Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics
Alec McHoul
Part Two
From Formalism and Ethnomethodology to Ethics
Chapter 13
Converse Communities
For Penrose, numbers have meaning by virtue of their truth-functionality; his position on meaning is a Platonic realist position. Effective semiotics is able to describe how that theory of meaning works inside the community of mathematics in order for them to perform a kind of gatekeeping operation. But it would not be able to take on board a truth-functional theory of meaning as its "own" theory, if only because Platonic realism is unable to provide descriptions of other communities' ethno-semiotic positionings. For example, it can find fault with mathematical intuitionism, but it cannot describe it in its own terms. Could effective semiotics, then, use an intuititionist position on meaning as the basis of its description of community relevances? Just now, we have seen that the social/historical phenomena of plausibility, understanding and competence may be more deeply ingrained (for any study of communication) than questions of truth and falsehood - and so intuitionism might fit well with this position. So let's explore it a bit further.
Outside mathematics, intuitionism is usually known as social constructionism. It holds that meanings arise because of various forms of community agreements or contracts. One subdivision of this position, psychological constructionism, would obviously be of little relevance to effective semiotics itself: precisely because it forms its idea of community out of a consensus of like minds. This is not a sufficiently materialist version of community since it ignores the social/historical dimension of plausibility, understanding and community competence. On the other hand, a fully social constructionism might bring us closer to a workable and pluralist position which was able to describe whatever community relevances we might locate empirically in texts, transcripts, photographs and so on. But there is a further problem with such a hermeneutic theory of meaning: namely, that it locates meaning as arising from community consensus. Why is this a problem? Can communication ever occur in situations which work without deep-seated forms of consensus?
Put more simply: if signs cannot be said to "mean" by virtue of their attachment to fixed realities, if questions of absolute truth are no longer available, do we then have to be satisfied with the idea that some kind of social consensus or contract must be the "key" to communication? Can't we go any further than this?
The traditional formulation of the hermeneutic view - that communication is always and irrevocably underpinned by consensus - is to be found in Gadamer. For Gadamer, consensus cannot be overthrown. Even when "surface" misunderstandings occur, they are "based" on a deeper, underlying ground of understanding. For example: if a misunderstanding is even to be recognized as such, then the participants must have at least the same recognition procedures in common. In Gadamer's own words: "Is it not, in fact, the case that every misunderstanding presupposes a 'deep common accord' (tiefes Einverständnis)?"1
In a later formulation of the problem - set up as a critique of Gadamer - Habermas argues that consensus can and often does lead to "distortions" of communication. Yet while he is skeptical of ever being able to give precise details of the "deep common accord," Habermas nevertheless shares Gadamer's idea that it must exist (perhaps in some imponderable form):
Is it not ... the case that something like a "supporting consensus" precedes all misunderstanding? We can agree on the answer, which is to be given in the affirmative, but not on how to define this preceding consensus.2
His in-principle agreement with Gadamer emerges even more strongly in the paper "What is Universal Pragmatics?":
In other contexts one ... speaks of "general presuppositions of communication," but I prefer to speak of general presuppositions of communicative action because I take the type of action aimed at reaching understanding to be fundamental. Thus I start from the assumption (without undertaking to demonstrate it here) that other forms of social action - for example, conflict, competition, strategic action in general - are derivative of action oriented to reaching understanding [verständigungsorientiert].3
Note that, in the case of both Gadamer and Habermas, the assumption of foundational understandings is just that: an assumption - or rather a stipulation of faith or (perhaps) of methodology. To this extent, it is not unlike Penrose's faith in mathematical realism discussed in chapter 12 (above). One simply begins this way out of a kind of conviction that this is how the world must be: that even the horrible must depend on the happy, the actual on the ideal.
In some Wittgensteinian and ethnomethodological traditions, this ideal of a deep consensus, or "common accord" is taken up in the form of an appeal to the deep-seated "logical grammar" of everyday language. This must be shared by all participants alike if communications - even "surface" conflictual communications - are to take place at all.4 But - and this is my central argument - when communications take place between parties who are acting in those communications specifically as members of different and distinct communities, is it not possible that what will be contested will be precisely the respective "consensuses" or grounds of each community?
In our earlier discussion of indexicality (chapter 9), we saw that the in-principle open-endedness of utterances could, in practice, come to be closed or at least narrowed by the communicative work of a specific community - or, indeed, that some communities can work towards an opening and dispersal of indexical particulars such that ambiguity, inconclusiveness, and so on would be required and expected outcomes of "competent" communication. In that chapter I wrote that a critical semiotics "would leave open the possibility that not all social/discursive practice actually achieves social order (let alone 'consensus') but that some instances have such things as disorder, conflict, contradiction, struggle, antagonism (and so on) not merely as actional achievements but as part of their taken-for-granted background and foundation." Presumably this is going to be even more acutely the case when different community relevances are at stake. Let us look at some examples.
The following account is purely illustrative - and fictional. But I think it represents something that can happen in conversation:
the dinner conversation quickly became a free-for-all, with everyone talking at once. At any given moment, four or five separate dialogues were going on across the table, but because people weren't necessarily talking to the person next to them, these dialogues kept intersecting with one another, causing abrupt shifts in the pairings of the speakers, so that everyone seemed to be taking part in all the conversations at the same time, simultaneously chattering away about his or her own life and eavesdropping on everyone else as well. Add to this the frequent interruptions from the children, the comings and going of the different courses, the pouring of wine, the dropped plates, overturned glasses, and spilled condiments, the dinner began to resemble an elaborate, hastily improvised vaudeville routine.5
Somehow, we just know that there are "conversations" like this: forms of ordinary talk which don't easily square with the transcriptions to be found in conversation analysis; types of talk which work outside those sub-disciplines of (linguistic) discourse analysis which insist on finding routines and methods "behind" the apparent chaos of everyday conversation. Perhaps we should make it easy for these kinds of analysis and simply say that these are just not conversations: but this would only make the analyst's position look completely self-definitional. But I want to try to begin to think otherwise; this is conversation: locally organized, situationally specific (and so on) but so as to be disorderly, polyvocal, carnivalesque, con-verse, perhaps even chaotic. It may not have easily visible rules. In fact it may mean that there are parties in conflict who are out to defeat whatever rules they can find, local or general. But, above all, it does have (in fact it almost radiates) pleasure.
Let's leave this, though, as pure speculation and turn to some non-fictional cases. As an initial attempt to show how membership, competence, understanding and/or plausibility can be contested, I briefly want to inspect some conversational materials collected by my students and myself, then move on to a fuller discussion of a fragment from the ethnomethodological literature.6 The first instance is a telephone call:
1 Caller: ((Dials phone))
2 Answerer: Can I have your name please
3 Caller.: Er, Jones
4 Answerer: And your telephone number
5 Caller.: 335 3966
6 Answerer: 335 3566
7 Caller.: No 335 3966 ((Caller can hear another phone ringing at Answerer's end))
8 Answerer: 335 3966 I'll get right back to you to confirm your order of a tape
9 Caller.: Oh, er, all right
10 Answerer: ((Hangs up))
The caller, in this case, was also the student who transcribed and analyzed the tape. In her initial analysis, she speculated on the possibility that the answerer had received another incoming call at line 7 and, for this reason, had hung up in order to call her back later. The student described the conversation as a peculiar one: as if the answerer were playing some kind of weird game with her. But this is clearly an instance of another type of event all together. That type of event might be called the "dial-back pre-call." It's a strategy used by businesses which sell by phone - businesses which invite prospective buyers to call them. Typical cases are fast-food outlets (where meals can be ordered by phone for later delivery) and TV sales ads (for furniture, gadgets, and so on - in this case a videotape). In such cases, an initial contact phone number is given in the advertisement. Interested parties are expected to call this number and to give their own name and a number in a brief exchange. After this the business then calls back to ensure that the order is genuine and not fraudulent or a hoax. Hence, the dial-back pre-call itself has minimal turns: ideally it simply involves the exchange of a name and a number so that the sale itself can be transacted in an immediately following call initiated by the business interest rather than the purchaser. In fact it is so minimal that it can be (and occasionally is) handled by a machine.
In this case it's quite clear that the caller is unaware of this genre of call. She is expecting the sale to be transacted there and then. She assumes that this is going to be the sales call. With this baseline assumption about the event in place, the call's sequencing does indeed appear bizarre. It's almost as if the sale were being refused or deferred in favor of another (represented by the ringing phone). It seems to be a very peculiar way of doing business or making any kind of money-for-goods transaction at all. However, when it is read and understood as a dial-back pre-call (which is what it is for the answerer), it makes perfectly good sense.
This is a fairly trivial example: but it does show that forms of communication can take place (and successfully) without a "deep common accord" or agreement. In fact, in this case, the deepest possible matter is in doubt: namely, what kind of an event this is, "what we are doing here," "what's going on," "what it is am I supposed to do," and so on through a quite massive list of supposedly routine and baseline assumptions. This is a case where we have differential uptakes of indexical particulars: difference and, to some extent, conflict, but not (yet) contestation.
In the next example, I want to show how a conversational participant, far from displaying agreement, where agreement is expected, refuses that particular uptake in order to display her sense of herself as distinct from her interlocutor in terms of community membership.
1 K: You don't have ta be - a top - brain - as long as you've got - um (.) a lo:ve for Christ an' you can put it over to the kids an' they kno:w tha- you know that (.) .hhh you have got (.) um a special love then you c'n (.) .hhh you c'n do a:nything? (.) You know what I mean? - um (.) .hhh if you lo:ve what you're doing - then you will do it well.
2 L: oh that's true - yeah
My interest in this fragment is what happens just after Karen says "You know what I mean?" It seems to be a "transition relevance place" and yet no turn exchange occurs there. According to Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, one mode of turn-transition in conversations is called the "current-selects-next technique."7 At a "transition relevance place" (here: "You know what I mean?"), the current speaker selects the next by directly addressing him or her and requiring a response. Questioning (or interrogative) formats are typical ways of doing this, and current-selects-nexts may have the name of the recipient (next speaker) tagged to them - though this is not a feature of the present instance.
What I find interesting about this case is that the choice for Linda (as potential next speaker) is not merely a surface-technical one but also a deep moral one. To be heard to do an agreement with Karen in this specific slot (and given a dispreference in conversation for disagreements) would be to align herself with a specific community membership, Christians - a community to which Karen belongs but Linda does not. Technically, she should speak at this point - but morally she cannot, unless it is to do a disagreement.8 The moral choice, as it were, over-rules the technical requirement. She then waits until Karen offers a down-graded (not specifically Christian, not specifically religious) version of her proposition ("If you love what you're doing, then you will do it well") and only then offers her acceptance or agreement.
Here we can begin to see conflicts of community relevances entering into a stretch of talk such that those different and distinct relevances can be seen to have priority over what many analysts have assumed to be deeply-seated and relatively fixed conversational rules. A very basic assumption about the sequence-grammar of conversation (namely: after a current-selects-next technique, the selected person should speak), is, in this case, put aside lest clearly distinct community grounds should become confused.
We can see a similar phenomenon occurring in the following transcript. Here an academic expert in popular culture ("Tony") is being interviewed by phone, live on radio. Regular listeners to the program know that the expert and his skeptical, more conservative interviewer ("Kenny") often engage in verbal "sparring." As the interview begins, again regular listeners will know that Kenny ended the previous session by doubting the authenticity of Tony's pro-feminist politics. That session ended (right on the regular time, after several signals from Kenny that it was time to end) with Tony making the sound "Hm::::?," marked by a clearly upwardly-rising contour. This in place of the usual closing procedures.9 So as the current session starts, we can hear this topic being taken up again - a nice instance of a turn-pause lasting for a whole week.
1 K: at twelve tuh six .hhh now to our sensitive cultural commissar who joins us each tuesday ev'ning on Dri::ve, Tony, Mai?ller .hh putting at least er seven intriguing levels 'v meaning tuh th' mos' commonplace of or'nary behaviour in our pop culture slot .hh like >f'r example< getting z:apped .hh or z:apping as it is sometimes caused er called uh a >ref'rence o' course< to er arcane video behaviour Tone >is 'at right?<
(.)
2 T: .hh it may well be Kenny but as usual you've caught me totally off guard with your - charming description of me, sensitive, when did I suddenly get this appelation
3 K: Well it w's - after you::r grov'ling 'nd er before the altar of post feminist feminism:: las' week er where you w'r reproving me fer not being politic'ly correct Tone s'I thought .hhhh obviously th- here's a man who's er .h chasing after >shall we say< er .hh sensitive new age s::kirt.
(2.6)
4 T: I'd like tuh say th't Telecom's cut in here and there's some kinda communic( )ns breakdown=
[ ]
5 K: .hhh
6 K: =hahk y'k hah
[ ]
7 T: ( ) -ing like tha' 'n we all know I'm
thee - authentic f:eminized male 'v thee: -
early nineties
[ ]
8 K: (hhh) hah hah hah
[ ]
9 T: Let's get serious
The interesting phenomenon here is the gap between turns 3 and 4. By any standards, it's a very long conversational gap and - since it occurs at a transition relevance place - it is clearly Tony's gap and not Kenny's. Tony is expected to speak here: to do something in response to Kenny's strong taunt to the effect that Tony's pro-feminism is actually a sexual ploy. While, at line 4, Tony jokingly offers a technical hitch as the reason for his silence, this is clearly not what has happened. Talking to him afterwards (more as a fan than a colleague), he made it clear to me that he was simply furious and outraged at this insinuation. He was in fact in danger of replying in terms which are unacceptable on radio. So: being himself a trained broadcaster, he held his tongue. This gave him time to collect his response - and it also gave Kenny's show a dose of what all professional broadcasters fear: dead air. It worked as a kind of reprisal. Once the gap was over, Tony was able to use the "Telecom" explanation as a polite excuse (with his word "communications" conveniently blipped across by a tiny patch of broadcast silence), and get on with his riposte.
As with the previous case, we can see that a technical requirement (minimization of gap - one of the major design-specifications of the turn-taking system) has been passed over in favor of a moral requirement. In this case the moral requirement is for Tony to express his deep-seated community membership allegiances and his differences in this respect from Kenny's. For Tony, Kenny is overdoing traditional masculinism to the point of misogyny and inviting him (Tony) into an admission of his co-membership in that community ("here's a man who's chasing after ... sensitive new age skirt"). Off-air, verbal abuse might be the most effective reply, followed by a termination of the talk. Suitable on-air language would sound like a compromise - and the station's contract with Tony requires him to continue the talk somehow. Temporary but extended silence has the artful design-consequence that it both generates dead-air (as a direct and immediate reprisal), and allows the formulation of an over-emphatic and ironic riposte which reminds Kenny - who, after all, is the host, the "professional" and ought to be going about his professional business of interviewing - of the purpose of the program ("we all know I'm the authentic feminised male of the early nineties ... let's get serious"). As with Tony's earlier "Hm::::?" sign-off, it allows (despite, and perhaps because of, its breaching of interview conventions) a deep-seated community-membership difference to be marked.
In the next instance, I want to look at an exchange between two senior school students, John and Rachel. They are taking part in a class discussion on "Resources, Population and Pollution."10
1 J: You have to say what a resource is. You have to say it's useful; it's a natural product
2 R: What's natural?
3 J: That comes from the earth
4 R: But you have to tie everything together. To see how each one relates to the other, how they affect the product and um, the uses that we get from this product
The ethnographic work on geography classrooms from which this fragment arises11 shows that Rachel has a very different basic and underlying notion of what geography is and ought to be, by comparison with most of the boys (and to some extent the teacher) in her class. Crudely put: Rachel sees geography in terms of the environment and its proper ecological management; the boys treat it as a technical subject without any necessary moral component.
The interest I have in this fragment is the way in which these two community memberships work in it. At line 2, given the rest of Rachel's written and spoken contributions to the class, she is quite clearly questioning John himself about his use of the term "natural." She finds that he's used it in a way which greatly conflicts with her idea of how the term should be used. John initially uses "natural" to refer to artificial products - commodities which, nevertheless, have a basis in some natural substance (plants, animals, ores, and so on). For Rachel, this use of the term is problematic. To her, John seems to be confusing the natural and the artificial. She, perhaps, wants to engage him in debate about what is to be counted as natural and what not. Elsewhere in the same discussion, for example, Rachel tries on several occasions to get the rest of the class and the teacher to acknowledge a sharp separation between "the natural" and "the useful." For her they are morally distinct: the natural can be useful but it is not necessarily so; to think of it only in terms of its use is to degrade it. There is also a sense in which it is important in its own right regardless of utility. Yet her adversaries (the technical geographers) continue to conflate the two terms, even when "picking up" and evidently "expanding" on Rachel's own use of the terms.
In the fragment, then, John does not take Rachel's question to be criticizing him on this account. Instead, he takes it as a request for a definition - as it were for information which Rachel does not possess.
Elsewhere, I have tried to analyze conversational questions into two broad types, Q- and N-types.12 Roughly, Q-types question the material substance of the topic at hand; they are informational inquiries. N-types question the utterer, they are critical inquiries. "Did you feed the cat this morning?," as a Q-type, simply asks whether the cat was fed. As an N-type it could be an accusation or a reprimand ("I know you didn't but you should have"). One interesting feature of the distinction between Q- and N-types is that it can be decided after the fact of any question having been uttered. That is: those who reply to questions can "choose" to hear them as a Q- or else as an N-types and to respond appropriately. Hence there are no guarantees for interrogators.
What seems to be at stake in our classroom fragment is this: by issuing her question as an N-type (which our other evidence suggests she is), Rachel is setting up the possibility of a conflict or controversy between community relevances (environmentalists vs. technical geographers). By taking the question up as a (less conflictful, less threatening) Q-type, John not only asserts his own community membership but asserts it as the only possible one: for, by this same move, he incorporates Rachel herself into a form of communication - that is, a community - based on information exchange (technical geography) rather than moral debate (environmentalism).
As a final example, here is a transcribed conversation from Jeff Coulter's The Social Construction of Mind:13
1 MWO: Dr ... Dr K. asked us to call ... to take you to hospital.
2 PP: Err ... I'm alright as I am.
3 MWO: You know Dr K. and Dr S. that saw you last night--
4 PW: --Yes--
5 MWO: --they want you to go up this afternoon, and they've asked us to call ... we've got the car with us, you know--
6 PP: --Aah, I, I'll make it in my own time// if you don't mind.
7 PW: //ya can't make it in yer own time.
8 PP: Course I can. (Pause of 1.5 secs.)
9 MWO: Err, well, you know, I mean Dr K.'s quite busy and he's made an appointment for you this afternoon at the hospital//( )
10 PW: //no harm to go and see him is there?//( )
11 PP: //no, I-I'd rather go on me own I ... I
12 MWO: Won't take us long down the motorway in the car ... go up the M55. Be there in no time.
13 PP: Nah I'll remain as I am (Pause of 2.0 secs)
14 PW: Ya can't remain as y'are ya gotta see the doctor ...
In this stretch of talk, a "Mental Welfare Officer" (MWO) has called to the house of a "Prospective Patient" (PP) and his wife (PW) in order to try to obtain PP's voluntary admission to a mental hospital.
While Coulter offers "a normatively uncommitted or disinterested analysis of this material,"14 it is quite plain that substantive descriptions such as "prospective patient" (rather than "reluctant victim" for example) are not without their judgmental aspects. For example, the term "prospective patient" is much more likely to be a term used by the MWO than by the man himself. But this is unremarkable and not the main point. What I want to argue instead is that even though Coulter is quite correct in his logical-grammatical analysis of the episode, the "deep" logical-grammatical stratum which he locates is itself a site of semiosic struggle (rather than a guarantee of consensual understanding).
So I am not arguing that there is just a "surface" or "substantive" struggle in the transcribed occasion, underpinned by some kind of logico-grammatical, deep-seated "agreement" (for example, pace Gadamer, on "how to struggle"). Rather I am arguing that how "the world" is conceptually organized is itself at stake in this event; that a conceptual contestation of the most fundamental order is taking place; and that this has to do with the essentially different community memberships and relevances of at least two of the parties; or with their respective and differential methods for producing and understanding spoken indexical particulars.
While I don't want to repeat Coulter's acute and painstakingly accurate analysis of this transcript, it should be noted that PP's utterances at lines 2, 6, 11 and 13 work to retrospectively "hear," and have publicly counted, the prior utterances 1, 5, 9 and 12 by MWO as having been "offers." That is, expressions like "X asked us to call and take you to hospital," "X asked us to call and we've got the car," "an 'appointment' has been made," and "It won't take long in the car," all provide for a multiplicity of readings. As indexical particulars, there are several ways of hearing them. But PP - by his responses to them - tries to have them heard as offers, repeatedly and emphatically, across all four instances. Offers characteristically provide options or choices in the slots following them: acceptances and refusals, for example. Now by doing one of these (a polite refusal), PP makes available only one version of himself: as one who has an option or choice in the face of an "offer." In doing so, he gives a characterization of himself as a particular kind of community member or social subject. For him, he is not a "patient" (a member of the community of the insane, for example, or however this may be expressed). For such community members are not in positions of choice to accept or reject offers of lifts in cars to hospitals. PP offers an account of himself as a member of some kind of roughly democratic public-at-large - a public which offers and accepts (or refuses) on more-or-less equal terms.
Notice then that MWO does not seek to change this reading in the course of the original "offer" and its several repeats. In fact, he constantly affirms PP's understanding of himself as one with options. If anything MWO's requirements get weaker in the sense that they move away from possible hearings as imperatives. That is, they get more propositional in form, offering "information" about places, routes and distances and dropping reference to official authority (Drs K. and S.). And they do this progressively. That is: PP's reading of the scene and of himself (of what he is) is the one that tends to gain dominance as the event continues: literally in the face of "what everyone knows" (and what PW says) about asylum admissions.
But not only is PP's verbal strategy (at least partially) successful - at least as far as the fragment we have goes - it also makes acceptable a highly uncommonsensical, "deviant," or transgressive conceptual arrangement of things. That is: while the MWO is effectively trying to bring off an incarceration, PP manages to get this very same state of affairs heard as nothing more than "a lift to the hospital." To be offered a lift to the hospital is to be given a choice: effectively between being or not being an object of medical and psychiatric practices, a patient. The man in question here is therefore struggling over a very central conceptual point: what/who he is, officially, publicly and socially. He is either a relatively responsible adult in his own home, merely being offered a lift to a hospital, for his own good, at his own behest and to save him from mere transportation troubles; or else he is a clinical object, an insane person, one to whom the rationality of the "commonsense" reasonable person cannot be accorded, a subject fit for psychiatric treatment.
What is at stake here is precisely whether a putative bedrock (logico-moral rationality) can in fact be extended to all persons and all communities. For it seems to me that there is a plausible counter-reading of this transcript: two different community members are in relatively "deep" contestation as to the "meaning" of what is being transacted here. What one insists is a quite routine and normal "offer," the other uses as a means of getting a hospital admission and, possibly, forever changing this person's community membership.
Coulter is right: PP plays artfully with the presuppositional aspects of MWO's talk. And to support his case that MWO might have a reason for leaving his ultimate "order" or "command" tacit, Coulter brings in other evidence:
MWOs operate with a preference for converting an involuntary admission to mental hospital into a voluntary (or informal) self-admission by the pre-patient wherever possible. In this light, we can discern some discourse-independent grounds for the MWO's recycling of his offer, since he treats it as an offer that cannot ultimately be refused, but as one which nevertheless should be couched as an offer rather than, e.g., an order.15
Now we can see that there is a tacit connection between the broader institutional concept of an "informal admission" and the linguistic action of an "offer" - and a corresponding connection between an "involuntary admission" and an "order." Hence who (or what) one is, one's subject-position, may only be contestable within certain rules of play and the obvious question of "strategy" comes to the fore. PP may indeed be seen to be invoking conceptual connections which defeat the dominant logical grammar of the situation in order to save his social identity (as a rational being rather than a madman) - but that is always potentially over-rulable by a wider array of connections: namely types of admissions connected with types of linguistic acts.
Put another way: for the MWO, constructing his conjoint and prospective future actions with (or against) PP - that is, an incarceration - as merely an "offer" acts as a solution to a socio-logical problem. The problem is: how to get PP to hospital at the institution's "command" without an actual command being issued (since a "command" would lead, narratively, to a case of involuntary or forced admission)? And the solution to the problem is to modulate the command downwards, to an offer. The problem that then arises is of the order of a Catch-22: if the man is in a position to make a rational choice between acceptance and refusal of the offer (if he is one to whom rational choice can be ascribed at all), then he is in no need of psychiatric treatment. Hence: PP's positively strategic uptake of the implied institutional command as a personal offer.
Either way, MWO and PP are engaging in a struggle at the very basis of what it is to communicate as particular kinds of social subjects or community members. The interesting thing for us to note here is that they do in fact communicate: but not on the basis of any shared consensus or "deep common accord." It is the fact of the absence of this very basis (or the possibility of multiple bases) that is at the very core of their conflictual communicational practice here. If one of them is right about "who we are" and "what this occasion is," then the other is wrong, and vice versa. Both positions cannot hold at once.
The analysis of this type of contestation might benefit from Lyotard's concept of the diff_rend.16 According to Lyotard, the différend exists in any case where a critical difference (for example a deep-seated complaint) cannot be properly heard because the idiom or discourse in which such matters should be properly couched is not appropriate to it. Lyotard gives the example of a courtroom situation:
The plaintiff brings [a] complaint before the tribunal; the accused argues in such a way as to show the inanity of the accusation. Litigation takes place. I would like to call the différend the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes on that account a victim. If the addresser, the addressee, and the meaning of the testimony are neutralized, everything takes place as if there were no injury. A case of différend between two parties takes place when the "regulation" of the conflict which opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the injustice suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom.17
The caller in our first transcript appears to be clearly in this position. The salesperson controls the mode of exchange, making this situation a case of the "dial-back pre-call" which is a highly economic form of exchange where complaints (such as "Why not just sell me a tape?") cannot be heard. In the classroom example, Rachel is also to some extent the victim of a différend. The idiom of technical geography is relentless to the extent that it hears her attempted complaint ("What's natural?") as not even being a complaint. Instead it gets to be heard as a request for information - information which Rachel is presumed to lack.
But, as we have seen in at least three of our transcripts, potential victims are not always without tactics in the face of official forms of conflict regulation. Linda's refusal to take up Karen's Christian idiom and Tony's refusal to take up Kenny's sexism might be cases in point. PP's insistence on a form of conversational address [OFFER + POLITE REFUSAL] in the face of MWO's implicit command appears to be an even stronger case in point.
Such transcripts might therefore be an initial point of departure for establishing a thorough-going counter-knowledge of how institutional methods operate: a form of knowledge which would be potentially liberating for those who, like PP, might have an interest in transgressive and resistive conceptual schemes, even in the face of quite overwhelmingly dominant versions. It is interesting for us to note that the struggle, in this instance, does not occur so much within a given logico-grammatical domain as between contested versions of what is to count as logical and rational procedure. Working at this socio-historical level (the contestation of rational grounds themselves) could be a way of building a counter-archive to the official archives, manuals and tacit techniques of power. But "empowerment" in the face of a dominant logico-grammatical structure is highly problematic for the simple reason that that structure is not always easily visible. It requires a critical analysis to bring it to public visibility, let alone into tactical contestation.
At the same time, since this type of contestation is not merely technical (linguistic) but technical-ethical (semiotic), the ethical position of the analyst is also imbricated in it. The analyst's ethical question is: for whom and with whom (which communities, which technical-ethical interests) should such counter-archives be built, and to whom should they be distributed? Further: what kinds of control can analysts have over these matters? Bogen and Lynch have put this succinctly, referring to an earlier version of my re-analysis of the PP-MWO transcript:
In essence, McHoul appears to be advancing a sort of civil (or perhaps "conversational") libertarianism which would not distinguish between, say, the transgressions of a "reluctant victim" being shipped off to mental hospital and the transgressions of a "recalcitrant witness" testifying before Joint Committees of Congress concerning his role in "U.S. covert operations."18 It remains unclear whether or not McHoul is willing to accept the libertarian implications of his own arguments.19
These are harsh words indeed, but telling ones. Why write about and distribute strategies for overcoming institutional incarcerations or (as in Hartland's case) for getting desirable outcomes from magistrates?20 Are there not, after all, persons who should be institutionalized, whether in mental hospitals or prisons or other such places? A choice has to be made here between types of "victims" and the types of regulation which they face. The matter is an ethical one, through and through and it cannot be easily shirked. But what kind of positive ethics could an effective semiotics adduce? A discussion of this vexed question forms the substance of the next (and final) chapter.
=> chapter 14
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally hosted at freotopia.org/people/alecmchoul/seminv/13.html, and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.