well, so what. Then there's also, now that you look at it, "cut" and "cuz . " Then there is "really cut" and "resources cuz. " I want to focus on "cuz. " There's a term that, forgetting for the moment about alternate words, has specifically alternate pronunciations; say, "becuz" and "cuz . " Now, a way of seeing if sound considerations are relevant to selection would be to see whether "cuz" is used in an environment in which it stands in, e.g. , some historically sensitive relationship to a prior 'k', and "becuz" is used when there isn't such a thing, or when there's some historically sensitive relationship to a prior 'b. ' Then you could take the range of things that are like "cuz" and "becuz, " of which there

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are lots, and see whether the way they're done has some variability that stands in a relationship that looks like, e.g. , a developing sound-row. And it isn't a matter of that "cuz" is used in 'informal' speech and "becuz" is used in 'formal' speech, which is a way that people might be led to talk about it. But "cuz" and "becuz" both occur in this fragment: "It's just that BECUZ presents are so important to her, and so, he uh she was involved in this teamsters strike that went on that really cut into their resources CUZ they'd also . . . ' ' And when you've got "God . . . gotten . . . getting" and "big killing . . . be­ coming . . . commercialized, " issues of whether some sounds have systematic historical differences involved seem to be raised in this data, where pronun­ ciational differences have not to do with, e.g. , lapses, but tum on systematic differences within the data. Now plainly we're not only talking about sound relationships, and that makes matters more and more complicated, as there is also the contrast relationship and selections from among relatively synonomous words - as well as the selection of variable pronunciations for a same word. And note that all the stuff we're talking about now is extractable from this particular fragment, where it's in part by adding up the pieces that we begin to get some kind of feeling that some such thing is happening; that the stuff is woven together in such ways. Sometimes you can focus on a particular usage, and say about it that it seems slightly off - or maybe altogether off. For example, the following piece of data. Ken :

She came in there the other night with Scotch tape an'- every inch of the room. You couldn't- the roof I think she's got done in Beatie pictures.

Louise :

Well they need some kinda idol you know, something to look up to

Let me just mention the interesting relationship of having Beatie pictures on the "roof " and having "something to look up to. " But now, notice that "roof " is plainly a wrong word, 'ceiling' being the right word. And we can see that, on sound-selectional considerations, we get something that's close, i.e. , "room. " So that a way to account for the occurrence of "roof " as a noticeable slight error is to say that searching for a word to refer to that thing, sound-selectional considerations were involved in finding it. And not merely sound-selectional where any relevant recent word might serve, but sound­ selection plus some obvious semantic constraints - here, e.g. , a collection of architectural terms.

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With that as a direction, I want to note that I was slightly puzzled by, or came to focus on as possibly interesting: "Well you know we just haven't got much. Let's get things for the kids and you and I'll forget it, you know. " Where "forget" is not quite the right word there, strictly speaking. Perhaps it is a perfectly good idiom, and in that case we have another way to focus on specific usages, i.e. , where idioms, like expletives, have a certain freedom of occurrence and one might then be led to ask why this one now? At any rate, I began to wonder if there was any good reason that ' ' forget' ' might have been said - using my manifestly strange sense of 'reasons. ' Well, we've got things like "haven't got much," "get things for the kids, " "you and I'll forget it. " And immediately prior to "forget" there is a use o f "get . . . for. ' ' Now is there any reason to attend as a way that things possibly work, that there is some relationship that involves reversals? We can look a little further on in the data. "And THAT'S JUST ridiculous" says one, and the next says "It's JUST THAT because . . . ' ' And then someone is saying " . . . we had this tremen­ dous problem of HOW, NOW we don't want my mother to know . . . " and then, "NOW, HOW the shit are we gonna manage this thing?" So it isn't altogether an isolated object, even within, say, one minute of talk. Now it's no issue that we can find such sorts of things. Sure we can find them. But in making something of them, the possibility that we could find another one somewhere is something other than can we get batches of them - which of course is not to say that some things don't occur only rarely. And again, all of these have to be kept in a candidate status because we don't know that there is such a thing as a procedure of getting a particular word by reference to various sorts of environmental considerations. But we are trying to get at some collection of procedures whereby the words that people use come to be selected; procedures which involve that things like them in sound, or things that contrast with them in meaning, etc. , have been recently stuffed into the person's head by something someone else, or they themself, just said. And the general thing is, then, to begin to see if we can't specify some procedures which have the same character. Where we now have a whole series of possible procedures which operate within the argument that words are selected in an historically sensitive way, and where we can maybe specify some of the historically sensitive ways they are selected. That there are whole series of such procedures would account for the fact that in short fragments one can find materials like these. And I don't think that this is a particularly odd short fragment, though that remains to be seen. Another kind of thing, which now deals with both semantic and sound properties but in a different way than we've seen so far, turns on one feature of words, i.e. , that some words have multiple meanings. Now if sound is relevant to selection, then a thing that you might be led to expect is that you'd get small flurries of the use of a word, where what is involved is that a word, getting used for some reason, fitting some place, now starts to occur, running

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through the range of meanings of that word. So, taking 'got' and 'get,' which have rather variable meanings and for each of which you could use some other word, e.g. , 'receive' and 'become, ' what you have apparently is a collection of uses of 'got' and 'get. ' So, e.g., a kind of dramatic difference here is "Christmas has GOTIEN so damn painful . . . no one likes what they're GETIING, ' ' where the use in each case is semantically different. And you find such small flurries of a word's use. It keeps popping up - and popping up with specifically different senses of it involved, leaving aside it having consequences in sound terms for the selection of other words, so that words that sound like it also recur. Let me turn to something quite different for a while. Let's look at Ted's "He gave us one reason why no gifts" which is followed by "And I was questioning the reason. " Now, that he was questioning the reason is something he tells us not merely by saying ' 'And I was questioning the reason, " but by his formulation " one reason. " The sheer counting of it does as much as to say "I doubt it. " To say "he gave us eleven reasons" is to give a plainly doubting position on the reasons, and "one reason" works the same way. There are specific alternatives to "one reason" which have not to do with numbers, but with other things that express a different view about the reason. So, e.g., to say "he gave us one reason" is to say something altogether different from "he gave us his reason. " And the talk is pervaded with things like that. For example, a characteristic instance is "My mother went to Florida twice and my father had to go to New York. " Where to say he "had to go" is to say "whatever his reasons were, which I knew of, I'm telling you they were okay reasons. " "All I'm telling you about the reason is that I accept it. " And this is constrastive to "My father said he had to go to New York. " That kind of distinction, between "he had to go" and "he said he had to go" does a markedly different locating of the position of the speaker. And an import of that is that the sheer fact of doing quoting can be the expressing of a position. Q : What would be the distinction between the fact that the mother "went" to Florida and the father "had to go" to New York? HS : You got me! I don't know - now. Now, it's just, "there it is. " The task of making a problem is such that I couldn't even say whether the dimensions of this thing have to do with why does he say mother "went" and father "had to go, " and then, what does that distinction do. I don't know. It's not as if there is a list of problems and the data is approached with it. Even the question of how a word is selected is something that began to be posed because it looked like some answers could be found to it, by virtue of the things that were emerging as little bits of "What's that?" "Is that something?" Okay, I made a distinction between reports like "he had to go" and "he said he had to go, " the latter being some sort of quotation. Quotations are terribly interesting things, and if you start to ask why do people do quotations, then it isn't at all an issue of, for example, they do quotations to be more accurate. Because if he says "My father said he had to go to New York" that's not more accurate than "He had to go to New York. " It specifically differs in that it says "I doubt it" or "I don't know whether that's

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so. " And quotations are an environment for doing a variety of things; for example, mimicking. So that if you say "He said" and deliver what the person said in some mimicked fashion, you can also express your position vis-a-vis what they said. Now in this fragment there seems to be a curious feature where Ted is quoting his father: ' 'Well you know how the Christmas, all the stores, uh well, make such a big killing over Christmas, killing, and Christmas is becoming commercialized, and therefore I don't wanna be sucked into this thing. I'm not giving gifts this year. " Ted is arguing that he didn't believe that that was the real reason. And now I'm wondering whether, in that it has a noticeable awkwardness of delivery ­ searching for a way to say it, not saying it right, stumbling over it, etc. whether that's to be heard as a feature of Ted's trying to remember what his father said, or if it stands as a way - and I'm not saying that he's consciously producing this - a way that Ted can exhibit the hard-to-believe character of his father's talk. Now that may sound kind of dubious, except that now having said it you could easily enough make one up and do it just that way. So if you say "I asked him where he was and he said 'uh, well uh, I was- I was n- uh- nowhere I was right here' , " then we could say it looks like you can perfectly well exhibit the hard-to-believe character of a proposed account with such things as the delay and awkwardness of its delivery. Now I don't have a tape of these materials, I just have the transcripts, so I don't know how Ted delivered this. In any event, whether or not he's designing his delivery to exhibit the hard-to-believe character of his father's talk, we have stuff where somebody quoting can be found to be doing a mimic of the quoted one's voice without even knowing that they're mimicking. And that seems a relatively routine sort of occurrence. Anyway, that's a possible intriguing aspect of this quote, and perhaps of quotes in general. What you could say then is that Ted would have a series of ways of supporting his position in the argument with his father, other than that he delivers stronger reasons than his father did. There are ways of telling a story in which someone's chance to be given a hearing by the recipient of the story isn't a matter of the recipient now having in their hands a correct or incorrect version of what somebody said. That is, it's not that you have to worry only about the fact that a person will bias what somebody said, merely sketch their arguments etc. , but there are a serious of ways, besides that, of rather unnoticeably conveying one's position on the other's position. And they are ways that we would hardly think of as having anything to do with 'incorrectness, ' e.g. , there may indeed have been one reason, but to say "one reason" is already to be doubting it. Now that line, about the ways a story is cast, raises some rather interesting considerations about this conversation. There are some facets of these people's talking to each other, complaining in an accepted way about their parents, that might be looked into a bit. The theme I want to develop

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is the relevance for these two tales of a 'good listener. ' And also, what a good listener can get out of being a good listener. I'll start off with some relatively rough remarks in order to give us some idea about possible other hearings of either story. Begin by noting that Bob is talking about being involved in some interactional offshoots of a conflict between his parents in regard to giving or not giving presents to each other, and what he should do about it. And that is the proposed source of the painfulness. He isn't complaining about the fact that he had to end up spending money buying his father a present for his mother, he's complaining that he ended up spending an hour and a half figuring out how to do it. And it could be wondered if what he's annoyed about is that he ended up buying the present. And for Ted's story, it could be wondered whether he is kind of annoyed about not getting any presents (and in that regard it's rather neat that he says his father 'gave us one reason why no gift's,' i.e. , what he 'gave us' was reasons, not gifts). But the thing he's reportedly puzzled about is whether his father is stingy. That is, he rejeas his father's reason for the decision, not the decision. So he's involved in calling his father 'stingy' in this conversation, although plainly were he to raise that way of talking about his father to his father, then his father might well counter with "Well why do you care about my reasons?" That is to say, the freedom to analyze his father's reasons is something that he can secure only with an audience that will permit his father to be treated in a way that Ted will not be treated. Where, should Ted get treated in the way that he treats his father, if he's asked "Well why do you care?, " then as soon as he starts giving reasons, the question is - as his question was - "Are those your real reasons? After all, what he said is that you're not going to get any presents. Are you bothered about that?" And that possibility has, in some way, to be potentially felt by somebody like Ted. You could at least wonder: Should he not know the formal character of what he's doing to his father as something that can just as well be done to him, and if done to him have consequences for the way he makes himself out here? That is to say, everybody present in this conversation comes off awfully clean out of what are plainly a series of messy situations. Leaving that aside, a kind of neat facet to the whole business is that while a key thing about the character of this conversation is that these people would be said to be 'intimate' - revealing family problems and things like that - and doing 'intimate complaining, ' yet they are intimate to a point that is still altogether distant. That is, there are no conflicts raised about anybody present, though the same problems could perfectly well accrue to persons present. Like, how did Bob and Kim, between themselves, negotiate dealing with Bob's parents? It comes off with only a hint of possible difference when Kim says "We should have left everything alone" as though, say, she doesn't have exactly the same attitude as Bob does. So there are ways that these are ' fragile stories. ' They come off, however, as in no way fragile, but as correctly experiencing the world in a way warranted by their listeners. If that is the case, then the ways that they are

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Part V

fragile may be related to who is selected to be told them. And who is selected to be told them may be someone with an equally fragile story; someone in a position, then, to be happy to accept the first in order to have the opportunity to - in a safe way - tell a second. That is to say, when Ted says "I know just what you mean" he could be seen to be accepting Bob's story. But in accepting Bob's story he's also offering his own, where his story's acceptance turns on its having as good a listener as he was for Bob's. That these are two young couples complaining about their parents may then be not so unrelated to the way in which Bob's story works, with Kim in talking to mother, coming out and talking to Bob, Bob going out and talking to father, etc., in the sense that now, the story having been put together out of all these partially hidden conversations, it is to be told only to selected audiences. Let me mention in passing that the mother's mobilization of Kim to tell Bob to go and feel out the father is an altogether unspecial matter. You have here a prototype of the sorts of phenomena that are talked about in the psychiatric literature as 'the family as a spawning ground for paranoia. ' This has to do with the notion of families as an environment for conspiracies. And we have here such a conspiracy. The mother-in-law enlists her daughter-in­ law as an ally to deal with what she delivers as a thing she's afraid of - not merely that she's afraid her husband hasn't gotten her anything, but she's afraid to tell him that she's afraid he hasn't gotten her anything. Now, you could read considerable psychiatric literature on paranoia as a natural outcome of the way that families generate conspiracy, but it's preserved for us, in its artifacts, in this kind of a conversation. And not simply in the conversation reported, but in the ongoing conversation that the report is part of, i.e. , it is also that sort of a thing. That is to say, for one, they apparently aren't in a position to go talk to the parents about these reports and find out what indeed happened with the parents. What they can do is find friends with whom such information can be exchanged. Where, while it appears that they're doing terribly intimate kinds of talk, revealing deep secrets, their fragile positions can nevertheless be preserved. Again, what I mean by the 'fragility' of the talk is simply, in the first instance: What would happen if the way that speaker A characterized non-present party B's doings were applied to speaker A by his listeners? So that you could ask about Bob and Kim, "And you don't have any problems of that sort - having to find somebody else to tell your spouse what's going on?" Also, the marked difference that's proposed between what the parents care about - giving or not giving presents, and what the kids care about - not the giving or getting of presents but the problems involved in people's caring about giving and getting. And what I'm intending to be saying about it is that the way the talk comes off turns on their having found an audience who will not subject their reports of the circumstances in the story they're telling, to the ways that they've dealt with those involved in their stories. And at least an interesting aspect of how that fragility doesn't get burst is that they're able to find people who will have a same circumstance to present and who, in accepting the one, set up a way of getting a second also passed. So that it

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seems that "we both suffer the same troubles," "we both understand our circumstances, ' ' as compared to what might happen if someone were to simply apply to them as a way of analyzing their circumstances, what they've offered as their analysis of someone else's. Then you've got quite a different scene. And of course that happens. But it's not like I'm offering a recommendation or a criticism, because we can treat it as how in the world do perspectives which are delicate and tender, like a seven-layer cake or a flickering candle, get passed on for generations as a reasonable characterization of the world, without getting smashed, burst, dropped, ruined. And that makes the finding of someone to tell a distinctly relevant part of the enterprise of getting to preserve a version of what happened. Now, with regard to this complaining about parents, I just want to mention another nice fragment. It occurs in one of these teenage group therapy sessions, where Louise comes in late and one of the boys shows her a plastic beer bottle that he brought from his new job at a liquor store: Ken : Louise : Ken : Louise : Louise : Roger : Louise : Louise : Louise : Ken : Louise :

See our added exposition this morning, (/ ) In't that nice. 'S to remindju of last night. (/ ) Not me, I went to my sister's hhh hhh Junior High Show. v I> We wen' out fer ice cream. v I> That II sounds like a I I scream. D'youYou think it's fun, takin' : : , Two girls who are twelve years old? -- With makeup on? v I> A brother, a liddle brother an' a liddle sister who's ten? -- Out for ice cream? (/ ) whhew Cause my parents didn'wanna do it.

Again, that sounds like a viable complaint that she might have about her parents. Let me give some material. She's one of four sisters. She's 1 7 , there's one who's 20, one who's 1 5 , and the 1 2-year-old. Now it comes to Friday night, and there are various things these girls could be doing Friday night. Preferred number one choice would be having a date. And the 1 5 -year-old does date. Now thinking it out, how does Louise get selected to be the one to take the kid sister? Is it plausible that within the family scene where there are three sisters eligible to take the little one, Louise is picked by virtue of the fact that . . . what? They just pick on her? The parents don't want to go, so she of course goes? Or is it that of the three sisters there is some way in which at least

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Part V

one, maybe the two others, are so occupied that while Louise does not have the excuse "I have a date, " maybe they do? Now Louise says nothing about "and I had to cancel a date to do it, " which would make her complaint rather more powerful than it was - though that's not to say that her complaint wasn't powerful. But what you might then see is a scene where older sister and maybe younger sister have dates, Louise doesn't have a date and has nothing to do, the parents either have something to do or they perfectly well could get up something to do. Then Louise is arrived at as the one to take the kid sister. Now, to be put in that position is to be given something to do Friday night, so that she indeed ended up doing something as compared to staying home Friday night. But it's not just that she's been given something to do Friday night; she's given something to do which she can complain of in a quite different way than she might complain of not having a date. So the parents' solution to getting someone to take the kid sister to her Junior High Show provides a thing that Louise can complain of to other people, though complaining about it in the family would be a quite different complaint. But to other people she can focus off how she came to be selected, onto what she ended up doing. So you want to watch the relation between the way a complaint is put together and the non-presence of the people complained of. And again, the interest of the audience one has in the acceptance of complaints like that, by virtue of their then being told that they can deliver such. Let me pick away some more at our initial fragment. I talked a bit about the ways that talk gets topically connected, and I want to point up another facet of ways that talk gets connected which is present a good deal here, and picture a way to think about it that might alert one to its occurrence. Ted : Kim :

Well, doesn't she make any attempt to even hint or even­ What's even funnier is . . .

and Kim : Bob :

And that's just ridiculous! It's just that, becuz presents are so . . .

Not exactly the same, but in a fashion related: Bob : Kim :

. . . and see if he'd gotten her anything. (laughs) We should've just left everything alone!

and Bob : jan : Ted :

. . . I don't know how we did, butHe probably knew. I know just what you mean.

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The kind of thing I'm pointing to is a phenomenon where what tum out to be the last words of a current utterance are picked up by a now-starting speaker who uses them in starting his utterance. I talk of it as 'latching on. ' You might think of it as something like a relay race, where rwo runners come together and the baton is exchanged and one runner continues and the other one stops. Now it's not necessarily that a given speaker intends to stop, but that the next speaker latches on and seems to be continuing, or might be making a gesture of some sort towards continuing, picking up on, the current state of the talk. Latching on is a common close connection berween adjacent utterances, i.e. , the terms of the ending of one and the terms of the beginning of another, independent of whether the last was looking to close or not, have this relay feature. Quite another thing: The father says "Well after 2 5 years, I don't think we're gonna give presents. " I want to make an observation about things that go 'After X years, ' because you can come up with kind of a neat rule for the way in which those things are interpretable. Let me give some more of them and we'll see what's involved in them. "After 2 5 years they got divorced. " "After 2 5 years they moved to New York. " Now a question is, after 2 5 years of what? One has the subject of the clause "after 2 5 years" being, as they say in linguistics, 'deleted; ' it's not present. They say 'deleted' by virtue of the fact that they suppose that in, say, the planning of the sentence the subject was present, and in its delivery it was deleted. Maybe one oughtn't say it was deleted or it is absent, but plainly there's a question in interpreting the utterance, of "after 2 5 years of what?" And what seems to be involved is something like, with "after 2 5 years" you're told by the speaker "hold off trying to figure out the 'what' until the following clause, then suppose that its subject will tell you by contrast the 'what' that 'after 2 5 years' is about. " You can then get "after 2 5 years [of giving presents} he decided no presents. " "After 2 5 years [of marriage} they got divorced. " The interesting thing about it is the way that that phrase, and maybe other things, incorporates a delay-interpretation rule for a hearer. So that a knowledgeable hearer doesn't, e.g. , interrupt with "Of what?" or find himself trying to figure that out now, but will treat that as announcing the delay rule. And it's interesting that among the kinds of rules that people might employ would be rules that said 'hold off trying to figure out X until Y,' so that it wasn't an operation of interpreting the thing as the words come out, but one in which there would be some storage. And furthermore, what was to be stored for further work would be indicatable by the talk that was posing the problem. Now I offer that in that it looks like a kind of simple, straightforward thing, and it would be lovely indeed if any reasonable group of problems could have what look like relatively easy solutions like that one. Another interesting character to the solution is that it involves contrast. That's nice, and we're interested in attention to contrast because if there is some kind of formal attention to contrast then that's supporting to the notion that when these contrast pairs occur in close connection they're occurring by reference to an interest in contrasts. What a word means is then, in some reasonable way,

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something that needs to be gotten in part via a picture that allows for its contrasts as well as for its 'meaning . ' That is to say, its contrasts, its sound, and a variety of other things are attended when it's done. And you could build rules that relied on that possibility, i.e. , nature could build such rules. Another thing: The mother is reported to say "I don't want an electric skillet, I want a coat, or I want a sweater. " What's interesting is that she says, not 'I don't want an X, I want a Y, ' but 'I don't want an X, I want a Y or a Z. ' A first sort of interest to that sort of thing is if she said "I don't want an electric skillet, I want a coat, ' ' then at least one thing that could be involved is that picking a particular alternative might be seen as posing the problem too sharply. Like, "I can see how you don't want an electric skillet, but how can you expect somebody to know that you want a coat?" They would be wrong not merely if they got you an electric skillet, but if they got you a sweater. So in proposing what's wanted and what's not wanted, it's a not-unreasonable strategy to do it in such a way as to give options to what's wanted while rejecting a singular. The presence of options in 'what I want,' where it's done complainingly about 'what I get' is, I think, expectably regular, and is part of the way to do the complaint in such a way as to have it come off as reasonable. An interesting feature of having two options to the 'what I want' part of it is that whereas having said "I want a coat" you may be heard as saying you want a coat, if you say "I want a coat or I want a sweater" then you can be heard as saying, not "I want as coat or a sweater, " but "I want a coat or a sweater or a dress or a pair of slacks or something else. " So that the two can be heard as not simply a different quantity than the one, but, whereas the one can be heard as unique the two can be heard as instances. Giving options in the 'what I want' is, then, to be giving more than you've given. Finally, focussing on Bob's report: "And so my father, you know, was being very rational about it. ' ' It doesn't sound like a thing that has any serious import. It could be, e.g. , just a grant to the father, saying "I go along with what he did, ' ' rather than that 'rational' is descriptive. Now, occasionally it pays off to say, okay let's look at it. He says he was being rational. Is it rational? How is it rational? And maybe you find that it's kind of rational, i.e. , you could build a decent model about how to make decisions. So perhaps when he says "rational" here, there's something to it. Let's consider the problem. The father says "We just haven't got much. Let's get things for the kids and you and I'll forget it. ' ' (I kind of like the utterance because of other aspects of what is said, having to do with "we" and "let's, ' ' and then "you and 1 , ' ' where the "you and I" are markedly different than the "we" and "let's. ") Now we could imagine an alternate scene where the parents, under a condition of having minimal resources, are going to buy presents - for each other, for the kids, for whomsoever. Then there's a problem of how to allocate those resources. And neither can know, e.g. , whether what they bought for the other would end up being anything like what the other bought for them. That could be okay where there's not a specific attention to minimal resources and their distribution. But plainly there can be a problem where, while you've

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spent as much as they've spent, you've spent markedly less on them than they've spent on you, you having spent more than they have on somebody else of the same group. A solution to that could be if they all agreed on the sum and then just broke it into equal parts, but I can't imagine a family that could assume that; they would have to tell each other. The problem then is, how in the world are we to get into a situation where we can discuss what we're going to do. And the way we can get there is to say "Let's not buy presents for each other, whatever we have we'll spend on the kids. " That ends up with no problem of a marked skewing relative to each other, or relative to one of the kids, for that matter. So there is a way in which the combination "we'll buy for the kids" and "neither of us will buy for each other, " under a situation of specifically asserted minimal resources, is 'rational. ' It's at least culturally rational, in that he could conceivably propose "We just haven't got much, you and I'll forget it and let's buy presents for my girlfriend" or "let's give money to charity. " I don't know how much it pays off, but it's payed off for me at least occasionally to say: Somebody says 'he was being rational' or 'he was being such-and-such, ' okay, let's suppose it's so. What might people be reporting on? How would people go about doing 'being rational'? Can we find a characterizable procedure that they go through, a problem that they solve? So you take a characterization and imagine that at least for research puposes it's not just a casual remark, but that he might have picked it with some care; that it talks about something that has a describable character to it. Then you try to construct that describable character. And you may find things out in doing that. You may find out that there is a thing which has, independent of their use of it, features that we could call 'rational. '

March 1 1

Poetics; Requests} offers} and threats; The *old man' as an evolved natural object The following sequence occurs in the course of a conversation between a middle-aged couple, Ethel and Ben, their son Bill, at who's house this is taking place, and Ethel and Ben's stepfather-in-law, Max. Ben :

You haf to uh, Uh, ( 1 .0) Ben : Hey this is the best herring you ever tasted I'll tellyuh that right now. ( 1 . 5) Ethel : Bring some out II so thet m-Max c'd have some too. = Ben : Oh boy. Max : = I don'wan'ny (0 . 5 ) Ben : They don' have this et Mayfair but dis is II delicious. Ethel : What's the name of it. ( 1 .0) Ben : It's the Lasko but it's uh, this Herring Snack Bits. En' there's reasons why- the guy tol' me once before thet it uh wz the best. (2 . 5) Ben : 'Cause it's Nova Scotia herring. ( 1 . 0) Bill : Why is it the be:st. Ben : ((through a mouthful)) Cause it comes fr'm cold water. ( 1 . 5) (Bill) : [[(Oh.) Ben : S: :-col' water fish is always II better. Max : ( ) when they uh, can it. Ethel : [[ MMmm it'sBen : Cold water fish II is­ Ethel : Ouu Max have a piece. Ben : This 11 is, Ethel : Geschllmacht. Ben : -the best you ever tasted. 3 18

March 1 1 Ethel : Ethel : Bill : Ben : Ethel : Max : Ethel : Ethel : Max : Ben : Max : Ben : Max : Ben : Max : Ben : Max : Ben : Ben :

(

):

Ben : Ben : Ben : Ethel : Ben : Ben : Max : Ben : Max : Ben : Ethel :

3 19

MMmm. (2 .0) Oh it's delicious Ben w'dyih hand me a napkin please, Lemme cut up a' little pieces of bread. (2 . 5) I' n that good? It's duh::li_cious. It's geschmacht Max. What? Geschma:cht, (0. 5) Max, one piece. I d'n want. (4.0) Yer gonna be- You better eat sumpn becuz yer g'be hungry before we get there Max, So. (0. 5) C'mon now I don' wanche t'get sick. Get there I'll have sojjmething. Huh? When I W there I'll eat. Yeah butche better eat sumpn before. Y'wan'lay down'n take a nap? = = No, C'mon. ( 1 .0) Y'wan' sit up'n take a nap? B'cuz // I'm g'n take one, ( ) ( 1 . 5) -inna minute, ( 1 .0) Det's, good. (2 .0) Det is really good. ( 1 .0) Mmjjm. Honestly. (4. 5) �·mon, ( 1 .0) ((very soft)) (I don't want.) Max, please. I don' wanche t' get si:ck. I (won't) get sick, (3 .0) 00 that's // so­ MMm. It just // sorta-

320 Ben : Ethel : Ben : Ben : Bill : Ethel : Ben : Bill : Ethel : Bill : Bill : Ethel : Ethel : Ben : Ethel : Ethel : Bill : Ben : Max : Bill :

Part V

Isn'at- // Isn'at-gckles the tongue doesn' !!:? Mm hm? (4. 5) Mm ((through a mouthful)) Maybe we oughta take one take one home with us. Where'dejh � it. Alpha Be/ jta. Alpha Beta (up here) . ((through a mouthful)) Right here? Mm, hm? Hm. (2 . 5) Hm. You better put s'm more in the dish Ben, ( 1 0 . 0) ((sigh)) W'l you, be g'd enough tuh empty this in the:re en' then I'll fill it (h)up for you again. ((eight metallic bangs)) Yeah I // (know that whole --) Thankyou. (3 .0) Max doesn't know what he's missin' . He knows, I don' wan' him tuh get sick I wannim tuh eat. ( ) (1 . 5) Whadidjuh think a'this you wanna take this?

The sequence itself is really sharply bounded. Bill's utterance, "What did you think of this you wanna take this?" has to do with another matter entirely, and Ben's first utterance is a self-interruption of talk on another matter, which is altogether a lawful thing: "You have to uh, Uh ( 1 .0) Hey this is the best herring . . . " That is to say, for things like various sorts of noticings - noticing the taste of food or noticing a plane passing, or a sound, or something falling, or all sorts of things like that - one perfectly well can properly interrupt an utterance that one is oneself making, or indeed that someone else is making. There are sorts of noticings for which you want the timing to be such that it indicates that they're not being placed in adjacency to some other utterance, are not responsive to it, shouldn't be figured out by reference to what's been said, but have to do with things that have been proceeding in some independence of the sequence of talk. Self- or other-interruptions which involve remarking about food belong, then, to a special class of interruptions that are, in a way, properly done 'interruptively. ' Before getting into the sequence itself, let me suggest a way to approach a piece of data. A kind of easy way to start out is to pick out various sorts of

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sound sequences, and just mark them out on the transcript. That might give

you some beginning feel for at least whether there's perhaps more sound density than you'd expect. Having gotten some sound relationships, you might look around to see if something can be done with them or with related things. In this fragment we get a possible extension on a sort of thing I talked about earlier, which involved a focus on words like 'because' which are variously pronounced in conversation, e.g., "because" and " 'cause," where one can look to see how that word is said, and see of it's at all, for example, sound-coordinated with things in its environment. And we can find here a use of " 'cause" which is affiliated with closely occurring 'k'-beginning words: " 'Cause it comes from cold water, " and a use of "because" in an environment of beginning 'b's: "You're gonna be- You better eat something because you're gonna be hungry before we get there. " There are also a couple of other instances of that sort of thing present; relevant then to the issue of is that sort of thing a 'sort of thing'? And can we take it that the whole variety of such words are adapted to their local scene? For example, just as a way to extend things, the word 'this' gets, in one particular utterance, a "this" and a "dis" pronunciation: "They don't have this at Mayfair, but dis is delicious. " We can begin to suppose that a class could be marked out which is sound-adapted to its environment, and that some sorts of organization can be found to the relative distribution of "this" and "dis " , " 'cause" and "because, " etc., where at least perhaps partially there are matters of sound considerations and not, e.g . , considerations of formal-informal speech. So from this transcript we get 'some more of the same thing, ' that 'more' helping to put together a possible class, and some aspects of the way that class may operate. At one point in working with this, I started to look at the use of "Honestly" here. I began to wonder about what was involved in its use, in the light of what had been taking place in this sequence where Ben was trying to convince Max to have some herring, hadn't been successful, said "That's good. That is really good, ' ' and then says "Honestly, ' ' And one might readily propose something like: It might be that Ben figures that Max's not having eaten any herring is due to Ben's failure as a salesman, and he is now trying to deal with some possible failing of his sales job. However, at that point I was in a position to play around with some stuff on the sound locus of "Honestly. " Ben has begun a series of prior utterances with sounds involving " . . . ON . . . : " "Yer gONna be-, " "C'mON now, ' ' "Y'wAN'lay down, ' ' "C'mON , ' ' "Y'wAN' sit up, ' ' then the "hONestly, ' ' and then another "C'mON. " We have a relatively extended, relatively unbroken string of Ben's beginning sounds involving " . . . ON . . . " So there's a patterning of those, independent of "honestly, ' ' within which "honestly" fits. And that now adds to the kinds of sound-sequence patternings that we're accumulat­ ing. This one says there may be patterning which can be selectionally relevant, which operates at particular junctions in utterances, for example, the initial word of an utterance. We haven't much looked at cross-utterance patterns. This particular kind of cross-utterance pattern, i.e. , the string of "on"s, is of some interest because it

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doesn't involve directly adjacent utterances, though it does involve adjacent­ to-same-speaker utterances. And that is not much of a movement from adjacent utterances, particularly in a case like this, where the same speaker is essentially speaking in every alternative utterance. Now, if such sorts of things are operative, the relevance of that is that you then need partially to weaken any argument you might make about what is somebody doing with, e.g. , some such words as they use which also have the feature of being consistent with a sound pattern that is developing within the sequence. So you don't want to make too much of what somebody is doing by saying "Honestly, " where it is perhaps partially selected via the way he's going about building the beginning of his utterances. Looking at the relationship of "take one" and "tickles the tongue, " it seemed that "take one" preserved some facets of "tickles the tongue. " I puzzled about that for a while, as to whether anything could be said, until I saw that one utterance says " . . . sorta tickles the tongue" and the other one says " . . . oughta take one home, " i.e. , that "sorta" and "oughta" are kinds of nice things for those particular adjacencies. And then up at the beginning we get " . . . the guy told me once before that it was the best. " I was semantically puzzled by the occurence of "once before, " which in this talk seems unmotivated. Now this sequence begins with "Hey this is the best herring you ever tasted I"ll tell you right now. " So now we have ' 'I'll tell you that right now" and "the guy told me once before, " where there is an exceedingly close parallel between those two things, where the "once before" may be, for him, completing a thing he has been saying which starts with the first utterance of this sequence. Sticking with this words-as-objects kind of thing, later in the transcript Ethel says "Will you be good enough to empty this in there, and then I"ll fill it (h)up for you again. " She's talking, by the way, about an ashtray. Now, "Will you be good enough" seemed in the first instance to be an awfully formal way, if you thought of it in its semantic sense, to be saying to her husband "Will you empty this?" so I was looking at it, and noticed something which I've been intrigued with and which this seemed to be another instance of. The other instances seemed to be partially conjectural also, until I had a bunch of them, and then they looked like a possible way of connecting things which was not made up but which was indeed operative. "Enough" is a member of the class, 'measure terms. ' I want to notice its membership in measure terms because then I can notice things about measure terms, forgetting about "enough" specifically, which are obvious for this utterance. For one, if we were marking the local occurrences of contrast terms, then "empty" and "fill" would have been isolated out as such an occurrence. And "empty" and "fill" contrast as measure terms. Now there is a just prior use of a measure term when Ethel says "You better put some more in the dish Ben," and there is a just consequential use of a measure term, when Ben says "Max doesn't know what he's missing. " So we have flurry of measure terms occurring. Let me hold off the argument I want to make, and give another fragment, from a different conversation.

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What's been happening is the past three times she's been over here, she's been feeling us out by saying, oh, she'll say, like this morning "Oh I'll come over and we'll all have supper together. " And then about ten minutes later she said "Well, I'm not gonna come because you two never get a chance to be alone and I feel that I'm intruding. ' ' And I said "Well come on over Kit, we'll all eat supper here. " And uh she's been doing that now for three or four days. When I looked at that I was wondering why in the world would he say "What's been happening is the past three times . . . " rather than, e.g. , "re­ cently" or something like that. It seemed to me that you could say "the past two times, " but "the past three times" begins to get awfully precise, i.e. , you don't indefinitely count events. Now "three times" might not seem all that peculiar, but if you listen to number uses for counting events, then after "two" you begin to get approximates, or something special is being said. I began to wonder if an environment of number words made a place for more number words; that is, if "the past three times" turned on that the problem being talked about is that there is a couple, and two girls live next door to them; one of those girls is very friendly with the couple, comes over all the time, and is now embarrassed that those two never get a chance to be alone, but are involved in this threesome. That is, her problem is focussed by those numbers. And in telling this story about the "two" of us and the "three" of us, that focus might provide some kind of source for an extension of number uses around it; specifically, some surplus of number uses. The idea roughly being that you might be able to look for flurries, for some class, of its terms. When perhaps not all the terms of that class that are occurring in some small fragment had equivalent sources, but that some are occurring by reference to the fact that a bunch of the others had already occurred or were going to occur in the already-planned talk. And in the data at hand we have, not a flurry of number terms, but a flurry of measure terms ("more," "enough, " "fill," "empty, " "missing"). Here is a similar sort of thing, occurring later in the same conversation. The topic is altogether changed. Ethel is telling a long story about some friends of hers and Ben's who have a son around Bill's age. The story involves a complaint by the friends about their son, which Ethel delivers very sympa­ thetically to the friends' complaint. At one point in the story the son is in Los Angeles and has to go down to La Jolla, and Ethel is telling how her friends came to go down to La Jolla with him. Ethel : Ben : Ethel : Ethel : Ben :

but tuh, he kept sayin' "Well how'm I gonna get down tuh La Jolla. How'm I gonna get down tuh La Jolla. " A:nd uh, W'theive �' II they, ha:ve two calj:rs. I guess they could1 guess they could have uh- uh given him a ca:r,lI y'kno: :w, There's two cars. They're only drijlvin' one.

3 24 Ethel :

Part V

But they were prou- This is the f-first time in many yea:rs thet they've been alo:ne with him fer say two days. En I guess they wanniduh be, with him. "hhhh So, you haftuh view it from both si:des.

Now the "both sides" business might be kind of weird. It's not that she's been viewing it from both sides. The qustion is, is the "both sides" some kind of takeoff from this series of twos that they have just gone through? The rough idea is that if you don't always read the transcript contentwise - where if you were looking at "good enough" contentwise you wouldn't see the "enough" particularly as a measure term - you might come to find small flurries of some class of words. And if you find them, you can make kinds of issues for how you would come to be explaining, e.g. , why she said "Will you be good enough" or "You have to view it from both sides. " And my feeling is that you ought to be allowing the possible development of a picture in which at some point in utterence sequences people are partially assembling their talk in a way similar to the way you do it in some kinds of board games - out of what we've already built. They're doing some sorts of recombinations and are exceedingly sensitive to historical developments and extensions on what we've so far said. And this is not talking about it in terms of what they topically say, but, for whatever they say, in terms at least of where they get the words they're using. Q: Are you saying that "Will you be good enough" is not selected out of a bunch of things like "Would you be so kind," but is sound-selected? HS: What I am wondering about is whether it's at all appropriate to say that the alternative class members are to be derived from ' 'Will you be good enough" by considering what sort of a polite object it is and saying "Would you be so kind" is another, but that "Will you be good enough" is partially selected, e.g., by reference to the massive ongoing occurrence of terms like "best, " "better," "delicious, " "good," and by reference to the local flurry of measure terms like "more," " fill," "empty. " It might not be anything like that, but if someone were going to make something out of the measure terms and the assessment terms that they've so far used, then they can do it in this request form with "good enough, " and "Will you be good enough" pops into her head independent of a search for something like "Would you be so kind. " Now I don't really know if this is the case, but as a matter of aesthetics I would prefer that it were. and I would be, e.g., stacking things in that direction in my re-examination of it. Q: Could you include the "wanna"s and "gonna"s and "inna"s that are going on, aside from the beginning of utterances there? HS: Yes, you could stick them in as another development. I wasn't tracking the internal " . . . on . . . " sounds, I was looking at the track that ran for beginnings of utterances. But sure, that's another. I used to figure that I ought to put everything I could see onto the board. Then somebody remarked the fact that people were finding things for themselves, and it became obvious that if I didn't put up everything I saw, there would be room for people to

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find them themselves. They could say ' 'Oh look at that. There are things happening here . " Where, if all that has been done is to assert what I see going on here, it looks like maybe it's there, but you get more convinced if you see that thing happening yourself than by my pointing them out. But in fact I hadn't noticed those internal " . . . on . . . " sounds. Q: Couldn't that be carried too far? HS: The whole problem is that it's nowhere in the first instance. And the issue is to pull it out and raise the possibility of its operation. It might be that the only basis for doing that, which would get anybody to do it, would be under the hope that it was really much more important than it would turn out to be. So the fantasy that leads you to try to work on it is that it might turn out to have some really outrageous operation. I guess I don't think so, but while I'm working with it I'm going to propose that it could be. Otherwise it's kind of boring. Now one virtue for going through this sort of thing is to establish for yourself that there is a texture to what these people are doing, that can be put on the transcript in just these sorts of ways, before you begin to get much involved in what might be more difficult aspects of the thing. You might otherwise find yourself looking at a transcript that you dido' t have any way to begin working with. Turning now to what's going on in this sequence, I eventually want to get at why Ben and Ethel keep reasserting that Max should have some herring. I want to deal with a variety of aspects of the sequence they employ, beginning with Ethel's first utterance, "Bring some out so that Max could have some too," to which he says "I don't want any. " So when it looks like the herring will be made available for him to have some, he turns it down. And, an offer being turned down, that can be that, routinely enough. Here we don't have that kind of a development. It's turned down, it's nonetheless brought out, and it's reoffered (it gets reoffered and reoffered, but at first it's just reoffered). So the question is why, in that it's turned down, is it brought out and reoffered? And there is a real point to taking the thing step by step. Let's focus on Ethel's "Bring some out so that Max could have some too," considering it first of all by reference to a possible dilemma of sorts that Ben could be in, given that Ethel has told him to bring it out for Max and Max has said no. The dilemma being should Ben bring it out or shouldn't he, i.e. , which one of them should he listen to. Now this is forgetting about whether Ben would have wanted to bring it out in any event. That is to say, an argument could readily be developed that Ben was perfectly well going to bring the stuff out, he didn't need Ethel telling him to bring it out, and, that Max said he didn't want any doesn't then make any puzzle for him about whether he should bring it out. So I'm not going to make a case for Ben's bringing out the herring because Ethel told him to, but let's initially consider it that way, as though at least part of the basis for Ben bringing it out is Ethel's telling him to, and the way she tells him to. Under that circumstance, Max's "I don't want any" might be relevant to whether Ben should bring it out or not. That is, if he brings it out he's listening to Ethel not to Max, and

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if he doesn't, he's listening to Max not to Ethel - or so it might be said on some literal interpretation of what Ethel and Max have said. Now, that sort of dilemma doesn't occur for Ben, in part by virtue of a consideration of what both Ethel and Max could be doing. Ethel could perfectly well have said "Bring some out so that we can have some too," or " Bring some out for me, " etc., i.e. , she could perfectly well be entitled to be a recipient just as much as anybody else, or needn't locate some particular recipient. And the relevance of that is that some people might choose to ask for something to be brought out, intending to eat some, but ask for it on behalf of someone else. So that Ethel could be heard by Ben as saying, in the way that Ethel likes to say such things, that she wants some but she doesn't want to ask for herself, and has here used a way of making a request which involves attending to someone else - that one being the person present to whom others owe most deference, i.e. , the oldest one there, which Max happens to be. That is to say, in asking not for herself, there may be some observable orderliness to whom she asks on behalf of. That some such person as Max would get picked is, I think, an orderly aspect of the choice involved in a request that is 'not for myself,' i.e. , someone to whom, in bringing things out, one could be paying deference. In which case, not only the bringer, but the asker can also be paying deference, aside from using Max as a vehicle for getting the herring out. Under that situation, Max's "I don't want any" can be an equally allusive thing, in which he's saying, not "I won't eat any, " but "Don't bring it out on my behalf. " That is to say, in the first instance saying "I don't want any" when none is there is quite different from saying "I don't want any" when something is there. And that is known, i.e. , a common, known, pattern is: Being offered something that isn't present, people tum it down. They tum it down under the auspices of "I don't want to be a bother, " "Don't go to any trouble for me. ' ' And that difference can partially account for the reoffering of the stuff when it's there. So, if someone says "Would you like some X?" when the stuff isn't there, someone can say "No thanks. " If the stuff is then brought out, that they said "No" doesn't provide that they're not asked again. And when asked again, they may well say "Yes . " At least one difference, then, between the scene of the first offer and the scene of later offers is that the stuff is, on the occurrence of the first offer, not present. So in a way, Ethel's request could be perfectly well to be recognized to be for something she wants, and Max's turndown could be seen as something you shouldn't take seriously. So at least in part one can account for the occurrence of a reoffer by noticing that in the first instance the stuff wasn't there and in the second instance it was, where the initial rejection doesn't count for the reoffer. You can, then, do a reoffer in the same terms as the offer, though there can be some change; e.g. , "Have some," "Have a piece," and as we get here, "One piece" - where the " One piece" is now something that attends "I know you don't want any, but you don't have to eat it, just try it. " Again, the reoffer can be done in more or less the same terms as the offer, whereas, as occurs later on, when the

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second rejection "I don't want" is done - in more or less the same way as the original rejection - then the offer-form changes. Later offer-forms take account of the second rejection's being " I don't want any" and fit the issue posed by it, i.e. , they no longer provide for it as a reasonable rejection, where the reoffer has allowed for the reuse of "I don't want any" as a reasonable rejection. That is to say, when the person has said, now in the food's presence, "I don't want any," you don't repeat "Would you like . . . " or " Have some. " But that doesn't mean you can't do another offer, because you can find another way of doing an offer; one which doesn't provide for "I don't want any" as its rejection. Such things as "You'd better have some because we're not going to eat for a while, " for example, to which "I don't want any" is not an appropriate return. Those sorts of shifts take place and, again, that they don't take place right from the beginning has to do with the difference between the stuff being there and not being there. So there is at least some orderliness to why the offer-form can be preserved across its first two occurrences, and when the offer-form gets changed. Now I want to pick up on something relevant to how Ethel gets the stuff out, and her " Oo Max have a piece, " because there are some nice similarities between those two things. Ethel, having asked that the stuff be brought out for Max, is now eating some. However, what she does in her appreciation of the stuff is to turn herself into someone who's not 'eating' it, but 'tasting it for Max. ' So she retains her position, first of having it brought out for Max, and then eating it as a taster for Max. And that kind of a thing is not altogether odd. There are people who can find a whole range of things to be doing not on their own behalf but that others might enjoy. She could be in a position of, having had this stuff brought out and now eating heartily, feeling for herself that she's making sacrifices, i.e. , that she's done this thing not at all on her own behalf. I don't say this terribly lightly, in that a great deal of what's involved here has to do with how these people, Ben and Ethel, while eating and enjoying this stuff, are finding themselves burdened by Max. And that's part of what we want to be getting to when we ask the question, why do they go on and on in their reoffering? So the " Oo Max have a piece" as Ethel's first response on eating and liking the stuff, is in some possibly nice relationship to the way she gets the stuff out, "Bring some out so that Max could have some too. " We get a movement from a variety of offers, to a request - not to eat but to taste, " Max, one piece, " through the warning format, "You better eat something because you're gonna be hungry before we get there, " to, finally, some sort of quasi-threat, " I don't want you to get sick. " (In parallel to that, the herring becomes transformed to "Eat something. ") I want to deal with the relationship of the offer-transforms to some changes in identities of the parties. And what I mean by changes in identity doesn't have to do with changing from identities they had at the beginning to identities that they didn't have at beginning, but it's a changing of operative identities, where the identities they end up with are identities they have in the world, but that they weren't employing earlier on. And we'll find that the sequence of

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offer-transforms operates via a series of identity changes that progressively provide further transforms. That is to say, at the various rejection points, in order to proceed one has to find not simply another offer-form to proceed with, but a form which is usable for and by the one to whom you are offering. Now if we go back to the beginning, then some initial bases for making offers are at least and maybe nothing more than that the people who are making the offers have eaten the stuff and liked it, and there is somebody else present who hasn't. Somebody in a room with a bunch of people and stuff on the table that isn't segregated onto various people's plates can, tasting something, remark on it in such a way as to have it be heard not simply that they're congratulating whoever bought it or made it, but that they're inviting everybody else to eat it. And any person who thereafter eats it can comment on it in just such a way, i.e. , appreciate it, and appreciate it in such a form as to have whoever else has not yet eaten it hear themselves being invited to eat, just by virtue of that the current eaters commend the thing. So, for the initial series of offers, there need be no more between the people than that they are gathered together and this eating has begun, and the food is available to all of them. That situation doesn't require, e.g. , that one isolate people who stand in a relationship to you of 'child, ' 'spouse,' etc., though those sorts of things would be involved if, e.g . , the food were distributed on various people's plates. In that case, though there perfectly well might be offerings, they would be fairly restricted. But when things are not arranged that way, any member of the group can say "Boy this is great, everybody ought to have some, ' ' i.e. , not mobilizing any more particular relationships than that we're all here together. But there are some facets of this sequence which involve some sorts of sharper things in it. For one, while Ben announces that the herring is wonderful, Ethel takes over the job of having the stuff brought out, at least in the management sense. Now Ethel is not the hostess here; she's mother of the host and wife of the one who made the announcement. But the hostess, her daughter-in-law, is not present and Ethel, the only currently present adult female, takes over the business of having the snack brought out. She also has it brought out in aid of Max, who is her stepfather-in-law and is now also a widower. And not just anyone would choose to say "Bring some out" or "Bring some out so that X can have it. " That is to say, these sorts of statements occur with serious restrictions on them, having to do with whose place it is, who this is relative to whose place this is, who it is that's being referred to, who it is that's being ordered, and various things like that. Not anybody in a room with persons gathered around on some social occasion says something like "Bring out the drinks" or "Bring out the herring" or "Bring out the herring so that X can have some. ' ' But that Ethel does it, she does by virtue of a series of positions she has, relative to this place and to the absent hostess. Now some person having been offered and having turned it down, the offer having been made by virtue of that the stuff is here and available, there

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are ways to reoffer. And you can try to play out, if you like, some of the ways that reoffering can be done, under various relationships that parties might have to each other. If the parties are unrelated, then it may be that once you get beyond, e.g., pleading with them in a non-serious way, you're at the end of the line. Even to take a step like "It's going to be a while before we get there" is to invoke managerial work, and not just anyone will choose to do so. Nor, for that matter, might there be any reason for them to do so, i.e. , they've offered, so that's that. That is to say, one doesn't want to simply ask how could they go about extending this sequence indefinitely, but one also wants to wonder at least as much, why in the world would they? I want to be suggesting that as between Ben and Ethel and Max there is a relationship which allows future forms, like warnings and threats, to get done, and which can at the same time provide part of the source for them to fail. Max is recently a widower. A thing that Ben and Ethel - his kids, so to speak - can be in a position to be now attending, is that they have become responsible for him. It's not that he's old. That's not at all the issue. It's that he's old and newly widowered. Because if he was old and his wife was there, then she would be the one, if anyone, to be insistent that he eat. But in that he's widowered, the question of who's responsible for him is one that Ethel and Ben can come to figure they have. And it's on just such occasions as when he does something like refuse an offer of food, that the phenomenon of their possible responsibility for him can come into operation for them and lead them to see that they ought to do something about it. That is to say, it's his turning down what in the first place may be an offer to anybody that provides for them focussing on his turning it down, and focussing on that by virtue of its making for them a question of their satisfying of their responsibilities to him - which is something that would otherwise never occur to them. If he was offered some food and turned it down when his wife was sitting there, it would never occur to them that he's going to get sick or any such thing, and it would just pass by. Maybe the wife would say something, maybe she wouldn't but if she didn't, that would be that. When he turns it down and he's now a widower, they can see their relationship involved in it, and find that they have to go on insisting. Now this situation of being responsible, which can be actuated so to speak by his turning food down - i.e. , they get reminded of it when he says "I don't want any" - would not perhaps be the sort of thing that would have led them in the first place to offer it. I'm trying to separate out what would lead someone to offer something in the first place, and what might lead them to reoffer it on its being turned down. You get, then, a picture, not of a sequence that unfolds as though I planned it this way, i.e. , ' T il make an offer and if you turn me down I'll do the following, " but one in which I make an offer to somebody and when they turn it down I can look at the rejection to see what to do; I can then notice who did the rejection and can then think about the rejection and find that, e.g . , in that that one did a rejection I ought to do another offer, and find a way to do another offer, maybe, or find that I ought to change the offer in some particular way.

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As they procee4 through the sequence and Max keeps doing the rejections, that status of his ....: that he has no one to take care of him - can be made more alive. Their reoffers can be specifically turning him into a 'stubborn old man . ' Seeing the stubborn old man, they can see that he's the stubborn old man that they're responsible for, i.e. , that he doesn't take care of himself. In part, then, the person he becomes in the sequence, the person they have got to take care of, is an identity that the sequence brings into focus. It's just a person who's sitting there. He is offered something, he says "No," it is offered again and he says "No" again, and we can imagine him ageing in the reoffering, with them saying "Oh my God it's that old man sitting there not eating anything, he's going to get sick for sure. " Now as it can happen that they see he's now the person they're responsible for, we can have the reverse of it. He can be finding something happening as well, which can be something like this: To use words that he more or less uses on another occasion, for 3 5 years someone has been telling him what to eat and when to eat, and now that he doesn't have a wife to tell him what to eat, he'll damn well eat what he wants. But as soon as he happens to be in that position, somebody else figures "He's all by himself, somebody has to watch out for him. " That is to say, the battle can have in part to do with the fact that what, for them, is that Max has no one to take care of him, is for Max a situation of he can do what he wants. And to allow them to win in such a scene is to acknowledge that they are the ones who are now responsible for him, in the sense of, they can tell him what to do. So it's kind of an awfully neat scene. Whereas they can figure that they're doing as they ought, and that he's being obstinate for no good reason, he can indeed have a principled issue on such occasions; that is, that he's damn well got to get them to recognize that they can't force him to do things or he's going to be turned into their little boy. But in that battle, whatever its outcome, he will properly become the object that he inevitably has to end up as, whatever he does, i.e. , a burden on them. And if you know an old man in a family, then you know he's a burden. What we want to do is think of 'the old man, burden in the family' as kind of a naturally evolved object. We want to see how it is that the burden he ends up being can be the product of some series of ways that he is pushed into doing things like being obstinate, stubborn, laconically rejective, by virtue of the way that things that are re-insisted for him extendedly, are not ever re-insisted for anybody else. And that has its ultimate possible irony in that it's kind of neat that they after all are the heirs, and to properly inherit his money they should suffer and he should be a burden so that when he dies there's a kind of relief involved. It's not like when he dies they will be in the sheerest misery. Coming to inherit, they will have been relieved of the burden that he had become when he was left alone, and they will also get something that's kind of a payment for having taken care of him. Though in this case the story is turning out quite differently; he isn't letting himself become that, he's spending all his money. Let's look at another sort of thing that's involved. We think of an 'offer'

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as something different than a 'request' or a 'warning' or a 'threat. ' But in some situations the offer is simply the first version of getting the person to do something. A person can say yes to an offer which is heard as the first version of something, where they say yes in order to accept the nicest version of what's being given. Alternatively, someone can use the offer-form when they and the other know that if you don't 'accept the offer' you'll do it anyway. One wants then to reconsider these objects - offer, request, warning, threat - not as though they're a series of different things, but to see them as sequential versions of a something. That they are sequential versions of a something can operate to account for how come the sequence gets stopped at any stage, i.e. , at the initial stage, that of an 'offer, ' somebody who's good enough to do the offer instead of right off doing an insistence, may well get an acceptance. You can then have A saying "Would you like . . . ? " and B saying "Yes," where A is saying "Would you like . . . ?" as their specifically first version of something, and B is saying "Yes, ' ' not by virtue of "Yes I want" - you can't read this to see that they desire this thing because they accept the offer - but by virtue of the known sequence that will eventuate if they don't. That is, they accept the courtesy, and the courtesy is what is offered in an 'offer. ' Perhaps it is sufficiently early on into Max's widowerhood so that they have not yet run him through enough of these sequences so that he sees that when he gets this offer he should accept it right off or else he's going to be run through the rings until he does. And eventually, then, you have the ideal socialized seventy-year-old who, whatever they're offered, very nicely accepts. They don't see an offer as at all the same sort of thing that you might see if you're a guest at a party: If somebody offers something, you think "Do I want it or don't I want it?" But they know it as "That's the first step . " So the sequential development here is not simply some possible natural sequence in which one object is replaced with another, replaced with another, replaced with another, but the initial one is treatable by parties as a version of the later ones, and dealt with by reference to what it might become, where eventually you don't get these elaborate sequences, but just "Have a piece" "Okay, sure. "

Part VI Spring 1971

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks © 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6

April

2 Introduction Let me give some introductory remarks. The course is about conversation. While for some people it could be a first course, for somebody else it could be a fifth course or whatever it might be. I haven't made it a practice for about the last three or four years to use this course to teach people how to analyze conversation, for a variety of reasons, some of which I'll mention. What I tend to do is to analyze conversation in the ways that I analyze conversation, which involves that I come in each week and put a bunch of stuff on the blackboard, or on brown wrapping paper, and consider it. And if you wanted to learn how to analyze conversation, then it appears that if you watch me do it enough and try the exercises that we give out, then over time you develop some facility at that. What the virtues are of that facility, I really couldn't say. One reason why I don't have the course as one in which I teach you how to analyze conversation is that courses in how to do things, academic things, seem to me to have some massive institutional support for their getting done the way they get done. That is to say, I could teach you calculus beause that's something the university has decided you ought to know how to do. But nobody has yet decided that you ought to know how to analyze conversation, and certainly I wouldn't make that decision. And on the other hand, I'm teaching in the university, and what I do is study conversation, and what I teach is my work. All the stuff I present is my research. And I tend not to present stuff that I presented last year. I tape record the lectures, and the past courses are kind of available; anybody who wants to read some past course can go up to the office and get a copy of one of them or four of them or whatever they want. Now some of the courses are geared to an introduction; like I'd wanted at that time to do an overview of where I was. But recently I haven't tended to do that at all. Recently I've been tending to bring into the class things that I'm pretty well currently working on. So I take a bunch of stuff that I've been working at for the last three months or six months or whatever, and organize it for the week before the class and then deliver an organization of it in the class. And that tends to be about specific fragments of conversation. And it tends to have, over three or four weeks, some thematic connection; like there are some problems which I will be working on in the class, though I won't much be developing a thing over the semester. You could, I guess, come in any time and see an instance of the sorts of things I do. And you could stay for three or four semesters, or one semester, and see a lot of instances. Now I feel kind of equivocal about doing it that way. That way I get what I want out of the class, which is to organize my current work and get it down Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks © 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6

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on paper and then let my friends see where I am. The lectures get taped, they then get typed, and then they get sent around to whoever it is that writes me letters saying they're interested in seeing what's happening right now. And that's my audience. That is, the audience that I think of being directed to is not here - or it's only incidentally here, if you choose to be one of them. It's an audience of people some of whom I know and some of whom I don't know, and it grows and changes. And I feel a bit equivocal about that; like why don't I spend time trying to address the particular people who are here? And with regard to teaching you how to analyze conversation, I'm not too clear on why people would want to learn to do that. I don't figure it's all that useful - I mean useful for doing better conversation, or useful for figuring out "what's wrong with my conversation?" or figuring out what somebody was trying to do to you when they did something or other. Aside from which I have deeper reasons, having to do with that I feel pretty confident that whatever you would think is useful is probably not very useful. And even though I guess I could show you things that you would think are useful, I don't want to be doing that because I don't think they're useful, so I'm not going to sell them as useful even though that could work out in its fashion. I guess I also figure that people just take a course for an hour, for whatever reasons there may be. And the choice of how to spend an hour is made from within some rather narrow constraints; it's not like some passerby picked up the catalog of classes at a bus stop in Santa Ana and said "That's the way I'm going to spend the next hour. " But it's among the set of courses that you could take, given that you're a student spending your time now taking courses, "which one should I take?" And then it gets chosen in a variety of ways which involve eliminating various things, etc. , etc. It's not a matter of someone waking up in the morning and deciding "what I want to know is calculus" or conversation, and then going and finding out where to get it. But that's my view of it. That's what I do. I wake up in the morning and want to study conversation, so I get up and do it. And if I knew that there were such people listening, then I would teach to them. Now there are such people listening, but they're not here. So I teach to them. And anybody else can come listen in. That's okay. I want you to know that I understand that you're listening in. And you, if you're not kidding yourselves, know the same thing. I don't have any feeling that the particular collection of people who come here are 'coming here, ' i.e. , coming because they know what's going on and that's what they want. And to treat them as though they are, is kind of a mutual con game in which I pretend that you came to take this course, picking it out of some collection of courses because that's what you wanted to learn, and maybe you pretend that's so, also. And then we play along with each other that here's this class and they're all interested in what's going on, when I don't have any reason to believe that, and you certainly know that's not so. So it would be kind of silly for us to go through a thing of "Okay, I'm going to teach you how to analyze conversation and you're going to sit there and learn

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how to analyze conversation" when you couldn't care less about learning how to analyze conversation - except if you cared to learn how to analyze conversation you could probably learn by listening to enough of the work, and also by coming around and letting us know that you're intrested in learning how to analyze conversation. And we have people who will help you try to do it. So, since I don't really want to spend our time conning each other, I try to find that sort of thing that I can do, and you know how to listen for an hour, so you can spend your time listening for an hour, or any way you please. If it turned out that some bunch of the class decided to spend the time learning how to analyze conversation, it would be easy enough to get me to tty to teach you how. Among the kinds of things you could do would be, when I run through something you could ask me to go over it and develop it a bit more closely, or you could ask me why were those decisions made about what's happening rather than some others. And I'll do that. I mean, I'll do it if it looks like it's not one person's aim that they want to learn a little more, because if it's just one person or two people, then the class will let them know that, and those two people and I can go off and have our party somewhere else and some other time. And I really don't want to bother the bunch of people who happen to be here, with what may or would or will seem to be dreary details. So that's kind of the mess that I see us as being in; here together for no good reason. You have rights to ask for clarification, ask for better statements, ask me why or how I did that, or is there more of that or is there a better way of doing it, and I will try to help you out. At least one kind of rule that I would like to have operating is, while you're free to argue and question and all that, I would appreciate it if you don't do it in the course of the lecture but do it at the end of the lecture. The reason for that is, if you do it in the middle of a lecture then I get completely disoriented. Since I normally have a big package of stuff I'm trying to keep in my mind to lay out, if you interrupt me then I'm liable to pick up what you're saying and forget where I was, and not be able to get back to it. And somebody will surely do it, and I will surely take them up and I will surely get lost. I hope it's early in the course rather than later so that we don't have to go through it too many times before we learn it works that way. I'll give you as much tithe at the end as you need. Nobody ever asks for such things anyway, but I'll give you as much time at the end as you need, and occasionally I'll begin the class by asking if there are any things that you've had in mind that have been bothering you, if so please tell me what they are and I'll talk to them. So it's not a terrible constraint. All I'm asking really is that if you have something that bothers you, that you write it down while the class is going on and ask me about it afterwards. That's not too much of a delay between when you get a thought and when you express it. I take an awful long time between when I get a thought and when I express it. The character of conversation is that you'd better say whatever you have to say fast or you'll forget it, but I would appreciate it if the class didn't run that way. It's a little bit of discipline,

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that you learn that when you have a thought, somebody who's been thinking about that thing might have had that thought already and eventually they will solve it (or get into worse trouble) . And if you wrote something down you might think about it, wonder about it youself a little bit. So bring it up afterwards. And everything is on tape: if I say "I didn't say anything like that," you have a chance to say "It's right there in black and white. " Is there any business that people have? Oh. There are things like what do you have to do to get a grade. We hand out a bunch of assignments over the course of the class. You're expected to do the assignments - and people can do them - and there's a last assignment and your grade is some version of your last assignment. There's no exams. Is there anything anybody wants to know about? Q : If we are incidental observers to what is your primary interest of appealing to your principal audience, why bother spending time with the class? Why bother stifling yourself with 40 people? Why can't you do what you do? HS : Well, there's a variety of reasons. I get paid. It turns out to have worked kind of well for me, in that it's a good vehicle for me to organize my work. And in some ways it's much more uplifting for the class. That is to say, instead of being treated as the people you think you are, you might be being treated as the people you might let yourselves be. I suppose that people are more serious than they are, and I therefore don't spend much time talking down to the class. That's justification, which only turns on that I heard an aggressive sense to your question and didn't feel like being counter-aggressive yet. But I've been saying what my experience in teaching, which is a long time, has led me to feel. And I just don't choose to pretend otherwise. But there are reasons which we could work out, which would make doing it this way just the perfect way to do it. Some people consider it the perfect way to do it. And I'm only saying that you're incidental for some unspecified people who could choose otherwise. The class has plenty of power. They can make me miserable, make me hate to come here, and on the other hand they can make me feel kind of willing to come here, and also make me fly a little better. If you're worried about my effort, it's harder to do it this way than to talk to where you are, because then I could spend the whole semester doing things I've already done in past courses, or introducing you to stuff that you can have access to otherwise. And here I've got to work. That's why I do it, in part. So I can force myself to work. Now, when I take a fragment and put it on the board, it's gone through a very elaborate filtering process and has ben isolated because I figure there's something new in that fragment that I've learned. So it's not designed for teaching you everything about conversation. It's put up because there are some new things - typically altogether new things for me - that I've been able to get my hands on from that fragment. So each one will be attacked in different - sometimes drastically different - ways. I will also pick out and talk to other things than the core thing I'm interested in a fragment for. There are a series of topics that I'm kind of working on, that a fragment may more or

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less permit me to deal with, and I'll tell you about them in some sort o f way when I'm telling you about that fragment. The gross aim of the work I'm doing is to see how finely the details of actual, naturally occurring conversation can be subjected to analysis which will yield the technology of conversation. So the idea is to take singular sequences of conversation and tear them apart in such a way as to find rules, techniques, procedures, methods, maxims - that's a collection of terms that more or less relate to each other and which I use somewhat interchangeably - which rules, procedures, techniques, methods, etc. , can be used to generate the orderly features we find in the conversations we examine. The idea being, then, to come back to the singular things we observe in a singular sequence, with some rules that handle those singular features, and also necessarily handle lots of other events as well, other than this fragment. So what we're dealing with is the technology of conversation, and we're trying to find that technology out of actual fragments of conversation so that we can impose as a constraint on some technology that it actually deals with singular events and singular sequences of events - which is a reasonably strong constraint on some set of rules. And I'm not particularly going to contrast the way I operate on conversation with the way other social scientists operate on anything else. If you take other social science courses you may see similarities, differences; that's your business.

April 5

Poetics; Avoiding speaking first The following minute or so of conversation happens to be from a group therapy session for teenagers that was recorded in 1 9 64. There are three teenaged males present, and a therapist. They've been talking for maybe an hour and a half, and one of the fellows, Ken, has been starting to say something about what he did "last night" - last night being Friday night, this being Saturday morning. He's said something like "I went with four guys to the Pike, " an amusement park in Long Beach. Okay, that's where we are. The names we're using are not their real names. 1 Roger : Ken : Roger : jim : Roger : jim : Roger : (jim) : Ken : Roger : jim : (Roger): jim : Roger : jim : Roger :

jim :

(Isn't) the New Pike depressing? hhh The Pike? Yeah! Oh the place is disgusting. // Any day of the week. I think that Pop is // depressing, it's justBut you go- you go- take. Those guys are losing money. hehh But you go down-dow-down to th'New Pike there's a buncha // people, oh: : an' they're old, an' they're pretending they're having fun, but they're really not. ((cough)) How c'n you tell. Hm? They're-they're tryina make a living, but the place is on the decline, 's like a dejjgenerate place. So's Pop. (Y'know?) Pop is just - Yeah i-it // it's one of these pier joints, y'know? It's a flop heh An' (there's) all these depressing people an'they're- an' they getting worse an' worse y'know becomin' alcoholics an' all kindsa- all kindsa things an' uh y'know they're tryina make a living an' m-having-making people have fun an' pretending they're having fun, an' they're really not. They get unhappy, an' they- an' they're stuck in this small little circle this w- y'know this little sea place, y'know, I mean((very softly) Have y'ever been down there?

1 In the original April 2 lecture, Sacks started to work with this data. The introduction to the fragment and some of the subsequent discussion comes from that lecture, the unedited pp. 7 and 1 2 - 1 4 .

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April 5 Roger : jim : (Dan): Ken : Roger : jim : Roger :

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(/) It-it's just wild. It's another way of I I life y'know? heh (No,) I thought it was a ball. 1- I I (don't care if you-) (Awright now an' look at the-) buh-an' I walked outta there man, It's just uh- it wasn't like fun, (it) just ( ) II )( These old decrepit ladies in these litle pizza joints an' never makin any II money, y'know Yeah an' - an' you know they- eh people you know they c'm fr'm these horrible pasts an' everything y'know w't I m'n? They're walkin' around drunk wi' tattoos 'n all kinds 'n fun houses y'know 'n this- this is where they live.

An object in this fragment which is partially responsible for the fragment's being isolated is instanced by a series of words used in it that begin with 'de; ' not necessarilly spelled 'd-e': I'm talking about the spoken language: "depressing," "disgusting," "decline, " "degenerate, " "decrepit. " And a notable feature, besides that a run of them occur, is that they are all 'negative' words in this instance, while of course it's not the case that all words that begin in that way are 'negative, ' e.g. , 'delightful, ' 'divine, ' 'delicious. ' And furthermore, it's not just that they have 'de' in the words, but the 'de' occurs at a same place in each word in which it's used, while of course the sound can occur at other places in a word: in the middle, e.g. , 'fundamental, ' at the end, etc. Those words are said by at least two parties to the conversation. It's not, in principle, that one guy happens to get on a thing where he starts using words like that, but that two of the primarily three people who speak use one or more of those words. So there are, then, at least these features: There's a bunch of words that begin with 'de,' and they are all 'negative. ' Now a question is, what's to be done with those initial sorts of noticeable aspects of the fragment? Now, characteristically what I'll be doing in the course is taking some observation and posing a problem and then trying to find a technology for solving the problem. And a kind of problem we can pose here is, how in the world do people find the words that they use? Where it seems reasonable to suppose that people are engaged in finding the words that they use in conversation, in the course of the conversation in which they're using them. And by 'finding them' I don't mean finding them anywhere, but using those they know. So that there are questions of how, within conversation time, like within the course of an utterance, do they get the words that they then say. Can we build any kinds of rules that will tell us how they might do that? Plainly we could build lots of rules that could tell us things about how people get the words they then say. The most obvious and well-known class are rules that have to do with syntax, which tell us, e.g . , that at a place after 'the' as an article, then only certain sorts of words will occur; nouns,

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adjectives, etc. So there are a variety of ways of imposing constraints on how people go about selecting the words they use. Now those constraints don't get all that fine in yielding what words people do use. And it's in that light that we can focus in on what might be interesting about "depressing, " "disgust­ ing," "decline, " "degenerate, " "decrepit. " Like we can ask, is it possible that in searching for words, people use a history-sensitive procedure? That is, do they engage in employing recent words as a source for finding new words? And if that's a possibility, how would they go about using the recent history of their talk or somebody else's talk in order to find new words? Words have lots of properties, and the idea is to see if we can't find some property that words have, that could be fixed on by a speaker in using what's happened in the past in order to get new words. For example, words have a bunch of sounds, and they have an ordering of the sounds in them. Suppose people used the sounds of words to find words. That's plausible. And there is a procedure that we know that people use when they're looking for something like a name that they know but they can't recall. That procedure is, essentially, to take the alphabet and start to go through it: Does the name begin with an A, does it begin with a B, etc. And that often works to find the name you're looking for. Now, if you used the alphabet in some fixed order at every point in which you were searching for a word, then we could say that's not a history-sensitive procedure. And it would plainly have a variety of consequences to it that could be checked out. Like if the word that was found began with T, then we might expect that there would be a longer delay between when it was uttered relative to a last word, and when a word beginning with C was uttered. So we could rule out this kind of a thing if there was no noticeable difference in delay time relative to what a word began with. That is to say, we're not simply making up possible procedures but we're making up ones that could be checked out. One aspect, then, of the arguments one wants to develop about the 'de' series has to do with how a word is found. What I would argue in due course is not only that things like the 'de' series will emerge at a point in a conversation, but that they will then stop. That is, you want as well to account for why words like "depressing" don't end up occurring with the same sort of regularity throughout the rest of the conversation once they get started. And what one does indeed get is not that sort of continuity, but a kind of disjunction between sorts of things that go on in small fragments of the conversation. Let me just for the moment point up some of the facets of sound and suchlike relations involved in this fragment; for now, only as a texruring device, and then I'll talk about what particularly interests me about this fragment. (And in passing, a reason for collecting the series of sorts of things I'm collecting and that I'm going to be just mentioning and dropping, has to do with a kind of justification that might be seriously developed for asserting that some sort of fragment has an elaborated organization which warrants pulling it out and working it over.) A thing you can notice about this fragment is that a bunch of the words that occur in it, that have marked

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contrast terms to them, have such contrast terms occurring within this same

fragment. So, for example, we find here: "these" and "those," "go to" and "come from, " "in" and "out," "you" and "they, " "man" and "ladies," "new" and "old," "ever" and "never," "pretending" and "really, " "de­ pressing" and "fun . " That's another facet of a way in which things are operating closely and with some sort of density here. And the one sound thing I pulled out is by no means the exclusive sound thing occurring here. There are other relationships, some of which, were they to be asserted right now would seem implausible as produced phenomena whether artifactually produced by reference to some way in which words are found, or intendedly produced doesn't matter - one just wouldn't figure that to notice them is to notice something going on there. So, for example, there's a possibly notable relationship between "degenerate" and "pier joint, " having to do with r-j-n-t recurring in these. Admitting it for the moment just as, "Well, that might be a possible thing" - certainly it's a thing in poetry - then things like that happen to have more than a little occurrence within this particular fragment. For example, a similar sort of thing is perhaps "walkin' around drunk" and "all kindsa fun, " or "alcoholics" and "all kindsa things. ' ' The idea of picking these things up is, as I say, that of getting a sense of the textured character of a small fragment. By which I mean that the thing is put together in some way that has its parts - hopefully obviously - more closely connected to each other than you might suppose on participating in it, reading it over, listening to it, etc.; a connection which a not too dose but not altogether incidental attention would begin to give you. Don't forget, we're talking about spontaneous conversation between three or four people. It's not a script, and it's not that somebody says something and then there's some marked pause and another person, looking to make a piece of poetic theatrical return, does something. There's essentially no pauses going on - and we mark them when they occur, say, at more than half a second between utterances. So this is talk at its usual rate. And the idea for now is just to get some idea of how closely attentive in some fashion people are to each other, where picking up the sounds, doing simple contrasts, etc., are ways that they may be doing being attentive to each other. One also wants to get - not now but eventually - some idea of where these compactions of local organization occur. They don't build up in a conversa­ tion to some kind of finale where, say, at some point all people are doing is producing variants on what's so far been done. Though it can happen that within, say, a topic in conversation, there are places where people are almost exclusively employing the resources-so-far for the topic, to produce a next utterance. As in the following utterance, where there's relatively little that can't be locked back into what's already been said: "These old decrepit ladies in these little pizza joints an' never makin any money. " For "pizza joints" we have a prior occurrence of "pier joint" and the last part of "decrepit. " "Decrepit" comes back to the 'de' series. "Old" and "these" contrast with prior items, "new" and "those; " "ladies" contrasts with the just prior use of

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"man," "never" with "ever, " and "makin' . . . money" with the prior "losing money. " But if conversation were proceeding simply in a step by step historical development in which parts are being picked up and put into a different organization, we might suppose that it would just continue that way, additively, and it does not. So one wants to deal with the disjunctiveness as well as the way things get put together within flurries or short sequences - or, as I might eventually get to claim, within a kind of unit within conversation that we otherwise talk about as 'topic,' but where we don't think of topics as having this sort of intensity of organization. And when we begin to collect the sorts of things that I'm noting here, we can feel that a serious attention to the way the talk is put together might pay. These sorts of things at least suggest some sort of close development. Let me now begin to focus on what happens in this thing as a piece of sequence, extracting from it some aspects of the way it works sequentially. A kind of thing one can look at is Ken's question "The Pike?" At least a first reason for giving it a bit of attention is that it's a question that follows a question, where we have in mind that a usual sequence is not Q-Q, but Q-A. And when you get Q-Q, that second Q will often be a thing like "The Pike?" where some aspect of the prior question is isolated and returned as another question. Where, then, you often get as a characteristic pattern, something like Q-Q-A-A, in which you have an internal sequence. Something like this: A: B: A: B:

Did you tell Mary we moved to the beach? Why, was she here? Yes. Yes.

As it happens, we don't have the pattern in this fragment, though we almost could have it. If Roger had stopped after this "Yeah," then he would be returning the floor to Ken to answer the original question: "Isn't the New Pike depressing?" "The Pike?" "Yeah. " And then we might get Ken saying "Yes," or "No, " or whatever. But that doesn't happen. Now I want to do more than focus on a pattern that doesn't happen to be fully used here; I want to focus on some other aspects of this thing. I started off by saying that just before this question, "Isn't the New Pike depressing?" Ken had said something like " Last night I went with four guys to the Pike. " Now I will informally say that it appears that Ken was going to tell a story about that last night's event. In due course, later on in the conversation he does indeed tell that story. What happens here is that Roger picks up on the mentioning of the place with a question of a sort. For sequential purposes it's better to think of it not as what he does is ask a question, but one might say he uses the form of a question to do some variety of things. We can then ask what might he be using the question form to do, and there are a lot of things we could say about it. The thing I want to focus on is this: Roger is plainly indicating but not asserting that he thinks the New Pike is depressing. To say " Isn't the New

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Pike depressing?" is sequentially altogether different than saying "God the New Pike is depressing. " The way in which the two things are altogether different has to do with something we can begin to think of as the issue of who goes first and who goes second with respect to some possibly arguable matter. And I want to assert that you can take it as a first policy for examining conversation that people prefer to go second. And if you look at conversations you can look for people's strategies for avoiding going first. There are technical ways of developing that 'avoiding going first' is a thing, which I'm not going into here because I want to be focussing on this particular fragment. But to ask the question "Isn't the New Pike depressing?" has that character by virtue of the way such a sequence can work. And that is that if Ken then states a position about the New Pike - that it is depressing or that it isn't, and maybe why - Roger is then in a position to take that apart, and Ken is placed in a position of having to build a defense. That is to say, if you can put off going first, it's not just a matter of your going second, it's that you don't have to state your position or argument; instead, you can criticize the prior party's. Now, the question " Isn't the New Pike depressing?, " while it does not assert Roger's position, plainly reveals it. And if Ken is going to answer the question, he's got to answer it with knowledge that Roger is going to attack him if he says, e.g., "I like the place. " That is information that Ken will plainly have, given the question. Further, that the New Pike is depressing is specifically a thing that Roger is raising knowing that Ken would, if he were free to, say otherwise. There are a variety of reasons for my saying that; among them, as a kind of intuitive point, that Ken has started to tell a story about what he did last night, Friday night - where Friday night is not just any 'last night. ' And Roger can know that one kind of common thing about people, that happens to hold for Ken, is that unless he had a good time last night he wouldn't have started to tell the story. So the fact that he started to tell a story about what he did last night - involving going to an amusement place - could inform Roger that Ken was going to say he had a great time. Indeed, in this case he happens to say "I thought it was a ball," but I'm suggesting that that eventuation is one that Roger already knew would be developing. In that regard let me sketch something out kind of briefly, just to give some further backing to the sequential movement here. Ken went to this place and had a good time. Roger has obviously been there and had a lousy time. Now, Roger has never mentioned the place. He could have come in some time and said he went to this place and had a lousy time. That could involve him in reporting some kind of a failure of an evening, and it could lead to various kinds of discussions of the ways in which he goes through the world. That is to say, leaving aside that this is a therapy session, if you're reporting an event and you're trying to make a case for both " I had a lousy time" and " the place is lousy ' ' then you face certain obvious difficulties. On the other hand, Roger can save up the failings he has at evenings, and employ them as ways of debunking other persons' experiences. He doesn't have to tell us about an

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evening he had. What he does instead is to talk about this place and its properties as negative in response to somebody else who proposes that they had a good time there. If we were to ask what's to be gained by saving lousy times that you've had, then a thing you can do with saved lousy times is to employ them in dealing with other people's happy times. And that as compared to feeling that if you don't tell the story it's not ever going to be usable. Again, then, what Roger has done is to provide for Ken's having to defend a position as compared to himself stating a position that he would then be the one to defend. Now, that Roger does this doesn't mean that he's going to win the strategy sequence. You can try, via some technique, to get to go second, but it's by no means guaranteed that you will get to go second. There are tactics that permit someone else to avoid that outcome. And such a question as "The Pike?" can do that. It throws back to the other, who, should he then go and develop what he indeed had to say, can then have his position attacked. Though that can fail also, since it can be followed with "Yeah" period, and then Ken is back where he was when he tried "The Pike?, " i.e. , back to now stating his position and having it attacked - though again, he could move in other ways. But the idea is to take a question like "The Pike?" which might be treated simply as 'he isn't sure he heard what was said, ' and give it a position within some developing argument with respect to some controversial matter - about which, if you watch conversation at all, you can see maneuverings. Looking at it, then, in terms of a simple distinction between going first and going second, we can begin to see that those are not equivalent positions, and also begin to see why they're not equivalent positions, i.e. , that it's quite a different thing to develop a critique of someone's position than to develop a defense of your own. Let me now pick up some further sorts of notably delicate aspects of the way this fragment moves. I want to point up a relationship between two utterances, "Isn't the New Pike depressing?" and "How can you tell?" Looking first at Ken's "How can you tell?, ' ' I want to say that what he's done is to focus on the more or less core possible weakness of Roger's argument. Roger's argued so far that the people at this place are "pretending they're having fun. " Now to argue that people are pretending is kind of a delicate thing to argue, and the weakness that such an assertion can have is revealed by such a question as 'How can you tell?" Ken's question here is not one that says "I disagree, " but one wants to see that he has listened to Roger's position, not so much for whether he agrees or disagrees, but for wherein does its particular weakness lie, so that that weakness might be used by him without ever getting into the question of whether he agrees or not. "How can you tell?" is technically appropriate to the assertion "They're pretending, " as Roger's "Isn't the place depressing?" turns out to be the appropriate way to criticize the New Pike. That is, the specific character of the Pike is that it's a "fun" place, and it's that specific character which is focussed on by calling it "depressing. " So in these aspects of the way they deal with the place they're talking about, and with each other's talk, there is an orientation towards each other which is at least mildly going for the jugular. And again, this is taking

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place in 'no time' we might as well say. It's not that Roger spoke and Ken sat down and tried to figure out what would be the best possible attack he could make; it's the attack he makes on the completion of Roger's utterance. And that paralleling of the attention to a distinctive weakness can suggest that they are moving with a kind of close attention to each other in a conflictive way.

April 9

Technical competition I want to talk about something I'm going to call 'technical competition in conversation. ' I want that understood in a very special sense: It is technical competition in conversation. Forget about the word 'competition' however you might normally use it about people competing in conversation, e.g., that in Roger and Ken's argument they are 'competing. ' I'm not thinking of anything like that. I'm going to develop something called 'technical competition in conversation,' and talk to how that works and what its sources are. Last time I mentioned that this fellow Ken had begun what we can think of as a possible line of development, one that I suggested would have eventuated in his telling a story about his trip to the New Pike, a story which he does indeed tell later on, a story which involved him having a good time. He doesn't get to tell it in this fragment. Roger, while taking him up on an aspect of the line he might have been developing, shifts that line of development slightly. And one wants to have in mind a conception of possible lines of development that a conversation can take for now, as things that speakers are attentive to in terms of whether they're going to go along with such a possible line as they can see developing, or whether they're going to change that possible line. 1 Now, I don't much want to focus on any possible competition between Roger and Ken with respect to the line of development that gets taken. Rather, I want to focus on the competition between Roger and Jim in that respect. Early on in the fragment we get: Roger : jim : Roger : jim : Roger : (jim) : Ken : Roger : jim : 1

((about the New Pike)) Oh the place is disgusting. // Any day of the week. I think that Pop is // depressing, it's just­ But you go-you go- takeThose guys are losing money. hehh But you go down-dow-down to th'New Pike there's a buncha // people, oh: : an' they're old, an ' they're pretending they're having fun, but they're really not. ((cough)) How c' n you tell: Hm? They're- they're tryina make a living, but the place is on the decline, 's like a dejjgenerate place. So's Pop.

Much of these introductory considerations comes from the April 5 lecture, original pp. 1 2 - 1 3 .

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(Roger:) (Y'know?) Pop is just - jim : Roger : Yeah i-it it's one of these pier joints, y'know?

If we just take the row of initials of the speakers, we get roughly, R, ] , R, ] , R, etc. I want to deal with a variety of facets of that, for which, for some purposes, just this kind of line-up will do to isolate some aspects of what is happening. As the series starts off, Roger's remarks are about the amusement park called the Pike, and Jim's are about Pacific Ocean Park, another amusement park that gets called "Pop. " We could diagram it as: R:

] : R:

]:

R:

Pike Pop Pike Pop Pike

And the relationships that they have to each other are at least that both speakers are talking about amusement parks, and both are talking negatively about the places they're talking about. Now, until Ken's utterance, they're both proceeding in a fashion that's slightly noticeable, in that they are essentially doing something that we give the name 'skip-connecting' to. What I mean to refer to with that is that a speaker produces an utterance which is indeed related to some prior utterance, but it's not related to the directly prior utterance, but some utterance prior to the directly prior utterance. And if you look at skip-connecting utterances, two prominent sorts of facts about them are: First, that when speakers skip-connect they tend to skip-connect to themselves, i.e. , to an utterance of theirs; characteristically to the last utterance of theirs. Second, they don't much skip-connect unless their own utterance was last-but-one, i.e. , the one that directly preceded whatever utterance preceded their current one. That is to say, they don't skip-connect over long distances. Now it's perfectly plain that speakers do things like reasserting a line that they earlier started to take, that got nowhere. But if they do that over any distance, then they tend to do it by reference to a re-beginning. So, a characteristic sort of thing involves someone saying, very early in the conversation, "I was at the police station this morning. " The talk that follows does not take that up. No questions, no comments, no invitations to say more. Instead, some sequence gets developed about something else. On the completion of that sequence, say, six or seven utterances later, the speaker reintroduces this thing, and reintroduces it in the same fashion he introduced it in the first place, by saying "I was at the police station this morning. " And then he gets an invitation to go on, and does develop whatever it is, or a version of whatever it is, that he seemed to have planned to tell. But both parties here are skip-connecting - and doing it mutually. That is to say, you can perfectly well have one party skip-connecting to their own prior talk

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across the talk of a series of others who are alternating. But a facet of competition in conversation is that parties do mutual skip-connecting. Two people competing for the development of some line in a conversation can proceed by alternating speakerships, each engaged in skipping the last and tying to his prior - his prior being the last-but-one - to develop the line that he began to take. If this is at all approximate to how things proceed, then a thing that is obviously set up in a circumstance of mutual skip-connecting is that other participants to the conversation become distinctly crucial. If a party to the skip-connecting is able to mobilize any third to talk, then the distance between the last utterance of the one whom he's competing with, and that one's possible next utterance, is increased. That is to say, if at some point in a sequence of alternating skip-connecting, somebody other than one of those who are doing it can be gotten to talk, and to talk to the business of one of the skip-connectors, then if the other of those is to skip-connect again, he's jumping a larger distance. I leave aside for the moment questions of what kinds of complicatednesses those sorts of things involve. But at least a possibility is that some third speaker can intervene in a sequence of skip-connectings, and connect directly to a last. And that he would connect directly to a last is not at all puzzling since under the usual way topical talk proceeds parties do connect their utterances to lasts, so the third party coming in is perhaps doing a perfectly ordinary sort of thing. Now he can connect to a last in a variety of ways. One way that's of distinct interest is that he does not simply produce an utterance which connects to a last, but produces such an utterance that connects to a last as on its completion provides for some further talk, directly, by one of the competitors - ideally the last before him, thereby further extending the distance between the other competitor's prior talk and next chance to talk. So, for example, what happens here is: R, J, R, J, R, and then K talks. At this point if J were to try again to skip-connect - and he'd have to skip-connect to continue his line since neither R nor K talk to it - then he's got two utterances between. And if it happens, as it does here, that K does something that provides for R to talk again, in this case a question to R, then there's now at least three utterances between J s last and his possible next. Of course K having asked a question of R, then, for example, R's answer can provide for K to talk next, further extending the distance between J s last utterance and any next possible utterance of this, making it that if he's going to try to bring off taking up his line again he's got to move across a whole series. So possibly any way that a third party can be led to select a prior-to-him to talk, can be crucial for ending a possible competition sequence, i.e. , by picking out one of the parties as the one whose line he's going to go along with, and making that the group decision by virtue of the way in which it complicates the problem of the other party to get his line reinstated. That then turns K's question, which may perfectly well have been a hostile question to R, into one that nonetheless gives R back the floor, permitting him to

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continue the line he was trying to take, and shutting J out for a time. So the fact that it's hostile is secondary to that it nonetheless operates to preserve the line R was trying to take. Now let's look back at some of the details of the thing, from the vantage we've so far gotten, rough as it may be, and notice that when ] comes in again after R's answer to K's question, he's now talking differently than he was. What he does now is to produce a connected piece of talk, no longer skip-connected at all, but connected to R's last utterance, i.e. , " So's Pop. " However, although connected to R's last utterance, it nonetheless keeps alive his interest in Pop as a possible topic. In negotiational terms he's done something that is in effect to say, "Okay I'll go along with Pike as the topic, but I want to have Pop considered along with it"- but now 'along with it' and not in alternative to it, which is what was happening at the start. And with that, we get a possible resolution of a sort of competition; the resolution being that the parties might find, and agree on, a way to assimilate the competing lines and talk them together. And it appears that J having seen that he's losing out, making a gesture of acquiescence while holding onto Pop, gets from R an acquiescence in including Pop in the talk. That is, in R's next, "Yeah it's one of these pier joints," he connects to )'s last. And J can then produce one that's unlocated as to that it is or isn't competitive; it's now an additive development. That there should be a possibility of resolution turns on what the sources are for competition in the first place. And here's why I'm emphasizing technical competition. You might think of parties as competing in conversa­ tion when what they want to do is to talk about different things. You might then imagine that they compete for the floor where what they're intending to do is talk about altogether different things. It appears that when they do that sort of competition which is characterizable in something like the sort of way that I characterize it, the sources of competition are that the two parties are intending to talk only about very slightly different things. And they get into the competition in that each, in the first instance, has started to take the line they do by reference to a line that's just been taken by somebody else. And when I talk about 'taking a line, ' I don't mean what they say in this or that utterance, but that they produce something that looks like it's something they want others to talk to. At least one evidence for that being that when no other talks to it directly, they themselves talk to it in a next utterance. And when anyone does talk to it, they continue talking to it. What we're saying then is that the sources of competition are, first, that parties are intending to talk to only very slightly different lines, and second, that the lines they intend to talk to take off on a line that someone else has just begun. And they will fight over the floor by virtue of the fact that if what occasions their talk is the talk of a just-preceding speaker, then, if they lose out on their line now, there is no reasonable expectation that such a place will occur again for the line they're starting to take. That is to say, the line they're taking being specifically occasioned by the talk of another, the question is which line will get going from that preceding utterance. The line that gets

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going will end up somewhere, a somewhere understandable as not likely to be an adventitious spot for the line that lost out. Whereas, if parties were talking about altogether different things, then one could perfectly well leave the floor to the one who beat you out, who talked faster, who got his utterance on the floor. Since you didn't in the first instance use the course-of-talk-so-far to place your own utterance, you might as well save it to place it somewhere else equally arbitrarily. But the thing is that by and large talk is very closely placed, and persons are engaged in finding that line of development which talks to whatever it is that's just been talked about, and not simply introducing topics wherever they happen to choose to introduce them. If what were being done were introduction of topics wherever one happened to intro­ duce them, then the source of competition for talking now would dissipate. So it's a concern to place one's utterance in such a way as to have it take off on a last, that provides for these sorts of technical competition in conversation. We're dealing in a particular way here with one enormously general theme about the organization of conversation, which can be said in a sentence as: Speakers specifically place almost all of their utterances. Where, by 'place, ' I mean they put them into such a position as has what's just been happening provide an obvious explanation for why this was said now (where, when they don't, a question could arise of why that now). They do use ways of indicating that an utterance is off-topic, e.g., "by the way" or various other sorts of things which say "don't attend the utterance I'm now producing by reference to what's just been happening. " But lacking that, the effort is to find such talk as provides for the slightest possible movement. Indeed, a rough observation which goes along with the kind of line I'm taking now is: The relative frequency of marked topic introduction is a measure of lousy conversations. That is to say, when you're in a conversation which you find is dragging, uninteresting, embarrassing, lousy in varieties of ways, then you might find that one of the ways in which that's happening is that new topics need specifically be introduced, and they get recurrently specifically 'introduced. ' Whereas in, quote, a high conversation, a good conversation, what you would find is that new topics are never 'introduced,' they just happen along. Though at any given point we're talking to something more or less markedly different than what we were talking about a minute or five minutes ago, it didn't happen by virtue of people saying, characteristically after a pause, "So what have you been doing? " or varieties of things that say "Let's start a new topic. " In a way, the measure of a good topic is a topic that not so much gets talked of at length, but that provides for transitions to other topics without specific markings of that a new topic is going to be done. The richness of a topic is, then, not to be characterized by the fact that there's lots to say about it, but that there are lots of ways to move from it unnoticeably. Whereas a lousy one is one that, the end of it having come, we know we're at the end of it, and if we're going to go anywhere else we've got to start up again. And that's the character of, say, 'embarrassing' topics and 'controver­ sial' topics; that to get off of them one has to specifically do 'getting off of them. '

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The upshot of this is in part that a consideration of some facets of the detailed sequencing of the speakers is informing us about things like how they do competition and why they do competition; things that tum out to be characterizeable as due to the way in which conversations are sequentially organized, moving utterance by utterance, in which, primarily, persons are engaged in producing talk that connects to directly prior talk.

April 1 2

Long sequences Let me take some time now to say what I figure I was doing last time. One kind of basic direction that the investigation of natural conversation properly takes consists in attempts to extend the length of sequences one is able to package. By that I mean in part, not simply the length of sequences one is able to deal with in some way or another, but the length of sequences one is able to put into an organization that deals with at least some parts of each, or almost each, utterance in that sequence. There are plainly ways of dealing with parts of the fragment we've been looking at, which do not contibute directly to putting it into a package. If, for example, I were to develop a characterization of that Q-Q-A thing, or some question-answer sequence as just a question-answer sequence, then while I will have brought to attention or remarked on or partially characterized some two- or three-utterance sequence that is a sequence in this fragment, how the sequence is part of the analytic package that's being developed is completely ignored by such a consideration. It turns out that one central problem in building big packages is that the ways the utterances that tum out to compose the package get dealt with as single utterances or pairs of utterances or triplets of utterances, etc. , may have almost no bearing on how they're to be dealt with when an attempt is made to build a larger package. That is to say, the operation is not at all additive. It's not an operation in which one develops adequate characterizations, interesting characterizations, of some utterance or some small sequence and then assembles them into a package. It doesn't work that way at all. So, e.g. , information about utterances and their organization for smaller units might be developed which would yield a discussion of all the utterances in this fragment and not tell us anything about some such larger package as I've been trying to get at. Certain aspects of the work you might do on a small sequence won't do you any good in trying to package longer sequences. Indeed, they might be misguiding in that you would figure that you've dealt with some pair in some fashion, and even in a sequential fashion, and thereby not see the potentiality for building a larger package for which the way you had studied the smaller sequence didn't have much bearing, or had only some relatively intricate bearing. So work on small sequences and work on large sequences can go on kind of independently. Packaging larger sequences is a different and in some ways rather more difficult task because one thing you're engaged in doing is finding what sorts of large packages there are, where analyzing the workings of, e.g. , question-answer is something that at least begins with a relatively firm, common, intuitive knowledge that there are such things and this is the way 3 54

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they work, and you can look to the materials in order to see whether this thing works the way we think or not. Again, then, a basic sort of investigation is that of long sequences as a coherent matter as compared to simply studying, utterance by utterance, a long sequence which you then have as an in-some-way connected series of small fragments. And such investigation is, if it's going to develop at all, at a rather primitive stage - leaving aside obvious sorts of things where you're dealing with relatively gamelike situations or other sorts of known, pre-organized matters. The sequences we're dealing with are not pre-organized sequences. To say such investigation is at a relatively primitive state is to say something like: This sequence here may be the longest coherent package that's ever been investigated in terms of its relative coherences, and for which we have mechanisms of some sort for putting the whole thing together. A sequence of that length has never been given anything like a characterization which says it all works, and where one starts at the beginning parts of it and characterizes them in ways that organize the beginnings by reference to possible developments that take off on them. And the term 'possible' is altogether crucial because in talking about, for example, lines of development, they are possible lines of development. I am not at all arguing that the collection of linked mechanisms that I roughly described run off automati­ cally given the initial one. At each point things could go specifically differently - and one can characterize some of the ways they could go differently. But what happens is that bits and pieces get characterized in one or another ways; like we began with some allusion to an utterance just preceding "Isn't the New Pike depressing?" which is done by this guy Ken, something like "Last night I went with four guys to the new-to the Pike. " From that we went on and didn't give much consideration to it in its own right. All that I wanted out of it was that it was an utterance that laid out a possible line of development. Now, it happened to do it in a characteristic, describable way, which is roughly that it was a specifically transitional utterance. There was another topic altogether being discussed, sex. At some point there's a long pause, then Roger says: -Roger : Ken : Roger : Ken : jim : Ken : jim : Ken : jim : Ken : -Roger :

Awright. Tell us about your sexual problems. Me? Yeah, you // c'n cry on our shoulder. I had aSheI had a nun to/jday, He's mad because she wouldn't do it last night. I didn't go out with anybo(h)dy last night. I went with four guys last night, we went to new-to the Pike. You're mad cause he didn't do it last nigh(hh)t hehh heh heh hhunhhh hhunhhh hhh (Isn't) the New Pike depressing?

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The transitional character of Ken's "I went with four guys to the Pike" has to do with the connection between what was going on before, i.e. , "Tell us about your sexual problems" and what follows, i.e. , "Isn't the New Pike depressing? " Where, for one, if it works it closes whatever has led to it while also opening up another direction. That is, he's setting up a story about what happened last night, using the chance to talk he was given, to talk in such a way as to involve him in responding to where we are, but to end up in some new place. And that's a way that topic change takes place. It's interesting because it isn't the specific introduction of a new topic in such a way as to involve no relation to what's just been happening, though it ends up with a new topic emerging, one that's unconnected to where we've been. Now if topics are gotten to this way, it might well be the source of a nice technical problem about topical organization in conversation which is, why is there some sort of extended relative amnesia for last topics? People can know what they talked about earlier but they routinely have a relative amnesia for specifically the last topic. And there may be ways that transitions between them take place which serve to break the connection between last and next, and perhaps these sorts of transitions are involved in doing that. Anyway, Ken does this transition, and now Roger comes on in a perfectly routine way to be dealing with an opened topic, which is to preserve that topic while making a slight shift in its possible line of development. And Jim does exactly the same sort of thing, i.e. , he talks to the topic being talked of while making a slight shift in its possible line of development. Either line of development might well emerge here and continue, or another party could perfectly well take up talk, doing precisely what these guys have done, and get another connected but slight shift. But all that we want out of it is that what would be minimally involved in getting into a possible competition sequence is that two slightly different possible lines of development have been mutually generated from a prior sequence. That then sets up a situation where some attempt might be made to preserve one or another of those lines of development. And for that attempt, we have the skip-connecting technique used. Now, you could perfectly well have a competition sequence emerge and skip­ connecting not be employed but some other device, and it's not the case that skip-connecting is specifically a mechanism for doing competition; it is used widely and for lots of other things. As it happens here, it is a part of the mechanism for doing competition and as such happens to be preserved in a way we would otherwise talk about it for consideration of a competition sequence. In any event, we have the skip-connecting device used here. Just how long such a thing could go on, I can't say. But for the skip-connecting to have its character as a mechanism in a competition sequence given two alternative lines having been offered, it would seem that at least a pair of skip-connectings would have to be involved. What we're getting now is a kind of a bare bones competition structure. And once we're into a competition sequence we begin to have a real problem of how such a competition can be won - it could just die out, it could move

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in other directions, but at least a possibility once you're into it is that it could be won. And a way it could be won turns on somebody other than the two who are doing the skip-connecting coming into the sequence in such a way as to link to the last utterance of one of the competing persons, and to provide that after they've completed there be more talk on the same matter by the person they've linked to. Now, coming in with a question that is linked to the last utterance is such a device, which is what we have with Ken's "How can you tell. Hm?" Though again, such a question sequence has no particular distinctive connection to a competition sequence. Asking a party a question about something they just said, which involves them in answering when you've finished, is a sort of phenomenon that is not at all distinctly located in competition sequences. But it can be a mechanism for a competition sequence by reference to the stuff I gave last time about the distance between the last and possible next utterance of one of the competitors doing skip-connecting, if the one who has now had that distance emerge between his utterances is to try to preserve his possible line via skip-connecting. Now there can be some other ways of preserving one's own possible line of direction, and in a fashion we get Jim using some other way of doing it, which is to link to the last utterance with "So's Pop . " That then allows Roger's line, while hoping that something can be done with the line Jim wanted to take. And we do then get Roger going along with it. In its fashion, then, that pair of accommodations constitutes a way that, the competition having been intervened in, it can get resolved. We then get the conversation running on with the parties roughly alternating about their new mutual topic. And again, for the purposes of the package the minimal components here would be that they do things which attend each interest while making some talk to the mutual line of development that's been gotten going. The idea is that, characterizing these things in terms of the whole package, we are able to say things that involve us in noticing facets of its utterances that are not transparent. We come to see, e.g . , that Jim's "So's Pop" and Roger's "Yeah it's one of those pier joints" are not just characterizable by reference to, e.g. , "This is an agreement" and "This is an acknowledgement of the last," but that these things are productively done by reference to the whole package. As we saw the relevance of Ken's "How can you tell. Hm?" in the way it links up to Roger's prior and gives him the floor back, where it's otherwise just some question to be dealt with in some fashion or another. But we saw that the character of that question as linking is crucial. We might then come to see that Roger could attempt to elicit such a sequence - not that he does it here, but that could be a resource for somebody in a competition sequence, i.e. , to attempt to get a question addressed to them on their intended line. Having the package, we were also able to give it an examination which would tell us something about the circumstances under which competition emerged in the first place. And that had to do with the characteristics of Roger's and Jim's first utterances as being placedly alike - each having as it source a just-prior thing said - and only slightly different in line of direction. And that, being technically altogether relevant to that a competition sequence

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emerged, was then of great interest in that it permitted us to consider the not too obvious possibility that when competition would emerge in conversation, it would emerge not about matters that involve people talking about totally different things, but about only slightly different things, where the only slightly different things that they wanted to talk about were each having as its source a just-prior thing said. And once we could begin to see that, we could begin to see why in the world they would get into competition at that point, and that they would not particularly need to have a competition where they were intending to talk about totally different things or things that did not have a local source. That is to say, the very phenomenon of their talking about things that took off on a last and were only slightly different, would be what would provide that they would fight for the position to talk about that line of development, given that the way that talk procedes means that if they lost a chance to take the line of development they were trying to take as a placed matter, such a line of development is not expectably reocurrently placeable somewhere else. So that we have, then, not simply a rough characterization of a sequence and its mechanisms, but an explanation for how come that sequence got going, though the explanation for how come the sequence got going wouldn't particularly tell us where it would go once it got going. I want to emphasize that this is by no means to say everything about the package's components, and I've said hardly anything about a lot of its utterances. Even the ones I talked about, e.g . , about the fineness of "How can you tell. Hm?" or the fineness of "Isn't the New Pike depressing?" I was dealing with in a rather different sort of way. There are, of course, a variety of ways that any of these utterances can be dealt with; ways that can all live together or separately. But a next order of aim would be to see how many of the facets that one could isolate out of such a sequence can, if you could develop a package for it, be put back into the package. That's another, yet more elaborate kind of operation, which is also at a kind of primitive state, and it's just absolutely unknown how much of what can be found out about any utterance, any fragment, any sequence within a fragment, etc., can be locked into some package, if some package can be found. And after this there are a whole range of other directions one can take with such an organization of findings. Only as an instance, one direction would be that we can now see the specific relevance of more than two parties for the ways in which a competition sequence could develop. That is, we can see a business that the sheer status 'third party' would yield, and, say, an interest that the two would have in mobilizing the third. And again, that could perfectly well be a matter of three with a fourth, or three now attempting to get one of those three to join with a second, etc. Those are now up for grabs as possible ways things can operate, and they can be thought about. But before we have this rough construction there's nothing to think about. Now you want to watch when I say "Okay, now we can, from this, begin to think about it. " Until then it's not that we're not thinking, but we're trying to find how some things are happening in the world which permit us to, or

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stop us from, thinking about them in interesting ways. And when I say that from now on we could think about something, that's an argument, and you could begin to see if there is anything to reason about or not, and would it be safe. It happens that the fundamental question in social science is when in the world do you have things in such a status as to be able to think about them. The difference between different sorts of model-makers is specifically when it is that they start saying "Okay, now we can theorize; we have enough data so that we can put our minds to work," and you can look at different areas just to see what sorts of materials are treated as adequate for reasoning; at what point people figure "From here on we can reason. "

April 1 9

Caller-Called This is a phone call. A and B are male, C is female. A: B: A: C: B: C: B: C: B: C: B: C: B: C: B: C: B: C: B: C: B: C: B: C: B:

C: B: C: B: C:

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Hello? Yeah is Judy there? Yeah just a second. Hello Judy? Yeah. Jack Green. Hi Jack. How ya doing? Say what are you doing? Well we're going out, why? Oh I was just gonna say come out and come over here and talk this evening, but if you're going out II you can't very well do that. "Talk, " you mean get drunk don't you? What? It's Saturday. What do you do. Go out and get drunk every Saturday? hm hehhhh Well my folks are helping us to do it this evening. That's why you look so bad on Monday morning. hehhhh No not that long. Hehhh No I just uh I didn't realize the library closed at five on Saturday 'nYeah, I got booted outta there too. Today? Yeah. Uh were you there? I was up in the grad reading room. Oh. Oh I was in the bio med library and I had big intentions of working all day and they flicked the lights and kicked me out. Well that's just- I was just gonna call and see if you 'n yr husbn would like to come over - Oh: : II Thanks Jack en we take a raincheck? But uh g'wan out as long as your parents are footing the bill kid, you just go right ahead Yeah you're not kidding hehhh Don't miss any of those opportunities. Get 'em while you can. heh Yeah you know once a week we eat.

April 1 9 B: C:

B: C: C:

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hehh Why is it every Saturday night out there? No Well I wouldn't want you to do it every Saturday night, but once in a while it's okay. Well lisWe might get spoiled. yeah. [[ Food's bad for you. Yeah well get on your clothes and get out and collect some of that free food and we'll make it some other time Judy then. Okay then Jack Bye bye Bye bye

One kind of central purpose I have for bringing this in and talking about it is as a differentiation from stuff I've been talking about so far, where a package involved a sort of sequence which has essentially no breaks in it, for its operation. That is to say, we haven't been moving from one place in the conversation to quite another place and talking about sequential relationships operating at a distance. And also, while there have been some sorts of mentionings of who the people are, a consideration hasn't been offered of their identities, and specifically of such of their identities as have the peculiar status of being features of the conversation. One way I'll be proceeding will be to focus on caller-called as identities for conversation, where, further, those are such identities as operate over distances, i.e. , at places that are not directly connected in the conversation, for example, at the beginning of the conver­ sation and at the end. At least one relevance of talking about such identities as caller-called if one can, is that perhaps we can say something about how a conversation operates, with relatively minimal introduction of who the parties are. Obviously if one can attribute something of what the parties do to each other in a conversation, to no more than such a thing a caller-called, then one is in a position to say that some part of a sequential organization of a conversation has to do with identities that the conversation itself makes relevant, such that for at least those facets of the conversation one needn't make reference to other sorts of identities that parties have which are, so to speak, exterior to not simply the conversation, but to its sequential organization. If, however, we found that such other identities were central to almost anything one could say about a conversation, then there would be a way in which conversation could not be said to have an organization independent from such other aspects of the world as yielded other identities, e.g. , the names, sexes, social statuses, etc. , of the parties. You could imagine a world where some social status the parties had, operated in such a way as to determine how they could talk to each other, and in that world conversation would not be an independently organized phenomenon. Now, one question involved in the study of any possible domain of social organization is, is there some extent to which it is independently organized? And one way to determine that conversation is independently organized -

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from such other things as social class, etc. - is to find, e.g . , that it has a sequential organization which employs identities that it determines, and that it does proceed to some extent in terms of its identities. So that's a kind of interest that could derive from an examination of how much it matters for the way conversation proceeds, that a party to a telephone call is a caller and another is a called. Where those identities might seem in the first instance ones that wouldn't cut too much; it happens that so-and-so is a caller and it happens that so-and-so is a called, but so what. So we've tried to set up the import of there being some consequence to these conversational identities caller-called, for the way conversation pro­ ceeds. Now a seemingly trivial facet of the caller-called identities, but one that at least shows a way that such identities are usable in setting up aspects of the organization of conversation, is that one can state a rule in terms of those identities that tells you how telephone conversations begin. The facts are not particularly newsy in the first place: If you're trying to say how telephone conversations begin, then you can say the rule is 'called speaks first. ' So if you took an indefinite set of telephone conversations, with, thereby, a possibly immense set of possibly relevant identities that the parties might have, leaving aside that for any conversation the parties might have more than a few possibly relevant identities, a rule which ignores all such identities operates, and operates to describe how conversations get started. All you need is caller-called and 'called speaks first. ' The rule has a series of strategic consequences for persons in a variety of other sorts of identities, having to do with, for example, how one can introduce considerations of social status into the beginning of a telephone conversation. And the fact that the rule 'called speaks first' operates generally, is not undercut by the techniques that have been introduced to deal with it in accord with other considerations, but the rule determines how it is that parties go about dealing with it, given other considerations. So there have been a series of institutions developed in an attempt to deal with the rule; things like secretaries. Now one might think of the secretary simply as a device whereby some people are prevented from getting through to some people. That's plainly a thing it does, i.e. , the secretary serves as a filtering device, allowing some calls through and not others, according to various considerations. But another business of the secretary is to be someone who routinely answers the phone but who isn't the person who is called. That is, a business of the secretary answering the phone is to be not-the-person-who-is-called. Other persons are the intended recipients, and those persons don't answer the phone. That can set up a way whereby relative to the called, the caller speaks first, though in actual conversation the secretary speaks first. Then, a sort of thing that operates most nicely in some relatively rarified statuses, is where two secretaries encounter each other. That sort of problem emerges in high business and bureaucratic situations, i.e. , if you call the President of the United States or of some business firm, you will never get them directly on the line. That means that whoever you are as a caller, called will never be first speaker, and you will then be selling yourself to whoever is

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the first speaker in order to get through. And a first step in dealing with that problem is to have the intended caller never call. The caller's secretary calls the intended called's secretary. At that point there is a problem which, so far as I know, has never been given a systematic solution, i.e. , the people involved in it have not found a way to deal with it except through more or less elaborated negotiations as to who will be put on the line first - whether it will be the intended caller or intended called who gets put on the line to talk to the other's secretary. And at that point there can be an infusion of outside considerations, i.e. , if your secretary gets a phone call from somebody who is plainly superior to you, then it's her business to put you on the line to that person's secretary, and you having been put on the line to her, she will put her person on the line. The categories caller-called are then being dealt with via the operation of outside considerations, such that if called comes on the line first, that is incidental because the same parties involved but caller-called reversed, then caller would come on the line first. That is, the secretaries are operating in terms of their notions of the positions of their respective people - sometimes clear, sometimes not clear. Sometimes one secretary will concede to the other, sometimes apparently the battles go on for quite a while, e.g . , the caller's secretary says "This is John Smith, president of X calling the president of Y. Do you have your party?" "Yes I have my party, do you have your party?" "Yes I have my party will you put your party on the line?" "Will you put your party on the line?' ' etc. Now the point of introducing all this is that this is about all you can introduce in order to show the ways in which outside considerations can operate to modify the 'called speaks first' rule. And this is plainly altogether special, and plainly doesn't ignore the rule but is an attempt to find some way of dealing with it. So even with this exception, this is about as far as we can go in finding a way in which caller-called doesn't yield the consequence that called speaks first. It then looks like caller-called is a relevant identity for characterizing aspects of telephone conversation, and characterizing aspects of tum-taking in a telephone conversation (first tum, second turn, etc.) inde­ pendent of any other considerations. Once having gone through the sort of sequence that caller-called generates directly - a greeting sequence and a variety of other things that I won't go into right now - one can get to a place for which caller-called is quite irrelevant. But, while there are identities that you might imagine can serve at a place and then no longer be relevant as others come to the fore, caller-called operates at the beginning and then may disappear from relevance, and then operates elsewhere; in particular, at the dose. Now, 'at the dose' is kind of a complex phenomenon because the way conversation operates is that once having gotten going there are rules and techniques which serve only to keep it going - things like, at the completion of anybody's utterance someone else should start talking. That rule, which we talk about as a 'transition-relevance rule' and which has all sorts of problems and techniques involved concerning how completions are determined, etc. , simply serves to provide for more talk on the completion of anybody's talk.

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It provides no way for finding out when talk should end. For that, there has to be a series of other techniques whereby a place can be arrived at, at which the transition-relevance of a completion is lifted, i.e. , a place where, on somebody's completion nobody talks and talk is not 'absent. ' There are plenty of places where, on somebody's completion nobody talks, but what happens there is that talk is missing. And that has to do with that while there is nobody talking in the conversation, it is not over. For it to be over, it has to be brought to a completion. Now the problem of bringing it to completion in the sheer sense of getting to lift transition-relevance, is trivial. There are a relatively universally used set of techniques for lifting transition-relevance, and that involves using things like "Goodbye" "Goodbye. " What those do is to say 'After we're finished with that, nobody needs to talk. ' But that doesn't solve the central problem, which is how do you get to the place where "Goodbye" "Goodbye" works? The question is, where do you put the first "Goodbye"? Plainly the first "Goodbye" is not stuck just anywhere in a conversation. But to say that it goes at the 'end' of a conversation is to say that that matter is decidable, which it isn't. The question is, then, how is it that where to put "Goodbye" "Goodbye" is dealt with. And at least for telephone conversations, that problem is partially - though not minorly partially - a business of caller. It is caller's business to find a place to stick in possible endings. And by possible endings I don 't mean a first "Goodbye," I mean things that go before it, which serve in such a way as that at their end they can be followed by "Goodbye. " We can talk of "Goodbye" as a terminator and then look at things that are closings. Among the things in telephone conversations that serve to close are making an arrangement or confirming an arrangement that's been made. At some point in a conversation somebody can say "Okay so I'll see you Tuesday, " or somebody can propose an arrangement; "Well then let's get together, how about Tuesday. " And terminating items can occur directly on the completion of an arrangement sequence. So then the question is, where do you put the arrangements. And at least one thing that can be said is that it may be caller's business to place them. A characteristic sort of thing that's used in placing a closing is something that can be elicited at the beginning of a conversation, where it has one sort of job. When it is used, then, for placing a closing, the talk can be seen as connected at sometimes very large distances. So, at the beginning of a conversation - telephone or. face to face - having gone through greetings, etc. , someone can say "So what are you doing?" to which varieties of answers occur, e.g. , "Nothing much" or "Oh I was just about to make dinner" or "Oh I'm going to the library. ' ' Now, if the respondant to such a question gives such answers as the latter two, which we call 'tickets, ' then the other can use those answers at some point in the conversation to say "Well, you'd better go to the library" or ' 'I'd better let you fix your dinner. " They have then not simply done the job of proposing to close, but have done it by reference to the interest of the other. A specific routine technique which holds for both telephone and face to face conversation is for the party who introduces close

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to do it by reference to interests of the other. And a way they can get those interests is from something the other has said earlier in the conversation. Those things are seemingly saved and used at some opportune time. Now in a telephone call, if caller hasn't gotten such a ticket, he has things like it available which he can introduce; things like "Well I'll let you off the phone now," where the sheer fact that I brought you to the phone permits me to now use that I'll let you off the phone as a caller-specific closing proposal. And it may be caller's business to watch, or to appear to watch, for any move on the part of called that seems to indicate that called is ready to close, in order to introduce an offer to close. Though called can then reject the offer to close by saying "No no I have nothing to do, " though rejecting a close in that way can have the insensitivity of taking seriously something that caller did as a way to get off the line themselves. But called is being shown that they're being closed off by reference to their own interests, on their own behalf, without, then, a basis for complaining by virtue of the fact that they figure that the other party wants to get off. In this conversation called has announced, to a question at the beginning, that they're going out. Talk goes on, and at some place in it caller says " . . . well get on your clothes and get out and collect some of that free food . . . " Now that is not a proposal as to what called should do in the future. It isn't that if called takes them up on the closing, then after the close it's called's business to put down the phone and rush around getting dressed, or any such sort of thing. It's the form of a closing that takes up the kind of information that called has given caller, that caller can use now to do closing, i.e. , a 'ticket. ' And in that same utterance there is a reference to future getting together, " . . . and we'll make it some other time then. " We have then, both a 'ticket' and an arrangements-making, and those can be packaged together, separately, one can occur and not the other, etc. Now a thing one wants to see with that close offering is, not "Isn't it outrageous that this guy tells them what to do, " or cute of him or whatever, but that what he's done is to indeed attend such materials as have been given, and use them to bring off a close, where it's his business to propose a close, and to propose it in terms of the other's interests if he can, and perhaps to do it in such a way as to also involve some arrangements. And that's the business of his utterance as compared to its being some sort of command. Where, then, "Okay then Jack" is not an agreement to do what he 'commanded, ' but is a way of agreeing to close. It's an acceptance of the close form and not an acceptance of whatever has been proposed in that close form. One wants to see a systematic differentiation here between a 'command' where nobody ends up doing activities by virtue of what's proposed in it, and things like "Is Judy there?" which is a 'question' to which you might imagine an 'answer' would be done, "Yeah. " Where that is not just a question but a 'request,' and it's heard as a request, to be dealt with not as "Yeah she's here" but "Yeah, just a second" and that party gets off the line and does an action by reference to the request, i.e. , puts Judy on the line. What is involved is a massive difference between what looks like a 'command' and what looks like

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a 'question, ' where the 'question' is a 'request' and the 'command' is a 'dose offering. ' And it's the 'dose' character that counts for the latter, as it is the 'request' character that counts for the former. Neither have anything like the way in which they would be grammatically characterized, as sufficient information about how they're dealt with. The one could be characterized as a 'question' and the other as a 'command, ' and that would be wrong for both. The point is, then, that there is a place to deciding what the language-form import is of something, but plainly some facets of the language-form import are not operative and others are, and you couldn't tell by looking at them which facet was operative. That of course is not to say that "Is Judy there?" is always a 'request. ' And the question, then, of how it's found to be a request is seriously askable, in contrast to this other thing which nobody would ever treat seriously as 'command' - nobody who knows English, anyway. You could conceive of someone who knows the language but not how it works, feeling obliged to do something, or feeling like being stubborn and saying "No. ' ' It's these sorts of differences that make the problems of things like Anthropological Linguistics serious, since if you're an outsider, for example, studying a language, then the difficult thing is, even if you know something is a 'question, ' to know what anybody does with it. Why doesn't he just give a question-return, "Yeah. " And if that's a 'command, ' why does she accept it? Where you could then imagine that a perfectly reasonable thing one would be led to do, would be to try to find out who could give commands to who in the culture, when no such things are involved. But here it's caller's business that, with a series of constraints, caller should offer dosing, caller should, if he can, use materials called has given him, etc. It being, then, an altogether routine, produced, dose, which attends what's happened in the conversation to get out of the conversation. In this case it all takes place in less than a minute, but it can also operate at very long distances, i.e. , the same sorts of materials can be used after a ten minute call or a half hour call, etc. Now, called can hint at such things as involve caller in picking up that dose can be made. And of course furthermore if it's caller's business to do this, one has a kind of simple explanation of why callers feel lousy when called does the dosing, or why calleds are hesitant to do dosing. And that is to say, how it is that conversations should go on longer than any particular party in them wants them to, can have to do with whose business it is to bring them to a dose.

April 2 3

Characterizing an Event B: C:

B: C:

B: C:

Oh I was just gonna say come out and come over here and talk this evening, but if you're going out I I you can't very well do that. "Talk, " you mean get drunk don't you? What? It's Saturday. What do you do. Go out and get drunk every Saturday? hm hehhhh Well my folks are helping us to do it this evening.

I want to talk a bit about the utterance "Talk, you mean get drunk don't you?" How is it that his use of 'talk' is for her hearable as a possible allusion to 'get drunk, ' or if not a possible allusion to it that he intended, then a reading she would choose. That is to say, whereas 'in' and 'out' and things like that have an obvious kind of contrast, 'talk' and 'get drunk,' while they can contrast, might not look like precisely the same thing, and I'm not saying that they're precisely the same thing. We can begin by noting that 'talk' is a formulation he makes of the business of the invitation, i.e. , "I was just going to say come out and come over here and talk this evening. ' ' A first kind of thing that might be relevant to the replacement operation, not 'talk' but 'get drunk, ' can be developed by considering the status of formulations of invitational businesses. It's plain that the terms used for invitations only partially formulate such businesses. If somebody says "Come over for dinner this evening, " then that's one way they might describe what we're going to do, but hardly does it constrain what we will do. "Come over for dinner" doesn't mean that there will be no talk or no anything else. So invitations partially formulate what the invitation is for. That means that other formulations are available, so that something that could be called "Come over for dinner" could be called something else as well, and that, too, would be true. However, it's nonetheless not so that one can choose any possible partial formulation of an evening and have that be an acceptable invitation. One can readily come up with more or less silly versions of a correct partial formulation of an evening which are not appropriately used ones, e.g. , "Come over and have a drink of water, " "Come over and sit on the living-room couch, " etc. But how they differ from 'talk' and 'have dinner, ' which are appropriately used, is not by virtue of that the former are partial and the latter are not. They are all partial. Further, among partial ways to formulate evenings which are appropriately used, there are preferred uses. That means that if one is inviting somebody for an evening in which dinner will be served, then apparently that sort of 3 67

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information should be included in the invitation or they will have reason to assume that dinner is not going to be served . On the other hand, if someone is doing an invitation for an evening in which talk will occur, then one needn't include that information. That is to say, if something other than dinner is mentioned, say, 'talk,' then what's being said is that dinner will not be served, whereas if something other than talk is mentioned, say, 'dinner, ' that's not to say that talk will not be present. So what we get is that 'dinner' is a 'first-preference invitation' - not in the sense that one would prefer to be invited to dinner, but if someone is inviting you for dinner they had better say so - and 'talk' stands as an alternative to 'dinner' in the sense that 'talk' being what one is invited for, one understands that dinner is not going to be served. In neither case is it that the way to choose the terms of an invitation is to fully describe what you're inviting the person for. Both formulations are partial, but now we can see that although there are a series of partial formulations for an invitational occasion, there can be another set of rules that tell you how to choose the terms of an invitation, and how to interpret some actualized invitation. Specifically, there is a way of selecting from among partial formulations which says 'select first preference' such that if the partial formulation you select is not a first preference, then you're indicating that a first preference is not present. 'Talk' not being a first preference, a way of hearing it is to hear that it's not an invitation for what it otherwise might be, such that you find from 'talk' that dinner isn't being served. Whereas, 'dinner' being a first preference, hearing it, you are not to be engaged in finding what you're not being invited for. So then, the invitee here, hearing that she's been invited for 'talk,' it's her business to see that the invitation 'lacks something; ' is to be read for what it says she's not being invited for. Now, having made an investment in that operation, it may be that that operation is now used to get a further piece of talk on her part; one which finds not only an absence of dinner, but an absence of something else. That is to say, 'talk' is in the first instance not alternative to 'get drunk, ' but alternative to 'dinner. ' But having found that 'talk' provides for an absence, she is then in a position to use that operation to get some other item that is also a what-the-invitation-could-be-for that is absent. How she gets the particular item she does get, turns, however on the use of other information. What we have so far is a way she might attend being invited for 'talk' as it involves a focus on 'something missing' in the invitation. Now to get at what particular something is missing, we have as a serious resource her use of "It's Saturday. " We can notice that her assertion "It's Saturday" is a relatively peculiar one. It states such a fact that she can assume he knows. And it's a general rule about conversation that it's your business not to tell people what you can suppose they know. If the rule were relaxed there would be no shortage of things to say. You could read from a physics text to somebody; you could announce the date, the weather, the time; you could say your name again and again; you could point things out: "This is a chair, " "Today is Saturday, tomorrow is Sunday, the next day is Monday. " The conditions under which

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some fact that is known is assertable, are then problematic. But at least a first remark in that regard is that one asserts some fact one supposes a listener knows, not when one is trying to tell them that fact, but where that fact has some relevance which they seem not to have noticed, and one is pointing up its relevance, not telling them the fact. And given that you wouldn't be asserting that thing that you assume they know, they will then be inspecting it for other than whether it's so, but for how does it bear on what we're talking about. Which is why we can think of things like "It's Saturday, " " My name is Joe," etc . , as 'reminding' somebody of something. So that announc­ ing "It's Saturday" she's engaged in saying "Look at this assertion to find out what bearing it could have on what we're talking about. " So, for example, if one begins a conversation with "It's Saturday, " then a hearer can suppose that they ought to know what its relevance is for what we talked about some other time, i.e. , they're liable to say "Oh yeah we were supposed to go somewhere, I forgot. " 1

1 It is very likely that the bulk of this session was given to dealing with student questions, and that the discussion of " 'Talk, ' you mean get drunk don ' t you?" started well into the hour and was curtailed due to lack of time. The next session takes up this utterance again.

April 2 6

An event as an institution B: C:

B: C:

B: C:

B: C:

B:

How ya doing? Say what are you doing? Well we're going out, why? Oh I was just gonna say come out and come over here and talk this evening, but if you're going out I I you can't very well do that. "Talk, " you mean get drunk don't you? What? It's Saturday. What do you do. Go out and get drunk every Saturday? hm hehhhh Well my folks are helping us to do it this evening. That's why you look so bad on Monday morning.

I want to give a bit of perspective on the discussion I began last time with regard to "Talk, you mean get drunk don't you?" by asking why in the world should people get into some sort of battle over a characterization of an evening to come; indeed, more particularly, over an evening that's not to happen. She's already turned down the invitation, and no matter what it would have been, it's not going to happen. Nonetheless she initially quarrels with his characterization, and subsequent talk is disputatious on his part; they are in a sense having it out over what started as a questioning about how to characterize this evening that's not going to happen. We might try to consider that as a curious topic of dispute. I don't think, were someone to have looked at the conversation, they would have found it a strange thing to be battling about in that I suppose you could perfectly well find yourself in such a dispute, and participate in it. However, suppose we were talking about some assertably primitive tribe, proposing that it's a kind of routine thing among these people that, for something that's not going to happen, that they acknowledge is not going to happen, if someone calls it X, then another is not unlikely to say ' 'No, it should be called Y ' ' and, that having been done, it wouldn't be treated as "Okay you call it X, I'll call it Y, " but that people will then rather directly pass into fighting about it, verbally anyway. If that were proposed about some group of natives, it would be something we could take home as a strange custom, while here it is quite unnoticeable, in that it is altogether not strange - strange only to have seen such a thing happening, and to have seen it in this utterly ordinary conversation. Now to say they do battle is to notice that it is apparently an issue for him to find some way of dealing with her seeming superiority over how to spend a Saturday evening, i.e. , going out and getting drunk, where he has proposed talking. And that he finds, from the materials she gives him, a way to turn that initial, seeming superiority, into something which ends up with him 3 70

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calling her "kid," i.e. , formulating her evening as something she's just doing with her parents: "But uh go on out as long as your parents are footing the bill kid, you just go right ahead. " We have an initial situation where this guy calls up this girl. Apparently they're both graduate students; that is how they come to know each other and in part how he comes to make the call to her. As he puts it eventually, he was planning to spend the day in the library; his plans to work being frustrated he devises a scheme which would involve that he spend the evening talking with another student, presumably about what they have in common, i.e. , school. His proposed occasion stands, then, in a very neat relationship to what he might initially have had in mind, i.e., studying. So they start out as co-students. She then seems to pull some sort of rank on him, having to do with his invitation being stodgy or unadult or whatever, not a way to spend Saturday evening. That is, when she says "Talk, you mean get drunk don't you?" there are plainly a variety of hearings he could give that utterance. He could, e.g. , focus on that she's saying what he really meant, to which he could respond as to whether he meant that. He could say "That's what I meant" or "You've got me pegged! " etc. , or he could be direaly disputatious, e.g. , "I didn't mean any such thing! " Now apparantly he heard something in her format different than that, where what seems to be going on is that somehow 'mean' can have different ways of meaning. He heard that she was proposing some characteristic project of her own, which she kind of assents to as what she was intending with "Well my folks are helping us to do it this evening. " He then gets oddly intimate in a way that only a conversational sequence can rapidly provide for, i.e. , it's only by virtue of its locus in a conversation in which a place for it has occurred that he could say to her ' 'What do you do, go out and get drunk every Saturday?" That question plainly relies on its context for it to be seen as not drastically insulting but intendedly light and funny. And he continues the insult with "That's why you look so bad on Monday morning, " which invokes that time when we know each other as co-students - although the conversation could have other statuses for occur­ ring, for the invitation, for our knowledge of each other, etc. In due course we get into the business of her going with her parents which she had initially introduced - which is, for her proposal that Saturday is go-out-and-get-drunk time, an altogether drastic reformulation of what it had sounded like. That is, when one is a student, 'going out and getting drunk' and 'going out with one's parents' are drastically differently charac­ terized events - though they could be the 'same' event, i.e. , she could perfectly well do the same thing - sitting and talking and drinking - with her parents as she could with him. But she having introduced 'parents, ' he now exploits that to make her someone still dependent on, and using, her status as a 'kid' as a way to find things to do on Saturday night, or to have things to do found for her. Now what in the world is matterable enough to have this run through? Why in the first instance should she have jumped at his characterization when

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she isn't in any event going to accept the invitation? And what is it that her jumping at it did to him? Those questions can provide us with resources for focussing on "Talk, you mean get drunk don't you?" and for seeing that in focussing on it we're focussing on something that seems to have considerable impact, at least for the conversation. And that is then to say that there is a lot of life in this conversation, and not merely as to what's happening between the two people involved, but what can be found out about a society in which just such things routinely occur. What I was looking to focus on was sorts of arrangements in the world; apparently referable-to institutions. Where by 'institutions' I don't mean events, like evenings spent, but some characterization of them, like 'an evening spent talking' or 'an evening spent getting drunk. ' And to talk of an 'institution' is then perhaps to say that characterizations of some event, like an evening, can be correctly or incorrectly done in the sense that parties might find themselves disputing whether that's the way to characterize it or not. And their characterizations can have some independence from whether what they're talking about is some actual evening or some merely possible evening, though what those investments are remains altogether obscure right now. But it's not too difficult to at least begin to pick out what could be involved in considerations of what characterization is to win out. One wants initially to think of things like religious events, and thereby find that it would be familiar to you that people might dispute how to characterize something that could be seen as a ceremony of some sort. With that as a familiarization, you might come back to 'an evening together' as something like a ceremony in the sense that what should be said about it, what should be thought about it, is something that parties can have interests in getting some consensus on, even if it takes that they have to fight over it. Now 'talk' and 'get drunk' as characterizations of evenings have a plainly marked difference between them, having to do with that they name bearably different types of evenings - one possibly having to do with the world of work, and one possibly having to do with the world of fun and sin. And that's a familiar thing that people might well battle over. Again, this is in full independence of what it is that takes place during differently characterizable evenings, since it's at least supposable for purposes of argument anyway, if not on the basis of one's familiarity with such evenings, that they could involve a mixture of such things as eating and talking and drinking and keeping silent and touching and looking, etc. , any one of which could be available for use as a characterization, leaving aside such further ways of characterizing them as boring or exciting, etc. At least a first way to address the question of why she picks his characterization as something that she's going to behave sensitively towards, is in terms of a sensitivity to how he characterizes what she's being invited for. Specifically, by reference to that he would be saying that he thinks she is someone who would be happy to spend Saturday evening in a way so characterizable. And that could be an insult to her, as much as if the call had started as it does, and then:

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How ya doing? Say what are you doing? Well we're going out, why? Oh gee, I was just gonna say my kid sister wants to go to the movies tonight and I wondered if you'd take her. Who the hell do you think I am!

Where the "Who the hell do you think I am" can be rejecting not merely the evening, but the characterization of the evening offered, since apparently you had some view of me which you used to generate the invitation, and insofar as we are in some relationship in the world, like we get together and you make looks at me on Monday morning, I would like you to know that now that I know what's on your mind I would just as soon you'd change your mind. Now that can give us that sort of grip on why they would be engaged in a dispute over the characterization of an evening that's not going to take place, having then to do with the way in which such a characterization could be treated as revealing what one party thought of the other - a matter that parties are not, apparently, insensitive to. For one, on a no-pause basis she's ready to jump with a critique of his characterization. And also, the rest of the conversation is specifically concerned with what each of us should think about each of us. That is to say, he then engages in an elaborate characterization of himself as 'serious student, ' and in due course 'serious student on his own,' not having such opportunities to be a frivolous child as she apparently has and makes use of. Which is then to say, he's accepted a re-characterization of herself which he's seen in her critique of his characterization. He's seen, 'What do you do, go out and get drunk every Saturday? Oh, that would explain why you look the way you do on Monday mornings' - as if that had been some long-term puzzle for him. And again, he has that immediately available; whether it's hypothetical or not is irrelevant since the evening itself is hypothetical. In that regard, then, a possibility is being extracted that, be the events under consideration utterly imaginary, an attention to 'what you think of me' is right at the surface - as a dispute, gone through with full seriousness, could perfectly well take place with "If you got two tickets to the moon, would you take me or not?" But that puts it in an overt way, where here, and commonly, no suggestion is made that he's intending to besmirch her or indeed that he's characterizing her. And of course it's utterly imaginable that the thing would go quite differently were his talk done by virtue of some sensitivity to being other than allusive about what he wanted to do, and once she'd said "Talk, you mean get drunk don't you?" he heard it as saying "You needn't be allusive" and he would say ' 'I'm sorry, yeah let's get drunk. " It's possibly something and possibly nothing that if you examine this invitation for any such ambiguity as it might contain, as might be some partial source for her focussing on what he means when he says something, then about the only thing I think you can come up with that is demonstrably so in the conversation itself, is who is "you" in the initial invitation. In our

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language 'you' can be nicely ambiguous as between some singular and some plural. It could conceivably be unplain as to whether he is inviting her or her and her husband - as he eventually says in a way that doesn't have that ambiguity, "I was just gonna call and see if you and your huslfand would like to come over," though I don't know whether he knew beforehand that she has a husband, or what his intentions are. But plainly if there were that sort of an ambiguity involved in the "you," then it might well mesh with the kind of relationship that 'talk' and 'get drunk' have, i.e. , he could be heard as proposing quite a different thing if he's proposing it for just her than if he's proposing it for her and her husband. I'm not convinced that there's any fragment of her response, "Talk, you mean get drunk don't you?" which turns on that there is that sort of possible ambiguity in his initial invitation. As I said last time, technical sources for finding trouble in the characterization 'talk' have to do with 'talk' being bearably a second preference, something missing, and then being used to focus on 'talk' as a non-preferred event replaceable with some preferred event, 'get drunk, ' which is other than the obvious preferred event, 'dinner' - which in the end it seems is what she's going out for anyway. That is to say, she seems to say in the first instance that she's going out to get drunk but it seems to end up that she's not going out to get drunk at all, she's going out to have dinner with her parents. Now, in attempting to give a consideration of how "Talk, you mean get drunk don't you?" can be heard as a preferred characterization of Saturday evening, we go through a consideration of an understood world in which these terms 'talk,' 'get drunk, ' 'Saturday' are not so much names of events, but names of things that if you know any sociology or anthropology, should be thought of as names of institutions. And Saturday is a sacred time for fun, in the ways in which she's intending - apparently successfully - to refer to it not as one day of the week, the day after Friday, but a day which has attached preferred characterizations of how one spends it. And that's a thing which he plainly picks up. That is, he uses it to make a describable day of his own out of it, i.e. , in that Saturday is a day to be devoted to fun, it's now sayable that he had plans for working all day. Were it some other day, e.g . , Thursday, this statement "I had big intentions of working all day" would be unsayable, in the sense of well, what else could one do on that day? In that regard, then, they're not talking of days in their lives, they're talking about what some days are to be characterizably devoted to, however anyone happens to spend them. And that's then similar to what some evenings are to be characterizably devoted to, without regard to how anyone happens to spend an evening. Where one can perfectly well be offended at how someone reveals they figure you might be happy to spend some evening, even though in the end, not merely aren't you going to spend it in a way that's better in the sense that you characterize as 'better, ' i.e. , that you might go out and get drunk Saturday evening, but it turns out that you're doing something that you could probably accept to be yet feebler than what had been proposed. That is, he had at least proposed that they get together and

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spend the evening talking with colleagues and she's ending up having an evening going out with her parents like some kiddy. And even though that's what she knows she's doing, she can be insulted at the idea that he would think she'd be doing anything less than going out and getting drunk.

April 3 0

Calling for help The materials I'll be talking about now were taped on New Year's Eve, 1 964. It's a telephone call made to a psychiatric operation which advertised itself for receiving calls from people who, for example, feel that they're suicidal, or people who are concerned with someone who is suicidal. During the day they operate as a regular emergency psychiatric clinic devoted specifically to people who are suicidal, and after hours and on weekends they had a system where somebody calls the place's number and an answering service routes the call to whoever is on call at the time. There are usually two or three people on call. They are not psychiatrists but are characteristically graduate students in clinical psychology, or other more or less trained personnel. None of them are specifically lay persons, they all have some professional training. But they are not yet professionals as is the staff during the day, all of whom have various degrees, PhDs in clinical psychology or MDs in psychiatry. It's a very large and well known operation, and people can know about it just by reading the newspaper. This is one call made on, as it happens, New Year's Eve. Go ahead please 1 This is Mr. Smith (pt; Hello) of the Emergency Psychiatric Center; Can I help you. pt. Hello? dr. Hello pt. I cant hear you. dr. I see Can you hear me now? pt. Barely Where are you, in the womb? dr. Where are you calling from? pt. Hollywood. dr. Hollywood. pt. I can hear you a little better. dr. Okay. uh 2 I was saying My name 1s Smith and L'm with the Suicide Prevention Center. pt. Your name is what? 1 The class was given copies of a transcript which, for reasons of space, is not included in this edition. Instead, segments will be shown. The transcript was produced by Sacks in 1 964 or 1 9 6 5 , and the segments as they appear here are attempts to reproduce Sack's original. The tape itself hasn' t turned up. 21nitially the line went: " okay. I was , " then the "I was" is struck out and "uh" added, so that the line now reads: " okay. uh I was saying . " It may be that a decision was made to include such a thing as "uh" in a transcript. It may also be that, as it happens with such items as " uh , " it wasn' t attended on an initial hearing.

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Smith Smith? Yes Can I help you? I dont know hheh uh hah

I hope you can

Tell me about your problems

I uh Now that you ' re here I ' m embarassed to talk about it. I dont want you telling me I'm emotionally immature cause I know l am

The " Go ahead please " is the answering service ' s operator speaking . Now the matter is slightly different than in other phone conversations because the two parties are essentially put on the line at the same time. That can partially account for the overlap that occurs at the start: Go ahead please This is Mr. Smith (pt; Hello) of the Emergency Psychiatric Center; Can I help you . That is, " Go ahead please " is unclear as to who should go ahead, and both parties sometimes speak up at the same time, where it would be extremely odd in telephone calls otherwise occurring that two parties would say hello to each other at the same time. I want to begin by focussing on one central theme of conversations like this one, involving people calling this place and in a more general way, involving people calling an institution of some sort for some sorts of assistance. And a first way to catch that special status of this sort of call happens right at the beginning of the call . It doesn ' t always happen in the same way for all such calls, but it is so characteristic a problem for such calls that there have been articles written on the matter. The matter being that on the one hand , one party introduces themselves and on the other hand, the other party doesn ' t . I t may seem in this call that it ' s just happenstance that she doesn ' t give her name and that he does give his name, but that ' s at least possibly not a matter of happenstance. In any event, the situation of the institutional person giving his name and the other not, is a problem that occurs for such circumstances. I ' ll talk a bit about some aspects of that. What we have is, Mr Smith introduces himself and then there' s a variety of ' can ' t hear' complications . Now, I make an argument that she specifically isn ' t giving her name, and that she has ways of avoiding giving her name . In any event she doesn ' t give her name here, and it later turns out that she doesn ' t want to give her name when she ' s specifically asked for it. Though, while she isn ' t specifically asked for it here, the sheer fact that he introduces himself involves that it' s her business to introduce herself, too . That' s a kind of general institution for phone calls and for other situations of parties getting into an interaction who haven ' t been in an interaction before, so that they aren ' t , then, recognizing each other. And

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it is something that this place and places like it use. When I say 'use, ' I mean to notice that the two names differ severely in their import. Whereas it would appear that there would be nothing noticeable if one said "This is Mr Smith" and the other then said "This is Mrs Jones,' the information received by either party in getting the other's name is altogether different. And that differentness can partially account for one party's perfect willingness to give his name, using it to elicit the other's, and the other's hesitancy to give a name. What are the differences? What use does the name of the person who answers the phone, i.e. , the person in the institution, have for the party who calls? Well, there are some altogether obvious uses. One thing is, when he says "This is Mr Smith" he's thereby providing a name that the caller can use throughout the call, insofar as they choose to address him. She can thereafter call him Mr Smith, and she does here and there call him Mr Smith. As a kind of side aspect to that, in calling himself Mr Smith, there are some obvious alternative things to call himself, which are interesting. He could call himself "Bill Smith" which would give her the opportunity to call him either Mr Smith or Bill; making, then, for possible informality, for the conversation to appear to be more intimate than otherwise. He doesn't give her that opportunity, though in some of the calls some of the answerers do indeed say "Hello, this is Frank Smith" as compared to saying "This is Mr Smith . " Now, i f he called himself Bill Smith, he would not only be gving her the opportunity to call him Mr Smith or Bill, but he might also be concealing something which Mr Smith reveals, something that is relevant for the call, i.e. , a difference between Mr Smith and Dr Smith. That is to say, in saying to her "This is Mr Smith , ' ' he's saying to her "This is not Dr Smith. " And in such calls, if a person is a doctor they always say "This is Dr Smith, " where that conveys not only information about a title that should be used in the call, but about their professional status. So that on the one hand "Frank Smith" says "You can call me Frank, " on the other hand it does not say whether I am or am not a doctor. And then " Mr Smith" says "You can't call me by my first name because you don't know what it is, ' ' but it also says ' 'I'm not a doctor, " as compared to "This is D r Smith" which says "You can't call me by my first name but you know I'm a doctor. " And indeed when someone says "This is Frank Smith" the caller may well ask "Are you a doctor?" and with some characteristicness, if he said "Frank Smith" he will tum out not to be a doctor. We have, then, a series of alternatives that are not transparent, i.e. , Frank Smith turns out to be alternative to Mr Smith, and not Dr Smith. And Dr and Mr are alternative by reference to the issue of 'Is he a doctor or isn't he?' So that the " Mr" part of Mr Smith says ' 'I'm not a doctor" and the "Smith" part gives a name that he can be called, and the whole thing, "This is Mr Smith, " besides saying what my status is and what you can call me, does a job of saying "Tell me what your name is" - not by virtue of this institution's way of working, but by virtue of how phone call and other interactional beginnings appropriately work. The caller is also being given some other things in this kind of place and

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in other places as well, and that is, they're being given the name of a person in the institution which they can use for later dealings with the institution. Calling back some other time they can say, "I spoke to Mr Smith last time, " asking to speak to him again. Or they could be asked if they've spoken to anybody before and if so to whom, and then find that they're referred to that person again. They can also use that they have his name to do things like register complaints or provide plaudits to the organization. In other institu­ tions that matter can be a bit more delicate, in that personnel might be more sensitive to the possibility that their behavior may be complained of. The obvious sorts of instances are things like policemen taking off their badges when they go to do things that they don't want anybody to be able to complain about them by reference to, so as to make themselves unidentifiable except as somebody in the organization. Now, on the other hand, when the caller gives his name, while he's surely giving such a name as he can be called by in the conversation, he also takes it that he's giving such a name as he can be found out from; that will permit somebody to go track him down. If, for example, someone calls and says ' 'I'm suicidal, " then they can figure - and this is not something I'm making up, but something they say in such calls - that it's possible that if the call doesn't seem to be turning out too well, then people from this institution will call the police and have the police pick up the caller and take them to a hospital. People calling will give that as a reason for not giving their names when they're asked to give their names, not having given a name at the beginning. And when that's asserted, the people from the institution will say "Look, we don't do that. We never do that. " And they don't for various reasons, among them being that the police won't do it. Another sort of reason people have for not giving their names is, people who kill themselves are sometimes interested in not having it known that they killed themselves. They merely died. If they call and the call doesn't work and they decide to kill themselves, then if they die under possibly problematic circumstances and there is no reason to suppose they might have killed themselves, then it might well be figured that they just happened to die. If, however, they told their name, it can be known that they had been suicidal. And that can focus on the possibility that it was suicide, and they can end up being classified as a suicide. Persons are deeply concerned about whether they will or will not be called suicides once they're dead. And over the span of sociology there's been an enormous interest in this phenomenon, having to do with why in the world are people who are killing themselves out of the world concerned with that the world figures that they did or did not kill themselves? Where, when you kill yourself, dying out of the world that you are in, you are doing an event in the world other than happening to die out of it. So that people are seriously oriented to the terms on which they leave. It is plain that people care either to make it certain that it is known that they have killed themselves - and calling this place is one such way, saying ' 'I'm going to kill myself and you can find me at this address . . . ' ' etc. - or to see if they can possibly survive, but

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to hold as a contingency that they may not be able to, and if they are not able to, wanting to not have it known - for insurance, the children, the family, etc. - that they did indeed kill themselves. So their name is known by them to be a relevant aspect of what they would perhaps be leaving. And in that regard it's an immensely curious fact that routinely they will not give their names, but also they will not lie. That is to say, they will be exceedingly hesitant, argumentative, etc. , about giving a name, they will refuse to give it, when they could perfectly well just give any name. Now, that's something to puzzle over. I don't know whether it doesn't occur to them that they could just give any name, or whether while knowing that they could give any name, they will not give a name at all if they're not going to give their own. But again, it has perhaps to do with some way in which they are indeed more or less seriously involved in this world that they're in. In any event, asking them to give a name by offering your name is to ask of them something that you and they know is much more of a thing than you're giving them. You're asking them for a commitment of a sort that can be more or less problematic to them, and which is distinctly more problematic to them right at the beginning of the conversation. And that has a very considerable interest to it. From the way he proceeds in the conversation, we can see that the recipient of the call, this Mr Smith, treats the call as the project that the party who is calling is engaged in, i.e. , she's calling for help, and having called him she's done what she should do to call for help, and he's prepared to give her the help that she's looking for. Whereas for her, that this place is the place to go is not obvious, and the question is that she wants help, but that she called here doesn't constitute a solution, only a possible solution, and she'll see whether it's so. And we can get into some of the details of how, that he supposes that she's gone to the right place and she doesn't suppose that she's gone to the right place, work their way out. One of the things involved in that is kind of simple, and that has to do with, having introduced himself he says " Can I help you. " Now, there might be nothing noticeable about " Can I help you" but for the way in which she in the first instance deals with it. That is, "I don't know . . . I hope you can" is a notably curious response to " Can I help you" in the sense that having introduced oneself as a member of an institution, " Can I help you" is delivered as a format affiliated to the way that, calling Bullocks' rug department, you'll get "Rug department Jones speaking can I help you?" to which you say "Yes" or whatever. That is to say, it's a purely etiquettal thing which says "Okay tell me what you called about," whereas she hears it as something rather different. She hears " Can I help you" as "That's indeed a problem. " Aside from these routinized initial usages, a first kind of thing I want to point out about the ways in which he deals with her concerns a series of questions, somewhat interspersed, that he makes to her in the beginning part of the call. Right off we've gotten "Where are you calling from?" and "Tell me about your problems. " A bit later we get the following:

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I guess I just wish somebody' d help me I been helping myself for over a year and I'm worn out dr you're not married no, not now pt dr you're divorced then pt yes dr I see (she sniffies) have any children? pt no (very low) dr we how old are you by the way pt sigh I'm 40 . dr you're working are you pt yah (same tone as 'no' above) dr are you satisfied with that? pt oh its a very nice job mediocre but very pleasant no problems dr how long've you been divorced? pt oh a long time maybe about 1 1 years

pt

These are essentially things that are called, in the mildly technical jargon, 'face sheet data. ' They are things about which, whether it's so or not - and whether it's so or not can be irrelevant - one can imagine that the institution person is sitting with a list of matters he wants to get answers on, which are matters not merely for helping him do a diagnosis, but, characteristically, for some statistical investigation that the organization is engaged in. They might be running a study of where people are suicidal in this city; are people who live in Hollywood versus West LA suicidal? Are people who live in Hollywood who are unmarried suicidal? etc. They also want to know with whom they have more success. And in order to be able to do an appropriate medical investigation they have got to get some body of answers to questions. And for a variety of institutions, having not necessarily to do with suicide but pretty much anything to do with medical and social problems, if you call them, then you'll find that you're being asked a same series of questions somewhere in the conversation. Now there's some neat aspects to that. If someone calls and presents this variety of information, then by virtue of investigations that have been done on prior such matters, the called can more or less make an assessment as to the seriousness of the problem. I'm not saying the called will be right, or the called will be wrong. But the way those places work is that they can use that information, by virtue of the information they've collected and other general census data, to decide how much they need to worry about a case. If, for example, the caller is a 1 3-year-old girl and she's living at home, then they can figure it's not too serious, and know how to deal with it, e.g. , they can be reassuring, they can try to find out what the problem is, but they can know that she's not going to kill herself tonight. Whereas if it's a 5 7-year-old divorced lady with no children and no family here, etc. , then it might well be that they can know that how this call works out is relevant to whether she will or will not kill herself. So the collecting of that information is on the one hand

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relevant for assessing how this person is likely to behave and how important it is that you deal with them now as compared to saying "Come in Monday morning, ' ' and also it's relevant by reference to use in later cases. All of which gets relatively interesting in that each new piece of information can affect the corpus of earlier information. For example, if it turns out it's a 1 3-year-old girl who goes indeed kill herself, then that adds a bit of weight to any next 1 3- or 1 5 -year-old girl who calls, even though for this one you figured you wouldn't have to worry about her very much since, given our earlier ones, they either rarely attempt to kill themselves or are rarely successful. But a thing to be focussed on is that the information is not collected as ' 'before I know how to deal with you and for other purposes than dealing with you, I'd like to have this information. ' ' Instead, it's dealt with as though it were fully part of the help that I'm giving. That is to say, its interests are partially concealed. A question then is, how can they be concealed? And at least one way they can be concealed is by at least partially placing the questions in such a way as to have it appear that this conversation is as spontaneous as any other, i.e. , I'm asking you this question only by virtue of the last thing you said. As, for example, when she says ' 'Where are you, in the womb?" he then says "Where are you calling from?" which can have to do in some way with the prior question and with the fact that we're having difficulty over the line, which could be explained by knowing where you're calling from. And, for example, when she says "I guess I just wish somebody'd help me. I've been helping myself for over a year and I'm worn out," he says "You're not married. " Now that sounds like a picking up on her indication that she's helping herself. On the other hand, and while it's doing that, it's also providing an item on the checklist which says things like 'married, divorced, single, ' etc. And the checklist character of it can be drastically revealed by a kind of routine thing he does thereafter. She says "No, not now" and he says "You're divorced then," whereas a more optimistic and non-institutional hearing of it might be "Oh you're going to get married. " But 'going to get married' is not a title on the classifications available censuswise, 'married, ' 'divorced, ' 'widowed, ' etc. , and there's an of-course hearing of "not now" as meaning 'in the past,' 'was,' for which 'divorced' can be one obvious reading. So there are ways that under some hearing she can find that she's only being partially listened to in the sense that she says that she wants somebody to tell her that they care, "somebody that would just, just listen for a minute. " And while there's a way in which he is offering himself as such a person, she can see that she's being dealt with as 'a somebody, ' not as the unique person she'd like to have people recognize that she is. Now that can be no problem in some places, but in this kind of place it's a distinct problem. The people calling are in a position of wanting to know if anybody in the world cares for them; as she says, she wants to kill herself for the same reason everybody else does; you just want to know if anybody cares. Now it's a seriously problematic thing when, in order to find out if anybody cares, you have to call, not a friend, but an institution, a phone number. And where, then, the

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way they deal with you is not in the first instance "Who are you, I want to know you," but "Which are you?" That is to say, part of the thing that they're doing is getting that information, and regardless of the outcome of this call it will have been useful to them. Which is not to say that that information wouldn't help them to help you, and of course it's deeply believed by them that that's so - and it may be so. But it involves that they have a problem of collecting information within the call which is, at least in part, not for use in the call. And though they don't say "Look, before we get started I've got to know the following things, ' ' that they're doing some such thing has a kind of apparency to it which could be some source for some of the discomforts that are involved in these calls.

May 3

Problem solving; Recipient-designed solutions I want to talk this time about two things that are related in a slightly obscure way. There ' s a specific substantive problem which , stated kind of generally, has to do with conversation as a vehicle for problem solving , and there ' s another, more methodological problem which has t o d o with collecting observables and putting them into some such relationship as permits posing and solving problems with them. So I want to sort of reproduce a procedure I used in getting to this problem of a way in which conversation is relevant to problem solving, by making a group of observations that in the first instance don ' t particularly have anything to do with each other and don ' t particularly have to do with the problem that eventually gets dealt with and where, then, there was some effort to see if there weren ' t some way to collect those observations and get from them a posable, solvable problem, that problem coming in the end to some ways in which conversation is specifically relevant to problem solving . I ' ll state the general problem we eventually get to , right off. It's noticeable about problems that people face, that they can know that they have a problem , suppose that there are solutions to it, and feel unassured that if, say, somebody offered them a solution , they would be able to assess it, recognize that it was right. That is, there are problems that you have, where you have techniques for recognizing when you ' ve got a solution to it, but there are others where you have a problem , you suppose that there ' s a solution , but you don ' t know how you would recognize a solution . And that can put you into a relatively difficult situation, common aspects of which are that you never know when you ' re being conned by somebody who tells you how to solve it. If you go to an auto mechanic with a problem and he tells you what the problem is technically and how he ' ll solve it, then you can often feel uncomfortable as to whether that ' s what the problem is. There are lots of things like that, and lots of them have roughly to do with possibly technical areas . If you go to a doctor feeling some malaise and he tells you that you ' re suffering from this, and this is what should be done, then while you might go through with the treatment and it might turn out that you feel better, you don ' t have some way of deciding , from what he tells you, before you do what he tells you , that he ' s right or that that' s a solution . I eventually want to say that there are kind of obvious ways in which that applies in some circumstances of people feeling suicidal or othetwise mentally disturbed, and it can be readily enough supposed that they might be in a position to

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not feel able to assess an offered solution and yet be concerned with its correctness . So we ' re going to look for ways that people might have of assessing the possible correctness of a solution whose correctness itself they can ' t assess in the first instance, i . e . , before ever trying out whatever it is that' s proposed that they do, where conversation can perhaps be not merely a vehicle for telling problems and receiving answers , but can provide resources for assessing answers . That being said , one can easily enough think of some obvious ways that it would be so . For example, if you could find out from attending the talk of the person you ' re presenting your problem to , that they' re being inconsistent, then you might have a way of saying that they' re changing their mind or they don ' t know what they' re talking about, and things like that. That is to say, there are obvious ways of monitoring their talk so as to assess the possible quality of their solution, even though you don ' t know what a solution would be. You could feel confident that you could at least rule out one or another solution by virtue of features of the talk that it was delivered within, or features of the scene that it was delivered within . Now then, let me try to get to where this goes, without saying that what will be looked for is how conversation can play some part in finding ways to deal with that problem . We can look at the circumstances out of which the problem came to be focussed on, as both a way of collecting a variety of observations, and in terms of which that variety of observations might be used to describe a solution that people might employ for the problem.

I

noticed that right off in the conversation she says she ' s having difficulty

hearing him. And , forgetting about whether she is or isn ' t , there are a variety of virtues to announcing at the beginning of a telephone conversation, that you can ' t hear. One virtue is that having established that there is some difficulty in hearing the other when they 've said " Hello , " i . e . , at a point where there ' s no particular connection between what they ' re saying and any obvious interest of yours in not hearing what they ' re saying, you ' ve set up the reusability of that you can ' t hear for future occasions on which it might matter that you could say "I can ' t hear " for other purposes, i . e . , seeking a delay or avoiding answering a question , it not now being an obvious strategy on your part, to have asserted that. And let me say in passing that my remarks on the usability of "I can' t hear you " tum in part on that we have a transcript and a bearable tape, so that we suppose that, both the voices on the tape being

bearable, it' s at least some sort of possibility that it was other than that the

voices are not bearable that was involved in her saying "I can ' t hear you . " There ' s also quite a different possible way of looking at somebody proposing right off in a conversation, i . e . , when greetings are taking place, that there are difficulties in their hearing you . When someone picks up the phone and starts talking into it, they use a voice that they figure the one they ' re talking to can hear. Now, a feature of the voice you use talking over the phone is that it is effortless. So if they ' re insistent that you can ' t be heard , then it' s not just that you speak louder, but you put that sort of effort into your talk which is involved in attending whether you can be heard , i . e . , you

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attend the sheer production of sound as something you have to work at, whereas when you're otherwise talking over the phone that isn't treated as part of the job you're involved in. Turning that slightly around, at least a possible use of saying to someone "I can't hear you" is to have a way of making them put more effort into their talk than they otherwise planned to. Now that way of looking at an insistence on "I can't hear you" has as an obvious correlate that you could at the same time make for some further effort in their participation by yourself talking in a way that would make it difficult for them to hear you. So that you could skew the effortfulness with respect to talking and hearing: You insisting that they're not talking loud enough, and recurrently noticing that they're not talking loud enough, they're then engaged in watching for each utterance, not only what they're saying but whether it's loud enough. And you're talking in such a way that they have to make an effort to hear you - where again, in their routine talking over the telephone they don't think of listening to another's voice as effortful with regard to hearing it. Another sort of thing. There's a place in the conversation where she says to him "Doesn't it bore you to have people like me talking to you? " and I somehow I'm feeling that I'm a nothing (smiling sigh) uh huh And I know nobody's a nothing but I am Its like everybody else is somebody or something and somewhere along the line I muffed up dr uh huh This this proves your need for psychological help doesnt it? pt oh I know dr I think it does pt Doesnt it bore you to have people like me talking to you? dr pardon me pt doesnt it bore you to have people like me talking to you? dr no it doesnt pt doesnt it bore you on New Year's Eve when you want to go out and get to your party? dr no not really but there is uh uh I have this strong feeling that you need this psychological help You could get it through a clinic pt Like like down at County hospital can go in there with all the poor people the people that have just never made anything out of their lives pt dr pt

Now, if one can use as a procedure trying to see what it is that he's been doing that could lead her to say "I notice your being bored, " then a possible thing to find here is that he's reasserted a series of times that she should get help at a clinic, and she's rejected that. dr pt

you were in therapy with uh private doctor? yah

\

�

May 3 dr pt dr pt

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have you ever tried a clinic? What? Have you ever tried a clinic? sigh no I dont want to go to a clinic

and: I try so hard not to be emotionally immature and I am and I know I am and I hate it I hate it its a disgrace uhhg sometimes I cant help it I just am dr why why wouldnt you be willing to go to a clinic for help? oh Cause I dont want to identify with the poor people (sniffle) pt

pt

and again: I've had some therapy and I've had some group therapy I know I got a damn good picture of myself (dr I see) n its much harder than when you dont know dr you you know then that you should get this clinical help, then dont you pt Know but I dont think it would help me dr well uh pt It would take me down a step further dr (talking along with her a bit) over the telephone pt What? dr if you're not willing to work at this and help yourself in a clinic or somewhere how can I help you over the telephone? pt you cant I guess nobody can Was just a wild (laugh) stab in the dark

pt

Where at least an available interpretation of somebody presenting repeatedly a solution to some problem that's posed, that they've offered immediately upon the problem being posed, is that at some point they're exhibiting that they're bored. All they're doing is, whatever I say, they offer the same thing. She's not at this point assessing the offered solution ' Go to a clinic, ' she's assessing something about how that solution is being delivered, i.e. , that it was offered first and has been offered again, and again, and now again, across a variery of things that she says about her circumstances. Still another sort of thing. There's a place early in the conversation where we get: I've got a date coming in a half hour and I (sob) I see I cant go through with it I cant go through with the evening I cant (sniffle)

pt dr pt

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Part VI

uh huh you talk I dont want to talk uh huh (laugh sob) It sounds like a real professional uh huh uh huh uh huh

Similarly to the last thing I pointed to, she is attending that "uh huh" has been undifferentiatedly used to a lot of the things she's said. And that recurrence is otherwise characterizable as 'professional listening; ' 'professional' here being intended in a derogatory way. So again there's an apparent attention to things he says which focusses on their patterned, undifferentiated - in a way, for now, 'effortless' - presentation, though in giving that as a way to think of it I'm already skewing in my favor a line of consideration we might take. That is to say, there is a plain sense in which, having come up with, on the first thing she says, that she should go to a clinic, and proceeding with that thereafter, he can be seen or thought or said to be making no particular effort other than whatever it is that he first said. And again, to say "uh huh, uh huh, uh huh," while it might perfectly well involve that he differentiatedly understands each thing and only uses a same way to express that, it can also involve that he doesn't differentiatedly hear. It at least involves that he picks the same, i.e. , the most effortless, way to respond. And she tells him that she sees that and doesn't like it. What we're noticing here is that to things he says, she is giving hearings which can have to do with a problem for her of "how carefully are you listening to me?" And she's ready to complain when it appears that he isn't listening to her sufficiently carefully, and further, she is letting him know that she can find out when he isn't listening to her sufficiently carefully. That is to say, aspects of his talk may give that away, and it isn't to be supposed that he himself notices, since he wouldn't then do such talk. And she can be found to be listening in such a way as to attend not just what he says and its merits, e.g. , the way that "uh huh" can possibly be understanding the last thing she said, but, doubting that, listening to find that though he doesn't know it he's shown that he's being casual or professional or bored - which are plainly things that if he knew about it, he wouldn't choose to do. He might then come to figure that she can pick those things up if he is feeling them, so that if he cares, he had better do something, perhaps not merely to try to conceal that but to change it. She also tells him that she's aware - whether it's so or not is kind of irrelevant - that he thinks he knows a bunch of things about her given what little has so far transpired, or given just that she has called, i.e. , she says she knows just what he thinks about her even though he doesn't know her: I known damn well theres nothing wrong with the world its me dr uh huh

pt

I know

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oh I am not blaming anybody else Thats why its so hard for me to talk to you because I I I know what I am (dr uh huh) I know just exactly what you're thinking and I know exactly what you see without even knowing me dr (chuckle) I see

pt

Now, if the line I took about the series of questions that he asks her is anything like so, then there are ways in which he's going through a relatively precast conversation. He has a bunch of things he wants to get out of it from her: her name, her age, is she working, is she married, does she have any children, etc. And in that way the event is one for which he is partially engaged in making a routine for himself. And one can think of this series of things I've noticed as a possible collection of attempts on her part to take a situation which she can suppose is one that involves him in dealing with what she will say in a relatively precast way, and make it one in which if he's going to emerge from the conversation in a comfortable way, then he's got to put a lot more work into it than he had supposed. That is to say, at least one thing that runs through the matters I've noticed here is that remedying them makes talking in this conversation a lot more effortful for him than it might well be, in a series of different ways. He has to attend whether his talk is bearable. He has to see whether some way he uses to appreciate a thing she says captures that it appreciates the thing she says - and in later parts of the conversation he gets much more elaborate in his indications of 'I know what you're saying' than "uh huh" is. He makes paraphrases of what she says, he may generalize what she says, etc. He is then engaged in exhibiting some understanding, which may well be the understanding that he otherwise would have used "uh huh" for, but is at least different from that in that she can look to it to see that the work has been put in. So we have a variety of conceivably technical things she uses for making his participation effortful - specifically making it more effortful than it had been at any point at which some complaint of hers gets raised. And that can connect back to how she deals with "Can I help you?" and varieties of other such things. Now then, what kind of interest is there in the issue of 'effortfulness' as an achievable feature of a conversation? And it's not simply effortful in the sense that he's going to, e.g. , start varying; saying instead of "Uh huh" things like "Yes," " Mm hm, " "I see, " " Surely, " "I understand, " "I get you," etc. so that a pattern cannot be found. It's not so much that which is involved in the effortfulness as that she can come to see that he is working at her case, i.e. , that he's now trying to design whatever he 's going to say by reference to what she's telling him.

We're plainly, then, dealing with conversational matters, and indeed very heavily telephone matters where she's restricted to the phone and its properties in order to deal with him. Now the question is, what can be the virtue of doing this to this guy? And that question sits. To that question, then, the task is to devise a problem for which the kinds of observations I've made, and their possible connectednesses, would constitute the makings of a

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solution. That is, starting with a bunch of seemingly unconnected observa­ tions, seeing that they have some technical relationship to each other, that there's a way to put them into a package of sorts, we then ask 'Is there some problem in the world that that set of things could be a solution to?' Now the problem itself can be a relatively familiar one, and indeed the terminology of the solution can be a relatively familiar one. What we wouldn't have known is what the technical means are; what people do in solving the problem. And the problem that I offered was how to assess a possible solution when you can't assess it on its merits. We can now reconsider that problem in the light of the sorts of things she seems to be doing, and we can perhaps then come up with what, in some theorized way, an answer would be for somebody. And perhaps an answer would be something like: If you can get the other party to feel that you have ways of deciding that the solution they offer is not fitted to the problem you've posed, then you may get them to work at putting together a solution that is fitted to the problem you've posed. Aside from the sorts of things we've seen, that could also set up strategies for persons with problems, involving things like giving a specifically wrong version of the problem first, getting a solution to that, and then changing the problem. If the solution changes, then you can figure that maybe they're listening. Of course there are no guarantees involved at all. The idea is what kinds of things do people have to latch onto, that, furthermore, they do seem to latch onto? In a way, you could ask what would be the difference if he designed it for her or not? It appears that if in offering a solution you can show that it's a solution devised for just this person, then they will routinely feel happier with it than they will if you deliver it as soon as they say "hello, " though you could perfectly well do that. And indeed it's well known among medical doctors that, while you can often diagnose a patient as they walk into the room, before they've even sat down at your desk, i.e. , you can look at them and see what specific disease they have, you will normally ask them for a set of symptoms and ask them such sorts of questions as will indicate that you're attending their proposed symptoms with care before you tell them what your diagnosis is, since their problem is how in the world are they to believe what you're saying. So I'm not arguing that the solution is better that seems personally designed and is thereby asessable as 'better, ' but that there are such procedures, and one can make use of a variety of otherwise available conversational features.

May 1 0

Agent-client interaction I want to introduce some considerations, which will turn out to be relevant to this particular conversation, that involve some of the sorts of possible differences in two-party, caller-called conversations when one party is speaking as an agent of some organization - by which I mean that in the conversation they are in some way doing the organization's business - the other being in some way a client. And in this case we plainly have a situation where somebody is not calling this Mr Smith but the organization he works in, and he certainly treats the call as having that character in the first instance, in the way in which he identifies himself - where presumably were you calling him at his home he wouldn't identify himself the way he does, i.e. , "This is Mr Smith of the Emergency Psychiatric Center, can I help you?" Now, that status of his matters for more than how he introduces himself, and I want to talk to some facets of that. One relatively delicate way in which a facet of that appears in conversation is the promonimal way that a party refers to themselves. So that, for example, if you call a store and say "Do you have any potatoes?" then on the one hand it's not unlikely that the party you're speaking to will say "No we don't" not "No I don't, " and on the other hand it's also likely that when you tell another what happened you'll say "They didn't have any" not "He didn't have any. " So, in a noticeable way, though only two parties have participated, the third-person reference to one of them will be a plural. One can say, e.g . , "They weren't (or were) helpful" a s compared to preserving the singularity of the person, ' 'He wasn't helpful. ' ' If one then were to think of 'first and second person, ' 'plural and singular, ' etc. , those sorts of facts might be puzzling. But a simple solution to it is to say that 'we' and 'they' are not only plural references, but also, among other things, 'organizational references,' where their organizational status operates independently of whether the number relationship - plural or singular - happened to be present for the person or persons being described. So, attending the fact that an agent of an organization is being talked to or of, locates an otherwise anomalous feature of conversation, i.e. , that some person is referred to as 'they' when he ought to be referred to as 'he, ' and he ought to refer to himself as T and not 'we, ' in the supposable way that grammar works. There happen to be other ways in which one can and does use 'we' and 'they' when doing singular reference; I introduced this only to say that there are relatively delicate and technical ways that, that an agent of an organization is being dealt with, matters for conversation. What I want ultimately to get to is, roughly, that it seems that one possible eventuality of this conversation might be, she's called and said "I need help" 39 1

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and he's said "Go to a clinic, " that she then says "Okay" or "No" and that's that. That is to say, it appears that what he is prepared to do at the outset of the conversation is to offer that sort of help, i.e. , help her to find a place that will give her help. Now it doesn't turn out to come to that. And I want to raise as an issue, how can she get him to do differently than he seems initially prepared to do? And that he is an agent of an organization may be variously relevant. That is, he could say to her " Look, that's all my job is. I'm here to tell you where to go. If you don't want to go there, well, I've done my job, " but on the other hand there may be organizational considerations usable to get him to do more than he's initially prepared to do, and some of those could be readily extracted. Suppose that this conversation is one on which he's going to make a report, i.e. , it looks like while participating in the conversation he's taking some sorts of notes on it, if only to check various things off - age, sex, occupation, etc. , and also presumably such things as if it looks serious or not. And one can feel rather certain that there must also be a place to note the disposition of the call, i.e. , "I advised her to go to County Hospital and she said yes," where, on the other hand he might have to note, " I advised such-and-such and she refused. " Now, one thing the place to note 'disposition of the call' does is to provide a way that the organization can assess his work. So if, after some time, someone were to look at the series of papers he'd returned, and some reasonable proportion of them said "I advised such-and-such and they refused," then the question of whether he was doing his job well might be raised. And now suppose that he were to get her name also - which definitely becomes a non-happening only when the conversation ends, i.e. , for the course of his participation in the conversation he can't be sure he won't get her name - the name would also serve as a datum in considering the disposition of the call. That is to say, if it turned out that he had put in some names and those names appeared on the coroner's list of people who had possibly committed suicide, then the question of whether he had done his job right would surely be raised. That is to say, to be sure he has some considerable leverage over her with regard to treating her as someone whose fate does not implicate his own, i.e. , he could write up a report which indicated she was hopeless. But if his reports showed that more frequently than others' reports, then it seems reasonable to suppose that although the organization would back him up in various instantial cases, it would make him justify his presence in it rather more seriously than were he able to propose " I suggested such-and-such and it was accepted' ' or were he to have a long list of names none of which turned up on suicide lists. Now, particularly where careers are involved, those sheets can matter a good deal. They can be used to decide whether to promote somebody, whether to fire them, etc. And it's also possible that a client can know or suspect that, and can use it to gain some leverage with the person they're dealing with, insofar as they can bring the possible disposition into focus as one that would not be happy for the organizational agent. Plainly there are also other techniques available to a client, to affect the

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position o f the agent they deal with . They can write a letter t o the organization afterwards saying "I spoke to Mr Smith and he was very helpful , " or a complaining letter. And in the case of suicides it' s imaginable that they can do rather more drastic things, e.g. , include in the suicide note that they had , as a last attempt, called this organization and the person there was altogether callous, and so, coming to the end of that, they figured they had no alternatives . Now that wouldn ' t do too much good for the public relations of the organization , and probably wouldn ' t be altogether consistent with the continuation of the career there of the particular person who happened to deal with them . Furthermore of course, it can be relevant to the future references, etc. , that they get. So it ' s not simply that they might lose a job here, but they might also then be kind of marked thereafter - particularly for someone in clinical work. In short, there are ways for a client to mobilize the locus of a person in an organization in the client's interests - without ever having to deal with the agent ' s sympathy . That ' s quite a different matter. In that regard we might notice a particular feature of this conversation, which is that at the beginning of it the lady who is calling is crying . And one callous way of conceiving an import to her crying is something like this: This phone call takes place at some time . Any phone call to an organization takes place at some time. A question is, in what way does the time the call is placed figure in it? For many calls it can be altogether incidental , e.g. , ' ' I ' d like to have a checkup on my teeth, when can I get an appointment? " or ' ' I ' m considering a trip t o Alaska, what' s the situation about reservations? " In which case, things like the hour you call or whether it was toward the end of the week might be altogether incidental considerations . Now this place is open for calls 24 hours a day. It happens that a specific problem of people who are suicidal concerns others taking them seriously, where, to approach someone and say ' ' I ' m feeling suicidal " is not necessarily to be believed , in which case it may be best to only make an approach when you can bring off the utterly current character of your feelings . Among ways to do that would be to call in a state of specific emotional trouble. To call up crying is at least to say that when I called matters for me, i . e . , the problem that I ' m telling you about is a problem I have now. And of course her crying will quite unavoidably be heard as having to do with the call, i . e . , it would be altogether ludicrous were she to say, sobbing over the phone, " Look, I have a suicide problem . Excuse the crying , I just stubbed my toe. Don ' t worry about it, it has nothing to do with this. " So, crying can bring off not simply the seriousness of her business but its current seriousness, and can be a way to attempt to affect its disposition . Calling up crying, one can hope that somebody won ' t say " I can get you an appointment for next Fall, " but that they will come to feel that unless they do something soon you might be a trouble on their record . Crying isn ' t the only way in which she shows the current character of her trouble. At one point she says " I just drove home from somebody ' s house where I was being ((sarcastically)) really gay, and on the way home I fell apart. " Where that business of giving its local history is affiliated to making the thing now-serious, where making the thing now-

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serious can provide some sorts of bases for the other attempting a disposition now. And again, without their having any particular sympathy for the client or in any way getting involved with the client, dealing with them purely as someone in an organization for which records are made by them, the use of which records are part of the way they're assessed as to their current and future state in that organization or other such organizations. So there are ways in which, that somebody is situated in an organization which is characteristically thought of by us as a position of strength, untouchability, impersonality, etc. - makes that person available to manip­ ulation by an otherwise weak client; in our case, somebody who is suicidal. Somebody who is suicidal can, calling some organization, have some sorts of power over the persons that they just happen to deal with, by virtue of that person's position in the organization. And they might use those powers, and that might affect how they get dealt with. And the idea is to see what sorts of strategic matters are available to an interactant with regard to that they're dealing with someone in an organization. In that regard, then, one can see as a kind of a bluff, that Smith says "If you're not willing to work at this and help yourself in a clinic or somewhere how can I help you over the telephone?' ' Where that might get her to feel that if she won't acknowledge being willing to go to a clinic, then she's not g-oing to get help over the telephone, and she has no place else to turn. On the other hand, she could see it as 'He can't get away with that. Our lives are now locked together in some way, and whatever he thinks of me he's not going to let me off the line so fast, ' so that she can call his bluff, and when asked "How can I help you over the telephone?" say "You can't. I guess nobody can . " He won't hang up. I'm trying to focus on how it .is that, where there's an initially proposed solution, " Go to a clinic, " some sorts of interests of the person proposing that can be mobilized to get them to propose otherwise. And in the first instance I wanted to deal with such sorts of interests as have nothing to do with the caller, and have only to do with the career contingencies of the one who is giving that advice and who is prepared perhaps to give only that advice. Now plainly there's more to the world than that, but the idea is to see that there is that. For one, that's what people have to start out with, i.e. , what she has to start out with is that it's Mr Smith of the Emergency Psychiatric Center, and they're on the phone so she can't use other vehicles for getting him interested in the case. And clients will routinely try immediately to mobilize the agent to interest in their case, and a variety of rather common occurrences should be considered in that light. For example, first therapeutic sessions are a special sort of event, where a first session is not necessarily a first in a series, but may be the basis on which a therapist decides to take or not take a case. And a common thing for those, where the possible client is female and the therapist is male, is that she will check out if she can mobilize the male interest of the therapist in her. One altogether simple thing is to make some move toward smoking a cigarette at the beginning of the session; an unnoticeable thing, since at the beginning of a session persons are, after all, nervous. The key problem is, is

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he going to light it or not? If he lights it, then that suggests that other than the professional relationship can be actuated between them. That's not to say that he's going to become a lover or anything like that, but one can count on those energies as available for use. And senior therapists will often twit the young therapists they're supervising, if, e.g. , they're watching a videotape of the first session, with "Well why did you light her cigarette?" or "What did you feel like when she reached for a cigarette?' ' in order to see whether the therapist under supervision has any interest in the case (some people figuring if you have an interest in the person you might have an interest in the case, and others figuring the reverse) . This is distinctive from the conventional issue of that males light females' cigarettes, where if one refuses to light the cigarette then one is being less of a male. What is involved here is the kind of way that a male can be attending the female's body for its movements, which would be something he would discover when she happened to make some gesture and he found himself reaching for his matches, i.e. , psychi­ atrically he could learn that he wasn't just dealing with some client, but was attending to pleasing this woman. Let me just note that the call has an incredible economy to it, not only in the sense that she sets out a series of demands and constraints on those demands, like that she has a date coming in half an hour, and that she wants certain sorts of help and refuses to get other sorts of help, where the call proceeds within those constraints and finishes in time and finishes with her getting what she wanted out of it. But also there's a sense of its economy in the way in which events in the call are turned to the specific business of the call. So, for example, at one place we get: My father used to say unless I change no man'd want to touch me with a ten foot pole dr uh huh so you decided to prove it pt laughs you're making me laugh I must be feeling better. dr laughs pt laughs pt

So she laughs and says "You're making me laugh, I must be feeling better. " Now the laughing can be something interpretable simply by reference to that someone says something possibly funny and someone else laughs. Laughs are not routinely talked of in terms of some course-of-the-interaction character they might have, or for the issue of what-you're-doing-to-me by reference to the business of the interaction. But here she does her laugh, apparently a spontaneous laugh, and then gives an interpretation of it having to do with its position in this conversation - this conversation under its narrow formu­ lation of 'I want help from you now; such help as has me feeling better by the end of this, so I can go out on my date.' And the question I've been trying to get to here is, why in the world should he care about that, and how does she bring him to care about that, so that in fact, in the end, the two of them have accomplished that.

May 1 7

Poetics.· Spatialized characterizations I'll start this time by noticing, for a variety of different types of things, some similarities. Within some 26 lines of talk we get three characterizations of facets of a course of life: I dont know Mr. Smith I I guess that I got to a point where I all therapy's done for me was give me a good fat clear look at myself

pt

a bit further down: you go through a period where its everybody else's fault and you understand its just fine as long as you can blame everyone else

pt

and further on: Its like everybody else is somebody along the line I muffed up

pt

or something

and somewhere

These are three temporal descriptors in a fashion; characterizations of time in the sense of time in a course of a life. They're each perfectly good as characterizations of time in a course of life. They have a common feature which is separate from that, i.e. , each of them distinctly spatialize the characterization. They do that not simply with the use of words that are alternatively temporal or spatial, like 'point, ' 'period, ' 'line,' but, where such words could be made more temporal with the use of 'when,' "where" is used in each of them: "You go through a period where . . . , ' ' "I got to a point where . . . , ' ' " . . . and somewhere along the line . . . " Plainly enough, one could have course of life descriptions that were not temporal and spatial; they could be purely temporal. Here's a group, each of them is spatialized, i.e. , turned to a spatial sense. So that's just a something. Now let me shift to another sort of thing present in the conversation. There are some more or less neat idioms used, and I want to offer a partial list of them. On page 2 : do you have any friends or relatives around? not anybody I'd ever tell this to I'd nope SCARE THE DAYLIGHTS OUT OF THEM.

dr pt

On page 4, rejecting clinical therapy: 396

May 1 7 pt dr pt

397

I dont think it would help me well uh It would TAKE ME DOWN A STEP FURTHER

Again on page 4: if you're not willing to work at this and help yourself in a clinic or somewhere how can I help you over the telephone? pt you cant I guess nobody can Was just a WILD (laugh) STAB IN THE DARK dr

On page 9 : I'm not perfect but god damn it I've GOT SOMETHING ON THE BALL

pt

On page 1 1 : My father used to say unless I change no man'd want to TOUCH ME WITH A TEN-FOOT POLE

pt

And on page 1 7 , again and finally refusing to give her name, she says: pt

I'm kinda HIDING UNDER A PAPER BAG at the moment.

These are not all the idioms or proverbials used in the conversation, but these are sprinkled across the conversation from its beginning to its end, and there is a notable facet to each of these, i.e. , each involves an idiom which is Jpatialized. Obviously there are many idioms which do not have spatializa­ tion to them. So now there are two domains which are kind of separate from each other, one having to do with course of life characterizations and the other having to do with idioms. Both of these are spatialized. Does it mean anything? Let me now turn to the initial problem in the conversation, i.e. , hearing him: pt dr pt

I cant hear you. I see Can you hear me now? Barely WHERE ARE YOU,

in the womb?

Now one might not at all attend that the initial possible solution to why she can't hear him has anything intriguing in it, but again, plainly enough one could have another way of formulating the difficulty in hearing than by reference to "Where are you?," i.e. , trouble on the line is a more obvious thing than distance. The next problem that emerges has to do with her hesitancy to tell him about her problems, and she poses that as "Now that you're here:"

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Tell me about your problems I uh NOW THAT YOU'RE HERE about it.

dr pt

I'm embarrassed to talk

Clearly there are special ways that he is "here, " i.e. , it has to do with 'now that we are in contact, ' "here" being a way of spatializing a co-presence which is in the first instance an abstract co-presence, i.e. , over the phone. Later, with respect to men who like her: the only time that I have anybody FLIP OVER ME is when I'm not interested in them dr uh huh pt An Its a challenge and I cant GO ROUND ALL MY LIFE being a challenge

pt

And other problems which she poses are posed in partially spatialized terms. Also, this spatialization is something that Mr Smith turns out to be employing as well. Whether he begins to employ it by virtue of her use of it, I have no idea. In any event, I at least suppose that neither of them has any idea that there is anything spatial going on in the conversation in such a way as it is here going on. Let me mention some of the things he does. On page 1 3 , characterizing himself: pt dr pt dr

You sound very young to know so much ho huh huh hhhhh well like you, I'VE BEEN AROUND too

On page 14, characterizing her circumstances: yeah well YOU'RE IN A SPOT NOW at your age and in your situation that you've gotta MAKE SOME KIND OF A MOVE

dr

Where "make some kind of a move" as a way of describing what she has to do, i.e. , make changes, has a spatial character, in part perhaps by virtue of "you're in a spot" and whatever else has been transpiring, in which the world has been surfaced and flattened out and rounded, and that's what's being used as the source of characterizations of whatever in it. Also on page 1 4 : yeuh well you know after talking to you I dont feel quite so much right now dr uh huh pt You know why cuz you told me you hated yourself once and you sound so confident hhhh dr heh eh pt laughing

pt

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dr well I feel like I'VE GONE THROUGH IT AND COME OUT THE OTHER SIDE

I suppose one could think of the conversation as an exercise or a game, but you must know that it's no such thing - in part by virtue of the fact that, e.g. , just reading through the transcript no one ever sees any such thing happening in it. And for all we know, lots of conversations may be as involved in some way of formulating the world, where whatever it happens that you're saying now, you do it in a way that is just running through the whole thing. Now I don't have much to say as to what this adds up to, and what I'm going to point out now I do not offer as an explanation or as more central - though I imagine anyone would be willing to make more of it than I think we can - and that is to focus a bit on the way she talks about her suicide problem. Among the reasons she gives for suicide are "I just want out of the world anyway if that's the way it is who wants to be in this world" and "oh I I guess suicide's an escape too" and she talks about "in church you know they teach that you die and you go to heaven and then you become one of God's children? and uh that sounds pretty nice; " that "they keep teaching you, you know, to be with God and I really want to be with him. " I suppose one has heard that kind of talk without seeing that it can have a certain sort of sense, under a spatialized view of what dying involves, i.e. , going from somewhere to somewhere. It is perhaps by virtue of a spatialized view of circumstances that one can treat dying not, as one of the options has it, as the end, no 'you' after, but as going somewhere and thereby an escape. Under that kind of consistency suicide becomes a voyage, a trip, one way to get away from somewhere to somewhere else. An argument was made in some work, discussing The Inferno by Dante, a book from many centuries ago which gives a very detailed characterization of Hell, and where the people are located in it who have committed the various sins. The argument was about the use of Hell in Medieval literature, and proposes that the people who used it did not have a literal notion of Heaven or Hell but that the conception was used as a way of organizing the sins that are to be avoided, i.e. , 'placing' each sin such that one could keep in mind the things one should avoid doing. And if that's so, then one isn't to suppose that the Late Medieval-Renaissance Christians specifically believed in a Heaven or Hell, but that they used a spatializing technique, which was at that time attractive by virtue of, e.g . , New World discoveries and interest in maps, etc. - as a way of organizing and keeping in mind, moral issues. There are, then, some apparent virtues to spatializing. Whether it's that by virtue of a spatialization it looks reasonable to talk about death as going somewhere, I don't know, but it does seem plain that with the stuff I pointed out here, and masses of other stuff in this conversation - and perhaps, for other conversations, this or other simple such notions - one may find oneself collecting an enormous proportion of the characterizations present in a conversation, present in consistent ways, ways that seem to provide both problems and solutions. That is, a suicide problem getting formed up within

·

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a spatial format can perhaps give one the notion that what we want is to get out of this world and go somewhere else, and that that's an achievable thing, where lacking that spatial conception no such solution may be available. But whether the spatial format of the suicide problem is core, or is just derivative from the rest, or gets the various participants into a mind where the possible absurdity of what's being proposed is not visible via the way in which the language has now put them into such terms as make it a reasonable proposal, are things which I'm simply in no position to say. But I do take it that, that one classification of terms - in this case spatial - can collect such a large amount of one conversation - a long conversation going on about all sorts of things - is worth some attention. And it is a different kind of organizing than I've talked about so far in the course. We again see a way that large, disconnected, about-different-things, by­ different-parties events have exceedingly simple similarities. And furthermore, I at least suppose for now that nobody in the conversation at all notices this organization. I guess that, that I say it goes unnoticed has to do with that I'd imagine that if it were noticed anywhere it would begin to be picked up on, giggled over, treated as embarrassing, and various other things that people begin to do in a conversation when something is just happening in it, beyond their control, that neither of them figures either of them is responsible for. That is to say, as when they begin to see puns popping up in a conversation, or when they find themselves using some odd word again and again, they do things that bring it to each others' attention. Now, how something as prominent, as striking, as overwhelmingly present as that goes unnoticed is a question. And it isn't particularly obscure, nor do you need a very abstract view of things in order to find this. Now I'm wondering, is it possible that if someone does such a thing this much and the other does not notice it, that the other will not do it also? Supposing that one talks in such a way - spatializing in this case; I have no idea of what the list of classes are that can be used to so fill a conversation but supposing that one talks in that way and doesn't see it, and the other doesn't see it either, then is it not sort of inevitable that the other person nonetheless now begins to exhibit an attention to it in some way, i.e. , begins themselves to form problems up, to characterize events in the way this Mr Smith ends up doing? In that regard, there's a kind of routine observation made about something that happens to people who are crazy, i.e. , they get the idea that other people are controlling their minds. Now that came up as a topic when I was working on a piece of data that involved somebody saying "Remember that car you had?" It sounds like a question, and you could think of it as just a question. In some ways it's not that at all, it's a command which says "Remember that car you had. ' ' And now you find that the car you had pops into your head, and you say "Yeah," not, however, "Yeah I was remembering the car," because the car wasn't on your mind at all. So if we wanted to know the sources for people having the view that others control their thoughts, then one kind of transparent thing is someone asking you if you remember something.

May 1 7

40 1

The first thing you know is that you remember it; they ' re telling you what to do with your head . And it ' s imaginable that somebody could go through a conversation like this one and have a sense that the other took over their mind , i . e . , the other person ' s spatial terminology has now become how you are thinking whatever you ' re thinking about, across a series of things you ' re thinking about, i . e . , while topics change. And a thing we can come away with is that people aren ' t crazy for thinking that other people control their minds. That could not be a source of their craziness. That could only be a matter of wisdom . Now, people may well be differentially sensitive to it, and indeed those who feel it may only feel it and not know why it ' s so . Plainly we go through conversations like this figuring we were being spontaneous and our own person , when some immense amount of the things we say are cast by reference to a way that the other talked - that they didn ' t even know that they were using . But it is imaginable that somebody could feel queasy about it, feel that they ' re talking in a way that ' s not their way of talking . You feel that you are not yourself - maybe ' phoney , ' maybe somehow something else . And what I ' m wondering is whether if you had a tape of the conversation you might not find that in ways like this the other has taken over your mind . Of course it might have been educational - you might have found a different way of thinking about things you ' ve thought about - but the thing is that you wouldn ' t in the first instance know what had happened . If you knew what had happened you might well have picked up on it, giggling over it or whatever. Again though, and as a further lesson for this , certainly it would be silly to take the complaints of crazy people too lightly. It' s much more interesting to consider whether what they say is at all so, not how is it nonsense . And for a thing that ' s very dramatically present and has been much talked about - the notion that others control my mind , influence my thoughts , etc. - there are simple and transparent ways in which that ' s obviously so . And thereby, people could not be crazy for asserting it. Why they feel it and no one else does? That ' s another question . I ' m saying that they ' re right. People do control their minds , and not theirs only. Now I ' m not saying that they ' re right for the reasons they think they ' re right, but certainly one might explain a feeling in an incorrea way and nonetheless have the feeling right. You can ' t , after all , complain about things like " Remember that car you had ? " You can' t say " Oh , go to hell . " Nor can you not remember. It' s a nice sort of power to consider.

May

21 Closing; Communicating a feeling; Doctor as 'stranger' This fragment is from the New Year's Eve conversation we've been working on. I'm going to talk about some facets of its dose. well well gee thank you I urn I'm terribly now I'm very ashamed of myself that I bothered you but I was in the house and I thought I just cant last and I just cant go it another minute I just cant dr uh huh pt Then I thought you know its like I know you're a stranger but its the feeling that there is somebody that would just just listen for a minute dr right pt And I didnt know anybody that would even understand what I was talking about and that makes you want to do it even more dr right thats right pt there isnt anybody in the world's gonna even know what I'm saymg dr uh hJih uh huh Thats right I understand that an you really didnt bother me because thats why I am here for thats what I'm here for pt well dr so I'm glad to have helped you I wish I knew who I was talking to pt hhhhh oh I dr really if you would be willing to give me your name I dont give it to anybody I just file it and uh If you should call back again we pt Yud say theres that nut again dr right heh heh pt laughs dr we'd just know a little more about you so that we could help better pt I really rather not cause right now I'm a little ashamed of myself and a little embarrassed dr alright if you need pt I'm kinda hiding under a paper bag at the moment dr heh heh if n you need us again you'll call back wont you?

pt

402

May 2 1

403

I will and I just thank you so much I think I can go wash my face now and put on my pretty dress n dr good and remember Wilshire Methodist pt Wilshire Methodist yeh I will pt n What do I do just go in and ask about it huh? dr Yes I believe I'd give em a telephone call and ask em how to do it pt Yeah dr An I think you'll find help there pt I sure thank you and I certainly wish you a very happy new year dr thanks very much and the same to you pt thank you dr good by pt good byyy

pt

We are, with this section, fully into the closing of the conversation. Now this closing bears some notable relation to the talk that just precedes it, and a first thing I want to point to involves us in looking at that. The talk that precedes this closing concerns another scene, therapy that she was in, about which she says that it stopped at an inappropriate time. this means you havent gone far enough in therapy I stopped at a very bad time I know I did (m hmm) But I uh job situation got moving and I I stopped right when I was beginning well I would a been better if I had no therapy then to stop when I stopped (dr yeh sounds like it) Cause I stopped right when I was looking at the whole gory mess (dr uh huh) Before it started you know Before I started a clean it up a little dr uh huh pt Was like a surgeon getting down to the disease you know and all of a sudden he opens you up and there's the disease whooah yeay dr he he he pt He knows what it is and quits there ha laughs dr yeah I suppose that thats it pt laughs dr thats a good example, thats good pt well well gee thank you . . .

dr pt

So when talk about the therapy she was in stops, we get into the close of this conversation. And it is contrastive with the talked-about close, by virtue of the way in which this close does not have the sort of inappropriateness as the prior one did, i.e. , this close occurs, not before some help, but after some help. So the positioning of the close here does not just come about by reference to one way in which it appropriately could be placed, i.e. , after she's gotten some help, but it is also an ending that is positioned after a discussion of the positioning of endings.

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I want now to point out some aspects of a relationship between the start of this closing and earlier events in the conversation. One kind of marked, relatively formal thing can be noted by comparing her report now, and her report at the beginning of the conversation, of her feelings before the conversation. On page 2 she says: I've got a date coming in a half hour and I (sob) I see I cant go through with it I cant go through with the evening I cant (sniffle)

pt dr pt

and here she says: I was in the house and I thought I just cant last and I just cant go it another minute I just cant

pt

Plainly, a sequence is reproduced, roughly involving an initial - for a hearer eliptical or allusive - statement ("I can't go through with it" and "I just can't last"), an elaboration on that ("I can't go through with the evening" and "I just can't go it another minute"), and then an emphatic end ("I can't" and " I just can't"). Now the replication of that triplet raises questions as to whether that format has anything interesting in it. Is it just a remembered version of what she'd earlier said, or does it capture something else? Like, does it in some way capture something having to do with how she felt? I want to point to something that suggests, yes, there are neat things it captures. One such thing is plainly present in the first version. What we have here is that the initial formulation of the thing, " I can't go through with it," contains a pronoun, " it, " which is then explicated. I want to suggest that a statement like "I can't go through with it' ' may reflect how the feeling was felt, in contrast to the assertion "I can't go through with the evening" which is involved in a characterization for a listener, not a characterization for the speaker-feeler, of the thing being reported. Here's the kind of thing I'm thinking about. Among the great, now 'early, ' explorers in the novel of inner states was Virginia Woolf. And a way she differentiated between the way the world was felt and observed, stood in contrast to novels of the time where, if a known person entered a room, then the person was identified: " Mr Jones came into the room," "Her husband came into the room. " Now that kind of identification serves very well for a reader. The question is, does that kind of identification reproduce the way a person who is in the room, who knows the person entering, would have formulated it for themselves? Virginia Woolf argues that that's not so, and her characterizations of people entering a room involve things like "He walked into the room," the pronoun "he" involving that she knew who he was such that she didn't have to pick some identity of his in order to characterize him. That is to say, she identifies him, not for the telling of it, but

May 2 1

40 5

for that 1 know him, it being enough for purposes of identification for the reader, to indicate by ' 'he' ' that he might be known, and in various other ways indicate who he might be, e.g., by the way the person who is now having their consciousness explored in the novel would feel about him and things they would notice about him. The idea then is that things like non-complete, non-objective, non­ nominalized references do perhaps reproduce in some way, how a person having feelings that they're not in the first instance having by reference to their communicatability, has them. And if what she's trying to do is say how she felt or what she thought, then a sequence which goes, "I can't go through with it, I can't go through with the evening" would involve first the felt thing and then some explication of it to the hearer. The upshot then is that a sequence in which an amplification occurs second and follows a something that, for a hearer, needs to be amplified, may well be at least a way that a person reporting on feelings and thoughts of their own can bring off that this was something like what their initial thoughts were. Such a sequence does, then, have a point to it, in its connection to such proposals as "at some point I thought, " "at some point I felt, " discriminating a narrative designed primarily for its listener following what's being said, from one designed also, but designed to first say how it appeared to me then. And plainly things like that are used by participants to a conversation in order to elicit interest, etc. , by doing what would be heard as 'musing aloud, ' e.g. , "I wonder what he meant by that, " thereby getting a question from someone who makes themselves an overhearer of it, taking it that they may not have been addressed. Where the format of not identifying the 'who' or explicating the 'what, ' etc. , is one that occurs, and is affiliated with 'private thought. ' I want now to notice that in her thankings she apologizes for having 'bothered' him, and talks of him as a 'stranger. ' now I'm very ashamed of myself that I bothered you but I was in the house and I thought I just cant last and I just cant go it another minute I just cant dr uh huh pt Then I thought you know its like I know you're a stranger but its the feeling that there is somebody that would just just listen for a minute

pt

I'm interested in the connection between "stranger" and "bothered, " and the way in which he deals with that. And I want to make certain kinds of points about some selectional possibilities that permit one to see the kind of directed work that goes into what looks like an altogether natural characterization of something. First of all there is an obvious relationship between calling what you did 'a bother' and calling the person to whom it's a bother a 'stranger. ' For one, not anyone who is a candidate for being called a stranger will be called a stranger.

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That is to say, if a stranger is thought of as someone who doesn't know you, then plainly there are lots of people who could give one help whom one wouldn't call a 'stranger. ' If you broke your leg and went to a hospital, then you wouldn't thank the doctor who fixed your leg for fixing the leg of a stranger. If you walked into a department store and the sales personnel were very helpful, you wouldn't say "Thanks for doing this for an absolute stranger. ' ' There are all sorts of people one encounters, who do one good, who are not conceived as 'strangers' though to be sure they're strangers. If one now tries to figure who among those who are strangers gets called a stranger and who doesn't get called a stranger, then plainly with a little thought one could see at least that somebody who could be called a stranger is not called a stranger when what they did is what they hold themselves out professionally to do. The doctor or dentist or butcher or policeman, etc., who does a service to some previously unknown person is, for that encounter, 'doctor, ' 'dentist, ' etc . , and not 'stranger. ' And connected to that can be that what they did is not a 'bother. ' They may be thanked, but they're not to be thanked for the bother - though were they to do something beyond the call of duty, then it could be talked of as a bother. For that matter, someone who is not a stranger would perhaps not be thanked for the bother. These terms are then involved in ways of formulating social relationships; 'bother' being ways of characterizing things done between persons related in some way, i.e. , related as 'strangers' but not as, say, 'professional-client. ' In a way, then, calling it a 'bother' is focussing on that we might be intimates but we're not. What I mean by 'we might be intimates' is 'I'm not thinking of you as somebody like a doctor or dentist, I'm thinking of you as a candidate for someone I could know, and you're not, and therefore it's a bother. ' In that regard, at least one way she comes to call him a stranger has to do with the way she puts together how she's come to call him in the first place, that having to do with that she's looking for "somebody" and her friends can't be called. sob I want somebody to talk me out of it I really do uh huh Cause I cant call any of my friends or anybody cause they just gonna say "oh that's silly" or "that's stupid" I guess

pt dr pt

Now, consistent with a conception of looking to 'somebody, ' finding 'friends' ineligible, then the group left are 'strangers, ' persons she sees herself turning to by reference to not being able to tum to others. A characteristic that 'stranger' involves, then, is that it is not merely one way of characterizing some person, an alternative to, e.g . , 'doctor, ' but it's an alternative charac­ terization in the sense that somebody is called a 'stranger' when one would have liked to have turned to somebody else. Now, he is not treating himself as a 'stranger. ' Nor is he treating himself as a 'friend, ' but as someone who's doing "what I'm here for. ' '

May 2 1

407

dr Thats right I understand that an you really didnt bother me because thats why I am here for thats what I'm here for

And someone who's doing what he's here for is not a 'stranger' though you don't know him in the first instance. In that regard, there is an issue of their mutual agreement on the terms of the contact, she calling him a 'stranger' while he may be conceiving of himself as something else. And that can make for such issues, in a closing, as that the offered terms of a thanks might be rejected by the recipient. If, for example, one thanks a stranger for the bother, he might say, "It was no bother at all and you owe me ten dollars, " it turning out that it's his business to tow cars, and here you're trying to make something of a gesture to an unknown Samaritan. So the negotiation over the terms of the closing can be connected to such sorts of things as ' 'Do I thank you or pay you?" aside from do I thank you and pay you, do I thank you and not pay you, do I not thank you, etc . , where some people wouldn't get either thanks or payment, e.g. , if they were some sort of friends doing something expectable for a friend. Taking a slightly different facet of the issue of 'a stranger, ' there's a relationship berween 'stranger' and 'bother' that can involve that what the person you're calling a 'stranger' did was something like 'help,' i.e. , you're not merely reporting on somebody in some conversation with you. So that if, e.g . , you got into conversation with someone on the subway, then you might not report it as "I was talking to this stranger on the subway" but "I was talking to this guy on the subway, " nothing being reported but what we talked about. Where, then, if somebody on the subway helped you, it might well be that they would now be called a 'stranger, ' that being kind of intimately related to that what you're saying about them is that they helped you, where 'stranger' then focusses on that the deed they did was something they weren't relationally obliged to do. The whole thing then gets a funny blowup when one way that persons measure the moral state of society is in terms of whether strangers help others, 'strangers' being persons who, the fact that they help others makes it notable that they are strangers and remarkable for them to do it. So people talk about New York or America or whatever going downhill by reference to that strangers don't help people; again, with that strong connection between the formulation of a somebody as a 'stranger' and the talked-about thing being the giving or not giving of help. So we're getting sharper and sharper constraints on 'stranger' and its use, even though plainly a vast number of people are eligible to be called 'stranger' in a vast number of interactions. It isn't, then, as though nothing is happening when someone calls someone a ' stranger, ' by virtue of the fact that after all they are a stranger. Involved in the choice of that term are matters having to do with its alternative status, that help was involved, that one is taking someone to be a non-professional. And those matters can themselves be operative for the other ways that one then orients to someone so called, i.e. , thanking them for the bother and things lik� that.

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Now, insofar as what he ' s doing is characterizing himself as ' not a stranger, ' there are, as I noted before, issues about the terms of his treatment of her appreciation . It is then of some interest that he says both 'it's no bother' and ' that ' s what I ' m here for, ' which are quite separable things . One could say " I t ' s no bother, I really enjoyed it, " or "I got a lot out of it too , " etc. The ' that ' s what I ' m here for' is a different way of making it ' no bother' than the others . It has , then , a slightly curious relationship to what follows it, i . e . , an acceptance of the thanks, " So I ' m glad to have helped you . "

dr

Thats right I understand that an you really didnt bother me because thats why I am here for thats what I ' m here for pt well

dr

so I ' m glad to have helped you

This might look like merely a matter of ' you thanked me so I accept your thanks' but it turns out to be something quite different in this conversation . Let me work toward that by noticing first that things like that are often other than sheer etiquettal relationships where you thank me and I thank you for your thanks . Then I want to notice that we get such a series at the end :

pt dr pt

I sure thank you and I certainly wish you a very happy new year thanks very much and the same to you thank you

And those things can go on rather elaborately, depending , perhaps, upon anybody' s wishes to go on with them . Now a thing we can notice about this end thanking sequence is that she does a thanks and then follows it with something that

he can do

a thanks for.

And the situation of parties exchanging thanks at the end of an interaction which was plainly one-sided in some fashion, is of interest in that we can notice that a party will , in doing thanks , somehow also get themselves into a position of getting thanks . It happens here that there ' s an event, New Years , where happiness can be wished on this occasion, but the patterning of that - that somebody having done something relatively effortful being thanked , the thanker will find something to be thanked for in return - is of some interest. Specifically, there are apparently some sorts of events that should be exchanged, and for which, that they' re not exchanged can be a trouble about them . A more dramatic such sort of thing is, e.g. , if somebody says "I love you " then you don ' t merely say " Thanks, " or you shouldn' t , or if you do then you ' re doing something different than an exchange. And it is that potential of an initial thanks opening things up for an exchange - which the thanker can set up or the thanked can set up, which can end up with " Thanks for your service, " " Thanks for using our service " - which is in this case exploited in his earlier acceptance of her thanks, i . e . , ' ' I ' m glad to have helped you . " Having done his acceptance of the thanks, he then uses the exchange issue to himself make a request whose

May 2 1 fulfilment would then allow name.

dr

him

409

to do a thanks , the request being now for her

Thats right I understand that an you really didnt bother me because

thats why I am here for thats what I ' m here for

pt dr

well so I ' m glad to have helped you

I wish I knew who I was talking to

So that we can see here that via the exchange property as an appropriate potentiality given the occurrence of a thanks, he sees in her thanks an opportunity to himself do a request that she should comply with by virtue of the fact that it will then permit him to do a return thanks . In a way she might have forestalled that, had she earlier done not simply a thanks but a thanks plus something which would directly end up with his doing a thanks. That might have cut off the way in which he could sequentially use her thanks to get his request done . And of course the general situation is one where, having some request to make of another you can , when you get into a conversation, hold off making that request under the possibility that the other will ask you for something or you will end up doing something for them, at which point your request stands as something they can do for you in exchange for the thing that they just acknowledge that you just did for them . And people routinely do offers when they have some request in mind as well, i . e . , I ' ll do an offer, if you accept it and thank me then I can have an occasion to do a request. So, what seems like sheerly a form: " Thank you and have a happy new year, " " Thank you , " involving as i t does the ' exchange' feature, can b e a serious part o f the business of interaction, with one party awaiting and watching for chances to do a request they have, by reference to that general principle that I ' ve raised : If you can do something second, prefer to do it second .

May 2 4

"Vh huh;" Questioner-preferred answers I want to deal with a couple of things which are otherwise not particularly related, where the common interest for them is to give a kind of sequential cast to some objects other than I have previously given them. The two things are "Uh huh, " and some differences between "Yes" and "No" as answers. Starting off with " Uh huh," I had for a long time made the argument that a business of "Uh huh" , was something that we talked of as serving as a 'continuer. ' The idea being that it said to the person who was speaking before it that they could go on after it with whatever it is that they were talking about. And that's I suppose a reasonable enough interpretation of what "Uh huh" seems to have happening in its environment, i.e. , if you look at talk in which it occurs, then somebody is talking about something, "Uh huh" occurs, and they thereafter go on about whatever they were talking about. And consulting your own sense of what you're doing with "Uh huh," then you can figure you're saying 'go on. ' I essentially want to sharpen that picture up only a little bit and consider the matter from only a slightly different angle. Now, we think of "Uh" as doing something called 'filling a pause. ' It's not normally added, though I guess it goes without saying, that the pause it fills is the pause in the talk of the person who's speaking around it, i.e. , in the middle of your own utterance, were you to pause, and choose to not have that pause filled with silence, then you might do an "uh" there. There are indeed some issues about that sort of way of conceiving it, but let me just use the notion 'pause filler' to notice that with it, one might need to collect not just "uh" but "Uh huh" and raise for consideration that what "Uh huh" does is to fill a pause in the other person's talk. That is to say, "Uh huh" is the same thing as "uh," only it's done by you when the other person is talking, not when you're talking. Why bother to mention a difference like that? For one, there are intriguing things about the use of "Uh huh" which the characterization of them as saying 'go on' doesn't focus well enough upon. One such thing is the way that "Uh huh" can be done within the talk of somebody else in such a way as to have their talk fully bounded, i.e. , they talk, "Uh huh" occurs, and they talk again, and there isn't any gap between speakers. "Uh huh" can in that sense anticipate a possible pause. It doesn't occur after the other has paused, it occurs at a place where they might now pause and fills that pause, and fills it 410

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41 1

in such a way as to have on its completion the other start up again. So a first thing that we're adding about "Uh huh" is that a really kind of characteristic place for it is within the talk of one speaker by another, done in such a way as to have no gap on either side of it. And, equally characteristically, no overlap between speakers on either side of it. And things that preserve that feature 'no gap and no overlap between speakers' have a very large sort of interest because it can then at least be asked, how can such things be done spontaneously between speakers? That is, that with two or more people talking they are able to so monitor their talking that they don't overlap and also don't have a gap between utterances. Where by 'gap' I mean things that can be as fine as one tenth of a second. A second sort of thing about its use is that instead of its saying 'go on' to a just prior speaker, "Uh huh" can be conceived of as noting that while the speaker is now about to pause, he intends to go on. That is to say, the speaker's talk so far is available as merely syntactically complete. And routinely, after the "Uh huh" speakers continue a sentence, using things like "because, " "and," etc. , etc. , as compared with starting something new. In that way, then, one doesn't want to think of "Uh huh" as simply saying 'go on, ' but as anticipating the other's intention to go on, and saying something a bit more elaborate; something like: I see that you're reaching a point where - maybe for altogether technical speech reasons, e.g., you have to get a breath - you're going to stop at a syntactic node in your talk, e.g., the possible end of a sentence. At that point I could start talking if I chose, by virtue of the kind of rules that operate in conversation, where a listener can treat a possible sentence as a total utterance and start talking. I also see that you want to go on, and I'll let you. But do not treat that you're getting a chance to go on as indicating either of these things: ( 1 ) that I'm not listening and didn't notice that you'd come to a possible completion point, so that you happen to be going on just because nobody is listening to what you're saying, or (2) that I've just given you the floor for as long as you want it. What's involved, then, is a listener's registering the kind of attention that could be turned to his taking the floor, noting points at which he could take the floor and resigning that floor use of now to the other. And in that regard, that for "Uh huh"s what the prior and thereafter speaker does is to 'go on with' the talk, i.e. , continue a sentence, is a rather non-incidental feature of the thing. For one, that will be informing the one who did "Uh huh" that they indeed saw that though a possible completion was reached, the speaker intended to go on. There are several sorts of things that this discussion can lead one to note: How finely placed "Uh huh" is within the talk of another, and that indeed "Uh huh" is bounded by no gaps on the other party's part. Then there is the kind of talk that routinely follows an ' 'Uh huh, ' ' in terms of the way that, e.g., that talk syntactically connects to the talk that preceded. And there are the differences between all that, and no use of "Uh huh, ' ' with a speaker simply being allowed to go on, where we can ask whether there are ways that a speaker will attempt to find out whether the other party is listening, i.e. , will

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attempt to get the other party to speak - though perhaps only to indicate with an "Uh huh" that indeed he's listening. And then, there is a kind of trouble that the whole thing sets up, which is in part why I raised it for this conversation. The sort of understanding of the use of "Uh huh" which I've described, permits a sort of exploitation, which is that one party to a conversation can employ "Uh huh"s where the other party has no intention of going on. Hearing "Uh huh" they are then in a position of seeing that they said something that the other party figures to be as yet incomplete, and they then proceed to find that they ought to go on. ' 'Uh huh' ' can, then, be heard directively. And it's not a matter of a statement, e.g. , "Well you've said this and that but it doesn't sound complete, " but it's something which will simply elicit a feeling of "They must have thought I was going to go on since they said 'Uh huh, ' so I guess I have more to say. " This interviewer technique (psychiatric or otherwise) of using "Uh huh"s can operate, then, off of the way in which "Uh huh" tells you that the other person is granting you the floor again though they could take it over, by virtue of the fact that they figure you want it, i.e. , that they're doing you a favor. Now obviously if it gets done enough, the speaker can become aware that there's an intended distribution of talk which involves them doing the talk and the other person not saying anything except to mark possible points where they could have talked. The speaker might then make an issue of " Do you ever intend to talk? And if not, is it a matter of your thinking I intend to go on, or of your telling me to just go on until you stop me?" One further consequence is, if the sort of argument I make has some sense to it, then one would expect that "Uh huh" would occur much more commonly in two-party conversations than in multi-party conversations by virtue of the fact that whereas in two-party conversation the listener can be gracious and give the floor to somebody who seems to want to go on, in multi-party conversation there's nobody of the non-speakers who has a distinctive right to give the floor to the current speaker. If one listener doesn't want to talk, then there may well be somebody else who does want to. And my impression is that "Uh huh" is dramatically lessened in multi-party conversation, except under kinds of special circumstances, e.g. , that it has become a two-party conversation by virtue of, in effect, only two people out of a group talking, or where in effect only one person talks and the others become an audience. Somebody telling a long story in a multi-party conversation might well get "Uh huh"s. Now if anything like that is so, then the question becomes why does "Uh huh" distribute in two-party conversa­ tion and not in multi-party conversation? And an answer to that question might well involve its connection with floor management. The next thing I want to talk about occurs on page 6 of the New Year's Eve transcript: dr pt

do you have some church affiliation, now? What?

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413

Do you belong to a church now? No I went to church I havent been to church for a long time and I went its a funny thing I went Christmas Eve with my family the Episcopal Church and I took communion and uh dr uh huh pt I that triggered me somehow its kinda been building up since then

dr pt

I want to talk a bit to ' ' Do you belong to a church now? ' ' ' 'No, I went to church . . . etc. ," but let me just make a passing observation on a difference of an obvious sort between "Do you have some church affiliation now?" and " Do you belong to a church now? " It's kind of a minor law of conversation that if somebody does a question or statement and the other person says "What?" then you can get a repeat. If you don't get a repeat then what you will get will stand as a more simply phrased version of what was prior said, i.e. , 'affiliation' is replaced with 'belong. ' That replacement is not exactly perfect; one could have some church affiliation and not belong to a church, and there might be an intended delicacy to the question - the guy happens to be a minister. In any event, he might well be wishing to allow for a wider range of 'yes' answers than 'belong' might involve, for reasons that have to do with something which occurs towards the end where what he does is to use the church affiliation to give her a recommendation on where to go for a clinic. He might be looking for that when he asks about her church affiliation here. And a question can be raised as to why the replacement is simpler than the initial when you get "What?" At least some suggestions on that matter might be offered. "What?" says at least 'I didn't hear what you said, say it again, ' but it's employed and is well known to be employed as a substitute for 'I don't understand what you said, ' i.e. , when one doesn't know a or some of the words used. Now asserting that is apparently something that is lesser to be chosen than asserting that one didn't hear. But while asserting that one didn't hear it is preferredly said, the speaker can, in making himself more hearable, also choose to attend the possibility that some word he used isn't known by the other, and not simply speak louder or enunciate better, but also speak in a simpler way. "What?" then seems to serve as a generalized instruction: Find whatever kinds of trouble the hearer could have with that thing, clear them up, and say it again. People can then use "What? " knowing that they will often get a chance to not have to disclose the source of their difficulty. And plainly, speakers and hearers can be variously friendly or nasty about the whole business. A speaker can very clearly enunciate something he figures contains a word the other doesn't know and, getting a "What?, " enunciate it very clearly again and force the other to say " I don't know what that means. ' ' Or the other can choose in the first instance not to say something that could be interpreted as ' I didn't hear what you said' and - brashly or embarrassedly or whatever - announce " I don't know what that means. " In any event, we have a sequence of: A version, a "What?" and a simpler version following that. It's an exceedingly lawful thing.

4 14

Part VI

Let's tum now to "Do you belong to a church now?" "No, I went to church . . . etc. ' ' One way to characterize that is something like, the answer to the question is "No, " but but while they're talking about churches and their relationship to any problems she might have, she offers some thoughts on that. Now that way of looking at it provides for this sort of a difference: Suppose she had said "Yes. " If she had said "Yes," then I figure she would not have taken the opportunity to talk about recent involvements with church in the way she did here. She would have said "Yes, " period. And I want to focus on a kind of difference between " Yes" -period and "No" -plus. What I'm interested in is questioner-preferred answers and their occurrence and non­ occurrence. Questioners can of course prefer a "no" as well as a "yes," e.g. , "You don't want that lamb chop do you?" where the questioner has designed a question that says he's looking for a 'no' answer. But for purposes of this discussion we're just going to talk about situations where "Yes" is the preferred answer and we get "Yes"-period or "No"-plus, though it could perfectly well be "No"-period and "Yes"-plus if the preference were put the other way. A while back I gave some discussion about question design, that involved questioners preferring one answer and not preferring another, and indicating in their talk which one they preferred. When I was talking about those sorts of things I didn't have any particular sequential characterizations of why a preference is put in, I had other sorts of reasons. Like, by putting in a preference the questioner could show that he had access to what the answer was, i.e. , a preference would be the questioner's way of saying 'I already know the answer in part by virtue of what you told me, ' e.g. , "You're not married are you? " and things like that. 1 Now there's another way in which the preference thing operates, and that sets up an observable - I think - difference between "Yes"-period and "No" -plus. It has to do with that for some sorts of questions, if a preference is put in, answerer can see that questioner has asked it for some reason which, if the answer is the preferred one, questioner will then proceed to develop, i.e. , the question is part of a line of direction that they're planning to take and the continuation of that line of direction turns on the answer. Now, you don't know what that line of direction is, you only know that the questioner has one and is showing you he has one, so if your answer is consistent with the preference, give the answer and stop so as to allow him to pursue that line. On the other hand, if your answer is inconsistent with the preference, then he isn't going to take up the line of direction he intended to, and if you can find some line of direction yourself, you are free to take it up. And, for example, we can see an effort in this piece of conversation to make something in the world, of 'church . ' Though the preferred answer isn't present, the answerer seeks out 'What can I say about my life that would be interesting to you, with regard to the church, with respect to the current problems I'm having. ' So that the doing of "Yes"-period involves returning the matter to the 1 Such a discussion does not occur in any of the transcribed lectures.

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questioner, by virtue of his having by his preference indicated that he wants to go somewhere but where he's going to go turns on whether "Yes" is said, and "No"-plus involves that, given that he won't be taking up the line of direction he intended to, you yourself are free to take it up. Now, possible evidence for this sort of a thing is something which goes as an alternative to "Yes"-period and "No"-plus, and that is " Yes, but. " Now the "Yes but' ' s often seem to involve something like this: You ask me a question to which the answer is indeed "Yes," and I say "Yes . " But what I try to tell you is that although I don't know where you're going to go with it, I doubt that the implication you would take from my "Yes" is the kind of implication you ought to take, e.g . , ' ' Are you unemployed now?' ' ' 'Yes but I'm independently wealthy. " So you have some line you want to take about how come I'm troubled and now you're going to fix in on that I'm unemployed. I can see that that's a line you could be pursuing, and although it's true that I'm unemployed, you can't take the line you seem to be taking. And it may be a responsibility of the answerer to indicate that while you seem to be wanting to use this answer for some line of direction, and this answer is indeed the one that is preferred, and it's so, it doesn't carry the implications you'd probably care to have. Again, then, for "Yes"-period and "No"-plus or the converse, one of them, by virtue of the preference put into the question, becomes something which should be followed with a period, whereas the other can be developed. That is to say, the answerer can see that the questioner wants to take a line, and if they have the preferred answer they can allow the other to take a line, whereas if they haven't then they are free to take up a line. What I'm saying then is that "Yes" and "No" become quite different sequential objects under this kind of a situation.

Part VII Fall 1 9 71

Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks © 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6

Lecture 1

On hypothetical data; Puns; Proverbial expressions I will be occupied throughout the course with a phenomenon, storytelling in conversation. In the first several lectures I'll be occupied with two sorts of

lessons. The first is - I will attempt, anyway, to show - that storytelling in conversation bears and will repay close looking. The second lesson may appear to be somewhat more exotic. It has to do with this: In that the kinds of observations on stories and storytelling that I'll be making in these beginning lectures involve catching some of their details, then a thing we can come to find is a difference between the kind of way I'll proceed and one characteristic kind of way that social science proceeds, which is to use hypotheticalized, proposedly typicalized versions of the world as a base for theorizing about it. I imagine that in the things you may have read, or in the courses you will have had, you find that somebody will say, "Let us suppose that such-and-such happened" or "Typical things that happen are . . . " and you find yourself perfectly willing to grant that such things happen. Where, on the basis of those assertions, suppositions, proposals as to what's typical, some explana­ tion about the world is built. What I want to argue is that if a researcher uses hypotheticalized or hypotheticalized-typicalized versions of the world, then, however rich his imagination is, he is constrained by reference to what an audience, an audience of professionals, can accept as reasonable. That is to say, theorizing in that fashion has as one boundary on it that only those things can be offered which pass under some notion of believability. There are things that somebody might present as "Let us suppose . . . " or "It's typical that . . . " to which the response of an audience would be "Ah come on, that doesn't happen. " So, a researcher might perfectly well be able to imagine a large range of things. I'm suggesting that if how he proceeds is by offering hypothetical examples or typicalized versions of things, then he's limited as to what he can theorize about by reference to what he figures anybody can accept as happening or as typical. Now that might not appear to be a terrible constraint, except when · we come to look at the kinds of things we'll be seeing as occurrent. Then it should be plain that if those were offered as hypothetical or as typical, we would be laughed off the floor. These materials could not be successfully used as a base for theorizing if they were urged as imagined. One is then debarred from using these kinds of materials. And that debarring of lots of things that actually occur, at least presumably affects the character of social science theory very strongly. Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks © 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6

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Now our business will be to proceed somewhat differently. And one of the gains of proceeding somewhat differently is that we can start with things that couldn't be offered as imagined, by reference to showing that they happened. Then the question is, can we proceed to explain those things that are otherwise debarred from being explained, where we might then gain some increased satisfaction with or commitment to the use of observation as a basis for theorizing. That is to say, a base for using dose looking at the world for theorizing about it is that from dose looking at the world you can find things that we couldn't, by imagination, assert were there: One wouldn't know that they were typical, one might not know that they ever happened, and even if one supposed that they did one couldn't say it because an audience wouldn't believe it. Where, then, if we can add to the stock of things that can be theorized about we will have done something more or less important - if the things that we've added have any import to them. So my business in the first several lectures will be to point out that there are things to see that you wouldn't have noticed, and that we can then use those things to begin to try to develop explanations in which they are the materials. That is to say, I want to encourage the sense that interesting aspects of the world, that are as yet unknown, are accessible to observation. And then we'll see what can be done with them. And that particular theme is going to be developed by reference to stories, since over the semester I will time and again be engaged in a dose look at storytelling. The fragment of material I'm beginning with will initially yield a rather fragile observation. And what I mean by 'fragile' will become more or less apparent in due course. Let me first say some things about the fragment. The names along the side are pseudonyms of the speakers, three teenagers approximately 1 6- 1 8 years old. The conversation from which this fragment has been extracted is a group therapy session for teenagers. It was done a long long time ago, some seven years ago. Ken is telling a story about his 1 2-year-old sister. Wuh-d- her whole room jus' got it wallpapered. She jus'­ she jus' got done rewallpapering it about a month ago, Louise : -with the pictures of the Beatie/ js. Ken : No. A-a month ago Mom had it done in this gra:ssdoth, like junk r"know it looks like // HawaiianLouise : Yeah I know we have it. ( 1 . 5) Ken : She came in there the other night with Scotch tape an' every inch of the room. You couldn'- The roof I think she's got done, in Beadle pictures. An' she lays in bed at night, (2 . 5) Roger : She's doing that 'cause all'er friends're (doin' it). ( // ) over th'Beadles. Louise :---+ Mm they need some kinda idol y'know, something to // look up to, Ken :

Lecture 1 Ken : Louise :

42 1

!;dol! They look like little kangaroo: 'I'I: :s. hheh!

My interest now is in this particular utterance, "They need some kind of idol you know, something to look up to; " in particular, its relation to the story told about the 1 2 -year-old sister; in particular, this utterance of the story, ' 'The roof I thing she's got done in Beatie pictures. And she lays in bed at night. ' ' Louise uses the word 'idol' and then goes on with a proverbial expression that continues and partially explicates a sense of 'idol' relative to what she's talking about, i.e. , "something to look up to. " Now what I want first to point up is that "something to look up to" stands in some possible punning relationship to the story. That is to say, the story has the little sister lying in bed with pictures of the Beatles on the "roof, " and what's asserted in Louise's utterance is that they need something to look up to. That's the initial observation we're going to be doing some coming to terms with. And I take it that the phenomenon might be of the sort that would be hard to put into an imagined story on the basis of which one was going to theorize about storytelling. That is to say, if we look at linguistic philosophy or linguistics, then things like this are not the common sort of objects used. And were I to say "I made this story up and I'm going to consider it' ' then you might feel hesitant about what I would make of this, by reference to whether such things happen. Now the observation that there is a pun here is fragile for varieties of reasons. We can wonder whether she put the pun in, or whether it's just a matter of my having seen something here that really has nothing much to do with whatever is happening, i.e. , it's just some assertion by somebody who's looking at it, as we all know that people can make things of talk - and other things - and we could feel queasy as to whether they were really there. And in the case here of a possible pun there are some good reasons to doubt its serious presence, by reference to that we know how people respond to puns that they produce or hear others produce: If they catch it they will characteristically mark it; laugh at it and point it out. And no such thing takes place here. The pun that happens - if it happens - is unnoticed. And if the argument is that there's a pun here, then presumably we'd be better off if there was some indication that they'd noticed it. I say 'presumably' because while we would in some sense be better off, we might in other ways not be. It might be that if we could establish that the pun is there, then we could do some interesting things about how come nobody noticed it. Now the way I'll proceed here is kind of characteristic of the ways I will proceed throughout the course. Let's hold the pun in abeyance and work our way up to some assurings that it's there. The way I'm going to work our way up to that is by examining this utterance, " . . . something to look up to, " in terms of what is to be a persistent theme of the course; something roughly to be called 'sequential analysis of storytelling. ' And we'll arrive at an initial sequential feature of storytelling, and do some specifications of that, relative to this utterance.

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The utterance is done by a recipient of the story. It's one of two utterances done on the completion of a story, by recipients: Roger : Louise :

She's doing that 'cause all'er friends're (doin' it). ) over th'Beadles. II ( Mm they need some kinda idol y'know, something to I I look up to,

Both utterances can readily be seen to be explanations of the reported event; morals to the story; more generally, indications by a listener that the story was understood. I want to suggest that part of the common business of storytelling occasions, involves story recipients positioning an appreciation of the story on its recognized completion. That, of course, differentiates stories as they occur, say, in books, stories as told in a variety of other occasions, from stories told in conversation: Stories told in conversation have commonly on their completion, a recipient or a series of recipients offering an appreciation of the story. There's no particular news to that, except that there's an initial sense for a sequential organization of stories: On their completion something is done by somebody else. And that something can be said, roughly, to constitute an understanding of the story. Now, if one looks at the objects with which stories are understood, then, again quite commonly, proverbial expressions are used. One can turn the matter around slightly and say: Examining the distribution in conversation of proverbial expressions, one characteristic place they occur is on story comple­ tions. And one characteristic use of them is as understandings of the stories they are produced directly after. That sort of fact turns out to have a variety of interests to it. A common kind of puzzle about proverbial expressions is that for almost any proverbial expression it's possible to take another proverbial expression, counterpose it to the first, and see their inconsistency. That is to say, it's often been noted about proverbial expressions that they're not a consistent package of things, but that as one says "A rolling stone gathers no moss," so another says that "consistency is the something or other of small minds, " etc. Now the question is, is that a defect of proverbial expressions? Or is it that, if it turns out that what proverbial expressions do is that they are used to understand something else, then the question for them is, are they applied to something that they evince an understanding of? If so, it's quite irrelevant that, as a package, they can turn out to have an inconsistency among them. The problem is not, on any given one's use, is it true relative to other proverbial expressions, but, does it, as something one understands with, understand what it applies to? Where, what it applies to is the story it's used after. So what's being recommended is: Take an object like proverbial expres­ sions. Subject them to a distributional investigation. Use that distributional investigation to see what's done with them. One then comes up with that they're used to understand other things; that what they are, are things to

Lecture 1

42 3

evidence understanding with. What's done with them is to take one and see how, for what it's positioned after, does it understand that. It can then be seen as irrelevant, somewhat arbitrary, to say "Let's take the set of them and consider whether they're consistent, to determine whether they're true. " That may be not at all how, empirically, they work. Okay. We have, then, at a point where understandings are properly done, a possible understanding offered. And that possible understanding is done with something that is an instance of things commonly used to exhibit understandings, and commonly used in just such a position as this one is used. What we're doing now is holding aside the question of the serious presence of the pun; we're engaged in finding that the utterance that has the pun does have a serious presence. That is to say, it has a methodical source for being where it occurs, not simply as something that understands the story, but as something that is commonly used to do just such a job. We are now in a position to see, for many many more stories, that things just like this occur in just the position that this does, and do just the job that this does, so that we begin to get a sense of some relatively abstract object being produced here. And furthermore, we can come to see that it's one of a variety of types of things used to do a similar job in a similar position. This particular understanding has a relatively nicer fit to the story than we've so far noted, that nicer fit turning on that one sense of the form of the story is that it constitutes a puzzle or a problem. That is to say, what Ken is telling is something he is offering as "Here's something weird my sister did. Why in the world would she have done it?" And at the point where an understanding for the story is appropriate, what's done is something that stands as an explanation for the puzzle that the story contains. So that a thing one might see is that the understanding-object that is used stands in some methodic relationship to the form of the story, i.e. , the story is a puzzle and the understanding is an explanation. And one might then look to see whether, for stories that are not of the form of puzzles, the things that are used to do an understanding fit them also. I want now to note something about proverbial expressions, and that is that they commonly have a relatively empirical content. And while having a relatively empirical content, they're not to be understood themselves as the empirical assertion they might be. That is to say, one misunderstands "a rolling stone gathers no moss ' ' if one supposes that the talk is about rolling stones and moss. One might not even particularly notice that facet of it, i.e. , that is has some empirical content. Now that particular fact about proverbial expressions can tum out to bear on the question, why, if the pun is here, isn't it noticed? At least grossly we can say that when proverbial expressions are heard, they aren't heard for their empirical particularities, such that if what the pun involves is a relationship between a particular sense of the proverbial terms and other materials - like the particular sense of the story - then, hearing the thing for its proverbial sense, one wouldn't at all notice that it has its non-proverbial sense also apply. It might then be not at all unusual that if it happened, for whatever reason,

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that a pun of this sort were present between a proverbial expression and what it's talking to, the pun wouldn't be noticed. The fact is here that the pun isn't noticed, if it's present. And what's now being suggested is that the way proverbial expressions are heard is such as to have it common for them that if some sort of pun is present, it won't be heard. One will have focussed on what is a specifically alternative sense of the utterance that contains the proverb. Which is still not to say that the pun is present. But it is also to say that since proverbial expressions always have at least two possible senses - one being their particular empirical sense and the other being their lesson sense then they might kind of commonly have the possibility of a punning relationship, not to just anything in the world, but to precisely what they're talking about. And what I didn 't yet notice about this situation is that the pun in the proverb is a pun precisely for the story that's being talked about. The pun could perfectly well be a pun, and be a pun about almost anything that happened priorly. It could pun on itself, it could pun on a fragment of the story that had nothing much to do with the story's business. But what I want in due course to argue is that the pun is very finely related to the story's problem.

Lecture 2

Doing *understanding;' Puns I'll begin by reviewing the kinds of things I was doing last time substantively, anyway. I started out by noticing a possible pun, and then proceeding to attempt to see what kinds of resources could be deployed to begin to turn the pun - or if not the pun, at least the object which contained the pun - into one which had a more or less fine methodical place where it occurred . That involved leaving the pun aside for a bit and proceeding to propose about the utterance that contained it, that there were a variety of aspects of its positioning which had an orderliness to them. So, for example, that the utterance was done by a recipient of the story on the story's completion and constituted a way of 'understanding' the story, was a collection of features of that utterance relative to storytelling, which at least I asserted were a common coincidence, i.e. , on the completion of a story, commonly a recipient talks, and what a recipient does is to produce an utterance that exhibits an understanding - where the question of how it 'understands' remains open for investigation. Precisely that kind of question is one that's intended to be looked into somewhat closely, since one of the things that can be done with it is to determine what do 'understandings' look like, how do they show sorts of hearing of what has preceded, etc. Sequentially, then, there is a place for 'understanding' of stories; that place is directly on the completion of the story. Such things are done by other than the teller, i.e. , by some one or more recipients. In this case it's done by several. Now there are lots of ways that intended understandings are exhibited, such that, for example, it's quite possible that someone produces what is in various ways recognizable as a 'possible understanding, ' and that is then taken to task by the teller, who argues that it's not an 'understanding' but a 'misunder­ standing: ' "No, that's not what I meant; that's not the point of the story. " Which could, of course, have a variery of functions right then and there; of, for example, giving the recipient a second chance; letting the teller know whether the teller's intended point - if there was a point - was caught, and if not, to correct it, etc. The assertion that a place for putting in 'understandings' is directly on the completion of a story, can itself get firmed up in lots of ways. One additionally methodical way that such a claim can be developed involves the possibility that there are objects with which such things as 'stories' are 'understood. ' That is to say, there might be a form of talk that people commonly use, which can be recognized for its 'understanding' business. Where, then, in a way, that doesn't involve simply looking at the talk, and the story, to see "Does it understand?" but what you have is an object that suggests that it's such a thing as is used to do just that job, independently of its use here. Now, that 42 5

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can happen in some places and not happen in other places, and it happens here that an object that is commonly used to do 'understanding' is used to do the understanding here. So that we see a kind of formal thing used. And what I'm suggesting for that is that the status of the remark "they need something to look up to" as a 'proverbial expression' involves the use of just such an object as does 'understanding' in this 'understanding position. ' One could then look to varieties of stories and see whether indeed there are objects which are specifically for 'understandings, ' as there are objects for lots of other things, like 'promising, ' 'cursing,' 'betting,' etc. That is to say, if someone says such a thing as we known can serve as a 'promise, ' then we can see that they're not just doing promising, but they're doing promising with one of the ways that promising is done. It may be less commonly asserted and therefore less obvious that there are objects with which one understands except in the obvious and trivial and possibly incorrect sense of things like "Uh huh . " That is to say, we take it that one obvious use of a thing like "Uh huh" is that it proposes at least "I heard" and maybe "I heard and understand what you've said . " Now what I'm proposing is that a character­ istic job of proverbial expressions is just that kind of thing. They are things to understand with. So there's a proverbial expression used in the position that 'understanding' are properly put; proverbial expressions being a particular type of utterance used to do 'understandings' - in that position and in other positions. I'm in addition asserting that proverbial expressions are more or less ideal objects to do understanding with, since they have an appropriate way of being heard. Where that appropriate way of being heard involves hearing them in one specific way, of the alternative ways that they can be heard. So, e.g. , one could hear ' 'A rolling stone gathers no moss ' ' as being asserted about rolling stones and moss. In that sense one can hear it to be making an assertion about the things to which it, in content, refers. Alternatively, one can hear it as making an assertion about something other than to what it obviously refers. Now, proverbial expressions characteristically have a thing in it which it could refer to. I made a remark last time that people do not hear proverbial expressions as referring to the thing that they can be heard to empirically be referring to. And that's a kind of well known fact. Indeed in classical tests for brain damage and schizophrenia of various sorts, persons are given proverbial expressions and asked to say what they're about. And at least it has been traditionally observed that brain damaged people of various sorts, when asked "What does 'a rolling stone gathers no moss' mean?' ' cannot do much more than say "Well, it's about rolling stones . . . " or something like that, whereas others can take it that it's not particularly about rolling stones and moss, and can readily give an abstract version of it, for a whole range of proverbs. If that's so, then one can see that what can be done with proverbial expressions is to take them and look with them for what they apply to. Now that makes them kind of ideal objects for use for exhibiting an understanding, in a particular sort of way. They can propose to be applying to something other than the objects which they refer to, where there could then be a job for

Lecture 2

42 7

one who receives one of them to find what does it apply to, and does it apply to it well. Now, how do people go about finding, for an utterance that intends an understanding, what it intends an understanding of? The argument is that an utterance's positioning can be used to do that. The positioning of an utterance can be a resource for finding what it's talking to. And that's altogether obvious in the sense, for example, that if someone says "Are you going to the movies tonight?" and another person says "Yes," the question is how do people find out what "Yes" is talking about? Where you don't characteris­ tically say "Yes I'm going to the movies, " you say "Yes" or "No" or things like that. What's involved, obviously, to anyone, is that the positioning of the "Yes" after a question is part of the information that's used in interpreting it. So the position of an answer is a resource for determining to what the answer applies: Look to the question to find to what the answer applies. Notice that the speaker of the answer obliges someone who is going to understand it, to have understood the question. So the very questioner is put into a position of having to understand the answer though the questioner produced an object which itself needed to be understood. That is to say, it's not as if the answer alone exhibits to anybody how it understands, but it makes a job of understanding, just like the job of understanding what was in the question. And stories are precisely that kind of object. A story is a puzzle. There's a job for the listener to understand them. When the listener does the job of understanding, he puts the original teller in precisely the position that the listener was put in originally, i.e. , when the listener produces his understanding the teller himself has to keep in mind the story, to understand that the story is understood. And the teller uses the positioning of the listener's utterance right after the story, to see that what's being done with that utterance is to 'possibly understand, ' rather than that this is an altogether new utterance, make of it what you want. What we're doing, then, is extending, from an obvious base - things like questions and answers - the relevance of positioning of utterances for determining the kinds of jobs that they do, and what they oblige people who are dealing with them to do. In a way, then, we've taken a story which has a whole series of utterances, and suggested about it that it can be treated as any object relative to something that follows it. And we can then begin to get an idea about why it is that the utterance that understands it goes right after it. That is to say, positioning might not be usable if a whole bunch of talk went on between the end of the story and the possible understanding of the story, particularly if what was adapted was a relatively simple situation of 'look to the last possible object to find what was being understood. ' It's not at all incidental, then, that story-understanding goes directly on the story­ completion. Since the understanding needs itself to be understood, and a way it gets to be understandable is by one's finding what it refers to, and positioning can be used to find that and thereby help it to be understood itself, then its positioning right after something is an obvious kind of solution, any modification of which makes for enormous complications. In any event, if

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positioning is used and can then be counted on, there are ways in which it's obviously easier to do an 'understanding, ' i.e. , you don't have to indepen­ dently locate the thing you're intendedly talking to. And with that kind of a discussion we get into a position to see that if that slot is filled with a proverbial expression it wouldn't be too odd for it to contain a possible pun, by virtue of the fact that the proverbial expressions have an empirical sense apart from their proverbial sense, and if they do, then at least one empirical sense they may have may be one that somehow puns on the story. In addition, if they're not heard for their particular empirical sense but heard for their proverbial sense, then we are in a position to appreciate why, if there were a pun present, it might not be caught. So what's being suggested is that this position is a specific environment for the occurrence of puns, and unnoticed puns. And a common object with which they will occur is proverbial expressions used to do understandings of stories. Now, when these things occur, something somewhat parallel to the visual-illusional duckjrabbit phenomenon may be present. That is to say, we all know about those illusions where if you look at it one way it's a duck and if you look at it another way it's a rabbit, etc. Here we might have not simply that sort of a phenomenon, but maybe even a rule that tells you which one is going to be seen. Where, in the typical situation of an illusion it may be that we don't know which is going to be seen, we only know they're exclusive, here it may be that we can say that a first hearing will be not the pun, and maybe even that the pun will not be heard. And that is a very neat kind of thing to know, i.e. , it's neat to know for objects that people hear, that are plainly ambiguous, that without even specifying which particular proverbial expres­ sion it is, we can say that it won't be heard for its pun sense. That's telling us some rather strong things about how minds work - if it's true. Notice of course that if the pun is seen, then the 'understanding' kind of dissipates; all she's said is the same thing; an 'explanation' of a story detail turns out to be simply another version of it. You can then see the importance of hearing the proverbial expression abstractly. That is to say, Ken having remarked that his sister put Beatle pictures on the ceiling of her room, we would take it as an altogether strange thing for Louise to have said "Well, they need something on the ceiling to look up to. ' ' Why would they need that? Whereas, having said "They need something to look up to, " it sounds like she's saying something abstract. By differentiating the thing that way, one might begin to get an idea of the important difference involved. And commonly one does deal with proverbial expressions as though something more abstract has been said - and indeed maybe something more abstract is being said, in some other sense. Now, forgetting about that issue, we can have at least partially arrived at an appreciation that something like the following was in Louise's mind: The story is over, she's in a position now of, if she's going to produce an understanding she's got to produce it right now. She can look for an object with which to do it. Proverbial expressions are one class of ways to do it; find now a proverbial expression that exhibits an understanding. That can be the

Lecture 2

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job she has to do within this period of time, which happens to be two seconds in this case. The question is, then, how does she go about finding the proverbial expression that will work? There are two sorts of things relevant to her finding the proverbial expression that will work, which are independent of the way her remark puns on the story. Those two sorts of things are the occurence of an error in the story, and that the story stops before some obvious senses of its appropriate completion. That is to say, it drifts off in the middle of its close. What I want to propose is that - even independently, but interestingly enough they conjoin - those two sorts of matters might have a bearing on where her mind is while she searches for a proverb. The way they could have a bearing on where her mind is, has first of all to do with that a correctable thing was said, and she didn't correct it, and nobody corrected it. The misused word here is of course "roof, " the correct word would have been 'ceiling. ' Now, a common occurrence on a word misuse is that recipients focus on it and sometimes aloud and sometimes not aloud, correct it. 1 So, if they understood what Ken was saying, then they would have mentally corrected it. They would see that "roof " is wrong, not intended - the story would be far more bizarre if that were intended - but that 'ceiling' was intended. It happens that I have lots of materials involving these people, and it's a very common thing for this kid Ken to make mistakes like that one, and it's also kind of common for Louise to correct him. It doesn't particularly add all that much to these materials that that's so, since in any event the correctable status of such a thing like "roof " for 'ceiling' is enough known. It happens that she doesn't correct him here. Now in the case of this thing, " . . . the roof I think she's got done in Beatie pictures. And she lays in bed at night, " a variety of things can be said. One is that such sorts of things are characteristically brought to completion by another speaker, i.e. , when somebody drifts off or stops within the course of a sentence that they've given enough materials to allow others to finish, then others quite commonly do finish it. It could be heard as a search for some words, and others will - not always, but characteristically - finish it off. In this case, were it finished off, it might well involve something like ' ' . . . looking up at' ' the pictures. So that both the error and the incompletion, if they were dealt with by recipients at all, could involve them in focussing on something like the thing that gets put into Louise's 'understanding. ' I want now to make some slightly parenthetical remarks to this issue of the incompletion here. That incompletion itself has a variety of kinds of orderlinesses to it. One has to do with that the story is developed as a puzzle and it ends as a puzzle - at least it ends as a puzzle in this particular sense of not having its ending presented - i.e. , apart from the question of why is she doing what she did, there is the question of what was she doing? It is commonly observable that for some 'what is it they're doings' a party will 1A bit of this consideration comes from the last moments of Fall 1 9 7 1 , lecture 1 , not retained in the edited version of that lecture.

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break off their talk before they say it, when they might well say it. And those have to do, not untypically, with obscenities. Where there is a kind of plain allusion here to that she's doing something dirty. The question is, what is she doing lying in bed at night looking at the pictures of the Beatles above her. That he drops off at that point is something not at all peculiar, and is at least a typical kind of incompletion which won't get completed by someone else. That is then to say that there are places in talk where it is, in a fashion, not wrong to stop your sentence in the middle. And one such place is where you've given sufficient indication that you're going to report on something dirty and then you stop without reporting it. Where, then, the sheer fact that others don't continue can in some way evidence that they see what you were saying. And furthermore, that you don't continue can inform them that that's what you were indeed going to say. So the incompletion here is not merely a fault of the story. What we get to, then, is something like: Possibly in search of a proverb to produce an understanding with, a thing used to find one of them - where varieties of them will work - is to use materials from the story that were themselves needing of treatment, as resources for arriving at a proverb. In any event, it looks like the content of this expression, aside from its proverbialness, does pick up on relevantly-to-be-picked-up-on aspects of the story. And a thing we can look for is to see whether, if someone produces a possible error in their talk, it happens that others later exhibit that they picked up on the error, though they didn't say anything to it then. That is, a piece of research that we're then led to do is to see whether, when someone doesn't show that they saw an error when they could have shown that they saw an error, they nonetheless at some point later on evidence that they saw it. And the same might go for incompletions. So we've put together a bunch of pieces from this fragment, which deal with it kind of neatly, but which also suggest that rather abstract events are taking place which can also be seen in lots of other places. And in that sense we can have some kind of a vision of relatively abstract machinery operating in this particular event. The abstract machinery, however, does not have the consequence of not handling the details of this event. That is to say, we have as a typical sense of abstract versus detailed considerations of things, that as soon as we get abstract, for example in social theorizing, then we're committed to losing the details. It's a credo of social science reasoning that we can suffer the loss of details while we build abstract models. It's a feature of abstract models, as compared to the real reality, that they do not preserve the details. Possibly it needn't be.

Lecture 3

Allusive talk; Poetics One thing I'm interested in doing in a casual fashion in these introductory presentations, is to allude to a view going around that pretty much all of what's interesting in conversation doesn't happen via the use of its words. Now, I figure that such a theory is held, not by virtue of an investigation of what words do in talk, but by virtue of a doctrine about words which assigns them a particular, narrow import. The consequence being that insofar as we know that lots of other things happen in conversation, we suppose that they don't happen with the use of words. That is to say, if we undertook an investigation of how words mean, then we might find, for example, that they mean more interestingly than we had supposed. And an interest I've had, then, and that I'll continue to have - particularly in the introductory direction - is to deal with the view that holds 'everything interesting takes place apart from the words' by indicating that there are some delicate, interesting things that happen distinctly with the words. The last two times, in talking about a fragment and the presence of a pun there, one of the things that we ended up with was not simply that we could see that the pun might have really been there, but also that proverbial expressions, given their features and the places where they're used, have a distinct aptness for a possible punning usage. The import of that being that we will have seen something about the language, or the language and its users, that involves the particular occurrence noted being turned from some private, occasional event into one that can have a sort of generality of presence. Where in part the question is how does one go about explaining such an occurrence? Does one, finding something neat and delicate, need to try to build into the particular person who uses it some sort of virtuosity which we suppose is unusual? Or is it that if it's a virtuosity then it's a virtuosity that maybe anyone has, or the language gives them. Now let's turn to a fragment. The series of remarks I just made will continue to apply to what I'll be saying this time and perhaps the next time as well. Again, the talk is from a group therapy session, the same series as the materials from last time. Al and Ken and Roger are the kids, Dan is the therapist. AI : Ken : AI :

((sung)) Ba: :rney Google with his goo goo googuly eye: :s. Ba: :rney Google hadda wife three times his si:ze, ehheh ((sung)) She sued Barney for deevorce, now he's living with his ho: : : : :rse 43 1

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Ken : AI : Ken : Roger : Dan :

(

):

Ken : Roger : Ken : Roger : Dan : AI : Dan :

Roger :

heh heh hh ((sung)) Ba: :rney I I Google heh heh ( 1 . 0) Did he buy the horse before he got divorced? Well so far, all of you skirted around the subject. That see(hh)ms to b(h)e predominantly uh on your minds at any rate, ((clears throat)) heh heh hmnYeh well we're at that sta(hh)ge. ehhI lheh hehh hhehh hehhh hehh I I hh hehh hh Yeah? Yeah. What stage is that, ( 1 . 5) Awareness.

I'm going to focus on the utterance "Well so far, all of you skirted around the subject. That see(hh)ms to b(h)e predominantly uh on your minds at any rate, " particularly on the phrase-part "skirted around. " Let me just note that the utterance doesn't refer merely to the Barney Google ditty, but to talk that had been preceding the Barney Google ditty and that the ditty is consistent with. Now, a plain sense of the assertion of Dan's utterance is that the talk that he's talking about was allusive. And a first thing to note about his utterance is that there are obvious senses in which it, with respect to the talk that it's talking about, is also allusive. That is to say, if what he's proposing is that they've talked around some unstated subject, then he, too, does not name that subject. There can be a variety of kinds of issues involved in such an assertion. One of them being, for example, if what he's proposing is that the talk has been talk around the edges of some topic, the topic having gone unstated, how does he indicate that he knows the topic that they've been talking around? He could say, "So far you've been skirting around the subject of sex. " Then of course he wouldn't be doing 'skirting around' that topic. What kinds of resources can he deploy to bring off claiming they're being allusive while himself also being allusive, while indicating that he knows the topic? There is plainly present and used, a resource for doing that; that being the ambiguity involved in this case - and obviously more availably than just this usage - in the term 'skirted. ' That is to say, "skirted around" is perfectly well a way of talking about how, for any topic, persons might talk to it, while the term 'skirt' is one way of talking about, e.g . , women, and perhaps thereby indicating that the topic that's being skirted around is a topic for which the word 'skirt' is itself indicative of the topic. Where there are a variety of ways of saying about some talk that it's, e.g . , 'beating around the bush,' 'evading

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the issue,' etc., etc. , not all o f which but not only 'skirting the subject' can also, for at least 'sex' as a topic, indicate that you know that 'sex' is the topic. So there are these sorts of things possibly present here: He's saying that they're talking allusively while he talks allusively, and he's saying that he knows what the topic is, and indicates that he knows what the topic is, without naming what the topic is. Now, with those at hand, we might ask what would be the business of doing such a thing? Here's one possible use: If the talk of the topic has been allusive, then at least what he can do with this way of noticing it is to preserve both the topic and its allusiveness while inserting himself into the talk with a note about it. That is to say, he hands them back the topic in almost the state it was in. And that sort of a treatment can have its own interest, if one considers some other ways that some of the jobs he's doing can be handled by the recipients of his utterance. So, for example, if he asserts what the topic is, then it's possible for them to deny it or to accuse him of reading into the talk what it didn't involve, and to tum it, then, to issues about his dirty mind. Alternatively if he does that, and does it as a complaint, then the correctness and adequacy and appropriateness, etc., of his complaint can be themselves addressed. That is to say, what the topic has been can be ignored for a consideration of the appropriateness of the complaint offered. Now I'm going to put something maybe a bit more abstractly than it's characteristically put: One of the problems about making complaints in conversation - complaints that are perfectly well fitted to something that's just happened, complaints about the course of a topic, etc. - is that there's a way in which the production of a complaint can free the talk from what the talk has priorly been. The complaint itself now becomes the topic. So, for example, there are a range of ways that, a complaint having been made, the course of the talk can be siphoned into a dealing with the fact of a complaint, like, "You always complain" or "You're being a killjoy" or whatever else, that has nothing to do with the particular complaint's connection to what's preceded it. It's a characteristically known thing that talk on any topic can "end up in an argument, " and one of the ways that that's a formal possibility for conversation has to do with there being places in it where some kinds of interactional events can be freed from whatever they were about, and themselves multiply. So a complaint can be met by a counter-complaint and the counter-complaint can be met by another complaint, and one can kind of rapidly get into an argument that - intendedly or not - loses the course of talk out of which it seemed to come. Where, then, there is a particular difficulty in, for example, holding a topic while also talking to it or about it. Such issues are roughly known, and commend attempts to allow the preservation of a topic across a comment on it: How to make a comment on it a comment in it. How to possibly avoid giving too much of a chance to persons who have now been embarrassed, to tum on the embarrasser. Returning to the allusive utterance itself, let me just note that the allusiveness of the talk continues after it: While acknowledging that he's

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correctly alluded to the topic they're allusively talking about, they continue talking in an allusive way. Roger : Ken : Roger : Dan : At:

Dan : Roger :

hmnYeh well we're at that sta(hh)ge. ehhl lheh hehh hhehh hehh hehh 11 hh hehh hh Yeah? Yeah. What stage is that, ( 1 . 5) Awareness.

Now, the resources he had for building his complaint allusively and sufficiently were this ambiguity in the term 'skirt, ' which can refer to women sexually. I want to make two sorts of points about the resources used: First, for not just any topic is there such a resource. And on the other hand, for referring to sex, there are lots of such resources. At this point I'm trying to locate the scope of usability of this deployed ambiguity. Last time I suggested that proverbs have a specific aptness for a punning relationship to the talk that they might be 'understanding. ' What I want to be saying now is that as 'skirt' is a way in which some unstated topic can be talked about, and also alludes to a particular topic, that sort of thing is relatively special for ' sex' as a topic, but is not exclusive to the term 'skirt' at all, for 'sex' as a topic. In effect, then, in some fashion, you can't as readily employ ambiguities to allude to just any topic, but you can specifically deploy them for ' sex' as a topic. What is being noted has a variety of sources. One of them is - to put it in a slightly paradoxical fashion - that the proper literal way to talk about sex is to talk about it allusively. So that if you talk about sex literally you're not talking about sex properly, you're talking about sex 'frankly. ' That is to say, what would othetwise be ordinary talk about some other topic, talked of in the same way for sex, it's 'talking frankly. ' And what would be for some other topic talking about it allusively, is talking about sex, in effect, literally. So the language for talking about sex - and a variety of other things - is specifically allusive. I mean to be noting such a thing as that a perfectly reasonable, literal, but not ' frank' reference to sex is 'going to bed with, ' 'sleeping with,' etc. And that has correlates for other sorts of events as well, as when announcing what one is doing one says ' 'I'm going to the bathroom. " That is to say, there are other descriptions which would come off not as literal but as 'frank' or as 'crude. ' And one wouldn't be heard as speaking allusively if one said ' 'I'm going to the bathroom. " Though, on the other hand, one might be heard as being allusive if one said ' 'I'm going to the kitchen" when one was intending to get something to eat. In a fashion, then, 'allusiveness' is the way sex is properly talked of, if you used the term 'allusive' as it would apply to some other topic. Then, too, there is the fact that obscene puns seem to have no particular locus, in the sense that there seems to be no particular topical talk that has, more than or

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less than any other topical talk, the possibility of having obscene puns emerge in it. Obscenity, then, is something that if one wants to avoid it one needs always to keep it in mind so as to keep one's mind off of it. It looks as though our language is one in which the possibility of obscenity is the ambiguity to be avoided in talk anywhere, such that sex is always latent in a way different than, say, politics or any general topic that one might get into is always latent. The pun organization is, then, sexual. The reason for my raising this is again to say that it takes no particular wit of somebody's to use the particular resources of an ambiguity in order to invoke sex as the topic that's being alluded to. That isn't the kind of thing about which what we have to see is what kind of a mind does this fellow have, or has he done something distinctly clever. In using the ambiguities of a term to invoke sex, he's done it in just the way that it's altogether easy to do. And if sex is to be talked of allusively, and is the primary allusively-to-be-talked­ about subject, it isn't surprizing that much of the language would turn out to be deployable that way. As persons sought to find ways to talk allusively on that topic they would have generated a more or less large range of otherwise punning terms that could have a specific sexual sense. 'Sex' doesn't have its own terms being used, so what happens is that the language in general is being raided for usable terms. And every time a raid is successful we have another obscene pun possibility added. And when, say, that term is otherwise used, the possibility of a sexual reference lies latent. So we've added to our prior stuff a way that can be seen to have some sorts of generality and also some sorts of anyman usage, to deploy ambiguity - a feature which is considered to be delicate on any occasion - systematically for interactional purposes. Now I want to move to another fragment, again from the group therapy sessions (these were excerpted from a collection of five two-hour sessions) . Roger :

Dan : Dan : Roger : Dan : Roger : Dan : Roger : Dan : Roger :

When I say I wanna be something, it's not that I just wanna be this, it's just 1-1-1 just- that's the only thing I tell people that I wanta be an artist. It's really a whole way of life, y'know, an' I guess that's- -- an' that's the way my brother feels too, so he just­ just tells everybody, b'cause he won't be accepted, y'know, the idea is I I not standard. Yeah. Uh huh. Y'know this is- this is just haifa the situation. ( 1 . 0) Mm hm, You visualize yourself uh living a certain way. An' the only thing'tchu tell people is uh whatcha do as yer occupation. Yeh I see it as a whole picture. It is. Y'know

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Yer right. Not just uh -- ( 1 . 0) -- Like my father, you know, "Well I -- I'm a painter. " Mm hm, Y'know? But I-I don't see it that way at all. Huh. I- How am I gonna live, what am I gonna do for a living, an' the whole- whole scene. Right. And uh since most people don't think along these lines . . .

Briefly, what he's doing here is asserting that he's unsatisfied with the ways in which it appears he has to describe his preferred occupation. He's unsatisfied because that seems to treat it as merely an occupation, i.e. , an eight-hour-a­ day thing. For him, the occupation he wants is one that he treats as life-pervasive. Now, a plain kind of issue is, he could say that; how can he make it believable that as compared to others it's so for him. That is to say, there's a large difference between claiming something and proving it. And maybe there are ways of proving something like this assertion. What we can do here is to look at a kind of neat thing happening - and again, we're dealing with spontaneous talk. The kind of neat thing happening is: The occupation he proposes as the one with which he's life-pervasively occupied is being an artist. Now let's note that while there is a whole range of ways he could describe the problems of having that occupation being life-pervasive for him, what he does is to use, a bunch of times, specifically visual terms to characterize his preoccupation. He talks about "You visualize yourself," "I see it as a whole picture," "and the whole scene, " "along these lines . " Any of these things could be formulated in a way that had nothing to do with some occupation, or he might use terms specifically of that occupation's mental state. What he's done is to show a listener that his mind is indeed kind of totally occupied with a visual way, i.e. , a painter's way, of thinking about the world. What's been done here is that someone has taken description situations which would allow for descriptions that had nothing in particular in common with each other, and isolate terms that all had a visual aspect. He has, then, mobilized, out of the range of ways that all of these things could be formulated, each of them as distinctly have a visual sense to them. He's thereby exhibited the visual character of his mind, and thereby proved that it isn't only a job for him, it's "a whole way of life. "

Lecture 4

Spouse talk This fragment comes from a conversation with five people present. Ben and Ethel are father-in-law and mother-in-law of Lori; they're visiting Bill and Lori, their son and daughter-in-law; Fred is Bill's grandfather. They drove down from Los Angeles for the afternoon. The first utterance, "When are your folks coming down," refers to Lori's parents who are also expected. Ben : Lori : Ben : Lori : Ben : Ben : Ethel : Ben : Bi ll : Ethel : Ben : Ethel : Ben : Lori : Ethel : Ethel : Ben : Lori : Ethel : Ben :

When're yer folks comin' down. They should be he:re. ( 1 . 5) There wz the one spot there, -- they must have hadda, -- I I some kind'v aWill they get into it too? 'r I I wz it- more up by yer house. Yeah. No, no they'll get into it. They must'v had some type of a showing. -- A camper sho:w or uhm- I I flea market, At the great big drive in theater. = = or they mighta hadda swap meet, and there were, so many cars parked there en' so many people walkin' on the bridge across the freeway thet people were slowin' down tuh look. Huhh Brother I mean it slowed up I I a:ll, the traffic y' know, An' there- there wz at least ten mi:les of traffic bumper tuh bumper. -because a' that, 1 .0) [[Damn idiots, An' how long did it- So-so it took a while tuh get through­ What time I I didju leave. Mm hm, Well, let's I I see, we­ 'Leven thirty, But that wz- Then you wentuh Fre:d's. We, I I we left- we leftNo. That's the time we left Fre:d's.

I've been engaged in pointing up some relatively delicate aspects of storytelling and attempting to make something of them. I'm continuing that now. And the delicate aspect of storytelling that I'm going to focus on is involved in Ethel's utterance, "At the great big drive in theater" and her 437

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utterance ' '-because of that. ' ' I want to develop an account of her usage and what it is; what she's doing and why. What she's doing in a transparent sort of way is producing specifically completions to sentences begun by Ben; such sentences as, so far as he's concerned, may already be complete, at least in the case of ' ' -because of that: ' ' Ben : Ethel :

An' there- there wz at least ten mi:les of traffic bumper tuh bumper. -because a' that,

In the other case he's going to go on in any event: Ben : Ethel :

They must'v had some type of a showing. -- A camper show or uhm- II flea market, At the great big drive in theater.

The phenomenon of people finishing off other people's utterances, or extending and re-finishing an utterance that somebody else has already attempted a finish to is not all that rare, though it has a great deal of technical interest to it and I'll suggest some of its technical interest in a bit. Now I want to locate one class of such occurrences and explain them. In doing so we begin at a place that seems very far away from where we shall end up; we begin with among the most general sorts of maxims for the production of talk in conversation, and specifications of this maxim will recur throughout the course. It runs: A speaker should, on producing the talk he does, orient to his recipient. We're concerned with one specification of that, for now. If the maxim is so - as it is - then a sort of consequence is that ifyou've already told something to someone then you shouldn't tell it to them again, or if you know in other ways that they know it then you shouldn't tell it to them at all. So that a typically complainable-about event is: Two parties walking along, both watching the same sorts of things, and one narrating what's happening to which the other can characteristically reply, "I see it, I see it. " Alternatively, one telling the other something that they've already told him, to which the other will characteristically reply, not awaiting its completion, "You already told me that. ' ' That's a very general rule, and it can present difficulty under certain standardized situations of which possibly the most interesting - interesting not so much for technical reasons but interesting for the plaintiveness of the problems it poses - are those in which one or more couples are present and talking in the environment of others, possibly other couples. And hereafter just imagine other couples so as to make it a little bit more interesting. If a couple is present and conversing with other couples, and there's a rule 'Don't tell your recipients what you know they already know; what you've already told them, ' then, if that rule generically applies to conversation, there would be a kind of dramatic bind on this sort of conversation which would involve that if, e.g. , one person is going to tell a story, then, considering whether

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others know it, if that person is a part of a couple then one thing they're very largely going to know is that their spouse will know the story by virtue of the fact that the stories they tell in the presence of others, they've already told their spouse. That is then to say that when couples get together they might find that they have almost nothing any member of the group can tell the group without feeling that at least some other members of the group already know what they're telling them. A general problem, then, is how to deal with the situation of a couple in conversation with others. One obvious solution - that spouses shouldn't tell each other anything that they might have occasion to tell other people obviously has massive troubles involved in it which are reflected in such a situation as someone telling a story and having their spouse complain "How come you never told me that. " However, spouses don't much get into that situation. And that has to do with, if they are in each other's daily presence then on any occasion that they have anything to tell, there are rather strong bases for their telling it to their spouse. So that they will daily use up, with regard to their spouse, any possible news they have. The reasons for that are themselves rather technical and general, having to do with things like: When people gather, including spouses but not uniquely to spouses, then, via the rule 'orient to one's recipient, ' one of the businesses is to inform the person they're with of any possible news relevant to that other that they acquired in between meetings. And this will partially explain how come spouses don't withhold from each other, until a scene in which many are present, the stories that they have. Now let me try to develop kind of an explanation of why, when something is news, spouses tell that news to their spouse first, i.e. , not necessarily first of anyone, though sometimes first of anyone, but on the first occasion they can. But I want to hold the problem and develop an explanation which will tum out to be an explanation of it, without at the moment referring to spouses. Everyone has encountered the following sort of scene: You meet somebody and they ask you, about someone you mutually know, "How is X?" Now, at least theoretically it's quite imaginable that you could say, not having spoken to the asked-about one in the last ten minutes, half hour, week, two months, that you don't know, and refer to as your source for not knowing, that you haven't spoken to them in the last ten minutes, half hour, two weeks, three months, whatever. That occasionally occurs to you, and we'll try to say why it can occur to you, but very characteristically you feel altogether confident in saying that they're fine or not so fine, and maybe adding some more or less close characterization of how they are. Now, how can you feel confident that · you know how somebody is whom you haven't spoken to recently? After all, people suffer all sorts of contingencies in one's absence. But for some sorts of people - roughly, close acquaintances (people in such sorts of relationships as involve others asking one party to the relationship about the other, i.e. , others know what sort of relationship you're in with the one they're asking about), it's their business to inform each other of any more or less dramatic events that

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happen to them. In some cases it's their business on the event's occurrence to sit down and start calling people up. Deaths, marriages, changes of jobs, whatever, are occasions for making a contact that otherwise one would not have then made with a variety of people. On the other hand, there is a variety of news which can await some other sort of contact; either one's normal contact-occasions, or however it is that a contact happens to occur. Now, parties in what we can call a ' reason for a call' relationship - and by that I mean that there are some things as between them, that if those happen it's their business to make a call or make a contact - can feel assured about the status of someone; assured enough not to call them to find out, or assured enough to answer somebody who asks about them, by virtue of the fact that they haven't received a call. That is to say, one can figure, about a whole bunch of people, that they are more or less as they were by virtue of the fact that they haven't told you otherwise. So we wander through the world feeling confident about the states of people with whom we aren't in moment to moment contact. That can be consequential if at some point you encounter them or encounter someone who's encountered them, and you discover that such an event as should have occasioned a contact has happened and a contact hasn't happened. That is to say, you meet someone and they tell you that some time ago X got married or X moved or some such significant thing, and X never told you. Not that they 'never told you' by virtue of the fact that you've seen them and they didn't say anything about it, but they never called you to tell you. If that happens then you can begin to doubt whether you know what's up with them. And if someone asks about them, you can end up saying though you've spoken to them with as much frequency as you normally do - that you don't know how they are: "We aren't close anymore. " People can feel "we aren't close anymore" about people they see with as much a rate as they ever saw them, by virtue of discovering that things have happened with them that they haven't told you. Now, spouses are plainly an instance of that sort of thing, i.e. , there's a large body of news that a spouse should hear about as soon as it happens, or on the first occasion thereafter. Indeed, pretty much anything you would properly tell anybody else, you will have or should have told your spouse on the first occasion you could have - which will characteristically be before you've had occasion, in public with your spouse, to be telling someone else. It would plainly be bizarre, seeing your spouse every day, to announce on a Saturday night in the company of others that you got a raise on Wednesday. She might well figure that something is up in that you didn't tell her. Or she would also feel strange if on Friday she were to hear from somebody else that on Wednesday you got a raise. She might well figure, not that you were holding it for a surprize, but that you were holding out on her. So, by virtue of what are really rather general considerations, spouses should end up telling each other pretty much anything they ever tell anybody else, before they tell - if not anybody else, anybody else in the company of their spouse. Unless, e.g . , they happen to arrive and the spouse is there with

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somebody else. But that has nothing much to do with spouses, it has to do with rules for telling and classifications of items that are tellable. Now, among the few occasions where spouses end up telling news to a spouse in the presence of others is when they're talking about the long and far ago, and it just hasn't happened that we've ever had occasion to tell of this, since the issue is I didn't know you then, so it never was 'news' for us. And in the coutse of our relationship since I've known you, such a matter as leads me to mention this never came up. But nonetheless spouses are often bothered by much of that happening, i.e. , they are bothered if, in the presence of others, too many reminiscences occur which they haven't already heard. And there are reasons for that, too. I can't develop them fully here, but roughly what it has to do with is that, in ways that we'll see eventually in the course, stories get occasioned by a current course of conversation. There are many occasions for any story getting occasioned. If we've known each other long enough, the course of conversation should have naturally provided that anything substantial at any time in your life will have been occasioned to tell. And people telling, then, the most antique stories for them, in whatever company, it will tum out that after they've been spoused for a while they've already told that to their spouse. So spouses can figure that if much of your early life occurs to you in conversations, not with me but with others and me, then you haven't been participating in conversations with me in the way you participate in conversations with others and me. Like, you only turn on when other people are there. Which is plainly a complainable. What we've been coming to, then, is that, not so much by virtue of being a spouse but by virtue of the consequences of being a spouse, one will have told almost anything worth telling to one's spouse before one has an occasion to tell it with one's spouse and others. Furthermore, it's kind of likely for lots of news that on any given occasion when one might tell it to one's spouse and others, one will already have told it - not simply to one's spouse, but to one's spouse and others, i.e. , for any given story one is going to tell, one's spouse will be publicly hearing that story maybe many times. Now, that is already to suppose a modification of the general rule, 'don't tell someone what you've already told them; ' a modification which says, 'in the presence of others, relax the don't-tell rule in the case of spouses. ' One question, then, is what do spouses do when their spouse is telling a story they've already heard? That's a professional problem for spouses, since a good deal of time that they spend in the company of others, they are rehearing what they've already heard. Another aspect of it is, spouses will jointly have participated in some of the events that they will have occasion to tell in the company of others - where, e.g. , having gone to the movies together they wouldn't come home and tell the other that they went to the movies. But the next night, having been asked "What did you do?" they would plainly be in a position to say "We went to the movies. ' ' Well, who of them is it that's going to tell of any event that they mutually participate in? The problem is after all simple in other circum­ stances. Whoever it is that something happened to can tell it. But what happens when it happened to both of them? It's common enough that

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something that one's reporting has happened to more than oneself, but it's also common that in any group of participants they'll find something to tell which has happened to only one of them. So that of all the people who went to some event, they will disperse backwards, such that each of them will end up in some environments in which they're the only ones to whom it happened. Milions of people go through wars, etc. , but for the millions of people who go through a war, there are events of the war that for some environment there will be recipients who weren't in it, or weren't in it in the way they were, and will thereby be proper recipients for the story that's available. But again, spouses are peculiar in that a great deal of what either of them have to tell in the company of their spouse to others is something in which they jointly participated. How then do they divide up the work of telling? There are some plain and classical solutions. In some places if couples gather for an evening, then the first thing they do after gathering is split apart. Men go into one room, women go into another room. That has as an obvious nice consequence to it that stories in one room can reproduce the stories in the other, while allowing everyone to tell a story, not having to compete for that story with their spouse. And in this culture, such things take place. An alternative thing might well involve some relatively simple rule, like if it happened to both of them then one of them has distinct rights to tell it. It would, e.g. , presumably be one index of male-female relationships if what held were what seems to have held often enough - that any story that happens to both man and wife, the man tells. Then of course the wife is in a position such that she not only listens to stories that she knows by virtue of the fact that her husband has already told her about things that happened to him, but she also listens to - or at least doesn't tell - the stories that she knows by virtue of the fact that she too was one to whom they happened. Now all of that is rather problematic by virtue of other technical features of conversation having to do with some of the reasons for the rule 'don't tell what you've already told. ' These have to do with how it is that people listen to stories and should listen to stories. For example, one kind of rule for listening to stories which I'll discuss in great detail eventually, is 'listen to a story to find out if a similar thing or the same thing happened to you. At the end of the story, if you've found such a thing, tell it. ' Plainly that would have bizarre consequences for one spouse telling a story that the other also participated in. That is to say, the one spouse having told the story, the other would say "The same thing happened to me," and tell the same story. Which isn't all that funny because just such a thing happens not that rarely, except that the parties to the story didn't do it together, i.e. , a first person reports on something they did and the other says "Isn't that a coincidence? I did just the same thing today" and then tells it again. We then get questions like "How come I didn't see you there?" etc. So at least one major way that listeners are occupied, is one that a spouse cannot be engaged in. What are spouses to do? It rums out that there doesn't seem to have been any formal solution arrived at for the culture, and spouses

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have to work out a solution, each for themselves if they can, though they tend to work out more or less similar solutions, some of which are to get angry and annoyed and bored. And one recurrent thing that happens is that insofar as one of the spouses is, if not a famous person, then a sort of a conversational star, i.e. , someone who, in the company of a variety of people, ends up telling lots of stories to the amusement of those other people, then while everybody else loves them their spouses hate them, in that what happens is that the spouse ends up hearing time and again the same stories told, and can't possibly find themselves being amused by them. It's a distinct problem of stars that everybody else is amused with them and their spouses are bored with them. And typically they don't know what to do about it, either of them. Now, one sort of solution is, if they do a lot of hosting themselves, then while one is telling a story, the other can behave also as a host by wandering around filling up drinks, making themselves busy, all in all not listening. But are there listening techniques available? Yes. One such listening technique is present in our materials and is altogether kind of common, and that is, a spouse listens precisely to the story they already know, for its more or less correct presentation, and engages in monitoring it - as a listener should utterance by utterance. But now, however, for whether it's correctly presented as they know it. If not, what they do is put in corrections at the proper places. This can be a more or less happy solution. It can also be a more or less unhappy solution. For its unhappy version, one routine situation for spouses is that at the end of the evening, when the spouses get together, the news that they have is their anger over the corrections that have been done to the story I told, or the way in which the story that I know has been fudged by its teller. That is to say, given the earlier remarks I made about spouses when they're together having news for each other, then an evening together can generate news for each other after the evening; the news being what either spouse did to the other in the course of the evening. And that can have to do with each's talking behavior. Again, then, an altogether common kind of thing is that spouses listen to each other's stories, and among the few ways they can listen to it to retain interest, is to listen to it by virtue of the story they know; that ending up in their engaging in modifications on the story, one telling it and the other modifying the told story. This situation also occurs when groups of people who are currently friends and also had a past together, are reminiscing together. Then, too, one finds some party telling a story they all know indeed, that's the nature of the reminiscence - and the others engaged in modifications and elaborations of the story being told. Occasions of reminisc­ ing are, then, specifically occasions in which the general rule, 'don't tell what the others know' is lifted, and where it's lifted its consequence is precisely the consequence that occurs for spouses generally.

Lecture 5

Selecting identifications This time I'm going to begin a consideration of a story which will take a bunch of time. I'm not sure how long, but maybe several lectures. The fragment comes from the same group therapy sessions that we've been pulling stuff out of. It's told by the girl, whom we call Louise, to the only other person present at the time she's telling it, Ken. Louise :

Ken : Louise : Ken : Ken : Louise :

One night- ( 1 . 0) I was with this guy that I liked a real lot. An' uh (3 . 0) we had come back from the show, we had gone to the ( 1 . 0) Ash Grove for awhile, 'n we were gonna park. An' I can't stand a car. 'n he II has a small car. Mm hm, So we walked to the back, an' we just wen' into the back house an' we stayed there half the night. ( 1 .0) We didn't go to bed to­ t' each other, but- it was so comfortable an' so I I nice. Mm hm, Mh Y'know? There's everything perfect.

This particular lecture will be devoted to developing an apparatus that sets up a consideration of the reference in this story to "this guy that I liked a real lot. " The analysis will be very general. I deliver it here because it's appropriate here, but it holds for identifications in stories and in conversations very generally. I'm going to present a typology for identifications and some rules for use of the typology, and then offer varieties of evidence for the operation of that small mechanism. What I want to be getting to with regard to the story is to be able eventually to focus on aspects of the way that "this guy that I liked a real lot" is an identification that's 'topically selected. ' But right now we're not going to talk at all about topical selection of identities; we may eventually be placed in a position to be able to do that. I'm going to describe one non-exclusive procedure for selecting identities. That procedure has two components plus the rules. The two components ways of classifying persons - I'll just give very non-descriptive names to. I'll call a first type Type 1 and the second Type 2 . And I'll propose that a rule of their use is that you use Type 1 if you can. One way of differentiating identifications made of persons in conversation is by reference to whether the speaker intends the recipient(s), or differentially among the recipients, that they use the presented identification to find from that identification that they know the person being referred to. And we intend, by Type 1 , to be naming such a type identification. That is to say, a 444

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Type 1 identification is one that the speaker produces with the intention of having the recipient use it to find some person that the recipient already knows. And a Type 2 identification is one that a speaker uses to indicate to the recipient that he should not employ it to attempt to find who, that he knows, is being referred to. In recipient terms, given a Type 1 identification it's the recipient's business to try to find from it who, that he knows, is being referred to. And given a Type 2 , it's his business to recognize that he's not to try to find from it who he knows that is being referred to. Now, there are some obvious members of either group. So, for Type 1 , obvious instances are things like first names: Jim, Joe, Harry, etc. and obvious instances of Type 2 are things like "a guy," "someone, " etc. Q : You can say that the Type 1 is specific and the Type 2 is general. HS : Why is that so? "Someone told me" refers to some one person. What makes it general? Q : It's not telling you which one, so it's general. It's indefinite. HS : How about "a guy. " Is that indefinite? Q : Yeah because there's a lot of different types of guys. There's only one Jim. HS : Oh is that so? There's only one Jim? Q : Talking about Jim it's understood as being one that's known by the recipient. Our problem is to find out how people interpret identifications. It's obviously not so that there's only one Jim. It's obviously not even so that for any one person they only know one Jim. The specificity of names does not, can not conceivably, tum on the uniqueness of the assignment of a name to a person. 'Someone' can be just as particular a person as 'Jim. ' Indeed, the formulation I first gave, 'recognize the person whom you know' is not quite correct and I would amplify it to 'recognize the person that the speaker knows you know. ' So that there can be Jims who you know, who you don't recognize when they say "Jim" because you figure they don't know him, or they don't know that you know him. So there can be a person, Jim, who you know and who they know, and that's not the person you recognize, but you recognize the person who you know that they know you know. The issue, however, is not to take the classification and see that it says that "this guy" is such a person as I suppose you don't know or have no reason to suppose you know, but to see such things as: Is there a rule which says which one to use? The rule is kind of important. And also, we want to see what else this thing will do besides assign a classification to types of terms. Last time I said that one - if not the most - general maxim for talk production in conversation is 'speakers should design their talk for recipients. ' In a way, we're dealing here with another specification of that general maxim; here by reference to identities of persons. That speakers do design identifica­ tions by reference to recipients is available from materials particularly used in that fashion. I'm talking about the combinations of pronouns and relational

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terms; things like "my mother, " "your brother, " and things like that. Where plainly for those, a speaker who uses one of them should use it by reference to himself and the recipient such that, e.g. , one shouldn't use "my mother" to a recipient for whom that person referred to is also the mother - one should use, instead, "our mother. " It would then seem as though that combination - pronouns and relational terms - constitutes the body in terms of which an orientation to recipients by speakers is done. That turns out not to be so for these, taken as a combinable group by themselves. Which is to say, one shouldn't use a term like "my brother, " though it's true that the person being referred to is both my brother and not your brother, if other things are so. One obvious instance would be, suppose he's my brother but he's also your husband. Then one is in a position where referring to "my brother" is kind of a special activity. Or, say, she's my mother but she's also your friend. Is the issue then that one chooses between, e.g . , "my brother" and "your husband" or between "my mother" and "your friend" in such a circumstance? That's not the way it's done, since what alternates with, e.g. , "my brother" or "my mother" is not just another term from the same corpus of pronouns and relational terms, but other terms altogether. So if, e.g. , the person you might refer to with "my brother" is a friend of the recipient's, then the issue isn't should I use "my brother" or "your friend," but what I should probably use is his name. At least a consequence of that is that this is not a self-contained group to be used for selecting identifications relative to indicating who, that we know, is being referred to, but at least this list plus, say, names, are obviously selected-among together. That is to say, it's not sufficient to analyze the combinations the pronouns and relational terms yield, in order to find how identifications which could have those things as their instances are selected. One needs to at least add to the list such things as names. What I've then been suggesting is something like this: If I wanted to make a case for ' recipient design' of identification-selection, then there's an obvious body of materials in terms of which a case might be made, i.e. , the combination of pronouns and relational terms. Now, while it remains so that pronouns and relational terms are used to do that job, focussing on them will not yield how that job is done. They are not a self-contained group selected from amongst each other to find which terms to use, but their selection involves some of them in alternation to other things, like names - and yet other things as well. Now, the way I'm going to proceed is first to look at what I'll call 'modified identifications, ' instances of which are things like: Lottie :

And Jan, uh this friend of mine, uh well she- I let her stay at the house this weekend.

Another one: Roger :

New Year's we: : split up the dues so we each hadda buck fifty tuh buy booze with for the New Year's party?

Lecture 5 AI : Roger :

447

Mm hm, So we wen' around the room they were takin' orders. So Jack s­ uh one guy bought a dollar fifty worth of glue.

So we've got "And Jan, uh this friend of mine . . . " and "So Jack s- uh one guy . . . ' ' What we plainly have here is a modification, specifically a correction, of one identification by another. "Jan" is said and then replaced by "this friend of mine" and "Jack" is said and then replaced by "one guy. " 1 Now, a question is in the first instance, why replace the names by the second identifications - 'replace' being what I'm emphasizing. I ask that by virtue of a differentiation between bases for correcting identifications and bases for doing, e.g. , cumulations of identifications. That is to say, there are familiar, obvious bases for correcting names. One is where you mis-name the person, e.g. , "And Jan- uh Mary . . . " where there's a person you're attempting to identify and what you've done is to use the wrong name. And you can correct an identification where what you're intending to bring off is that you referred to the wrong person, e.g . , "And Jan- no, not Jan, I mean the other girl, what's her name, uh, Mary . " I bring up that kind of correction because it's an obvious place where one is replacing one identifi­ cation with another. That's relevant because there's an altogether different thing which is perfectly legitimate, which is to cumulate identities. One can refer to a same person as "Jan, this friend of mine" where, then, one has two identities. And obviously you can have a large list of identities: " My friend Frank, a computer programmer who recently moved here from Kansas because he got a new job, he and his wife are coming over, they're leaving the kids home . . . " all those constituting an accumulation of identities for a single person. So identities plainly can be cumulated. Since they can be cumulated, if some two identities are correct for the person, then why replace one with the other? One can plainly see a basis for replacing one with another if one of them is wrong. We want to know why, when several identities are used which can all be correct, are they not done as a cumulation but as a replacement? That replacement is done suggests that some identities, both of which are correct, can stand in an alternation relationship to each other. The question is, how do they alternate with each other? If we look at those that are used in an alternating relationship, they map onto the types we proposedly started with, i.e. , "Jan" is an instance of a Type 1 and "this friend of mine, " on its own, .

.

1 Sacks ' version of the talk in the second instance is simplified, and the phenomenon is a bit more complex. The transcript goes : Roger :

jim :

A! :

Roger :

So we wen' around the room they were takin' orders. So Jack- k- this uh one guy bought uh dollar fifty worth a· Ripple, next guy bough (hh) t a dollar fifty worth a· glue hheh heh heh II heh heh hehheh heh heh! hhhmhhh heh " Planning on gettin' gassed . huh Jack ! "

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is an instance of a Type 2 . And if what's proposed about them is that one says 'try to recognize' and the other says 'don't try to recognize, ' then we have a basis for the fact that one is corrected to the other. Now, that they're ordered starting with a Type 1 and replacing it into a Type 2 is also consistent with the proposal which says 'try to use the Type 1 if you can,' i.e. , one would start with a Type 1 . Furthermore - forgetting about names or identifications - with respect to the issue of 'orientation to a recipient, ' the occurrence of a correction operation in speech is rather direct evidence for an orientation to recipients. And the positioning of the correction is also material on that issue, in the sense that to put the correction directly on what's to be corrected as compared to putting it anywhere else, involves some sort of very close monitoring of one's talk by reference to how recipients will deal with it. Having said something, and with an idea of what it is that a recipient will do with the thing you said, then it can be in point to put the correction right then and there, so as to try to have them relieved of a job that they might be at this point engaged in, i.e. , to take "Jan" and try to figure out who, that you know that I know, are you trying to tell me to recognize with that name. The replacement, then, says "Don't try to do that, I made a mistake, it's not someone whom I suppose you know . " And there are materials relevant to that indeed Type 1 s and Type 2s are heard in terms of the work they impose on recipients, differentially. Here is a characteristic fragment, again from the group therapy sessions. Two of the fellows, Al and Ken, are having a sort of mock fight. At one point Al says ' 'I'll give you til three to move" and starts counting, "One, two, ' ' and we get: Ken :

hheh heh heh hhh Alri(hh)ght.Alright D(h)addy, hh hh hh hh hhhh! (3 . 0) whhhh Ken : ( 1 .0) Ken : Ohhh (0. 7) Dan : Da-( 1 . 0) hh Huh? Ken : Dan : Daddy, Ken : Yeh at'sa new word t'day. ( 1 . 0) Ken : --Joelle's Mommy, (0. 6) He en be Daddy d'day, Roger : -- Who's Joelle. (0. 8) Ken : -- Th'girl th't lives nex'door. Sh's a li'l brat. She's about, fourteen fiften years old. Roger : Girl'oo lives nex'door? hehh (0.6) Haven'even med'er. (2 . 0)

Lecture 5

449

Ken :

Butchu don'needa meed'er. She's homey. (0.6) Show y'a picsher of 'er. AI : Oh hey! Eez gotta picture of 'er I'm II (sure we'll) ( ). Roger : - Oh you mean nex' II door t'yer house. Ken : hhh! Ken : Yeah. Roger : - oh I thoughtchu men'nex'door tuh he(hh)re hheh (2 . 5 )

Roger :

There's a vacant lot on that side 'n another head sh(h)rinker joint ne(h)x' door.

I want to focus on ' 'Joelle's Mommy," "Who's Joelle," "The girl that lives next door, " etc. What happens is, "Joelle" having been used, Roger engages in an attempt to try to figure out who it is that Ken knows that he knows, that is being referred to. The 'Who is X?' is something specifically done when a Type 1 has been used. Now, in a fashion, one could perfectly well say "Who is X?" for the other type of identification, e.g. , "Who is 'this guy'?" And there are some particular circumstances under which such a thing is done. Here is an instance of that sort of thing, where one of them, Jessie, is a visitor to California and the other, Goldie, is an old acquaintance living in more-or-less west Los Angeles. The old acquaintance asks if the visitor is planning to come into the city. The visitor is saying 'yes,' and the way she says it is: Jessie : Goldie : Jessie :

Yes. I will. I, I, uh as a matter of fact uh this friend of mine uhm uh who's lived out here all these years. She lives in uh the Valley? Sherman Oaks? Yeah? Uh she's gonna pick me up Thursday morning.

After a brief interlude: Goldie :

Uh uh what is your friend's name. 'Cause my son lives Sherman Oaks.

m

The name of "this friend of mine" was not given by virtue of it not being supposed that the friend would be known, in part by virtue of her living so far away. However, the name of the place has now been used to establish a possible warrant for her knowing that person, that then being a basis for asking 'Who is the friend, maybe I do know, though you would have every reason to suppose I don't, and I offer you a reason for my possibly knowing it. ' So there are some rather special circumstances under which, in producing a Type 2 identification, one can give off materials that allow the other to ask for a 'Who is X?' They may then include information about why, though you wouldn't know it, they have reason to believe that they might know the person.

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Now if a Type 1 has been used, like "Joelle, " and the question is "Who's Joelle?," i.e. , who that I know that has that name are you referring to with that name?, then the answer to such a question should be materials which I could better use than the name to find who that one is. And such possible materials come up: "The girl that lives next door. " What happens is that "next door" doesn't solve that problem. He engages in a consideration of who might live next door and finds that he doesn't know such a person, i.e. , "I haven't even met her. " He thereafter discovers that "next door" was meant to do a different job, i.e. , in that Ken was referring to 'next door to my house, ' it was such a thing as would say 'you don't know her. ' Having found that it's next door to Ken's house, Roger finds out that he's been misled by the use of "Joelle, ' ' and also by "the girl that lives next door" which wasn't intended to assist him in finding the person that he knows, but to indicate that he doesn't know the person. So that deals in part with the issue of the way in which the use of a name can be heard, and the kinds of operations that indeed a recipient will engage in, and also the way in which a recipient will treat possible materials he's given in aid of that search, to find who it is that he knows. Now this doesn't yet really directly go to the issue of the preference for Type ls over Type 2s, though it could, if such a thing could be established, bear on it. And kinds of materials directly relevant to the issue of the preference for Type ls can be gotten. jay : George : Jay : George :

Where' dju get the filing box from. From uh: : that fellow who usetuh sit in back of you, who, who got fired. Jordan? Jordan, yeah.

Another fragment: Marge : Marge : Bea : Marge : Bea :

Uh she asked me to stop by, she bought a chest of drawers from uhm (4.0) what's that gal's name? Just went back to Michigan? (2 . 0) Helen uhm Oh I know who you mean. ( 1 .0) Brady- Brady. Yeah. Helen Brady. Mm hm

Another: Rose : Bea : Rose : Bea : Rose :

Uh because uhm I think uhm what's her name? uhm Oh That's on in the morning? Sue? Sue Brown, I- she usually stays until eleven.

Lecture 5

45 1

What's happening in these is, speaker doesn't have the name. Not having the name, what speaker does is to ask recipient to give them the name. Now if Type 1 and Type 2 were not preferredly organized such that Type 1 is preferred over Type 2 , then if speaker didn't have the name, speaker could used some kind of identification. The question is, why do the speakers, if they don't have the name, attempt to get the name from the recipient? One thing that's evidenced, anyway, is that speaker in these cases is oriented to whether the recipient knows the person. Being oriented to whether recipient knows the person, and knowing that recipient knows the person, they can show that without having the name, by getting recipient to give them the name. Now, if the issue were only 'use Type 1 if you can,' by reference to 'if you have the name then use it, ' then if you didn't have it you'd use some other identification. But the preference for a Type 1 operates to get speaker to try to find the name if he figures that recipient knows the person - even if that involves getting the name from recipient. Such materials, then, bear directly on that there is a preference for Type 1 over Type 2 . It also can happen that neither patty can remember the person's name. Speaker can produce an identification intending to show 'you know who it is, I don't remember the name, do you have the name?' and recipient can say 'I know who you're talking about but I don't remember the name either, ' and give an identification which indicates that they recognize the person without the name. An instance of that: No some people-some people wish fer things that are beyond their reach. Now uhh with that father and- you know that family thing that- that we had here with that dod, that I went --+ to, that I didn't like? Roger : Huh? Ken : Uh that- On-on Monday nights I used to come II here Roger : You're talking about my parents, son. No! That that jerk that was tee- he was supposed to be the Ken : doctor.

Ken :

(2 . 0) Ken : You know? uhm the I I ( Roger : --+ Y-the quack! hhehhh Ken : Yeah. Well I was sitting in here and he kept . . .

Where Roger than produces an identification, "the quack, ' ' which says 'I know the clod you're referring to. ' The matter is a little bit stronger yet, since the preference for Type 1 s can operate where a speaker doesn't figure that recipient knows who's being referred to, but knows something that involves it in being an 'almost,' i.e. , that you know someone in some close relationship to that one being referred to. The kinds of materials I'm talking about here involve things like:

452 Bea : Marge : Bea : Marge : Bea :

Part VII

I'm reading one of uh Harold Sherman's books. Mm hm I think we read one, one time, about life after death or something. Mm hm And uh this is how to make uh ESP work for you.

The idea here is, a book is being referred to. The book is not taken to be known by the recipient. It could be referred to as ' 'I'm reading a book you've never read. ' ' Instead what's done is to find some way of referring to the book - here, via the author - which makes it an 'almost known' thing: You know the author of books of which this is one book. Where here we can see a rather elaborately found way to make this an 'almost Type 1 ' identification. Another instance of that sort of thing is from materials in which people went into houses and watched the children of the house for very extended periods, and wrote down, as much as they could, everything that happened. Here, 'she' is this little child that's being observed. She turned and went into the kitchen and asked her mother very definitely, " Mom, didn't they almost- Who is she?" Her mother said, "That's Rita. Do you remember the other day when you went to the party and met Una? Well that's Una's mother. " Now here, a person unknown is being asked about. The identification that's given is one which says 'You don't know her, but I can find someone that you know, that she is related to. ' And that's then the way it's done, to provide that this is an 'almost Type 1 ,' as compared to simply a Type 2 , "A friend of mine. ' ' The business of all this for our purposes here is to set up that a thing involved in "this guy" is that its use says 'the person who I'm referring to is someone whom I identify in such a way as to indicate that I have no reason to think that you know him. ' Now this leaves open the issue of, if one is going to pick a Type 2 identification, what are the constraints in choosing among possible such identifications? What I want to be getting to eventually is that if you're going to give a Type 2 , then there are lots of Type 2s you could give; how do choose among them? We've said at least that quite different things can be done with Type 1 s and Type 2s. Now one thing is that if what you're doing with a Type 1 is identifying the person with a name, then for Type 2s you're freed from that in some way, and you can mobilize the identification for other purposes. So you don't have simply that all it says is 'it's someone you don't know,' but you could have things like, for "this guy," "this guy that I liked a real lot, " which is another thing, but you could also have "this older guy that I liked a real lot" or varieties of things like that. We're in a position, then, to try to focus on how the particular thing that's used for this particular Type 2 got selected, and we'll go on to that next time.

Lecture 6

A 'defensively designed' story Louise :

Ken : Louise : Ken : Ken : Louise :

One night- ( 1 . 0) I was with this guy that I liked a real lot. An' uh (3 .0) we had come back from the show, we had gone to the ( 1 . 0) Ash Grove for a while, 'n we were gonna park. An' I can't stand a car. 'n he II has a small car. Mm hm, So we walked to the back, an' we just wen' into the back house an' we stayed there half the night. ( 1 .0) We didn't go to bed to­ t' each other, but- it was so comfortable an' so II nice. Mm hm, Mh Y'know? There's everything perfect.

We've so far arrived at that "this guy," as an identification, is rectptent designed in at least the sense that it proceeds from a determination - or a

claim, anyway - that the person being referred to is supposedly not known by recipient, and it instructs recipient to not try to find who, that speaker knows that recipient knows, is being referred to. Under that circumstance, that speaker is going to pick a Type 2 identification, then there are other possible Type 2 identifications that can be picked, and a question is how do they go about picking some Type 2 identification - or some set of Type 2 identifications, since they can perfectly well cumulate them. What we at least have as features of "this guy that I liked a real lot" is that it proposes about the person identified that it's male, and that there was an affectional relationship from speaker's side, with respect to that male. Those aspects of the identification have an altogether apparent relationship to an obvious business of the story - reporting on a date, and setting up what I shall claim is a decidedly focussed characterization of the occurrence of sex on the date. A thing I'll want to propose is that the story is rather elaborately organized, and that in a very detailed way its elaborate organization is recipient designed, in a fashion we've not yet focussed on. The recipient design seems roughly to be involved in bringing off something like the following point, under certain constraints. The point being that a particular variant place for sex was used, the constraints being that the story is being told to a partial colleague; one who is a teenager and unmarried like her, and in that sense a colleague, partial in the sense of being male not female. And by virtue of the maleness of him - and some other facts - the story is defensively designed. By that I mean something like this: By virtue of that he is male, a way that he has, that she can know of, of reading the story that she tells, is in terms of it possibly telling 453

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him the terms of her availability; a thing he could be interested in on his own, or, insofar as he has male acquaintances, then the terms of her availability can be used by him to advertise her. In due course I'm going to be arguing that she tells the story in such a fashion as to rather sharply locate what she will do and with whom, given that she's telling it to one for whom such a story told by an eligible female is readable, and known to be readable, to find out just such a matter. In that regard then - though I'm not going to rely all that much on it, but for now just introductorily - an obvious point is the use of ' ' . . . that I liked a real lot" in her characterization of the guy she was with. She didn't have to use it. It's not, for example, a feature of the course of events on this particular evening, nor is it for that matter, even a current characterization of the person. And in that regard there is kind of a marked difference between 'like' and 'liked. ' If she'd said "One night I was with this guy that I like a real lot," she might be saying 'you can't use this to see whether it will happen with you or any friends of yours whom you might arrange for me, because I'm currently occupied. ' Insofar as she's not reporting 'like' but 'liked, ' the question is, well why put in 'liked' since the person who is being referred to is no longer in the picture? And the point of its presence may have to do with the way in which it locates a condition for her doing what she did, where, in proposing what it is that she was willing to do, it can be heard as saying 'that which I was willing to do on that occasion is not something that one can suppose I would do on any occasion, ' such a matter having a specific relevance if she's talking to someone who could read what she did for its advertising purposes - to himself or to someone whom he might arrange such an occasion or such a relationship for. Now, I want to deal with some of the ways that their colleagial relationship is used for putting together the story, and for focussing its business. But first let me just note one sort of organization the story has, that seems to be elaborate and detailed, and that is, its tense organization. Consider one obvious alternative to the tense organization the story has; that being that insofar as the whole thing takes place in a past, then it could be given simply a past sequential narrative organization, a stringing together of "then"s: We went to the show, then we did this, then we did that, then the following, then . . . etc. It's a perfectly natural, if not canonical, form to stories. This story doesn't have that form. The form it has involves the arrangement of its pasts in such a fashion as to have, in the middle of it, a kind of present, i.e. , its pasts lead up to a present from which a future is looked towards - where the future is itself a past for the story's purposes. So we have "One night I was with this guy that I liked a real lot. " Then we start to move toward a present: "We had come back from the show, we had gone to the Ash Grove for a while; " we're now somewhere in a present. "And we were gonna park. " At that point we're in a present looking forward to something - that something has of course already happened when the story is being told. It stops at that present, looking forward to a first future, rejecting that future and taking up another, i.e. , not to "park" but to go to the "back house. " And the story then preceeds

Lecture 6

455

into a continuation of its past tense format. So in a way, a present is designedly isolated. By 'designedly' I mean to point up this fine organization in which a range of tenses are manipulated such that the pasts before that present are set up to arrive at that as a present, and that present is used, then, as a platform for projecting futures. Leaving the tense organization aside for the moment, and going back to the issue of the colleagiality of the characterization, I want to notice that the story positions the occurrence of sex in it, in a fairly elaborate way. What I mean by that is that there is a characterization of a variety of events, temporally occurrant in the evening. The sex in it is positioned among those as, after some events and before others, i.e. , it's bounded fore and aft. So it's announced that "we had come back . . . , " what we had done before that, that we did whatever we did after all those things, and that it lasted ' 'half the night. " What's the point of that positioning? For a colleague, i.e. , another unmarried teenager, the positioning asserted is the normal positioning of sex for a date. That is to say, one could plainly produce a story in which what one was pointing up was the unusual positioning of the sex on the date, e.g . , "We were going to go to the Ash Grove, but we decided not to, and right then and there we went off to park. " Note that the positioning is not said to be normal or abnormal. What's done is to employ the colleague's knowledge of normal positioning to indicate that that was normal. Which is then to say, in effect, 'I'm not telling you the story by virtue of that the positioning of sex in it was abnormal, don't look to its positioning to find what I'm telling you to be the story. ' Such a story as, ' 'One night I went out with a guy who I liked a lot and we went to the movies and after the movie we parked and eventually he went home" is no story for such as they. Though it perfectly well might be a story if she was 1 2 years old, or if she was considerably older than she is, in which case it might be 'doing something like unmarried teenagers. ' After all, for a married couple or unmarried adults or varieties of other combinations, this same positioning would be not be specifically 'normal. ' The sex only has its normal positioning vis-a-vis that they are unmarried teenagers. So we have an elaborateness of the tense organization and an elaborateness of the positioning of sex. And of course the two needn't combine in the way they do, since we could have the sex positioned via a narrative course-of-the­ date organization, and not one that focusses on the 'just before the sex' as an arrived-at present. But here we have an interesting tense organization and an uninteresting positioning, where at least a possible business of using the positioning when it's uninteresting, can be to isolate what it is that is interesting that's present. Again, there could be a variety of things interesting and present. It could be that the sex took place in a variant place and also at a variant time, and that's readily enough doable: "Instead of going to the Ash Grove we went to a motel, ' ' which would do both positioning and place variance. Let's move on to the issue of place. I want to suggest that the story's tense organization is built so as to allow for the assertion of a place for sex that

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wasn't used. Plainly, the place that was used could simply be asserted: "We went to the Ash Grove and then we went to the back house. " But what she does is to arrive at a present, the present being treated in the story as a decision point in terms of which alternatives are assessed, and one alternative is rejected, another accepted. I raise the question, why put in a rejected alternative? I would suggest that for people like them, had that second alternative not been involved, then one wouldn't have presented a rejection of one and an acceptance of the other. Now, that is to say something like this: If an event is alternative to another, then it's not necessarily the case that the other is alternative to it. While one may report one as done 'in alternative' to the other, if the other was done one wouldn't report it as done 'in alternative to something. ' That is, one could simply say "we parked" and not, e.g . , "we rejected going to the back house, and parked, " though one could present a rather different story, e.g. , "He said we should go up to his apartment and I said no, so we parked. ' ' But there are some events which can, under some circumstances, be presented as 'alterna­ tives to something else, ' where that something else, if it happens, is not presented as an alternative to some other. So parking is presented as 'an alternative' where parking is rejected, and going to the back house is presented as 'an alternative' where it's accepted. At least one aspect of the defensive design of the story, then, is that she would be telling an altogether different story if she simply said "We went to the back house" without noting "parking" as an alternative. What that involves is that as there is a normal positioning whose variance can be used to assess the terms of availability of the person telling the story, so there is a normal place, whose use or non-use can also be employed in the same fashion. Knowing that there is a normal place, at least for one's recipient and their supposition of colleagiality with you, if you ignore reference to that normal place then youy're making a rather different claim, i.e. , that something else is normal for you. So that if what she were telling were that for her the normal place is her back house, then she would be isolating herself as someone having different conditions of availability than if she indicates that parking is the normal place. Again, then, another aspect of the story's defensive design is that she indicates that she knows what, for them, is the normal place, which she can use to specifically locate what happened here as 'distinctly unusual. ' And the tense organization she uses allows that to have been present in her mind on the occasion she's now telling about. That is to say, she can use a decisional organization to invoke the normal priorities, in which, for unmarried teenagers, parking is 'preferred. ' I don't mean that it's favorite, but there's some way it's preferred over the back house, if at least only in moral terms. That is to say, she brings off that she prefers the back house, but there is a more abstract sense of 'prefer' which involves her in invoking the parking ­ that which is 'preferred' in the more abstract sense - as a first alternative. And she can do that via the decision situation which she gets to via her tense organization.

Lecture 6

457

Now, having done this variant event - going to the back house - she proceeds to temporally bound it - half the night as compared to staying there all night. And also she proceeds to indicate that they didn't "go to bed" with each other. Presumably what she didn 't do is something that she figures she needs to say, by virtue of the question now arising: "Okay, if she would do that, what else would she do?" So that in proposing that she did something that she knows is unusual - and she knows it's unusual by virtue of her commitment to the normal preferences - she then engages in bounding it as to what she didn't do. And again, were she telling her girlfriend, or were one guy telling another guy, then they might perfectly well choose to leave what they 'didn't do' allusive. So what we have are a series of technical resources mobilized to isolate a particular variant to a series of known normal structures - i.e. , that we had some sort of sex at an abnormal place - in the context of which elaborate materials are also used to delimit what it is that happened. All of which can be read by the male and thereby only partially colleagial recipient as a relatively sharp specification of what sorts of terms she has. Where issues as to her terms are made relevant by her wanting to say that she did a particular variant thing. By virtue, that is, of her having done 'going to the back house' for the sex, a whole range of other materials are stuck in: that she liked the guy a real lot, that they had gone to the Ash Grove before, that it just happens that she doesn't like cars and he had a small car, that they stayed in the back house half the night, and that they didn't go to bed with each other. So we can see a sense in which she's telling, from her point of view, a rather dangerous story. And in that she's telling a rather dangerous story, its size has to do with the warding off of inferences that could be made from the specific event that she intends to tell of. One can, I hope kind of readily, see how a specification of a range of venturesome acts, sexual and non-sexual, could have a similar way of being constructed, in which, to bring off a particular point, a whole range of resources are employed to indicate 'what I'm not saying . ' And those resources are employed in distinctly technical ways; i.e. , like this rather elaborated tense organization which isolates a present in terms of which the alternatives are projected, so as to get those alternatives into the story. And one can see that, as complicated as it rums out to be to tell this story to even a colleague, what a job is involved if one is trying to tell it to someone who isn't. She couldn't, then, use the positioning, place, etc . , the sense of "half the night," in order to bring off precisely what she's bringing off and defending against.

Lecture 7

The 'motive power' of a story; 'Ex-relationals' Before I get into the discussion let me just note that the Spring 1 970 lectures are also on storytelling, and in those lectures are a variety of technical materials which are much relevant to understanding how stories work. I figure I did them then as well as I would do them now, and I'm not going to repeat them. You should, if you are at all interested in how stories work, read them. A thing I want to address now concerns the motive power of stories. By that I mean, assuming that they get told in the first place, what keeps them alive; what keeps them being retold? I will address that question rather more specifically when I deliver a couple of lectures on jokes. This time I'll begin by making a bunch of points about aspects of the telling of a story, which are not available from the story itself though they're more or less pro­ foundly related to the story that's told. Then I'll see what can be done with them. The guy who tells the story, Tony, is around 40, and he works in a nondescript job at an insurance company. He's telling the story to a younger co-employee of his, Jay, who is quitting as of tomorrow and going back to school. This is a possible last conversation for them before Jay's going back to school. That he is going to quit and that he is going back to school is something that was known as between these two, and the conversation begins with that matter. They then go on to talk about a bunch of things having nothing to do with quitting, and eventually get into the following sort of talk: They are both of Italian extraction and they get into a discussion about being in Italy - Jay was there on a long trip, and Tony was there during his time in the navy during the Korean War. They talk about how they came to be in the military, and Tony says how he went into the navy because he was insecure and didn't know what to do with himself. He goes on to say, Tony : Tony :

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But I'm t'ankful anyway. I came back ali:ve, (4. 0) I'm thankful fer some things, (4.0) I could be a lot worse off. ( 10 .0) T'day is money. -- Uh- people don't- pee- people respectchu for how much money yuh have. (4. 0) They don't care how yih get it. (2 .0) We're talkin'- When I say 'people' I'm speakin' in generalities. (3 .0) They don't care how you get it. -- Jus' so long ez yuh have it. (2 . 0) See if they see you gotta fifty thousan' dollar ho:me? or a hunnuh thousan' dollar home? They don't care how

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Tony : Jay : Jay : Tony : Jay : Tony : Tony : Jay : Tony :

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yuh � it. (2 . 0) What is it Brentwood? Belaire, -- or Pacific Palisa:des or -- or what have you. Or Laurel Canyon? (3 . 0) They don't care how you get it. (8.0) Bud ! care how I ged it. (7 .0) Hmmh. (3 ,0) Well, (2 . 0) I think it's, ( 1 .0) I think it's useless. for a man tuh spen' iz life, making money, if he's not doing what 'e wants tuh do, Oh I agree with you. Wholeheartedly. I mean 'e c'n make all the money he wanz but what good is it if he's not really doing what' e wants tuh do. Yeh. (5 .0) Very true. (2 . 0) You c'n become president a' the company. (3 . 0) Buh what if yer not doing really whatche wanna do. -- Whad if­ whad if- whad if uh: : y'know. Whad if yer so bored. I met a guy in Jersey.

And the story is produced. Now let's look at the story. It involves the report of a conversation that Tony had with another guy some seemingly long time ago when Tony was younger, and prospectful relative to the circumstances of the other guy. That is to say, at that time he was a 'manager trainee' and the other fellow was an insurance salesman, and an insurance salesman in part by virtue of failed prospects he had once had. And he's telling Tony of the failed prospects that he had, and where he is now by virtue of those failed prospects. Tony :

Jay : Tony :

I met a guy in Jersey (3 .0) I wz working inna department store in New Jersey -- for a short while. Right- In Newark New Jersey. Right on Broad Street. -- Big department store. (4.0) And uh. I was a trainee there. A manager trainee. -- Butche hadda learn the business. Y'unduhs- They putchu in sto:ck . -work. Yihknow, the k- behind the counter I mean uh- to learn the business. Mm hm, (2 .0) And this- this guy wz selling us, insurance. -- He was, he- he wen' aroun' tuh all the employees sellin' insurance. En 'e wz a nice lookin' guy. Jewish fella, -- about, oh I guess he wz about -- oh about, thirdy fi:ve, -- sum'n like dat. Said he wentuh acting school with Kirk Douglas. -- Eh' I believe 'im. -- So I sez "What happena you. " -- Kirk Douglas is Jewish too. Bud �ay. Dat's immaterial. -- So I sez "What happena -­

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you" I sez uh "How come you didn' make it. " He siz "I got ma:rried I gotta coupla kids" -- he sz "I hadda struggle" -- he sz the- -- He sz "The interest was there" he sez "but- -- then the kid came along, I bought a nice home out here in, in Jersey" he sz "I gave it up. " He sez "Kirk, stuck it out. " -- I seh "Well that's the way it goes . " -- He wz, selling insurance. (3 . 0) ((clears throat)) Maybe he wasn't �py but he's doin it, -- A !Qtta people by­ sometimes by circumstances. -- Circumstances prevail where you haf to, do something -- not exacly to your liking. (4.0) I know it'd be a real catastrophe if all the people in the worl' did that. I unnuhstan' that. -- Somebody's gotta do it,

It's of some interest to consider the way Tony positions himself in the story. It isn't just that it happened some time ago, " Once I met a guy in Jersey, he was selling insurance and that occasioned the conversation, and he told me . . . , " but Tony locates a sort of point in his life at which this occurred. That is to say, we want to account for why Tony puts in the particular job that he happened to have at that time, since what he's doing in some fashion is telling about a guy he met. He could tell about the guy he met in a way that could have all this interaction occur without mentioning that he was a "manager-trainee. " Except that in saying that he was a manager-trainee he's locating a time when he had prospects. Now the point in Tony's life that this occurred, in the way it relates to the insurance salesman, has a kind of distinct interest to it, and that is in the way in which the telling here relates Tony and Jay. Tony's characterization of his situation at the department store does a positioning of him, in his own life and relative to the insurance salesman, which makes the story he was told something that can have a possibly nice relationship to the story he now tells. The story Tony was told, was told when he had prospects, and is the story of someone who at an earlier time had prospects that, at the time of the telling had failed. Tony is now telling the story at a time of his life when his prospects are no longer there, and he's telling it to someone at a time in their life when they specifically have prospects. These are not merely abstract prospects that anyone at any point in their life might or might not have, but he is described in this story as someone who had prospects, and the insurance salesman is described as someone who no longer had prospects. And the situation of the current telling is one in which differential prospects are specifically available to both Tony and Jay, as they were originally available to both Tony and the insurance salesman. Let's give some consideration now to the question, why did the insurance man tell Tony the story? The insurance man could just try to sell him insurance, and could go about selling insurance in various ways. I want to suggest that the selling of the insurance and the telling of the story are rather nicely related to each other, and that the selling of the insurance to someone

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who is a manager-trainee and the telling of the story are nicely related. That is to say, what perhaps in the first instance looks like merely a report of failed prospects, can be something we can see to be well used by the insurance man. As compared to selling varieties of other things, selling insurance involves a focus on current circumstances relative to future ones. And plainly it is a thing sold by reference to possibilities not turning out quite as you had hoped, but also turning on that you have possibilities for which you have hopes. Where there is a difference between selling someone, e.g . , burial insurance, which simply involves that you're going to die and people are going to have to bury you so here's a way of taking care of that, as compared to catching someone at a point in their lives when, not only do they have prospects, but that they have prospects is a working feature of their lives. So that you can appeal to their hopes and possibly their fears in order to get them to buy insurance commensurate with not simply their current circumstances but their notion of their future prospects. So, future prospects are something that insurance men are very much attuned to, and they're also very much attuned to the fears incumbent on the possibility that future prospects will not pan out. And of course they could perfectly well have materials in terms of which they talk about others' future prospects panning out or not. But there may be some more or less special virtues to your telling that about yourself. That transforms it from merely a sales pitch to something which perhaps isn't even seen as a sales pitch but is nonetheless appreciatable for its relevance to the recipient. The point then being that for the insurance man, the tale of his failed prospects can have virtues in selling insurance, in a way in which that wouldn't be the right sort of thing to tell if you were, e.g. , selling a refrigerator or a car or other things. It's not, then, simply that a personal story, or a personal story about failed prospects is apt for a sales pitch, but that a personal story about failed prospects can be apt for the sales pitch of the insurance man. Particularly where he's talking to someone who is now a person with prospects, as compared to someone with failed prospects or someone who conceives of himself as specifically a success. If the insurance man tells of his own failed prospects to someone who conceives of himself as a success, then he might be appealing for charity or whatever, but he isn't alluding to a way in which life can tum out to be not what you hoped, which plainly is one basis for the recipient of that kind of story considering insurance seriously. Which is then to say that this is a rather ideal story for an insurance man to tell, as part of the insurance sale, to someone who conceives himself specifically as a 'manager-trainee. ' There is, then, a kind of real aptness of the story told on the occasion on which it was originally told, as between the people who were involved in the telling and receiving of it. Let me just mention some things about the failed- prospects phenomenon. Kirk Douglas is a very relevant object for that, in two related ways. The one obvious way is that if he went to acting school with Kirk Douglas, Kirk Douglas now being somebody plainly a success, then the fact that Kirk Douglas is a success and he isn't, makes for that he did, indeed, fail. But also,

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that he went to acting school with Kirk Douglas who is now a success, also turns that he is a failure into something different than merely being a failure; it's a failure given that one had prospects. Where the question of the reality of prospects is relatively complex, in the sense of how you're to be in a position to have others believe that whatever your fantasies were, those fantasies had any reasonable chance of proving to be real. So, for example, Tony reports, "He said he went to acting school with Kirk Douglas. And I believe him" where what's involved in that is that the listener to the original story takes it that he can decide whether the prospects that the guy proposes to have had, he really had. He also puts in, "He was a nice looking guy, " where that report of his appearance would not occur with a male telling another male a story, both of them figuring they're not queer, if that feature were not a way to say 'I now looking at him, I can see he could have been an actor, in the sense that he looks like someone who could have been an actor. ' The question is whether one could say "I always wanted to be an actor and now I end up an insurance man" and someone could believe that you are now someone who had failed prospects in a way that's relevant to their own possible failed prospects. Where, e.g. , the guy he's talking to has 'realistic prospects, ' i.e. , he has this job, 'manager-trainee, ' a job that could become manager. It's not just that he's someone who says ' 'I'd like to become a department store executive' ' - although the reality of the prospects with respect to the manager-trainee business has a very interesting kind of status which I'll talk a bit about in a while. Let me make a parenthetical remark about Kirk Douglas. Kirk Douglas is an instance of a thing that has been described by an anthropologist named David Schneider who's done a bunch of work on American kinship. Among the things he proposes is something like this: Americans have a kinship system with respect to their knowledge of the members of their families which involves knowing all the close relatives and how they're related to them, and then not knowing distant relatives - except for some relative at a distance whose specific feature is that they know no other relatives at that distance, and furthermore, they know hardly any relatives at any distance between. And that relative is a famous relative. I'm now adapting that to call it 'ex­ relationals. '

There are people who are recognized as being in the family by virtue of their turning out to be famous people. Nobody knows them for some whole time in their lives. Nobody at this point knows them. Then they pop into the papers, and various people rediscover that they are relatives of theirs. Where, then, at some point if you asked them for a list of their relatives, they can tell you up to, say, typically not even second cousins, and then say "X, a famous person, is a third cousin. ' ' They can't give you any other third cousins. The point is, there is a special category, 'ex-relationals. ' That special category is much larger than actual relatives. It includes ex-relationals of all sorts and it works in exactly the same way: People cannot name anybody in their kindergarten class except for somebody about whom they say, "You know who was in my kindergarten class? X. ' ' Where X is a famous person. Or, they

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can't tell you whoever lived in the apartment house that they lived in when they were five or ten years old, except someone who now turns out to be a famous person. And the insurance salesman didn't go to acting school with Kirk Douglas. Kirk Douglas was nobody. He went to acting school with a variety of people, one of whom turned out to be Kirk Douglas, when Kirk Douglas turned out to be Kirk Douglas. At any place in your life that you encounter large batches of people all of whom are forgotton, somebody may pass through your life who is later rememberable, by you or by other poeple in the same group, as having been in that group. And now you can say "I went to grade school with" or " My next door neighbor when I was 1 2 years old was" some X. Where, again, that's not true because there were all these other next door neighbors and people you went to grade school with and people you went to' acting school with, and X only became such a one when they became the someone they are. But that's sufficient to generate a comparative situation for you. And there's a rather large, complex kind of mechanism involved in rediscovering these people. A circle that's hardly even alive will go to work to tell the members of it that for our circle, a member of it has now become X. So, two girls age 30 who don't see each other anymore may have one of them call the other up and say "Remember me?" "Yeah of course, we were really good friends. ' ' ' 'Well, if you watch TV tonight you'll see that so-and-so, that guy you once went out with, is now a TV star. " So the circle becomes alive to establish its ex-relationals. That's important, because if lots of people can have famous ex-relationals, then the fact that somebody becomes famous or known to be successful can reverberate back to a pool of people who now see that they had chances once. Where if no one they ever knew becomes somebody other than somebody they might as well know now, then that they ever 'had chances' is something they cannot say. The difference, then, between a relatively mobile system and a relatively fixed one is that in a relatively fixed one you 'have no chances' in the sense that no one you know will ever tum out to be somebody whom you could tum out to say you once knew. That is to say, a poor black kid in the ghetto 2 0 years ago had no prospects of anybody they ever knew becoming somebody they could ever say they once knew - or they had that in vety narrow ways, i.e. , it could tum out that some athlete is an ex-neighbor. But to tum a life into a reasonable failure you have to have these ex-relationals around. And there are many more of them than people figure. Like, it's a thrill that the insurance salesman knew Kirk Douglas, but everyone knows someone like that. Lots of people would have had Kirk Douglas and all the other people equivalent to him - if not actors then a whole bunch of other things - as ex-neighbors or ex-classmates, or whatever. At least in a world where people do pop out from nowhere and others move around a lot. Now, there's an important parallel to that, in the phenomenon of the 'manager-trainee. ' Large businesses need lots of young men to do jobs that, if described in terms of what those jobs involved, they could not get the kind of young men they want. That is to say, you can get people to sell stockings

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behind the counter. The question is, can you get people who are, e.g. , highly motivated, obviously middle class, etc.? No you can't. How, then, do you get them to do it? A way that's been devised is to make that a position in a future development, i.e. , one isn't doing 'selling stockings behind the counter, ' one is doing something else, for the future of which one does this. Now, most people who do this eventually quit. Some people who do this eventually get, not much higher, but somewhat higher. That they can conceive of themselves, while doing 'selling stockings, ' as 'manager-trainees' provides them a way of seeing that they're not doing what they obviously are doing, and by virtue of their not seeing that they're doing what they obviously are doing, they come to be able to do it - at least when they're young. So that 'manager-trainee' is a name of a job whose specific interest to those who are wanted to do it, i.e. , people who 'look good, ' is in terms of the future prospects it has. Though plainly that set of people cannot become the future it promises. That is to say, in no business will you ever have anything like the number of managers out of the set of manager-trainees. And of course, had it not been that you wanted a certain sort as a salesman or a stock clerk someone who cares enough to try to sell a lot and look good and all the rest - then you wouldn't call it 'manager-trainee. ' But the people who come into it can think of themselves as having prospects. And thinking of themselves as having prospects, they're available, not only for working hard and keeping clean and doing all that sort of thing, they're also available for being sold insurance as a future manager. And they're also available for having failed prospects. What I wanted to be getting to was the motive power of stories. By that I mean, this fellow Tony hears a story, say 1 5 years before he tells it here. And when he hears it, it's not his story at all, it's a story that may be offered in an advisory fashion by someone else, but is heard as 'having nothing to do with me because I'm not going to turn out that way. ' But at some point in his life, that story also turns out to be his story. It's not like you're told a story and you realize then and there that it's your story. That's one sort of thing. What is intriguing about the motive power of a story like this is that it's a story that, if it's going to work, it's only going to work at a substantial delay. It's only going to be realized, made available for retelling, some long time afterwards. He doesn't know it's his story, he wouldn't think of it as his story when he's told it. Some time later it comes back to him as his. Now, characteristically a story you get is, if it's to be retold at all, to be retold the next day or shortly thereafter. Here's a story that, once we can uncover its bases for being retold, it will turn out not to be retellable for a long time. And in that way one can think of it as planted with an enormous delay fuse on it. The delay fuse not only having to do with its retellability, but for ever seeing that it's about me - if it ever is. Though again, one can imagine quite well, not that one guy just met one guy in New Jersey and told him a story at a time in his life, but that there are a series of delayed fuse stories put into people at various times, that they carry around, that sometimes turn out to be their story. And then there may be an occasion for them seeing that, and

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then seeing it as something to be told to someone else, for whom it has precisely the same character. That is to say, the story Tony is now telling, is to somone who is also a 'trainee' - who is going out to learn in order to become something other than he is, and who in that way has specific prospects. That story is, for the person it's now being told, also specifically 'not my story, ' though it may happen that at a point 1 5 years later that story may have become his story. And, encountering someone in the situation that he was in, it may tum out that he now retells a version of it. Though of course if things are otherwise, he may retell something else, which was also planted in such a fashion. And apart from its delayed reaction relevance, one can get some kind of bases for the insurance man telling the story in the first place. And one can see that he has reasons for analyzing his life in such a way as to make it one of 'failed prospects, ' and to analyze the life of the person he's dealing with so as to be telling the story to someone who is now 'someone with prospects' prospects that may fail or not; someone to whom the story has a local relevance with regard to why they might buy insurance.

Lecture 8

Preserving and transmitting knowledge via stories There are things about the story we started with the last time which I didn't bring to completion. I'll try to re-say some of what I said, while adding some new things. Most of the stories I've ever dealt with in the past, if they get retold, then they get retold quickly. This story is peculiar - but altogether non-unique for having as a systematic aspect of its retelling that it will be retold by a recipient only a long time after its initial telling. Now that aspect, that it's retold only after a long delay, is affiliated with at least one other feature of it, and that is that its reteller retells it when his recipient identity - who he was when he received the story - has now been more or less radically transformed, and he is now in something like the position of the original teller. That transformation of identity - from being an appropriate recipient; someone with future prospects in this case, to being an appropriate teller; someone with past 'future prospects' that have not panned out - is what accounts for the delay, and that transformation is also key to that it gets retold. That is to say, other transformations, and even other orderly transformations, are obviously possible given an initial position of being, e.g., a manager-trainee. And by 'orderly' transformation I mean one that has a systematic relationship to the original identity as compared to, having once been a manager-trainee one is now, at some later date, a one-armed tennis player, or ranges of other things that a person can become having once been something. But having been a manager-trainee, one could become, say, a manager, but then one wouldn't be in the position of the original teller. So, not just any orderly transformation of identities yields that the original recipient becomes a future reteller of such a story. Further, even if the original recipient does become somebody transformed in the way in which this original recipient was, they may have no one to give it to, i.e. , someone in the position one was in when one originally received it. Also, there are issues about having some reasons for telling it and occasions for telling it. Last time I talked about how the insurance salesman had, not merely this story, but bases for telling it - he could use it as part of his sales program - and occasions for telling it - he was engaged in conversations with people who were appropriate recipients for it, in the course of which the story could be told. And it's imaginable that the current teller in this case, though he has become someone with failed prospects, would have had either no one to tell it to who is now like he had been, or, though he'd been engaged in 466

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interaction with people who are now like he once was, he might have lacked reasons for telling it or occasions on which to tell it. That is to say, here it comes up at a distinctly apt time - the day before his recipient is leaving the job for a prospectful future. And it comes up in an occasioned way - the talk being about whether people should do things other than those that make them happy, what they should be willing to do for money, and things like that. And one can adduce other reasons for him telling it then and there. Roughly, it can serve as some sort of experience-based defense of an acceptance of a fate that does not involve the fruition of one's hopes and possible prospects. The story justifies an acceptance of things not having come to what it looked like at one time they might. And as such, it can defend his current circumstances. We can ask a series of questions: What are the bases for there being stories with long time delays involved in them? What kinds of work can they do? And, if they are important, what are the kinds of mechanisms that can more or less assure that they get told? Some of the things I've said answer those questions in a fashion, but one thing they have to do with concerns the kind of object that stories can be. A question that can be either banal or deep, and has a series of alternative forms, is this: Why do people transmit information to others? How could they be gotten to transmit information to others? How is the world organized so as to have more or less important information preserved and transmitted? The kinds of lessons that stories often contain can perfectly well be delivered in the form of simply a lesson, a proverb, an idiom, a general expression, a general truth. Like, "Sometimes circumstances prevail where people have to do something not exactly to their liking. " And in considering things like that, relative to stories, one wants to know whether there are differences between them and stories which account for the use of stories. A seemingly dumb difference between them is just this, that the story that the insurance salesman told - which could be given, in a fashion, in the lesson at the end of Tony's report - is something that happened to him. Or, as we should put it, it's something that happened to him, too. That is to say, if there are such lessons in the world, then presumably there are lots of happenings which they characterize. The story here may not be something that only happened to the insurance man. And it need not be a condition for his telling the story that, not only did it happen to him, it happened only to him so far as he knows. But maybe that it happened to him can serve to make him a possible carrier of it, and it happening to lots of people, then one gets lots of carriers of it who have a particular basis for telling, i.e. , that it happened to each of them. A question is, well, so it happened to them. Why does that make it something that they are interested in preserving and telling? It's imaginable that the world would be arranged so that people are not interested in telling a story unless it happened to them, without it being a consequence of that that they are also specifically interested in telling stories that did happen to them. But the gross fact is that the stories they are interested in telling are those that

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happened to them. People in this world in any event are built to be the custodians of just about only their own experiences. And a lot of things that people are built to be the custodians of, i.e. , that they can be made to care about keeping, taking care of, defending, and the like, are more or less whatever it is that the world has them conceive of as 'their own . ' Their experiences are but one class of such things. And in the prior course on storytelling I've discussed some ways of motivating people to make available their private experiences, and ways of having them analyze situations so as to have available to them more or less antique private experiences of theirs. 1 I'm trying to suggest a picture in which lots of things are happening in the world, out of which people are catching the way in which what happens, happens just to them. Where the world is arrangeable nonetheless to have that be a vehicle for the culture reproducing itself in terms of its body of knowledge. That is to say, one kind of problem a culture faces is getting its known things kept alive. A basic thing it uses is people's heads. Where people's heads are not just to be repositories for known things, but they have to be repositories that are appropriately tapped so that those known things get passed to others. And, having been put in some others' heads, there need to be ways that those known things again get tapped and put into yet others' heads. Now plainly one can think of various ways that the passing on thing could happen. Having been told a story about an experience of someone's, one might tell it to the next five people one encounters, and they in tum do the same. Or it might be that one holds a story for some specified time - a week, a year - and then tells it. Or it's imaginable that every person would be the passer of one story which is their property, and everyone they encounter, they tell that one story to. Or it's imaginable that someone of an age that would involve them in being able to understand stories at all, could be sat down with story-repository persons and have the culture's stories committed to their memory. Such a technique is employed in various places at various times, and it works in a way and doesn't work in other ways. So that, e.g. , the Iliad, the bible, and other objects like that, get told and retold in some independence of recipient or teller situations - though it's notable about their telling and retelling that occasions are designed to have them appropriate for being told. That is to say, a way of thinking about sacred occasions is as occasions that are simply made for the purpose of telling large batches of information which is to be remembered and to be passed on on other such occasions, independent of what's now happening. But plainly, telling occasions can be distinctly more powerful if what a story does is to proposedly analyze the occasion on which it's told, mobilizing the parties to the telling into the story itself, where their retelling occasion will be also an occasion that they analyze. A thing that's interesting about storytelling, then, is the way in which the telling of stories is done for persons 1 See Spring 1 9 7 0 , lectures 4 and 5 respectively.

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located to be distinctly ripe for them, and done on occasions that they're powerfully relevant to. It's as though the stories in people's heads are more or less constantly alert for the occasions for which they are distinctly apt. And they come out then, and are maybe never thought of any time else. So, what the world uses is persons' interst in analyzing any situation they're in - e.g., to know how to deal with it - in order to get them to see that a story that they know, insofar as it analyzes the situation they're in, is tellable. That is, on analyzing a situation they're in, they discover that they know about it with some story, which can be made, then, something they now recall, have at hand, and may tell as a proposed analysis of our current situation. They're not, then, doing simply telling a story for no good reason, or telling of something that happened once, or telling of something that happened once to somebody else, or that happens to people, but they're offering something that does something now, i.e. , describes, explains, accounts for, our current circumstances - mine, or yours, or mine and yours. And that usefulness of stories is not simply a usefulness to its current teller, but would be precisely the kind of usefulness which would in the first instance motivate a culture to have stories used. That is to say, what a culture wants to do is not simply have what it knows preserved, but to have what it knows used when it should be used. Now, that can be appreciated by persons in such a way as to lead them to regard the knowledge that's passed on as indeed worth keeping. That is to say, the knowledge that they get, they see as possibly usable. And that is of interest for the situation of a story being told that, when it is received and when it is retold, it will be understood in altogether different ways, which is, in its fashion, extremely common. Old people are routinely telling young people stories that they were told when they were young by someone old, where, when the story was told them they thought it inapplicable to them but when they tell it they now agree with it, though they tell it to someone who is in the position they were once in. So there's a large amount of stuff that may only become apposite to tell long, long after it's been received. And when it's received it's either not understood or not figured to be 'for me, ' and nonetheless it's preserved. There is, then, a serious problem in the preservation of knowledge for a society, under this particular constraint of the information involved being appropriate to an initial recipient only a long time after he's received it. And I've tried to suggest that there are massed cultural resources for putting information into a shape that makes it acceptable to very long-delayed transmittal, and that those things have to do with the usability of the story form particularly, to analyzing possible current circumstances. Where, again, the knowledge persons get in a story is seeable by them for its possible usability, and they can then come to have regard for the usability of such sorts of things, such that, though it's not on the occasion of its being received figured to be 'for me, ' it is nonetheless preserved.

Lecture 9

The dirty joke as a technical object; Temporal and sequential organization; 'Guiding' recipient I'm going to begin a presentation that will take a while. It will involve an analysis of a dirty joke, eventually leading up to a theory of some of the business of dirty jokes. This time I want to argue the artfulness of this joke. Where, by its 'artfulness' I mean to be referring to that not only is it elaborately organized, but some aspects of its elaborate organization can be found to be occupied with two sorts of jobs. One is concealing some of the ways the joke works on its recipients from those recipients, and the other is direaing its recipients to attend it in rather sharp ways. A motivation for beginning by characterizing some aspects of its organization with an orienta­ tion to the artfulness of its construction, is to develop a basis for giving careful attention to the joke. That is to say, if we come to see that it's extraordinarily carefully put together and extraordinarily carefully put together in a way to direct a recipient's attention, then we have a basis for looking at it closely in other ways. Roughly, I want to make a case for the dirty joke as a technical object worth attention. One way I think of this investigation - which is only partially correct - is under a tide like A Detoxification Program for Dirty Jokes. Which is to say that one might imagine that dirty jokes are kind of frivolous objects, or that what's interesting about dirty jokes is necessarily the ways that they're dirty, and I will suggest that there may be ways in which that's not so; that they are serious technical sources of information, and not merely at all sexual information. We'll get to that kind of a position rather later on. I'll proceed in the following way. I'll begin with an overview of some sorts of organization the joke has, and then proceed to take it apart rather more closely. Ken : Roger :

You wanna hear muh-eh my sister told me a story last night. ! don'wanna hear it. But if you must.

AI :

What's purple en 'n !sland. Grape, Britain. That's w't iz �if jster-No: . To stun me she says uh (0 . 8) There wz these three girls 'n they jis got married? ehhh/ jhehh hhh hhh

(0. 7 )

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A: :nd uh Hey waita seco(h)nd. heh! [ Drag th(h)at by ag(h)ai(h)n hehh I I hehh ThereThere wz these �hree g!:rls. En they were � sisters. En they'd jis got married tuh three brothers. Roger : You better have a long �alk with yer sister. Waita waita I / minute Ken : Roger : Oh: I I three hrothers. AI : eheh AI : ehl lheh! Ken : A: :nd uh, so AI : The Qrothers of these sisters. Ken : No they're different- mhhllhh AI : heh Ken : Y'know different families. I I (No link-up.) Roger : Th's clo�ser th'n before, II hhh Ken : [ SoAI : heh! hh hh

Ken : Roger : AI : Roger : Ken : Ken :

(0. 7 )

Ken : AI : Ken :

Quiet. hh hh 11 hhhh So: , first'v all, that night, they're on their: : : honeymoon the- uh mother in law says- (to 'em) well why don'tcha all spen'th'night here en then you c'n go on yer honeymoon in th'morning. Th'firs'night, th'mother walks up t'the firs' door en she hears this uuuuuuuuuhh! hh Second door is HHOOOHHH! !bird door there's NOthin' . She stands there fer about twunny five minutes waitin' fer sump'n duh happen. -- Nothin' .

Ken :

Ken :

Next morning she talks t'the firs' daughter en' she s'z -- uh how come yuh- how come y'went YAAA: : : las' night'n daughter siz �ell it gckled Mommy -- second gi�rl, -- How come yuh screa:med. Oh: Mommy it hu :rts. -- !bird girl, walks up t'her. (0 .7) Why dido' y'� anything las'night. -- W'you tol'me it wz always impolite t'�alk with my mouth full, ( 1 . 5) hh hyok hyok.

Ken :

hyok.

AI : Ken : (A/) : Roger :

HA-HA-HA-HA! ehh heh heh II hehhh hehhhehhheh hhh Delayed rea�clltio(h)n.

( 1 . 0)

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(0. 5 ) (2 . 5)

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-

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Part VII

472 AI : Roger :

hehh I hadtuh �hink abouj /t it awhile y'know? hhh heh

Roger :

hehh hh hehh hhh You mea(h)n th(h)e dee(h)p (h)hidden meaning there rloesn' hitcha right awa-ay heh heh // hehhhh­ hhhh hehhhehh hh hhh 11 hhh (Yeh. I // guess so.) What' e meant tuh say is the t- thet u:m

( 1 . 0)

AI : (Dan): AI :

(0. 5 )

AI : Ken :

Ki/ jnda got ps: :rchological over/ /tones (to it), ( ) 1ittle sister's gittin' // older. hehh hh hehh ehheh heh That's w't I m(h)ean tih // say, Sounds like it, Fer twelve years old tellin' me- ! didn' even // knowHow do yuh know she's jis' not repeating what she heard'n doesn'know whaj/t it means. She haftuh explain it to yuh Ke:n? Yeah she had to explain it to detail to me,

AI : Ken : Ken :

Okay, good. Gladju gotta sister thet knows // somethin' . hh hhh She �old me she wz eatin' a hot dog,

Ken : Roger : Ken : AI : Ken : Ken : AI : Ken : AI :

hh Wha'does that mean, hh hh Yeah �orne // on. Ex,e_lain // it to us, hnhh heh heh Explaijj:n, explain everything you kno:w Ken, hhhh! Nuh I: D(h)ON'KNOW I j's' sai:d tha(h)t. Explain �verything.

Roger : AI : Ken : (Roger) : Ken : Dan : Ken : Roger :

(0. 5 )

(0. 3 )

A first, very gross pair of related facts about the joke is that it's both temporally and sequentially organized. With regard to its temporal organiza­ tion, it has what I earlier called the canonical form for narratives, 1 that it proceeds in what we might take to be directly the temporal ordering of the story's events: They just got married, then there is the first night and the next morning, all ordered in that kind of a natural way. But we have to keep very well in mind that when we say that the joke or story preserves the sequential form of its events, then one has to remember that it's made up. There weren't 1 See lecture 6, p. 4 5 4 .

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such events. And in that regard, it adopts a format which such events might have. If it were a real story then this might be its events sequence. But it isn't a real story, or isn't to be supposed to be real story, and therefore, that it has its events presented in a canonical temporal form such that they are heard by recipients as mapping onto some actual sequence of events that went off in the fashion it reports them, turns out to be a type of organization that can do other sorts of jobs that we'll get to in due course. Among the other sorts of jobs it can do is to array events in such a fashion as to have an otherwise extraordinarily implausible set of events appear plausible. So we have this overall temporal organization. Now, I separated temporal from sequential organization by virtue of that a sequential organization is such as for each point in it that is subsequent to some other point, an appreciation of that point turns on an appreciation of its position. Which is to say, e.g . , "next morning" i s a term that requires for its understanding that one have kept in mind that there was a "last night. " And, for example, there's a "second door, " and to understand what is going on by reference to it one uses that there was a "first door. " In detail: The mother "walks up to the first door and she hears this uuuuuuuuuhh! " She doesn't "walk up to" the second door, nor does she "hear" the sound. It's just "Second door is HHOOOHHH! " To understand what's happening at the second door, that event is appreciated by virtue of what we know about the first. We see that the second is similar to the first except by virtue of the different sound. We don't repeat the whole organization for the second. And in due course I'll show that the sequential aspect of the joke's organization is distinctly powerful in the way in which it leads a recipient to understand the joke. Now, one could have a temporal organization that did not employ the resources of sequential organization. One could have simply dates or times; ways of referring to events which don't require the connectedness that a sequential organization employs and thereby leads its listener to use to appreciate each of the subsequent events. So that temporal organization could involve things like, " 8 : 1 0 p.m. , conversation with mother, 9 : 0 5 p.m. , mother standing at door, " etc. Those are just times. They happen to be temporally ordered, and one might use them to see their relative positioning to each other, but their terminology doesn't require that one keeps their positioning in mind in understanding what they are. So there's an overall temporal organization and an overall sequential organization. Now, the body of the joke is composed of rwo sequences, the "first night" sequence and the "next morning" sequence, each of which is composed of three events which are themselves ordered temporally and sequentially. The "first night" sequence poses a puzzle and the "next morning" sequence yields a solution to the puzzle. And that, of course, also has a sequential character to it, i.e. , first puzzle, then solution. Now, the solution is nicely positioned for a joke. Which is to say there's a puzzle­ solution form which is fitted to the joke form such that the solution to the puzzle matches the arrival at the joke's punchline. We want to kind of begin to feel our way into that there is a story-structure type that the joke is

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operating within, and it can more or less fit the story-structure type. That is to say, you can imagine that there could be a puzzle posed at some point in the story, and a solution to the puzzle which will complete the story. Now, if it's also a joke, the punchline of the joke might fit somewhere relative to the solution to the puzzle. A more or less perfect meshing would involve that the punchline of the joke is the same event as the solution to the puzzle. But if one's going to be putting together a joke with a story structure, then, plainly, arriving at it in that kind of a fit might be something that would take some kind of constructional work. Let me start to deal with the first sequence. Ken :

Th'[trs'night, th'mother walks up t'the firs' door en she hears this uuuuuuuuuhh! hh Second door is HHOOOHHH! Third door there's NOthin ' . She stands there fer about twunny five minutes waitin' fer sump'n dub happen. -- Nothin' .

What we have here looks simply like an ordering of the mother's behavior relative to a series of doors behind which we know are the newly married couples, where this just happens to be the order in which she approaches the doors. She gets a puzzle from this sequence, which she proceeds to attempt to get resolved by her interrogation sequence the next morning. But one wants to think of the mother as something like a shill in the story, to direct the recipient's attention. The figure of the mother serves in part as a way to lead the recipient to hear the story in certain ways - 'the mother' being, now, not a person for our purposes, but a guide in the story (though of course recipients don't treat 'the mother' that way) - so that if the mother is puzzled, then there's a way in which the recipient can come to adopt the mother's puzzle as the recipient's. So the mother is puzzled by this silence at the third door. And now the recipient is engaged in trying to figure out what it will turn out happened there. The mother's sequence, then, leads the recipient to focus in a way that the mother does. How is it that the mother operates as that kind of a guide? There's apparently a merely temporal ordering to her going to the doors, and there is no statement in the story of what it is that she's interested in at the doors. That, however, is very powerfully conveyed by her behavior. Which is to say, she goes to the first door and hears a sound, and then directly proceeds to the second door where she hears a sound, and then directly proceeds to the third door where she hears nothing, and waits. Now, that tells us that what she's interested in and what then puzzles her, is the sounds and the absence of sounds. Plainly, one could have a story where she goes to the first door and hears "uuuuuuuuuhh! " and then she stands there listening for some extended period of time, and a whole range of sounds or various other sorts of things could be reported. By the faa that she moves promptly on, we know that what she's heard there is what she was interested in. And by the fact that she moves promptly on again when she hears the "HHOOOHHH!," and by the fact that she then waits extendedly when she hears nothing, we know that

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she's interested in hearing some sound. We thereby get the puzzle that she has, from the way in which the story reports on her movements, and what it is that seems to be adequate to have her move on or stop. So that by the end of the first sequence we know that the puzzle is 'why no sound at the third door?' I want to give some attention to the fact that we have three events; two of them sounds and one of them silence. If we're going to have those three events, then, for the development of a reasonable puzzle it's crucial that the silence comes third. That is to say, the mother isn't surprized that she hears a sound; what she's surprized at is that she hears no sound. Well, to have that be the nature of her surprize, then it has to be that the third door is the place where the silence occurs. Now, that is different than a merely temporal ordering. It involves that a temporal ordering is used to convey a sense of a natural ordering - where such a natural ordering could yield the surprize, but whether in a natural ordering it would happen that way is an altogether different question. But following 'the mother' and imagining that 'the mother' is a reasonable person proceeding along, then a recipient is led to appreciate the possible surprize of no sound - rather than, e.g . , to be amazed at the coincidence of the two earlier sounds occurring just when she arrives at the door. And it's for those sorts of reasons that we are focussing on the way in which a temporal ordering adopted for a constructed story can do a job of leading recipients to suppose things about what's reasonable and unreasonable in the events being imagined to come off that way. Now, for the silence to be a puzzle, not only is it important that the silence be third in the sequence of three, but it's also the case that you need at least three to get the silence as a puzzle, and that you need no more than three. Three is then a perfea economical use of a number of events to get some puzzle. Imagine there were two doors; at the first door, sound, at the second door, silence. So? One was sound and one was silence. How could there be an issue of why was there silence. It could as well be why was there sound. But the two doors' sounds suffice to make the third door's silence noticeable, and you don't need more - though you could have eleven doors, at ten of them the mother hears sounds, at the eleventh she hears silence, and we'd say "Huh! Wonder why that was. " But three will give you that, whereas two can't give you that. Three suffice, as long as you preserve that arrangement of the silence occurring last, so as to build up an appreciation of the expectable, normal, majority character of the sounds. Three is, then, a minimal but sufficient number for making the minority event peculiar and therefore focussable on as a puzzle. Let me go on now to the second sequence. Ken :

Next morning she talks t'the firs' daughter en she s'z -- uh how come yuh- how come y'went YAAA: : : las' night'n daughter siz �ell it tickled Mom!!!Y -- second gi�rl, -- How come yuh screa:med. Oh: Mommy it hu:rts. -- !hird girl, walks up t'her. (0 . 7 ) Why dido' y'say anything las'night. -- W'you - tol' me it wz always impolite t'falk with my mouth full,

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As I said, the second sequence specifically connects to the first via its use of "next morning," and now we get again an apparently natural sequence: First daughter, second daughter, third daughter. Where again, that's given as a temporal thing and again it works as a sequential thing. And again, what I mean by a sequential thing is that "she talks to the first daughter and she says how come you went YAAA last night, " but we don't get for the second daughter a statement of "She talks to the second daughter and says . . . ; " we get simply what we hear as a quote of her remarks to the second girl: "How come you screamed. " Also, "How come you screamed" is of interest for what it begins to say, which is that this second inquiry is addressed to someone who has been a listener to the first. Imagine that the second girl is inquired into in isolation: "How come you screamed?" "How come I screamed when?" That is to say, the second girl is using - and we as well use - that she is second having heard the first, to know what is being referred to. A statement like "How come you screamed" properly occurs when somebody has just screamed. Well, she hasn't just screamed, so she wouldn't know what she's being asked about. It's the "last night" scream that's being asked about, and that scream is found by reference to the question to the first daughter, that we are now told that the second daughter is hearing. And the presence of all the parties in the same room is kind of crucial to getting, not just the second daughter, but importantly the third daughter, to know what's being asked her. Because in a way, the question being asked the third daughter, "How come you didn't say anything last night?" is rather more bizarre yet. "Last night" is a long time, and presumably there are a whole range of things that she did say last night, at any time in it. But she knows what's being asked. And she knows it not only by virtue of the questions that have been asked the others, but the answers that they've given. Their answers have been consistent with regard to an allusion to the sexual activities involved. And for the third to be in a position to explain how come she was silent, to see that it's a puzzle, then that the others made sounds is something important for her; it lets her see her relative circumstance. Now, forgetting about jokes or stories, this is the normal form for talk involving a series of parties present. One doesn't have to review, for each party, what it was that was asked the last, and what their answer was. But having at hand that the daughters must have been present to each other when this "next morning" sequence went off, we're in a position to see that what is presented as simply a natural temporal ordering of an inquiry to the girls, is not that sort of a thing but is parallel to the first sequence, and for reasons. That is to say, if the daughters were all present to each other, why inquire of them in precisely the order that they were encountered last night? We know that last night's order of encountering was functional for setting up a puzzle. And it is functional in this second sequence for setting up the positioning of the solution to that puzzle at the end of this sequence, and for having the solution be where the punchline is going to go. So we have this apparent temporal ordering. Layered onto it is a sequential ordering that builds off of

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it and employs it so as to preserve the apparent naturalness of the parties while concealing the way in which that temporal ordering is used to make an appreciatable problem in the first place.

Lecture 1 0

The dirty joke as a technical object (ctd); Suspending disbelief; 'Guiding' recipient; Punchlines I'll continue on with our consideration of a dirty joke. Last time I talked about the ordering of the second sequence (the interrogating of the girls) which repeats the ordering of the first sequence (the listening at those girls' doors). I remarked on the detailed ways in which the ordering is used in the construction of the second sequence. And that involved, for example, that all the daughters needed to be present in the scene from the beginning, as the very understandability of what the mother is talking about in her capsulized question to the second girl, and the very plausibility of the inquiry to the third girl, required the kinds of sequential attention that I've been talking to. Now, one of the persistent themes of the analysis so far is a kind of massive consistency throughout the story. That is to say, the storyjjoke employs a series of co-occurrent coincidences; things like: It happens there were three sisters who got married at the same time. It happens that their mother got all of them to agree to stay the first night, as compared to it being perfectly possible that she proposes, "Why don't you all stay here tonight and go on your honeymoon tomorrow" and two of them say "Fine" and the third says ' T d rather go somewhere else; " so it happens that the three are willing to stay. It happens that the mother goes to listen at the doors in some order, and that arriving at the first she promptly hears a sound, goes on and promptly hears a sound at the second, and goes on and hears nothing at the third, and waits, and hears nothing. It happens that the sounds were made by the daughters exclusively, though of course it's perfectly well imaginable that if a sound were to be heard at one of the doors it could just as well be a son-in-law, or both, or whatever. It happens that the next morning the mother interrogates the three daughters in the sequence in which she listened at the doors, though, since they were all there together she might perfectly well have interrogated them in some other sequence. It also happens that for each of the three daughters, their answers involve that the overheard event is interpretable as a sexual event though, for one or another or all three, it could have been other than sexual. So, the first daughter says "it tickled" and the second says "it hurts. " Both use a same format answering, in which there's this something-or-other "it" which a recipient can take it has a common, presumably sexual, interpretation. And that then sets up an interpretability of the third as consistent with the first and 478

Lecture 1 0

479

second, i.e. , all the answers are interpretable as intendedly sexually allusive. Where one intrusion of an interpretability that wasn't sexual would make for rather extended problems in interpreting any later answer, and also for the parties being able to use allusive language which is understandable as specifically sexual. That is to say, instead of, e.g. , "it hurts, " it's after all perfealy possible that the answer could have been "I stubbed my toe," but the intrusion of such a possible event would have consequences for the consistency of the interpretability of events - a consistency which yields the kind of starkness that stories charaaeristically have. There is, then, this series of co-occurent coincidences. Now, these turn out to be organizationally crucial to the story. That is to say, we wouldn't have the joke without them. And we can begin to visualize a series of components that need to go into the joke, where, with rather slight variations on the components, we wouldn't have this storyjjoke. Now, seeing the necessity of this co-occurrent set of coincidences, and seeing that they all happen together just as they're needed, makes their happening rather implausible. That is to say, we're seeing now a stock of materials that have to be put into the joke for it to come off, i.e. , the collection of a series of coincidental events. One or another or many of them might perfectly well be there, but they're all there, and they're all there necessarily. They become, then, distinaly implausible. But for the joke to come off, it is central that they are not implausible. The question then to be raised is, how is it that they can be put into the joke and have their implausibility not seen? This kind of harkens to a really ancient theme in the construction of things that have storylike form, i.e. , Aristotle's notion that for drama or tragedy we engage in a willing suspension of disbelief. Now, the notion that what we do is simply suspend disbelief is, if aaual stories are going to be examined, nonsense. What we should see is that while for the story to come off we may need to believe, the story is built in such a way as to not lead us to have to figure "This is implausible but I'll suspend disbelief. " And the thing then is to look to see what kinds of ways a recipient is led to not have that occur. First of all, of course, the canonical temporal ordering does a good deal of that. The sheer narration of the thing as having happened in just this sequence, delivered flatly, does some of the work of having us see that it happened as it happened. The burden of work, however, seems to be accomplished in the following sort of way. I've made a good deal of that the story is sequentially organized, meaning by that, that to understand at all what some second component says, one needs to interpret it in the light of a prior component. It's built so as to require that kind of usage. That is to say, in order to understand what "Oh mommy it hurts" refers to, one needs to position the thing in a sequence involving the prior question and answer, the prior night, and the setup having to do with just having gotten married. Now, if it's built sequentially in that kind of intense fashion, then the recipient is indeed engaged in doing a job of analysis on, say, roughly, each sentence of the story. He is always engaged in figuring out what each sentence

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means, using the rest-so-far and what it looks like it's developing into. The story, then, by its sequential organization, directs certain sorts of work that the recipient is going to do to understand it. And having done that work, the recipient finds himself in a position of understanding it so far. Where, then, the story's sequential organization poses jobs for recipients, whose success is demonstrable when the next thing happens. So, if you suppose that "it tickled" is sexual, then when you hear "it hurts" and consider that it might be sexual also, then you find that "it tickled" was indeed sexual and "it hurts" is sexual. So the story's sequential organization can be said to guide a whole job of work that the recipient will engage in. Now, one has further evidence for the rationality of the things happening. Last time, I talked about the mother as something like a shill in the story, operating as a kind of a guide to the recipient. What I want to be noticing now is that there are characters in the thing, who also are engaged in sequential work, i.e. , they need to figure out what it is that they're being asked, and they produce talk that appears to involve that they understand what they're being asked. They're not puzzled, though plainly there's plenty of places where they could be puzzled; as in the second sequence the girls could be altogether puzzled about what's being inquired of them, and how anyone would ever know that they said any of those things. That is to say, whereas the recipient can know what the mother is asking about, by virtue of the fact that the recipient has been told that the mother was listening at the doors, this is something that isn't to be presumed that the daughters know. But the recipient apparently doesn't have to figure there's an issue with regard to how the daughters know what the mother is talking about, by virtue of that the daughters do seem to be able to answer the questions. Or, an answer having been given like "It tickled, mommy," the mother perfectly well could say "What tickled?" But there is a sufficiency to "it tickled" and "it hurts" by virtue of the fact that nobody in the scene questions what they refer to. Nobody questioning it, the recipient, also making an interpretation, can figure that unquestioned interpretation is correct. So we have that in order to understand the thing in the first place, the recipient is engaged in a continual act of analysis of what's being said, in sequential terms. And that act of analysis yields an understanding, and it parallels an apparent act of understanding that the parties are engaged in. The recipient, finding that he can understand things in the way that the parties do, the parties' understandings can serve as a further confirmation of that the recipient is doing the right sort of work. And this borrows from a usual sort of business for stories and for observable events, which is: If it looks like the parties to some seen event know what's happening, or if the persons in the story seem to understand what's happening, then an observer or story recipient will not readily figure that those who are participating are all that crazy. And so far, then, as one can build characters who give off, if nothing else, that they understand what's happening, a recipient will not see that the thing is implausible - and crucially implausible. That is to say, without this set of implausible events, the joke collapses.

Lecture 1 0

48 1

What I'm suggesting as a picture is, there are a series of components put into the joke. Getting those components arranged in a way that makes the joke, can suffer the consequence of ending up with an extraordinarily implausible sequence of events. But the story can be built so that the attention of its recipients is directed away from its possible implausibility, i.e. , the question of disbelieving it need never come up, one being altogether fully occupied in understanding it. One is not, then, ever in the course of it, in a position to assess the complex of its components. And, arriving at the end, one's problem right then and there is to solve the punchline as fast as possible. Having solved it as fast as possible, the whole thing is over as soon as you've laughed. There's no room in the story to engage in assessing its plausibility. Now, the reasons for wanting to solve the punch line as fast as possible are given by knowing that it's a joke, where a delay can involve that one isn't 'getting' the joke, and therefore reflect on one's sense of humor, sophistica­ tion, etc. So the social circumstances lead a recipient to attempt to be finding what the punchline means. Having found that, they've demonstrated that they understood the joke. Having been involved in trying to understand the joke as the thing that they know from the beginning will be the test of them, questions about believing or disbelieving it need not emerge so long as they can, indeed, understand it as it goes along, and come up with an interpreta­ tion of the punchline that they can exhibit by, e.g . , laughing, and laughing as soon as possible. I want now to talk a bit to the mechanisms involved in the punchline sequence, i.e. , the third question-answer sequence. There are some altogether standard joke, and dirty joke, components. First of all we're in a position of having a puzzle solution arrived at; the puzzle having been set up in the first sequence, and again in the second sequence with the first and second answers. Now, in a joke, it will be characteristic that while the puzzle is solvable from the punchline, the solution won't be asserted in the punchline but will have to be interpreted out of the punchline. And that, of course, has to do with making it the recipient's business to get the joke, where getting the joke involves being able to assign to the punchline an interpretation that solves the puzzle that's been set up. So in this case, the third answer isn't a solution to the puzzle, it's what the answer means that's a solution to the puzzle, that being 'gotten' by the recipient. And routinely the materials used in a punch­ line involve an altogether well-known expression - an idiom, a proverb, a rule - produced in such a way as has its sense for the joke or story be other than its normal sense. In this case it's transformed into something obscene, and that is one characteristic way that dirty joke punchlines get produced, i.e. , there's a common expression with a properly obscene interpretation of it to be assigned by a recipient. That's one aspect of the punchline's work. But in this joke something new has been added. And that is, while the answer to the third question, like the answers to the first two, constitutes an explanation of why something was or wasn't done, in the third case the explanation operates as a squelch. Now, for

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the squelch operation, some things that are in the story become rather crucial. That is to say, the daughters' answers could operate as explanations to anyone who happened to ask them that question. Had anyone been standing at the doors and then the next morning interrogated the girls, then the answers they give are satisfactorily and understandably answers. But the third answer wouldn't be a 'squelch' unless it's 'the mother' who was standing at the door and does the asking. Saying it as to somebody else, "My mother told me not to talk with my mouth full, " it isn't a squelch to them. So, while there are a series of identities of the girls in the joke, i.e. , they're first introduced as 'girls, ' they're collected a s 'sisters, ' that they just got married makes them 'wives, ' that they function in these two interactions largely as 'daughters' becomes, in the third interrogation of the second sequence, crucially a 'mother-daughter' interaction. With her answer, the 'daughter' is doing something to 'her mother' . And what she's doing is squelching the mother's question. So we have an 'explanation' which is an 'excuse' of a very particular sort; one which says, 'What I did that might violate a rule, I did by reference to some other rule that you told me to follow. ' And that is one form that squelches take. I'm asserting, then, that the power of the punchline involves a series of things: It permits finding a solution to the puzzle that the first sequence yielded as a 'story. ' For the 'joke', an obscene interpretation is to be applied to the answer to 'get' the joke, and that obscene interpretation is to come off of an otherwise non-obscene common expression. Further, however, the punchline constitutes a squelch on the question to which it responds - the squelch in this case involving 'mother' and 'daughter. ' So that there are, then, a series of ways that the punchline works, one of which, the squelch involving mother and daughter, is the surprize of the joke structure. That is to say, while we're all prepared for some sort of interpretably obscene punchline, we're not prepared for the squelch. That is a new, surprize element in the punch­ line. And I will make a lot of the mother-daughter aspect of the squelch when I get into the second sort of discussion I'm going to build off of this joke.

Lecture

11 The dirty joke as a technical object (ctd); Packaging and transmitting experiences Continuing with our consideration of the dirty joke, let me now begin in a quite different fashion. I want first to consider some similarities and differences between stories, jokes, and dirty jokes. Stories are plainly ways of packaging experiences. And most characteristically, stories report an experience in which the teller figures. And furthermore, in which the teller figures - for the story anyway - as its hero. Which doesn't mean that he does something heroic, but That the story is organized around the teller's circumstances. To give what can pass as a bizarre instance - though it's not bizarre and is altogether characteristic - I'll more or less give a couple of stories told shortly after the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Two ladies are talking on the phone and one of them, talking about the helicopter that carried Bobby Kennedy's body back to wherever they took it, says, ' 'You know where the helicopter took off? That was the exact spot where our plane took off when we went to Hawaii. " To which the other responds, "Oh for heaven sakes, weren't you lucky. If it had happened when you were going to take off, it would have ruined your trip . " It's i n that sort o f way that an event which, i n the, quotes, objective reality, has the current teller figuring altogether incidentally, gets turned into an event in their lives specifically - or an almost-event in their lives specifically. In another conversation two women are talking about the tragedy of the assassination, and one is telling about her daughter's response - her daughter first being proposed to be someone who is highly political and who did a variety of things in the primaries, and how she was broken up and all that. The teller says "So she was really depressed" and then goes go on tell how the next night her daughter's ten-year-old son was in a little league game, and they didn't put him in until the fifth inning, and when he got in he hit a home run with another kid on base and they won the game and carried him around, and how her daughter was so thrilled and said, "It was the only good thing that happened to me this week. ' ' Again, for an event in the world - the assassination - it is her life that the assassination has happened to. That is to say, even indeed recognizing the character of the assassination, it happened to her as something depressing her, such that something that also happened to her could lift her depression. 483

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Now, that's one aspect of the way in which stories happen to their tellers: The teller figures in the story, and figures as the hero of the story. Related to that is that it's pretty much the teller's business to tell it with respect to its import for them. And, recalling some remarks I made earlier in the course, by virtue of it being the teller's involvement in it that provides for its telling and, indeed, for 'what happened, ' it has a very short motive power. 1 That is to say, teller can tell it to somebody who knows and cares about teller, and maybe the recipient can tell it to someone, but it goes very little further than that. So, in the case involving this ten-year-old boy, then his mother tells it as happening to her; she tells it to her mother, and her mother is now telling_it to her sister, i.e. , an aunt of the ten-year-old's mother. And the story has no base for going much further. So there's an initial power but it's short-lived since insofar as people tell stories in which they figure, most characteristically they're not much telling stories in which others figure except to the extent that the others are in some way 'themselves, ' i.e. , their children, etc. So recipients do not serve automatically as future tellers of the stories. That's reinforced by other kinds of considerations which involve that if, e.g. , someone is telling their experience of the assassination, then the person they're telling it to will also have such a story. And the person they're telling it to will tell back their own. So the scene will be one of an exchange of stories: You receive one and tell back one of your own. And on some next occasion, receiving another you will again tell back your own rather than now tell back the one you received. Though I don't mean to say one cannot tell stories at second hand. There are classes of second hand stories that are told, but they are plainly special, and the reasons why a recipient would retell are relatively limited. Now some differences between jokes and stories. Jokes characteristically have a story format, i.e. , they report some sort of single experience in which someone is some sort of hero. A first difference is that the teller is specifically not a character in the joke. One may tell funny stories in which one figures, but that's something different than a joke. In a joke the teller is not a character. And there is considerable importance to this. Obviously, insofar as one is a character in a story one tells, then, in telling the story, one is permitting or encouraging or desiring to have others get a view of you as courageous, thoughtful, frank, God only knows, whatever it is that stories will convey of someone. Jokes, then, can contain kinds of different sorts of events than stories will characteristically contain, since the characters in jokes can do things that tellers might not like themselves to be thought to be doing if what were heard were that the teller is a character in it. Whereas if one were to be heard as a character in it, there are lots of jokes one wouldn't tell. They wouldn't reflect well on you, for example. So, in a joke there's a specific disaffiliation between teller and the characters. A second feature of jokes is that any recipient is a possible future teller. Having heard a joke, having 'gotten' it, that's enough to be able to tell it. 1 See lecture 7 .

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48 5

A third thing is that jokes are not placed in the ways that stories are. One constraint on telling a story is that it needs to be fitted into an appropriate place in the conversation. It doesn't make its own place, and any free time that there might be, e.g., a silence occuring or whatever, is not an occasion for telling some, any, story. But jokes can make their place in a conversation. If nobody is talking one can say "I've got a joke" and tell the joke; it has no bearing on the conversation so far or thereafter. So that, as compared to stories, jokes 'go around' rather more extendedly than any particular story does. Now, one marked difference between jokes and dirty jokes is that while what holds for jokes holds for dirty jokes, there's one serious addition. Dirty jokes come with a restriction on them that says 'tell them with discretion, ' i.e. , don't tell them to just anyone. That is to say, their obscene character serves as a restriction on their passage. In effect one could say that a dirty joke is a story that comes with 'top secret' printed on it; 'pass it, but pass it with discretion. ' Tell it to only some sorts of people, not just anybody. With that kind of differentiation, let's suppose that stories, jokes, and dirty jokes contain some sort of information. Now, what sort of rational institution might dirty jokes be? One might be led to suppose that for dirty jokes, their information is their obscene information. But that would be irrational in a way which I can better propose by saying what would be rational for their use. Their obscene character serves as a restriction on their passage. If you have a way of restricting the passage of something, then plainly a use it has is to put in some other information than that, whch its restriction guarantees will only be narrowly passed. Having a vehicle which, by virtue of its dirtiness or whatever, has a restriction on it for passage, that vehicle would be rationally exploited if it were used to pass information other than just that information that restricts its use; things for which restricted passage is relevant. If there are any sorts of information which it's relevant to pass, but to restrictedly pass, then such things could be put into dirty jokes. All that the 'dirtness' aspect of the dirty joke needs to do, then, is to say 'pass with discretion, ' and it might then be simply a formal aspect of the joke having to do with its transmission and not particularly with its information. So that in some ideal form, one would have dirty jokes whose information had nothing to do with sex. What we're doing then is to examine the transmission considerations involved in something put into a story format. A story format can be powerful, but it has a short motive power. Turn it into a joke and you increase its motive power. Use the format for building a dirty joke and you preserve its increased motive power while also adding a restriction on its transmission. Under those circumstances you could put lots of information into, say, the dirty joke format. Furthermore, that information that you might put into a dirty joke format has a sort of safety to it in that, specifically, teller is not a character. So, insofar as the joke contains possibly embarassing or denegrating information, it isn't information to be affiliated to teller - nor, of course, to any recipientjfuture teller. And in that regard, the safety of it as a vehicle is also given for someone

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receiving a joke, in dramatic contrast to receiving a story. Receiving a story, i.e. , something in which teller serves as its hero, the business of a recipient is to specifically exhibit in a variety of distinct ways that they understood the information. Those include, e.g. , telling another such story in which they figure as the teller did in the first - and that's discussed in the earlier series of storytelling lectures 2 - or in other ways asserting the lesson of the story. And failing to properly assert the lesson of the story, the teller can say, "You didn't understand. ' ' Whereas, in jokes and in dirty jokes, the recipient sufficiently indicates an appreciation of the joke by laughing in an appropriately timed way, i.e. , as quickly as they can after they realize the joke is over - where, whether they understood or not is something that is private for them. So, whether they understand or not, recipient can laugh, and that suffices to bring off that they understood the joke. Furthermore, it's also in no way guaranteed or inspectable whether teller understood the joke, since what teller does is to repeat a joke they've heard, and all they need to do is be able to have the joke that was told them be available for retelling by them. So we see that there is a distinct safeness to jokes and dirty jokes as compared to stories; a safeness involving both teller and recipient; one that's in part presented in a joke telling, when a teller begins a joke by announcing that it's something he heard - not merely in the sense of it not being his experience, but that it's specifically something that he's passing on. Having preserved it correctly, then, whether he understood it or not is not to be inquired into. So that jokes can be passed among people when neither teller nor recipient understands them in the way that some others might figure that they understand them. And the knownness of that is present in our materials; one of the boys asks "How do you know she's just not repeating what she heard and doesn't know what it means. " That is to say, the boys here, who figure that they surely understand the joke, can figure that the 1 2-year-old girl who told it may not have understood it. They don't know the sister, they only know that she's 1 2 years old. What they know about jokes is that one doesn't have to understand them to retell them, much less be a person for whom what's being told is a real experience. With those kinds of features to dirty jokes, and the possibility that the dirty joke can be a vehicle for passing information which is intendedly restricted that argument having as a support for its seriousness that we have already seen that the joke is extremely elaborately put together, and it being the case that the joke is reported as having been told by a 1 2-year-old girl, I want now to argue that this is a joke for 1 2-year-old girls. It's told here by something like a 1 7 -year-old boy to a group of other more or less 1 7 -year-old boys - told by the boy as having been told to him by his 1 2-year-old sister. The boys know they understand it and they don't find it particularly funny, and they also don't figure that the girls would have understood it. I'll argue that the boys don't understand it, that the girls would understand it, and that it 2 See, e.g., Spring 1 9 7 0 , lecture 5 .

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involves some information that is distinctly and peculiarly relevant to 1 2-year-old girls. If one is thinking of a joke involving sex, then one of the kinds of questions one might ask is, if there's a drama in the joke, who is involved in the drama? And then, by reference to real persons, for whom is such a drama characteristic? Where what I'm suggesting by that is that it isn't for just anyone that the drama of sex involves, as it does here, 'mother and daughter. ' Whereas, for 1 2-year-old girls the drama of sex involves to some considerable extent, not their relationship with males, but their relationship with their parents; perhaps in particular their mothers. The conflicts about sex, dating, etc. , concern what mother will and will not allow, what mother wants to find out, etc. So the fact of a drama involving mother and daughter in the joke can indeed capture what for such persons would be a specific drama of their lives, whereas for lots of other groups that would hardly be a relevant kind of circumstance in their lives. We also have that the girls get married together. Now, while it occasionally happens that, say, two sisters get married on the same occasion, and maybe conceivably three, we might ask why that's put into the joke, and whether putting it into the joke at all reflects some interest that could be more or less distinct to, say, 1 2-year-old girls. I'd like to suggest that 1 2-year-old girls are perhaps in some way interested in sex and marriage and things like that, but I think it can be found that what they are rather more interested in is each other. That is to say, one of the really distinct features of that age group of girls is that they travel in packs, i.e. , they have a group life among themselves. And when they fantasize about a future, one of the things they know in some way is that that future will involve the end of their traveling in packs, that being replaced by, e.g. , that they get married and end up in two-person relationships, the other persons being a male. Now, one of the things they do when they fantasy about the future is attempt ways to project their pack-traveling into that future. And one characteristic feature of such fantasy is that they get married together. That's about as far as they can go as a projectable aim because they know that having gotten married, they are now split up. Indeed their getting married together might in some not too bizarre way be about the only condition under which they could accept as interesting that they have to get married. That is to say, for a group traveling in packs together, that the marriage take place in a pack is a way in which the future, of a marriage for each of them that splits the group apart, can be accommodated to their pleasure in their pack status. Notice again that in the joke the males play almost no part. They're introduced as a foil for the marriage and never appear again. So the event of the three sisters all getting married together can project a common fantasy that 1 2-year-old girls have. Now, insofar as the future of sex and marriage has an interest for them as something they could look forward to, then again a common object with which they would be occupied - and with which many others would not be occupied - is the First Night. For many of the purposes of the joke, the first

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night is an altogether incidental event. It could take place on any night. But some groups would find the first night a particularly interesting event, e.g. , those for whom a first night is a future. Having, then, some hints of a special interest that 1 2-year-old girls might have in this joke, what we're now going to do is look for interests of 1 2-year-olds in some materials the joke contains. I'll go on to do that next time.

Lecture 1 2

The dirty joke as a technical object (ctd); • • what is sex like?; ' ' Possible versus actual applicability of a rule I'm going to finish up this discussion of the joke. The interest so far has been to see that there are extremely well developed constructional forms that can be used to handle components - 'components' now being, roughly, pieces of information - in a way that allows for a story to be built our of them which is observably understandable and observably not implausible. I suggested that dirty jokes can involve a way of packaging information which is distinctly relevant to a particular group, where that packaging has a series of important virtues, i.e. , it provides that the information will be passed, and that it will be passed with discretion. I've been leading up to that this is a dirty joke for 1 2-year-old girls, and that as such it contains in it, extractable by them but perhaps not by others, information of distinct interest to them, and not of interest to others. Two sorts of such information seem to be present in the joke; one is specifically sexual and the other has nothing in particular to do with sex, but has to do with rules in general, and the way in which kids encounter rules. The sexual sort of information packaged in the joke seems to be specifically something for girls, and young girls; girls old enough to be interested in what sex is, and young enough to have only particular sorts of experiences. One such experience is that of encountering sex from behind a closed door. So: sex may be going on, it's going on behind the door, and not with you as a participant, but, e.g., with your parents as participants. A question is, what is it like? Where, encountering sex that way, what it's like is specifically ambiguous. And that is so by virtue of the fact that the sounds that might be the sounds of sex are ambiguous, i.e. , hearing them one hears sometimes sounds that seem like pleasure, sometimes sounds that seem like pain, and sometimes no sounds. So that, encountering sex that way, listening from behind a closed door - whether intendedly or overbear­ ingly - one doesn't get a solution to 'what is sex like?' but finds instead that a problem is posed: What is sex like? And furthermore, encountering it that way one faces the situation that whatever the sounds may mean, the question is, is that the way it is, or is that the way it is for my parents? Is the puzzling character of its sounds unique to my parents - they don't have fun at it or they only sometimes have fun at it - or is that the way it is for anyone? 489

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And the problem yielded by the information so encountered plainly has difficulties in getting an answer to it. It's supposedly illicitly acquired - you shouldn't have listened at the door. And a question then is, has anybody else acquired the same sort of knowledge, i.e. , have my friends also done the same thing? The illicitness of the acquisition of the information can serve to constrain getting a solution to the problem that acquiring that information yielded, i.e. , on presenting that information so as to get it checked out. As well, of course, that it's about my parents, my family, might provide a source for not telling it; for not saying to a friend, or indeed to a parent, "Listening at the door I heard . . . what does it mean, and is that the way it is?" And in that regard, then, if there were a package of information that was floating around which tells someone who knows of sex that way that, yeah, that's the way that people like us encounter sex, and indeed it is sex, and indeed it has its ambiguity; a package that could be transmitted without providing that its teller or its recipient had experiences such as the package preserves - its teller by virtue of that its teller is not a character, its recipient by virtue of that its recipient, laughing, doesn't reveal that he had such experiences - then such a package would have distinct transmission virtues. Now the second kind of thing involved here is something that the punch­ line provides for our looking into, in that it involves, as we talked of earlier, a squelch on the mother. 1 Recall that the girls being referred to have a multitude of identities in the joke. They're 'girls, ' they're 'sisters, ' they're 'wives' , and they're 'daughters. ' In the punchline, specific to the character of it as a squelch is that the one who does it is operating as a 'daughter' to 'her mother. ' Now I said that squelches are not unusual ways for jokes to close. And there is a particular type of joke for which squelches are distinctly characteristic. Those are political jokes; political in the sense of, say, conflict between groups. For such jokes, certain things are present. One is that they involve some known-to-be-lower person squelching some known-to-be­ higher categorial person, i.e. , a citizen squelching a governmental official, for example. And the victor of the interaction will characteristically have an identity which the teller has, and also the recipient has. So that we have a common identity occur between the victor, the teller, and the recipient. And in this squelch, in which 'mother' and 'daughter' are involved, the victor is the daughter. I mentioned earlier that the squelch is of the form of the use of some rule that the mother gave the daughter, as an explanation of some itself possibly wrong, violative act of the daughter's. I want to propose that with this squelch, i.e. , a rule in response to a question that might locate a violative act, we have captured here aspeas of an altogether characteristic, problematic phenomenon for children. Children in various ways learn rules. They learn them by inducing them from events, and they learn them from being told them. One sort of occasion on which they're told them is on some rule's relevance, when the rule is used 1 See lecture 1 0 , pp. 48 1 -2 .

Lecture 12

49 1

to correct some action that they did or didn't do. Now, a thing they can and do suppose is that they can be freed of correction - and whatever accompanies correction, e.g . , punishment, sanction, 'being a child' - by learning to use rules. That is to say, living under rules can provide a source of freedom for them; freedom from corrections, sanctions, and the like. All they have to do - it's not a small "all," but all they have to do is to have their activities conform with rules. It rums out that they discover, are taught, something else besides this. And that is, that the domain of a rule's possible application is not the same as the scope of its actual proper application. Instead, rules are to be used more narrowly than they might be used. Which is to say that not all occasions that any given rule might apply are the occasions on which it should be applied. This is an altogether pervasive problem. It's a problem, e.g. , in language use strictly. That is to say, when following the apparent rules of a language one comes across places where, using a rule, one ends up talking incorrectly, it happening that the language has 'irregular forms' which need to be learned separately. One very characteristic source of children's erroneous talk is that their talk is, in a way, more lawful than the language. it isn't that they're simply making an error, but their error is due to having applied some rule of grammar beyond its actual scope of application. The same goes for many, if not all other rules. That situation itself is non-unique to children. It is known for adults, by reference, e.g., to rules for which their scope of application can be precisely the kind of question that people in authority make decisions about for other people. And such decisions don't have the same sort of rule base that other decisions seem to have. The whole range of questions such as "Is this a government of laws or men?" etc., preserve that circumstance. But a distinct problem is posed for children, by virtue of the fact that in following a rule, they sometimes tum out to be behaving incorrectly and are then sanctioned by adults. What the size of that problem is, is something that they can't get a handle on, in the sense of coming up with a systematic solution. When a rule will tum out to be incorrectly applied is something they can only 'learn by experience. ' And, that rules tum out to be incorrectly applied by them is something that preserves adult authority over them. So that the dream that rule use can lead to a freedom from authority never materializes. It turns out that acquiring rules involves them on the one hand in finding constraint - that of living under the rules - and also in finding that they nonetheless are subject to the authority of those who engage in actions of correcton, sanction, etc. , for what seem like private interests - where they acquire in other ways, knowledge that adults can be capricious. Now, two sorts of things: For any given child, for whom the problem is, "I learned the rule and followed it and it turned out that sometimes - at times I wouldn't have known about beforehand - I nonetheless did wrong," the question is, is that a problem of theirs or is it a problem that is not particularly theirs? That is to say, it's their parents who taught them what seem to be general rules; rules having nothing to do with their parents. It's from their

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parents that they induced rules that seem to have nothing to do with their parents. But it's their parents who inform them of the violations that their rule use has produced. A question is, "Is it that my parents are introducing all these exceptions, or is it that that's the nature of the game?' ' Is it a 'my problem' or an 'anybody's problem'? How would anybody ever learn that it's not a 'my problem, ' that it's an 'anybody's problem'? Where it's easy enough to suppose that insofar as it's my parents that introduce the corrections, and obviously have an interest in preserving their authority over me that way, then it's my parents who use rules against me that way. That's one sort of thing. The other is that one charaaeristic way that parents do that correcting is to juxtapose some rules: ' 'You applied rule X here, but rule X doesn't apply here, rule Y applies here. " What children are then learning about problems of rule use is that at some places where a rule might apply, it's not that nothing applies but that some different rule applies. And the question then, in part, is learning which rules apply in any given scene; a problem which seemingly has to be handled empirically. In evolving ways of dealing with that problem, a special skill is to be learned which involves mobilizing multiplicities of rules to be juxtaposed against each other in handling circumstances. So, as adults characteristically use a rule to correct a child's intendedly rule-governed activity, one thing that can and does occur is the child using a rule to counterpose a proposed violation. Children come to learn to answer complaints about possible rule violations by introducing another rule which yields the very thing that is being treated as a violation. And they get a special kick out of it. So they can be motivated to acquire skill in rule manipulation by reference to the way that that can save them in situations of possible sanction. They can be found to be acquiring skill in the use of rules, to do things like make excuses. What will have happened is, having done something possibly wrong - ideally something that they know has no rule for it - they can come up with an offered rule as why they did it, and, again ideally, a rule that they were told to follow by that one who is now threatening to sanction them. This is one perfect fantasy solution for children who live with the authority of adults. And just such a thing is what the punchline here involves. The punchline has, then, one of the specific ways that children dream of turning the tables on adults present in it. It is then of specific interest to - if not 1 2-year-old girls specifically, then 1 2-year-old girls among other children. So, while there are various sorts of squelches, this sort of squelch is specifically the child-desired squelch. Therein we would find one way in which what's proposedly characteristic of some dirty jokes, i.e. , their hostile sense, is present here. And with this squelch we find one way in which this joke can be understood and appreciated by kids who have come to deal with the problem of the scope and domain of rules' applications; a way which others would hardly focus on as of any interest. That it has this thing, and that it involves a child using it and coming out a victor, seems then to be a specific occupation of this joke. And one that has nothing particularly to do with sex. The dirty joke, then, contains information and a drama that has nothing particularly to

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do with sex, but that does have particular interest for the group within which it might pass; where these are groups that do not have obvious other sorts of vehicles for transmitting information relevant just for them. That is to say, there's no child's newsletter that transmits distinctive information relevant to them. But, recalling my discussion about the transmissability of jokes and the transmissability of dirty jokes with a 'discretion' marker on them, then these sorts of things can move within the groups interested in them, informing its members of problems, solutions, fantasies, possible outcomes, of distinct interest to just those groups, in the way that, e.g. , private newsletters for small or large stockholders can do that kind of a job, or a motorcycle magazine can do that for motorcyclists. So we're dealing with what are learned in the first instance as possibly unique problems, possibly just my problems: Possibly just my fantasy solution to it, in the case of the rules; possibly just my parents' problem or my lack of knowledge of what it means, in the case of the sounds of sex. But both of these are distinctly problems of persons of a certain age, and in the case of the sounds of sex, more or less distinctively the problems of girls, i.e. , the sounds of pain are at least characteristically thought of as female sounds - if not some of the sounds of pleasure. So that the joke can then serve to package information which any of such persons interested in such information can pull out of it and see to be not merely 'mine' but 'ours. ' The joke passes, of course, in another guise; as simply an oral sex joke. I would propose, however, that there are a variety of themes of dirty jokes, of which oral sex is one, which in no way discriminate jokes in terms of their transmission. That is to say, oral sex jokes are told by all sorts of groups, where, however, not all oral sex jokes are treated as equivalently funny, equivalently reliable, by any group that tells oral sex jokes. So that the boys here don't find it particularly funny, but also know that they understand it ­ where what they understand is not the same sort of thing as 1 2-year-old girls would possibly see in it. And the fact that the boys don't find it funny doesn't mean that they wouldn't tell, and find funny, other oral sex jokes. So what happens is, it gets into their hands, it's not going to go anywhere, and furthermore, they're not going to see what's in it for others, since they figure they understand it and also doubt that the girls would understand it - which may or may not be true for its oral sex aspeas, but would have nothing to do with whether it's true for these other things it contains - that 'daughters' are involved, that they get married in packs, that it takes place the first night, etc. - which can turn them on to its special interest for them. Where, again, they can distinctively understand the power of the squelch solution. They are the victors in it. And the victor in it is a victor in just the way they will have dreamt of being a victor; if not for some sexual matter, then for some situation of rule use. In that regard, a chance feature of our materials - that the joke is told by 1 7 -year-old boys - turns out to be relevant to appreciating that the story form can be adapted to the joke and dirty joke form, to get itself moved and to have kinds of information put into it that differentiated groups would be interested

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in. Because one sees that the boys don't like it, they figure they understand it, they understand it by reference to its oral sex. So at least that aspect of it, that it is safe - i.e. , it could pass among others and they wouldn't know what they had - gets some sort of support. All in all, why this thing is so intricately put together can be given an account, having to do with that it has a very serious job. It isn't intricately put together simply to bring off the oral sex punchline, because the question is, why would effort, anonymous effort, be devoted to building these things? And unless there were some serious business they do, then that becomes obscure. They live and pass on rather extensively, no one having a particular interest in telling them - as for ordinary stories one might, having been in them. In this case it's precisely the situation that if one were in them, one would be hesitent to tell.

Lecture 1 3

Two floor-seizure' techniques.· Appositional expletives and "Vh " The thing I'm going to talk about this time turns out to have a series of aptnesses to it; to what's just ensued, and to what's seasonally forthcoming. It's a Christmas story, and it's about - among other things - private feelings and their public expression. But I'll begin with something not particularly related to the sorts of things I want to focus on about the content of the two stories which make up the fragment, but present in the fragment and related in a fashion. And that is the beginning, "Oh God! Christmas has gotten so damned painful! ' ' 1 Bob :

Oh, God! Christmas has gotten so damn painful! You know there's always this great no one likes what they're getting. You know what I mean? So you say, "thank you, " and like my mom, "shit, when's that guy gonna learn that I don't want an electric skillet, I wanna coat, or I wanna sweater, "

I t has a form to it which I would like to develop a basis of. The form is an utterance which goes something like this: A word or brief phrase, comma, sentence. In linguistics it could be talked of as an 'appositional construction, ' and there are other instances of that sort of thing present in these materials, e.g. , "Shit, when's that guy going to learn that I don't want an electric skillet, I want a coat or a sweater. " So we get "Shit" or "Oh God" or a variety of things like that; some expletive, followed by a sentence. A question is, are there some interactional bases for utterance constructions like that? There are some kinds of relatively obvious things one can say about them in the first place, one of which is that it looks like there is a relationship in which the expletive previews the business of the utterance. So that, e.g. , "Oh God" expresses a pain, and "Christmas has gotten so damn painful' ' explains the pain that's been expressed. With the expletive, then, one is told to listen to the sentence that follows, by reference to what the expletive expresses; to hear what follows as an account of how come the expletive was produced. And that kind of thing, in which one prefaces a construction by a 'reading rule' for what follows, is altogether common. Of course a question is, well why should you preface what, after all, is itself kind of plain? That " Christmas has gotten so damn painful" ts a 1Transcriber unknown. For the full fragment see Winter 1 97 1 , March 4 lecture.

49 5

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complaint, an expression of annoyance is plain enough; why would one have to say beforehand, ' ' I'm now going to say something in which I complain or express annoyance. " It's not as if the sentence that follows cannot itself be readily decoded. The answer is perhaps one for which one needs a consider­ ation of some of the rather basic rules of the organization of conversation. I'm intending, then, to take a typical syntactic form - here, appositional constructions - and give it a motivation out of rules of conversation. Let me begin with a different thing; something that looks somewhat alike to 'expletive, comma, sentence, ' and that is an utterance that goes "Uh, ' ' comma, sentence. A kind of common way that utterances are constructed is that the utterance is begun with an "Uh," then there's a pause, then a sentence. One might not think of them as constructed that way, but they are constructed that way. Obviously that does not have the same kind of syntactic organization as 'expletive, pause, sentence. ' That is to say, you could cut off the "Uh" altogether - but in a way, you could cut the expletive off altogether. In any event, a question is, is there some basis for beginning sentences with the "Uh," pause, sentence form? And I'll develop an account of why that's done which would put us in a position to see why the other is done. The 'why' having nothing much to do with persons' motives particularly, but with the ways in which the organization of conversation has this be done as a systematic event. The problem has to do with how persons get the floor. Roughly, there are two sorts of ways persons get the floor. One is that someone selects them to speak. In particular, the current speaker selects the next speaker. That doesn't mean that current speakers always select next speakers, but if anyone is selecting a next speaker it's current speaker. So one can get the floor by being selected, and one is selected by the last speaker. The other way that one gets the floor is by self-selecting oneself. Those two are not equally alternative options. Obviously they can't be. Obviously if they are both going to be present, then that current speaker selects a next speaker has to be preferred. Otherwise current speaker could select a next and self-selection could be done, and one would get two or more people starting. So we have a situation in which that current speaker selects next speaker is the first possibility. If current speaker has not selected a next, then self-selection can be used. Now, if self-selection is possible, a question when there are three or four or more present is, how does one get what one gets with current-selects-next, i.e. , that only one speaks? Various people could self-select themselves, and one would then get two or three people talking. But that's not what happens. The rule is 'first starter has rights to speak. ' (None of this is very obscure.) So, if first starter has rights to speak, then there is an issue of rapidly positioning the beginning of an utterance relative to the end of some prior one. A consequence of that is that one gets very fine relationships between utterance doses and next-utterance starts, particularly where no one has been selected. That is to say, where someone has been selected, then in that they have the floor they could take a bit of time before they start. If, however, no one has been selected and one wants to get next position, then the possibility that someone else

Lecture 1 3

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might want to get that position will involve that speakers will attempt to place the beginning of their utterance as close to the end of the last as they can. And it's a non-rare, really common occurrence that they do it so that there's no gap between the end of a last and the beginning of a next. So that if there's a seeming completion and no one has been selected, then the silence that ensues is such a silence as anyone's talk can occupy, and the beginning of someone's talk involves that they now seize the floor. Once they've seized the floor they have exclusive rights to produce an utterance. One could expect, then, that persons would attempt to seize the floor and have ways of attempting to seize the floor which would stand in some independence of having already prepared an utterance. That is to say, they could do it before they had formed up the sentence they were going to say. Which would then lead one to an expectation of a partial separation between what they seize the floor with - that being an issue of getting it in first - and what they're going to say. Once they've seized the floor there can be a silence. That silence is now not a silence in the conversation such that anybody can start talking, but a silence in the course of their utterance, i.e. , a pause. If the argument so far is so, then one expects that there are pure floor seizure techniques of which "uh" might be just such a thing, if it occurs close to - if not precisely on - the end of a prior utterance and is followed by a silence (the silence now being a pause within the utterance of someone who has taken the floor) and then a sentence. One doesn't, then, produce "uh" because one is hesitating with what one is going to say, but one produces "uh" to get the floor so as to be able to say what one isn't prepared to say. If one is hesitant with what one is going to say, one could after all say nothing yet. However, if one says nothing yet, then someone else may take the floor. So, routinely one doesn't get utterance completion, silence, new sentence start, but utterance completion, "uh," silence now, new sentence start. Obviously there can be various states of preparation for producing an utterance. If one wants to produce an utterance on a latter speaker's completion, then while one may not have it formed up, one may well be in a position where one knows the effect of what one wants to say. One may know that one wants to 'disagree,' or say something 'positive, ' or 'complain' or be 'joyous' or varieties of other such things. Then one might be in a position to not simply claim the floor but to also give some materials as to why one is claiming the floor, and thereby put persons in a position of beginning to work on what one will have said. That is to say, one can provide them with something other than "uh," something that tantalizes, that partially is a puzzle in a different way than "uh" is a puzzle; something about which, in the pause that follows, they can be asking why that was said, for which they will now be attending what's said next as an answer. And expletives are just such an object. An expletive will work to seize the floor, and in it one hears, e.g . , an expressed emotion, without hearing why it's expressed, and with respect to which one knows that one can listen to the sentence that follows the expletive plus its pause, to see why it was said.

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So the appositional form - particularly the appositional form with an expletive beginning - can then be seen to be a floor seizure device that will allow time, after the floor has been seized, to form up the utterance-sentence that it previews, where it also indicates not simply that I want the floor but that at the point at which I say I want the floor I know the sort of thing I'm going to say. Where, again, the appositional format has as its source that non-selected speakers can seize the floor and once having seized it they needn't produce talk consecutively to retain it. That is to say, they do not have to fill all the time of their current rum with talk, but they can produce pauses in that current rum and nonetheless yet have the floor. But they don't have the floor unless they've initially done seizure of it. Once they have the floor they can have silences of various lengths at various points in their talk without others taking over. Now in that regard, "uh" may be considerably weaker than an expletive, in the sense that "uh" plus a relatively extended silence will get someone else starting up, whereas it may be that using an expletive you get a longer time to form up your utterance. So then, the fact that one begins with something that can be read to preview what one wants to be saying, that that's done appositionally, that it's done appositionally with a pause following it, that it's done appositionally with a pause following it and a sentence following that, are orderly fearures of utterance construction for a system that has first startership as a way to get the floor. And the preview-explanation relationship between expletive and sentence is consequent on those sorts of things.

Lecture 1 4

The workings of a list; Doing 'hostility' Bob :

Ted : Kim : Bob :

Kim : Bob : Ted : Bob :

Oh, god! Christmas has gotten so damn painful! You know there's always this great no one likes what they're getting. You know what I mean? So you say, "thank you," and like - my mom, "shit, when's that guy gonna learn that I don't want an electric skillet, I wanna coat, or I wanna sweater, " and uhWell, doesn't she make any attempt to even hint, or evenWhat's even funnier is, his father said, "Well after 2 5 years, I don't think we're gonna give presents. " And that's just ridiculous! It's just that, becuz presents are so important to her, and so, he uh she was involved in this teamsters strike that went on that really cut into their resources cuz they'd also my mother went to Florida twice and my father had to go to New York. So jeez! They were pretty low! And so my father, you know, was being very rational about it. "Well you know we just haven't got much. Let's get things for the kids and you and I'll forget it, you know. " So, the day before, Christmas afternoon, we were over there, and Kim was in talking to mother. And then Kim came out to me and said that my mother had gotten my father just scads and scads of presents. And she said that, uh, and Kim said that my mother was afraid that my father hadn't gotten her anything. So I was supposed to go out and feel out my father and see if he'd gotten her anything. (laughs) We should've just left everything alone! - No. I'm glad we didn't. But, my father'd gotten her a lighter. (laughs) a little Zippo. (laughs) - At least it was for her use. Yeah, yeah. She liked it, sure. 1

I'll begin by examining a relationship between the first quoted thing the mother says, "Shit, when's that guy going to learn that I don't want an electric skillet, I want a coat, or I want a sweater, " and Ted's response, "At least it was for her use," to Bob's announcement, "But my father'd gotten her 1Transcriber unknown. For full fragment, see Winter 1 9 7 1 , March 4 lecture.

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a lighter. A little Zippo. " I want to propose that Ted's remark picks up on, not just Bob's announcement but also the mother's earlier quoted remark, and that it exhibits one rather formal product of an analysis that Ted has thereby shown himself to have been doing of Bob's story. With regard to maybe the most obvious topic in the study of communication, i.e. , do people understand each other? How do they understand each other? What do they understand? we can examine this material for, not just an exhibiting of that understanding takes place, but a way in which the understanding that gets done and shown, involves more or less formal operations. Let's look for a bit at the mother's remark, presumably produced in her husband's absence, presumably with a recipient being either son or daughter­ in-law. Among the sorts of jobs being done in the utterance is that it expresses concern with the husband's learning something, but it also turns out to be itself educational, in that it proposes what's not wanted and what is wanted. And a thing to initially fix on about what's wanted and what's not wanted is that there's a difference in their number. One thing is noted as not wanted and rwo things are noted as wanted, with their status being alternative ("I don't want an electric skillet" and "I want a coat or I want a sweater"). A question is, why does she have two things that she wants, and what will people make of that? At least an initial suggestion is that if she says "I want a coat" then presumably she wants a coat. But if she says "I want a coat or I want a sweater, " then it isn't that she wants one or both of those, but, giving rwo things, it may be that she's thereby locating a sort of thing she wants, where something else would also satisfy that, in a way in which something else might not satisfy "I want a coat. " The presentation of what she wants is, then, to be treated as instantial by virtue of the alternatives. That is to say, perhaps it's not a list which is specifically exclusive in its full character, i.e. , "I don't want an electric skillet, I want either a coat or a sweater. " Instead it might be, "I don't want something like an electric skillet (whatever sort of a something that is), what I want is something that can be seen to contrast with an electric skillet, of which a coat or a sweater are instances. " And that, then, is to propose a way she could be producing this utterance and also a way in which she could be heard to be locating what she does want and what she doesn't want. If we then look to what Ted says, "At least it was for her use, " we may find that he's examined the Zippo for its relationship to the prior asserted items and found that the Zippo is more like a coat or a sweater than it is like an electric skillet, it standing as a sort of thing she wanted as compared to a sort of thing she didn't want. And I talk of it as a formal matter by virtue of that such a classification operation could obviously be performed - dividing the rwo groups, attempting to extract their differences; e.g. , a kitchen item for the mother's use in doing things for the family versus something for her own private use, something to wear or things like that. The question then would be, how does the Zippo stand, relative to those rwo groups, such that he can conclude that it belongs in the latter group and is thereby, if only minimally, a good gift.

Lecture 1 4

501

Ted has, then, treated the Zippo by reference to an analysis o f the classification that can underly the way in which she produced her alternatives. And to do that is to show that he caught on to what she was saying in her proposal. Where, in a way, that could involve not just catching on to her proposed wants and dis-wants, but perhaps to their delivery as something intendedly educative. That is to say, from "when is somebody going to learn that I want this and that, ' ' he could himself try to learn what she wants, and then monitor what she gets by virtue of what he himself has learned. It's not, then, like he's monitoring the father's gift by virtue of himself independently knowing what she would figure to be correct or wrong, but by virtue of his having used her assertion to learn what it is that she might have wanted. We can then say that Ted subjected this bunch of talk to an attentive, analytic way of listening to it, which he then kept in mind to be used by reference to the actually-bought item. It turns out that the same would hold for the gift that Bob and Kim bought, a bracelet. Bob : Ted : Bob : Kim : Bob :

But, my father' d gotten her a lighter. (laughs) a little Zippo. (laughs) At least it was for her use. Yeah, yeah. She liked it, sure. So we went outSo we went out and bought her a bracelet. And then, we had this tremendous problem of how, now we don't want my mother to know that we did this . . .

It, too, exhibits an education from the mother's initial proposal, presumably falling on the same 'wanted' side. Notice that what Bob has talked of as the problem is, did the father get her anything, which is simply delivered in terms of number, i.e. , "and my mother had gotten my father just scads and scads of presents, " with the father's gift delivered as a ' one little thing. ' So, presumably Bob and Kim could have helped the father out had they but gotten her a variery of some other things. However, they don't just get her three or four any other things, or any one other thing. What they get is a ' one other thing' that also is such a thing as she might have wanted, given her statement of what she wanted. Which, again, is not treated by Bob and Kim as what they should get her. If Bob and Kim treated what she said as, not classificatory but a list, then presumably they could satisfy her by going out and, instead of buying a bracelet, buying a sweater - which they don't do. And nobody says "How come you bought her a bracelet? She wanted a sweater. " Where, of course, in delivering wants, insofar as one is delivering wants about gifts - which are supposed to be chosen by the giver, where the giver is supposed to be not just buying you an X but buying you a present - the wants should be delivered as instantial, i.e. , one doesn't properly isolate items as "That's what I want and nothing else . " Consider "I want a coat or a sweater and he bought me a new car. " And in that regard, 'coat and

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sweater' are not only for her in particular, they also have a possible price range involved in them. They're not, in some fashion, her fantasy gifts, they're realistic gifts. So, it's apparently evident to all that the kind of operation that Ted did is correct, that the kind of thing the father bought was correct, and that the kind of thing that Bob and Kim bought is also correct. All of those things perhaps turning on the list that presumably was available to Bob and Kim, and that is made available to Ted. Where perhaps in making it available to Ted, Bob makes available the sensibility of the thing that he will have turned out to have bought. That is to say, he doesn't have to put the list into the story at all. But Bob having put it in, Ted uses it for the father's gift. He could also use it to see the reasonableness of Bob and Kim's gift - though presumably were he to deal with the list otherwise, i.e. , empirically and not formally, he could find it a strange thing to do: "If you wanted to satisfy her and you knew what she wanted, why did you buy her something else?' ' Now I want to return to the mother's remark, as a complaint against the father. As such, it carries at least an aspect of its hostility to the father in a usual place for putting in intended hostilities, and that is in the way in which he's referred to, "that guy" being a way of exhibiting some sort of intended hostility. Now, a reference to a person is one obvious place that can be packed with endearments and hostilities, as one can also do varieties of other things there, some of which have been talked about earlier, e.g. , when I discussed types of identifications - those intended to indicate that the recipient knows the one being referred to, and those intended to indicate that the person is not known to the recipient. 2 Here he's referred to as "that guy. " How is "that guy" hostile? "That guy" can be a perfectly reasonable, non-hostile characterization of somebody, as compared to "that son of a bitch" or "that dope", which have rather weaker potential for being turned into merely a way of referring to someone. So "that guy" is then hostile not by virtue of that the term is hostile, but by virtue of other things. One obvious facet of those are that the person being so referred to is her husband and the recipient's father or father-in-law, and the term used makes it a task to determine from it who's being referred to, where such a person can be altogether readily characterized in a way that doesn't provide such a task. I'm not saying it's a difficult task; it's a task differently than is "When is your father going to learn" or "When is Bill going to learn" or whatever. And again, that doesn't necessarily convey a hostile intention, though it can be a component in producing a hostile charaaerization. Also, "that guy" is a reference to someone who, its use suggests, is relatively distant from the parties involved. One will use a term like 'guy' where either you don't know the person's name or the recipient doesn't know the person's name, and in that sense they're not well-known persons, and in using the term you indicate at least that sort of distance between speaker and the person or recipient and the person. "Just a guy I 2 See lectures 5 and 6 .

Lecture 1 4

503

know. " "Some guy who's name I forgot, " as compared to "Bill . " Now, plainly the person involved is not such a person. He's not distantly related or distantly unrelated. And plainly, a way of producing a hostile reference to someone is to increase the apparent distance via the use of a reference to them, beyond the actual known distance. Altogether simple instances involve, for families, instead of "our child, " referring to "your child: " "You know what your daughter did today?" - which is for that moment to remove her from what's also so, that she's "my daughter. " So, picking a term that asserts a distance that solving its reference will yield to be no such distance, is plainly a way of producing hostile references. One can, then, do the hostility by reference to that use of an apparent distance which will not, however, create a puzzle. That is to say, it's by virtue of the utter solvability of who's being referred to that the distance term can work to exhibit hostility. One needs somehow to already know that it's the father being talked of, so that you use the term to see he's being 'talked of as distanced, ' rather than using the term to try to find the person and thereby find you don't know who's being talked of, since plainly it couldn't be the father, since he isn't someone who's at that distance, and could be much more directly referred to. So, "that guy" will isolate an intended distance involved. And "guy" has a rather nicer relationship yet; one that we can approach by considering some alternatives and the way they would fit to the complaint. Consider a term like "When is that dope going to learn. " In calling him a dope, one has picked a term that fits the complaint very nicely. What's being complained of is that he doesn't learn, and the term used is 'dope, ' which would very nicely satisfy a complaint in which an assertion of lack of learning is done. But, while both 'guy' and 'father' are possibly identifying characterizations, 'dope' isn't. 'Dope' just says 'I'm hostile to someone and find out who I'm hostile to by virtue of dumb things they did which I may tell you about in the course of my utterance. ' But, again, 'dope' is very nicely fitted to a complaint about a lack of learning. Now I want to suggest that in this case, 'guy' is a term like 'dope,' in this sense: As one characteristic use of "that guy" is for someone whose name I don't know, then the accusation that he hasn't learned about her, can be claimed, in a non-serious fashion about herself about him. We all know about such a thing as, in trying to think of the name of someone one's angry at, one can't. I'm not suggesting that in trying to think of a way of referring to him when she's angry, she can't find it. What I'm suggesting is that in her concern for "after all these years that we've lived together he still doesn't know what I want, ' ' then a way to show her anger about that is to say " . . . whoever he is. " The upshot is, then, it may be that a term of reference to a person can carry not just such a thing as one's hostility towards them, but the sort of hostility one has; the reason for your hostility, or the consequences of your hostility, for example.

Lecture 1 5

'Fragile ' stories; On being 'rational' A question I want to raise is: Consider the variety of kinds of jobs that forming up a story might have for someone. For one, the sorts of relationships building a story out of some events might have to the character of those events. There are varieties of obvious options involved. There can be, e.g . , the production of a story simply devoted to telling about some interesting or amazing or extremely odd thing that happened to you, where in telling it, a thing you're asking of the recipient is, say, " Isn't that odd?" and they tell you "Yeah it's odd" or "No it's not odd . " One can think of varieties of ways that the job of a story can fit an event. Now, in the light of that one option - and there are plainly plenty of others - I want to introduce another sort, having to do with this possibility: Some rather complex events have happened, and a thing you're trying out is whether you can put together a more or less compelling version of them, that version isolating one or another of the happened things, to find "That's what happened, isn't it?" "I have a correct version of it, don't I?" What's involved, then, is that you may in some fashion present to your audience materials which are more complicated than your story has them, where your audience could suggest about the proposed upshot of your story that you may not have it right. Of course it would be curious if you gave them materials to allow them to say you may not have it right, but varieties of bases for that could be found. For one, the sheer announcement of a story involving, say, family troubles can tell that we're going to get a biased version of it. But the sort of thing I want to be talking about here is that you have in mind a bunch of things that happened, and as you're forming the story up, parts of it that you're not forming up as the story nevertheless appear in it. And by that I mean things like, in the Christmas story Bob's version has it that nothing is to be made of the money that he and Kim spent on the bracelet. Bob :

Jan : Ted :

5 04

So we went out and bought her a bracelet. And then, we had this tremendous problem of how, now we don't want my mother to know that we did this, but how are we gonna give it to my father without hurting his feelings? Oh, shit! And we ---- finally got it to him. I don't know, we spent about an hour and a half trying to figure out, "Now, how the shit are we gonna manage this thing?" I don't know how we did, butHe probably knew. I know just what you mean. We go through this thing every year. My father said, "No gifts. " And we tried to analyze what-

Lecture 15 Bob : Ted :

505

Does "no gifts" mean no gifts, or does it mean more gifts? ---+ No, he, he gave us one reason why "No gifts. " And I was questioning the reason. I didn't think it was his a legitimate reason. I don't think it was his real reason.

So, nothing is to be made of the money that Bob and Kim spent on the bracelet, where, listening to the story, one could easily enough figure that they might have some feeling about having to have spent the money. And he may have left some aspect of that in the story when he says ' 'We spent about an hour and a half, ' ' which focusses on, not that they spent money but that they spent time. Or consider, e.g. , that when Ted complains of his father's "No gifts" decision, he doesn't complain about - he maybe very carefully avoids any suggestion that he was bothered by - not getting gifts. Bur in a way, some such possible complaint, which the story is built to avoid, bur which a recipient plainly could raise, is left in when he does a thing like saying "he gave us one reason. " Where one could hear that "one reason" is something not alternative to "a compelling reason, " but alternative to "giving us something else. " There is, then, an aspect of both stories as possibly fragile. By that I mean that a recipient could say, "That's not what happened is it, really?" That is to say, first Bob and then Ted are in no way assertedly bothered by not getting any presents, though they are complaining by reference to there being no presents. And those are delicate paths to be able to move amongst safely. Bob's story could easily be heard as one in which he is after all complaining because it looked like they weren't going to get anything, and anything else he says rationalizes that. And Ted is after all complaining because his father said that he wasn't going to get anything, but he's proposing that he's bothered by the reasons, not by the no gifts. So there's a way in which the two stories can be seen as ordering materials out of alternative versions of what transpired, such that a recipient could, from the materials nonetheless left in there, pick away at it as to whether what happened is other than your version of it. Of course one can adduce reasons why one or another recipients might not do that. In this case there can be good reasons why Ted doesn't do it, one of which is that if he doesn't do it, having such a story himself, then his second story supports Bob's and is supported by Bob's. That is to say, if he supports Bob and thereby gets a chance to form up his story as "See, I wasn't annoyed either by not getting a present, what I was annoyed by was that he didn't seem to have a good reason for it, " then it's not likely that Bob is going to say, "Oh come on, you were just bothered because he didn't give you something. " So that there's a situation in which just letting the version go can serve to have the two of them, as it's said, wash each other's hands. 1 I've offered some allusions to possible ways that a story might be fragile or weak. Where, while any story might be heard in a way that leads to a questioning or a doubting of the version the teller gives, this one has 1 The discussion co this point comes from lecture 1 4 , pp. 1 0- 1 4 of the unedited lectures.

5 06

Part VII

discoverably formal sources for its possible fragility. Saying it in a sentence for now, they have to do with that the stories involve a character who happens to be the teller here, doubting the motives, reasons, things of that order, of another character, where the doubting that's been introduced could, readily in this case, be applied to the teller-character's report of his own behavior. So: That the story involves doubts, where one might extract the doubts and reapply them to the teller-character, yields one sort of characterizably formal basis for the story having a fragility to it. Where what's of interest in some ways is that it can be told and not have its fragility exploited by a recipient. And there may be bases for, and some sorts of assurances that, the fragility won't be exploited. Those can be kind of readily gotten at also, and have to do with - again, in a sentence - the possible similarly situated character of the recipients to the teller. In this case they, too, are children of parents, and in a position of being the proper recipients of gifts, such that they might well - as they turn out in this case to be - ones who have a similarly fragile story to tell. There's another sort of fragility the story has, which is perhaps not quite so obvious. That has to do with a relationship that is by and large suppressed in the story as a possible source of difficulties, and that's the relationship between spouses insofar as it deals with Bob and Kim. Which is to say that what takes place between them goes largely unsaid, particularly what takes place between them that could in various ways parallel the difficulties that take place between the spouses who are spoken of, i.e. , the parents. The parents reportedly have problems about getting gifts for each other, are sensitive to each other, unable to talk to each other about how to deal with getting gifts for each other, need intermediaries to deal with that. That there might be such problems closer to home, i.e. , involving Bob and Kim, goes unsaid. And furthermore, how these two went about dealing with dealing with the parents' problems goes unsaid. So, e.g. , we have the assertion of the father's problem, the assertion of the discovery of the father's having gotten "a little Zippo, " and then, "So we went out and bought her a bracelet. " Where, how they came to arrive at that, whether they were initially altogether in agreement about that, is unsaid. That is to say, there are a series of ways in which Kim might turn out to be a non-ally, i.e. , she could turn out to argue with Bob's version of the story. And that would involve, now, an interaction in which locally present persons are conflicted. It could lead to, say, the development of an alliance between Bob and Ted and one between Kim and Jan, in which their own conflicts about gifts emerge. And there are hints of it present, having to do with, e.g., that Kim proposes "We should have just left everything alone. " Bob : Kim : Bob :

-+

So I was supposed to go out and feel out my father and see if he'd gotten her anything. (laughs) We should've just left everything alone! No. I'm glad we didn't. But my father'd gotten her a lighter. (laughs) a little Zippo. (laughs)

Lecture 15

507

And there's a possible sense in which that source of what could turn out to be a present conflict is picked up on, e.g . , via Jan's remark "He probably knew. " Bob : jan : Ted :

--

I don't know, we spent about an hour and a half trying to figure out, "Now, how the shit are we gonna manage this thing?" I don't know how we did, butHe probably knew. I know just what you mean. We go through this thing every year.

Where does that come from, and to whom is she talking when she says it? I'm guessing a possibility that "He probably knew" is responsive to Kim's inserted remarks in the story, where Jan, as 'also a wife' is talking to Kim, telling Kim "I kind of see that you don't have quite the same view of the whole thing as Bob has. " My interest in mentioning this is, I offered some hints about a way that the story can be fragile, having to do with Bob's version of it being subject to treatment by Ted and Jan which could turn into other than what he's forming up. Now I'm suggesting that Bob's version is subject as well to treatment by Kim, which could have it be other than the version he's formed up. And each of those possibilities yields a rather different interactional development than we get here. I want to devote