Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics
Alec McHoul
Part Two
From Formalism and Ethnomethodology to Ethics
Chapter 7
Ethnogenealogy: Public Methods for Private Practices
As foreshadowed in the previous chapter, I now want to pay some attention to the possibility that ethnomethodological social theory can be used - at least in part - as a basis for effective semiotic investigations. To achieve this, I want to compare and contrast it with the archaeological/genealogical approach of Foucault. The impetus for this comparison and contrast stems from the fact that these two approaches - ethnomethodological and Foucauldian - represent the two extremes of social theory which, I have argued, an effective semiotics must be able to encompass. To put the matter bluntly: ethnomethodology is the social theory par excellence which has been able to generate detailed findings about concrete social situations and the forms of semiosis which produce them (and which, reflexively, they produce). On the other hand, Foucauldian discourse analysis has been superbly capable of situating discourse in terms of its general effectivity as means of producing (and being produced by) forms of knowledge, power and subjectivity in their broadest socio-historical senses. In the previous chapter, we saw that an effective semiotics should be able to range from the most basic of semiosic practices (the sheer intelligibility of signs or methodic activities), via the level of socio-logical problems and solutions, to the historical embededness (and supra-situational availability) of semiosic techniques within communities. To use a shorthand, this range might be thought of as one which reaches from the "situational," via the "social," to the "historical": from ethnomethodological to Foucauldian relevances via a possible common ground.1 But are these traditions of social theory and analysis not incommensurate? As we will see, the answer is both yes and no. There are very definite differences between the two traditions; but there are also crucial points of "touchstone" where they meet - points which may be central for the development of effective semiotic analyses. Naturally enough, this meeting ground can be seen to have its basic formations in the "social" sphere we have just mentioned, the sphere which effective semiotics projects in terms of socio-logical problems and solutions.
To make another contrast, albeit briefly: such highly distinct social-theoretical traditions as ethnomethodology and Marxism have both proposed that social practices be taken as solutions to problems or contradictions that arise for community members. Marx makes this recommendation in the Eighth Thesis on Feuerbach when he asks us (in an almost Wittgensteinian way) to treat social life as essentially practical: "All mysteries which mislead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in practice and in the comprehension of this practice."2 A vaguely similar theory exists in the works of Harvey Sacks where he treats socio-discursive phenomena such as speaker-sequencing as problems to be faced by community members (or "practical actors") and for which collectively available solutions can be invoked - in this case, the turn-taking organization for conversation. In both cases, this is a social-theoretical heuristic. Community members may be completely unaware that their forms of life are fraught with "problems" of basic conduct for which "solutions" can be found - as opposed to, say, highly overt problems such as how to get the car fixed, and so on. Thinking of everyday practical events as problem-solutions is an analyst's invention, a heuristic. But, I want to argue, it can be analytically rewarding.
In both ethnomethodology and Marxism, there is a notion of "logical" conditions underpinning the very possibility of social life. To be sure, this can sometimes be more overtly structural, even reified, in Marxist analysis (cf. "the real foundations"). The ethnomethodological tradition, by contrast, prefers to make reference to a formation of perceivedly normal appearances to which community members can and must orient themselves in the course of their sense-making practices. And, for ethnomethodology, this formation is by no means fixed or objectively given. Rather, it is continually re-made "for another first time" on each and every interactional occasion.3 Nevertheless, both traditions posit a relatively stable source of "problems" (a "problematic," perhaps) to which semiosic practice is a "solution." In what follows, I want to preserve this general outline as a heuristic for analytically understanding how signs (methodic activities) work in social life.
Moving now to Foucault: here the problem/solution metaphor or heuristic is not so clear. This may have to do with the fact that his concerns are effectively outside those of mainstream sociology - in spite of his incorporation into sociology and social theory.4 Foucault's focus of attention - especially in his earlier work on discourse5 - is turned fairly exclusively to the conditions of possibility of discursive orders as such. Yet it can also be said that Foucault does not always separate these discursive orders or regimes (which constitute the social fabric) from the particular circumstances or practices in which they are "played out." Indeed, in the work of his "middle period," and especially in the case studies Pierre Rivière and Herculine Barbin, Foucault comes to concentrate almost exclusively on particular instances or conjunctures within the webs of competing and contradictory discourses and on the kinds of social subject they produce - social subjects who must find equally discursive "solutions" to their problematic situations in the form of available techniques such as the confession, the diary, the erotic journal and so on. Two matters are worth noting here. Firstly, these "early" and "middle" preoccupations might give us some grounds for distinguishing between discourses (problem-conditions) and discourse or discursive actions (techniques or solutions) - such that it is largely the former (for example, "conditions of possibility") that have survived in recent Anglo-American readings of Foucault, at the expense of the latter. Foucault, for some, has become a general theorist, despite his insistence that theorization and particularism ("eventalization") are not incommensurable. Secondly, the work of Foucault's middle-period texts can be seen to directly parallel ethnomethodological work on competing readings of social events; for example Pollner's seminal analyses of "reality disjunctures."6
In both Foucault and ethnomethodology, it is possible to locate an abiding common concern with the local production of institutional orders, even if ethnomethodology is more consciously "analytic," preferring to "say" how socio-logical problems and their practical solutions work rather than to "show" how they might, as possibilities. In this respect, Foucault refers to "eventalization" (as opposed to generalization) while Garfinkel prefers to think of "invariance" (discourse) as a function or effect of contingency (discourse).7 Both, however, reject the idea that social practice is merely an effect of structurally given forms or ideal-rational rules behind the surface of visible action. Thus Foucault writes with respect to rationality:
[M]y basic preoccupation isn't rationality considered as an anthropological invariant. I don't believe one can speak of an intrinsic notion of "rationalisation" without on the one hand positing an absolute value inherent in reason, and on the other taking the risk of applying the term empirically in a completely arbitrary way. I think one must restrict one's use of this word to an instrumental and relative meaning.8
And Garfinkel:
It is not satisfactory to describe how actual investigative procedures, as constituent features of members' ordinary and organized affairs, are accomplished by members as recognizedly rational actions in actual occasions of organizational circumstances by saying that members invoke some rule with which to define the coherent or consistent or planful, i.e. rational, character of their actual activities. Nor is it satisfactory to propose that the rational properties of members' inquiries are produced by members' compliance to rules of inquiry.9
In this respect, in Foucault as well as Garfinkel, there is a common method: and this means not "accepting" social facts which must be explained after the fact; rather it means, in Garfinkel's phrase, catching "the work of fact production in flight" - which I see as essential to any effective semiotics. The analyst does not "deny" social facts - this is not what a "constructionist" or "effectivist" position means, for it could only lead to a kind of social solipsism. Instead, social facts become problems whose solutions must be practically constructed by community members. Passages from Garfinkel's Studies on the accomplishment of social facts appear uncannily parallel to Foucault's treatment of the construction of truth(s) and especially to some of his later thoughts on the question.10 Both writers find their topics in the relation between work (activities) and conditions of possibility (available methods) which, in quite local circumstances, lead to certain accounts being heard and accepted as "true" or as "the facts" - where this analytic method contrasts with those which try to adjudicate between different accounts' veridicality (for example, theories of "ideology"). If, however, Foucault wants to construct a genealogy of such discursive problems and solutions in terms of technologies of power and subjectivity, Garfinkel's attention is much more clearly turned towards their contemporary (synchronic) architecture - that is, to the specifics of their local material construction as against their "historicity." But, as we have seen, for all this, there is no in-principle reason why the synchronic (architectural) and the diachronic (genealogical) perspectives - to use a crude approximation - should not complement one another, especially if there is a more fundamental agreement vis-à-vis method: namely localization/eventalization, albeit at different levels of empiricity.
Both Foucault and Garfinkel have been associated with a "textualist" or even skepticist position on questions of truth; yet nothing could be further from the case. If an investigation attends to how an expression (for example a "statement" in Foucault or a "usage" in Garfinkel) comes to be counted as true, historically or situationally, this does not mean that the investigator is skeptical of that expression's status as true once it has been so-counted. If, to use a shorthand, "convention" guarantees truth, this does not make it the poor relation of other candidates for truth conditions or grounds (such as correspondence with reality or rational cohesion with other expressions in a theory). If truth is relative to, and dependent on, the very social methods and activities which secure it, this means, if nothing else, that it most certainly exists. The absence of some form of absolute truth (for example, literal descriptions which are independent of the methods and activities which render them sensible; or, in different language, independent of "interpretations") does not mean that truth is absent. Indeed, as Heritage argues, the essential indexicality of everyday expressions (their lack of semantic fixity) does not, for Garfinkel, separate language from truth; rather it is the very mooring of language to truth.11
A further difficulty in locating overlaps and resemblances between Foucault and Garfinkel is their quite different uses of terms such as "accounts" and "discourse." No doubt Garfinkel's terminology is more clearly related to Anglo-American empiricist ideas about speech (paroles) while Foucault's stems (albeit critically) from continental concerns with language in general (langue). But this is a very broad generalization; especially since both theorists are concerned to revise our routine thinking about these concepts. Nevertheless, a reading of Foucault's position on "statements" and their differences from "speech acts," "sentences" and "propositions" clearly shows Foucault's reluctance to think of discourse in terms of a pre-given language system or grammar and his preference for considering local and situational specifics first.12 And this is quite parallel with Garfinkel's initial remarks in Studies in Ethnomethodology.13 Both theorists have a preference for treating language in ways other than that of any formalist linguistics. To this extent, Foucault's conception of discourses (or discursive formations), perhaps via their proximity to concepts such as "bodies of knowledge" or even "paradigms," is not incapable of at least a rough equation with Garfinkel's idea of perceivedly normal patterns of accounting and institutional frameworks of accounting. In both cases, it is not merely an already given "normal subject" who knows how to wield such "equipment"; rather, subjects become normalized (they become community members) in and as the very course of the repetition of certain discursive formations as opposed to others. There is also a sense in which Sacks holds conversationalists to be constituted in and by the very conversational forms which speak them: for example, the teller and hearers of his "dirty joke" are as much, if not more, the products of it as it is of them.14
Continuing this line of reasoning: Garfinkel's rejection of sociology's "ironic stance" towards ordinary life and his idea that it can therefore avoid "constitutive analytic theorizing," have distinct parallels with the work of Foucault's "middle" period in which he refuses to offer simply another "scientific" account of positions adopted by marginalized persons such as criminals, perverts, and so forth. Neither theorist, that is, would argue that "scientific" accounts (including their own) can assume privilege over "lay" accounts. Instead, either of these might become topical for analysis. Foucault, for example, will work from the specific confessions of a multiple murderer or from the evolution of economic discourses in general.15 Garfinkel, too, will work on a case of a trans-sexual "passing as a woman" or on a night's work in an astronomy laboratory.16 In fact, ethnomethodology can by no means be defined by a sphere of proper objects; it works with anything "from divination to theoretical physics."17 Moreover, in both Foucault and Garfinkel, there is at least an implicit critique of the forms of privileged knowledge often assumed by the social sciences in relation to their analyzed objects.
It is nevertheless the case that Garfinkel's policy of positive indifference towards questions of value is much more explicit than anything in Foucault.18 Foucault (by contrast with say certain versions of Marxism) might share Garfinkel's analytic abstention from political-moral judgments about ordinary or popular practice (and, for example, Pierre Rivière is presented as anything but a cultural dope). But his numerous interviews suggest that Foucault's overtly descriptivist - he sometimes calls them "positivist" - histories are to be read as forms of social critique and even intervention. For example, Foucault's remark that he is "a good distance away from politics" is surely somewhat tongue-in-cheek.19 Again, Heritage shows how Garfinkel's work is quite capable of examining the means by which, for example, "research scientists both preserve an underlying commitment to the unitary character of objective scientific knowledge and exploit this commitment to advance their own theoretical positions" and by which other local-political effects are accomplished.20 To this extent, ethnomethodology's formal restraint in the domains of value, ethics and politics is not necessary to its overall social theory: if literal description is ideally unavailable (and this is a central tenet of ethnomethodology), then a purely descriptive sociology of everyday life is as subject to this same condition as any other social formation - hence the question of the political-moral grounds and consequences of the analysis cannot be ruled out in principle. Theoretical action and debate cannot simply be severed from civil action and debate by a programmatic statement. Indeed, that very programmatic statement could not be other than a political position.21
While it's true that I want to ground the social-theoretical component of an effective semiotics in both Foucault and ethnomethodology, it is quite obvious that these theoretical corpuses are far from unified in themselves; and they are certainly in no position to be formed into some kind of grand synthesis. Hence my remarks must remain very general - working towards an analytic mentality rather than firm and eternal principles. Foucault's minute investigations in the counter-history of ideas and Garfinkel's highly piecemeal analyses of everyday cognition and conduct have their bases in quite separate intellectual traditions. Their respective views of phenomenology, to take only one example, are almost but not quite antithetical. Foucault writes:
If there is one approach that I do reject, however, it is that (one might call it, broadly speaking, the phenomenological approach) which gives absolute priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity - which, in short, leads to a transcendental consciousness. It seems to me that the historical analysis of scientific discourse should, in the last resort, be subject not to a theory of the knowing subject, but rather to a theory of discursive practice.22
To be sure, Garfinkel's use of phenomenology is critical - perhaps even "materialist" or "actional" - rather than transcendental. Most genres of ethnomethodology have now moved clear away from Schutz's phenomenological-anthropological constants (such as "the reciprocity of perspectives"). One could imagine Garfinkel's broad agreement with Foucault on the importance of discursive practice being over and above consciousness.23 He has nevertheless been willing to retain a certain phenomenological orientation and to contribute positively to the debate on phenomenological sociology.24 But more conclusively than this, Garfinkel and Foucault can be seen to be in rough agreement on phenomenology's traditional adversary, structuralism, particularly in its highly mechanistic forms - and this despite the early Foucault's reliance on some versions of structuralism, particularly Dumézil's.
What their respective analyses of "discourses" and "accounts" aim to do are quite distinct matters. Foucault's earlier work, for example, centered on the archaeology of official and scientific forms of knowledge (such as structuralism itself) while Garfinkel was still attempting, empirically, to show up the "background expectancies" of everyday life (initially theorized by Schutz) and to argue that these expectancies are crucial grounds for any form of social action, including conflictual action. However, Garfinkel's concept of reflexivity has always ensured that acts or activities have more than a purely constitutive role: instead they should be thought of as both constituting broader social "objects" and constituted by generally available "methods."
Having mapped out some general ethnogenealogical principles, let us turn now to a particular set of practices: sexual learning. Foucault, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, argues strongly against a Freudian version of sexual discourse as essentially "repressed" discourse.25 Instead he shows how modernity continually transforms sexual practice into discourse. The technology of the confessional is the major means by which this is achieved. At a crude level of approximation: just as the Panopticon solves the problem of how to "know" the exterior behavior of "transgressive" or "unruly" individuals (prisoners, mental patients and so on), so the confessional solves the problem of how to know the interiors of all who might potentially transgress. Foucault, however, does not think of the confessional as a technology which is imposed from the top down; rather he locates a "will to confess" what are effectively "private" practices and desires - such that the "private" becomes an eminently social and institutional space guaranteed, in part, by the continual transformation of sex into discourse.
To this extent it would be a mistake to begin with the idea that learning sexual comportment is essentially repressive. Instead the problems that it poses lie in the relations that exist between official and local discursive activities; for example, between "sex education" (morality, hygiene, and so on) and "folk knowledge." While the problems are multifarious, they can be expressed in the form of a central contradiction. The public discourses on sexuality (manuals, for example) are specifically recipient-designed for the already sexually competent (that is, they aim to improve performance or to overcome problems with existing performance capacities). At the same time, sexual practices are largely conducted in private, at least in Western societies (such that there are legal penalties for public sexual displays). Thus while privacy allows a degree of freedom of conduct among the already initiated and for the novitiate alike (that is, "openness" necessitates more facile surveillance and direct policing), the learner in such "closed" regimes faces greater degrees of pedagogic difficulty than, say, the Samoan adolescent (if Margaret Mead is to be believed on that score). To be constrained by a "will to confess" rather than a direct panoptic gaze means, in effect, to be debarred from "observational learning" - if the policing-observer cannot observe, then neither can the policed-observed "object." In societies of this type, characteristic of modernity, how can sexual competence - one of the requirements of general social competence - be learned at all? The novice effectively faces the problem of being required to become competent and yet has no obvious or direct resources for the acquisition of that very competence.
Learning sexual comportment is, to some extent, not unlike learning comportment in any other life sphere. According to at least one reading of Heidegger on the question of comportment (Verhalten), this is simply a term for how, in any familiar situation, we "cope." For Heidegger, this does not necessarily involve the mediation of acts of consciousness; rather it is a question of "human activity in general,"26 part of that being which is a conjoint self-and-world and which, therefore, needs no equivalent or intermediary concept of mental activity. Hence, when we act competently, this is part of our intentionality, but that intentionality is no more than a matter of "directing-oneself-toward" something, rather than the intervention of a mental act between an "action" (self) and a "goal" (world). Hence it can be called "purposive action without a purpose," to use Dreyfus's term.27 Dreyfus goes on to say that this
occurs in all areas of skillful coping, including intellectual coping. Many instances of apparently complex problem-solving which seem to implement a long-range strategy, as, for example, a masterful move in chess [or sex?], may best be understood as direct responses to familiar perceptual gestalts. After years of seeing chess games unfold, a chess grandmaster can, simply by responding to the patterns on the chess board, play master-level chess while his deliberate, analytic mind is absorbed in something else. Such play, based as it is on previous attention to thousands of actual and book games, incorporates a tradition which determines the appropriate response to each situation and therefore makes possible long-range, strategic, purposive play without the player needing to have in mind any plan or purpose at all.28
This suggests though, that in learning chess, outside and prior to the mode of familiar coping, the player must be purposive, must have a plan "in mind," must be attending to the technical specifics of the play. The problem for the one who would learn proper comportment, then, in chess, sex, or elsewhere, is quite different from simply enacting or embodying the already-learned proper orientation of the master. A specific attention, in this case, does seem to have to be paid. But does this simply return us to a pre-Heideggerian phenomenology of intention? Dreyfus implies as much. But could there be, instead, even in the sphere of acquiring the techniques of coping and comportment, quite material forms of problem-solutions? Could learning something, itself, be a particular form of directing-oneself-toward: a socio-logical practice without need of ghostly mental equivalents which guide it?
If so, the sexual learner is very much in the position of Garfinkel's jurors who must display legal competence and respect correct rules of juridical procedure in their decision-making without, in any official way, knowing how such procedures are routinely, or should routinely be, carried out.29 Similarly - and not coincidentally - they are in the same position as Agnes, the trans-sexual of Garfinkel's study, of whom Heritage has written:
her task in managing, constructing and reconstructing her social identity is ... perhaps well caught by the famous Neurath-Quine metaphor of being compelled to build a boat while already being out on the ocean. It was unavoidably a bootstrapping operation.30
Remember that Garfinkel uses the Agnes case to show that socio-sexual identity is, for "normals" (as he calls them) too, a continual problem of conduct to which countless unseen solutions are in operation every day but to which neither the community member nor the investigator has "empirical" access - except, perhaps, in "special" cases such as that of Agnes. The Agnes case is, then, effectively a "naturally occurring" breach experiment. What I want to suggest is that the one who faces the problem of becoming competent in sexual conduct faces exactly such an "anomic" or breached situation, an in-built socio-logical contradiction.
The contradiction, in a nut-shell is this: if private, how learned? There is indeed a thesis which runs through many sexological studies and which argues that doing sex is natural and that one does not have to learn it.31 This thesis, dominant in psychology, common sense and (more pertinently) in many of the discourses on official sex education, works via concepts such as "instinct" and "natural propensity." While it partly solves the problem, it leaves open another problem as its legacy: it requires an ideal-typical notion of "natural sex" and leaves a socially arbitrary residue of practices which come under the classification of "deviance," "unnaturalness," "unhealthy practices," and the rest. When engaged in - and many learners, not being apprised of the very classifications they are learning, must engage in them - these produce sanctions, guilt and shame. Thereby, one contradiction is displaced by another: if natural, sex must simply be done to be learned. But just which practices are natural is not available until one is a competent practitioner and therefore discriminator. Hence "deviance" is built into a training which would ideally omit it. The route to the natural becomes "structurally" paved with shame. So let us drop, for now, the "natural sex" thesis as a resource (though it remains an interesting topic) and look to other possible solutions.
It could be objected at this point that: of course modern sex education is "up to the job." As I write - though not when I first formulated these ideas - every society, almost without exception, has engaged in massive and expensive campaigns to attempt to halt the spread of the HIV virus and, in doing so, has been forced to become more explicit not only about sexual practices but also about intravenous drug use. Nevertheless: such campaigns revolve routinely around what not to do sexually, rather than what to do. Even when highly explicit, they already assume that readers and viewers already know what certain sexual techniques are - they then become explicit precisely about the details of the curtailments, limitations and caveats. One set of materials states:
Making the first move might be scary, but more guys than you think have sex with other guys. It's natural, and if you're safe you'll have a great time. And what's safe? Kissing, cuddling, licking, stroking, wanking, oral sex (avoid cum in the mouth), vaginal and anal sex with condoms and water-based lube (such as KY-gel).32
All of this leaves open the questions of who is to have sex with whom, where and when; what these various types of sex and sexual objects are; how they are to be performed; and, perhaps most importantly for many sexual learners, how they are to be performed well - that is, what is to count as having had "good sex" or at least having "done it like everyone else (who is competent) does." Again, to some extent, the dominant sexological idea that these things come "naturally" appears to prevail. There is still no single technology, social space or institution where a sexual novice can (a) learn the basic physiologies of sex, (b) learn methods of "hygiene" and safety (countering the acquisition of HIV, sexual diseases, unwanted pregnancy, and so forth), (c) learn how to enjoy and know one's own competence in sex vis-à-vis others, (d) come to understand and realize the more abstract notions of desire, love and sexual relationships, (e) appreciate the details of sexuality peculiar to the different available sexual "permutations" - heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality and so on, let alone (f) actually practice sex in such a way as to turn the above into effective knowledge.
Imagine a society in which sexual practice is conducted "in private," for the most part by individuals alone or between couples (and more rarely, small groups); relatively stable membership of couples is expectable; and adults are expected to be sexually proficient. In such a society, there are two distinct possible solutions to the problem of sexual learning. Sexuality can be learned either by experimentation or by "secondary systems of elaboration" for sexuality and sexual discourse - where the relations between these two, themselves, raise further problematic issues. The first solution has the in-built socio-logical trouble of directly threatening the requirement of relative stability among couples. Experimentation and learning relatively stable coupling are potentially contradictory and, indeed, have led anti-sex-educators to associate official sexual training with promiscuity. The second solution has a slightly less troublesome upshot - it produces the sexual learner as "voyeur" and/or "exhibitionist," for it requires access to "official" competence via such unofficial discourses as pornography, graffiti, folk wisdom, dirty jokes, locker-room talk and so on, through a whole range of activities and practices (signs) which can only be called "furtive." It requires listening and looking for the sexual in whatever discursive resources might be available, intendedly sexual or not.
One clear and almost literal instance of this problem-solution is the type of graffiti which requires the reader to fill in sexual words which have been replaced by non-sexual substitutes. Clues to the "original" sexual words are given by their positions in the rhyme scheme. Two examples from toilets. Firstly:
There was a young lady from Bude
Who went for a swim in the lake
A man in a punt
Stuck his pole in her ear
And said you can't swim in here 'cos it's private
Secondly:
Shakespeare was a man of wit
On the tail of his coat he had some buttons
One day whilst walking by St Pauls
A woman grabbed him by the arm
She said I see you are a man of pluck
Come to my house and have a ham sandwich
Some are a penny, some are a bob
It all depends on the size of your ham sandwich
Note in these cases that the "repaired" versions are not particularly interesting or funny - in fact they tell more of violence than sexuality (though the two are often connected in graffiti). Their "point" it would seem is simply to act as a kind of furtive cloze test: does the hearer know the sexual word-replacements? If so: one has found that one knows what some other person knows. If not: one can ask, for example, "What rude word rhymes with 'punt'?" and so on.
Turning to another example: as Sacks has shown, such matters as where and how one is expected to laugh during and following the course of a dirty joke's telling can be taken by youth cohorts as marking one's competence: not just one's conversational competence, but one's sexual competence.33 Indeed, in terms of the activity of listening and responding to dirty jokes, the two competences cannot be clearly separated. Similarly, competence can be hidden from parents or other authorities, for example, by abstentions from laughter in cases where dirty jokes provide for appropriate laughter "slots." Learning when to laugh, learning to display one has got the point - in this case, in a joke about fellatio, where that practice, as part and parcel of the joke, indeed as its "point," is left unmentioned but hearable for those who can recognize it ("I told you never to speak with your mouth full") - shows that one knows just which practice is being referred to in such elliptical ways. It shows that one is a member of a certain community of recently-acquired sexual competence, that one can recognize a specific sexual practice from what non-members (pre-competents) could only hear as a blur of indexical particulars.
Community members, in this case, can narrow down the indexical potential of an utterance like "I told you never to speak with your mouth full," such that that very practice of narrowing - marked by laughing at a highly specific moment - is a community practice, a practice specific to a community. The activity [telling + laughing] is methodical; in fact, as Sacks shows, it is highly methodical, since it involves incredibly precise sequencing and timing: the telling has to be set up for the laughter to occur at a very specific instant such that any laughter which is even a fifth of a second late can be heard as a response to the already "existing" laughter rather than to the point of the joke.
In another sense, the method [sequencing + precision timing] reflexively produces an activity [telling + laughing] which is thereby intelligible as a community activity and, reflexively, the community in question is given its sense of itself (of "what it is for us," or "what we are") by being constructed as and through such activities as this [telling + laughing] along with numerous others. At a further level, the (reflexively combined) methodic activity comes to be used as a solution to the broader problem of sexual learning: as a kind of "voyeurism" or, perhaps, "écouteurism." And this would be how I would want to use a term such as "voyeurism." It is to be understood as naming a secondary elaboration of the sexual, or as a mode of transition between discursive competences - between the marginal (the furtive) and the official-sexual. Insofar as it at least attempts to conjoin such formations of competence, voyeurism can be thought of as sexual training by metaphor or, more generally, by figure of speech. Training can be tropic. So "voyeurism" is a metaphorical term only, but one which glosses essentially metaphorical/tropic practices. If (and this is speculative) voyeurism or other strategies of secondary elaboration came to be embedded in a community as "popular memory" - that is as a means of solving socio-logical problems more generally - we would then be able to locate its historical meaning.
Yet if voyeurism is at least one way of solving the pragmatic problem of sexual training, if it is a way of overcoming the contradiction between requirements ("outcomes") and available resources, it has a further problem associated with it. For voyeurism is always folded back into the very domain of the sexual practices it would discover. Being, as Heritage notes, a "bootstrapping" exercise, it is always an instance of the events to which it refers. Garfinkel (in his sense of "reflexivity") suggests, as we have seen, that accounts (utterances or "usages") are always incarnate in the practices which they account - and, in this case, we have seen that they are: voyeuristic utterances such as ["Don't speak with your mouth full" + laughter] are always already sexually imbued, for the community in question. They are not just isolated practices ("dead" linguistic signs); they are always already sexual practices. That is, for example, it's "sexy" to speak this way - if furtively so. "Talking dirty" is not just talking about sexual activity, it is an example of sexual activity; just as "talking or thinking through possible crossword solutions" is part of solving crosswords. Here we might note that the (perhaps) dominant discourse on the "naturalness" of sexuality and sexual learning actually categorizes voyeurism (or furtiveness) among its residue of unnatural sexual practices. Therefore it outlaws the very systems of secondary elaboration that it seems to require. The problem of learning therefore becomes one of seeing without being seen - leaving the sexual learner always potentially in a position akin to the impostor.
In this light, we can begin to see how an analysis of various sexual issues might be made. We can point to the conservative reaction against the continued existence of, or even the introduction of, sex education in schools (for example, the campaigns conducted over recent years by the fundamentalist right); or to the parallel UK debate on the access of "minors" to medical advice and prescription of sexually necessary items such as contraceptives which came to a head with the notorious "Gillick" court decision in favor of such interdictions.34 To make sexual training "official" (by medicalization or education) is unacceptable to those who argue that the sexual-moral is in fact "natural" and therefore the province of (supposedly) equally "natural" institutions such as the family - as opposed to "social" institutions such as the surgery, the family-planning clinic or the school. To make sex a matter of extra-familial discourse, it is argued, is to make it subject to unnaturalness, to potential promiscuity and so forth. That is to say, certain communities (which could be collected together by an analytic term such as "the right") have an interest in restricting the semiosic potential of sexual terminology such that it's their own rather specific versions of these terms which have official currency. To "let the terms go" into uncontrolled circulation is not, for these communities, merely a linguistic matter: it can, in and of itself, be considered promiscuous, proliferative and unnatural.
The struggle, for these communities, is against the very contradictions outlined here. Those contradictions, for the "right," ought not to exist. Yet what this leaves out of account is that the absence of official training means not only that (a) secondary systems of elaboration must be constructed as a socio-logical requirement of competence for those whose families find the positive transformation of their own sexuality into discourse harder than the interdictory policing of their children's potential sexuality but also that (b) a chance to engage sexual learners in surveillance by using the sex-lesson as confessional is foregone. Consequently: no matter which side of the debate one takes (for or against the proliferation of sexual information), the inherent contradictions of sexual learning in a sexually privatized society are not solved. They are simply displaced on to slightly different terrains.
The point of an effective semiotics of sexual learning, then, would not be to adjudicate in such debates, but rather to examine everyday activities (signs) - including the activities of the debates themselves - whereby actual practitioners who are faced with the omnipresent problem of learning actually handle the central contradiction which is preserved despite any matters of policy.
Turning now towards the side of "exhibitionism," another issue that could be handled using the theoretical apparatus outlined here would be: such aspects of social semiosis as displays of masculinity/femininity could be treated as surrogates for, or metaphors for, sexuality after the manner of the dirty joke example, above. Here we could hypothesize that, again, because sexual competence is privately practiced but must be publicly displayed and, given an embargo on its public display in any direct way, it will be displayed metaphorically in certain forms which are not "intrinsically" sexual such as physical toughness, swearing and so on (in the case of masculinity) and modes of dress, deportment, hairstyle and so on (in the case of femininity). That is, if the membership category "grown man" or "grown woman" carries along with it the category-bound activity (or predicate) "sexually competent," displays of "grown-upness," whether sexual or not, can get that activity (or attribute) seen.35 As Sykes puts it:
...the inmates of the New Jersey State Prison have changed the criteria by which an individual establishes his claim to the status of male. Shut off from the world of women, the population of prisoners finds itself unable to employ that criterion of maleness which looms so importantly in society at large - namely the act of heterosexual intercourse itself. Proof of maleness, both for the self and others, has been shifted to other grounds and the display of "toughness" in the form of masculine mannerisms and the demonstration of inward stamina, now becomes the major route to manhood. These are used by the society at large, it is true, but the prison, unlike the society at large, must rely on them exclusively.36
The adolescent, like the prisoner, is equally cut off from full participation in traditional adult forms of, for example, maleness, and it is no coincidence that ethnographic studies of male youth communities, such as that of Willis, show the same concerns with highly masculinist displays:
...the ambience of violence with its connotations of masculinity spread throughout the whole [youth] culture. The physicality of all interactions, the mock pushing and fighting, the showing off in front of girls, the demonstrations of superiority and put-downs of the conformists, all borrow from the grammar of real violence. The theme of fighting frequently surfaces in official school work - especially now in the era of progressivism and relevance.37
"Borrow[ing] from the grammar of real violence": the phrase aptly catches at the ways in which the voyeurism/exhibitionism "solution" is essentially a metaphoric/tropic one and indicates a potentially fruitful domain of further inquiry.38
If, for learners, the "sexual" has to be read for within semiosic displays which are not intrinsically and overtly sexual - that is via secondary systems of elaboration - the range of displays and occasions which could, therefore, come to be read as "sexual" could be potentially a vast one. An event such as a sociology lecture could be a case in point. Below, I will present a fragment of such a lecture. It is interesting on two counts. Firstly, it discusses sexuality "as an aside" and, to this extent, is an instance of the secondary systems of elaboration which, I am suggesting, can become routinized ways by which pre-competent persons can learn adult sexual competence. Secondly, it also addresses (makes a topic of) those secondary systems themselves - especially pornography, dirty jokes and party talk. In a double way, then, it is an empirical case which both acknowledges and instances the problems and solutions to which I have referred above in a very speculative way.
The fragment consists of a transcript of a sociology lecture to university students. It is, in ethnomethodological terms, a "naturally occurring" instance of talk; that is, I came upon it for quite non-analytic purposes and not in the form of a tape but as already transcribed. The transcript was made for professional and pedagogic purposes. I present it below with only the identifying details of participants changed, as the normal conventions demand.39
1•••LECTURER: (.) so I think we'll simply call off our class for today (.)
2•••Before you leave, Mr Howard (.) you need to go by the Sociology Office
3•••Mr Howard here? Yes (.) I guess they have some papers for you to sign
4•••Now, also, before you leave, I'd like to have some of this stuff passed out (.)
5•••How many people are enrolled in the course?
6•••Terry, would you give me a hand on some of this stuff?
7•••Would you hold up your hands, so we can get it to the persons enrolled? (.)
8•••Now I think there are (.) I have two extra copies (.) there are more copies
9•••I don't think we've run off enough to get them distributed to all the members of the class (.) so you'll have to allow some time like the middle of the week before we can possibly run off more
10••And I think I'm certainly going to change my ways of (.) if I give it to any of you then I'm going to give it to all of you (.)
11••The [untranscribed] paper is rather heavily revised (.)
12••Now this is an old [untranscribed] paper, it's on [untranscribed] interpretation; it's possible that some of you already have seen it (.) if so then it won't be of interest
13••If you'll just raise your hand if you need it (.)
14••Well, there'll be more materials (.)
15••There are other copies of the [Name of Paper], so I'll be glad to give them to you after class
16••Now I have, also, the copies of the [Sex Change] paper are available, and for those of you who didn't get any, if you'll see me after the break, in my office, I'll be glad to furnish a copy
17••Now let me tell you what this is about
18••There are a set of about eight studies that make up a book that's been sent to the publisher (.) it goes under the title of [Name of Book] - you needn't pay any attention to that
19••The thing I want to call your attention to is that in that [Sex Change] paper (.) that's a lurid title (.) as you can imagine (.) and I must ask you, as adults, - it's not for party talk
20••I mean (.) sure it's for party talk (.) but it's not to pass around the way one would pass around Toots and Caspar
21••You know what I'm talking about
22••So it's not a little bit of pornography that's kinda gotten loose from [The University] (.)
23••Now I tell you that because the person is very much alive and in the area (.) and, also, I have a collaborator (.) we intend to pursue the work more deeply than has been done here (.)
24••If it's turned into a scandal, there's no possibility of doing anything more
25••I'm not even afraid of the suit (.)
26••I'm just afraid of the mortification, and it would just be so unprofessional for it to be turned into a mere matter of (.) what shall we say? (.) of a dirty story
27••There's plenty of room for ironic and, you know, pornographic comment; it's after all a gal who's made a sex change (.) or a guy who made a sex change
28••So I ask you, treat it as your own property (.) and where persons have good reasons to read it (.) let's say with educated interests (.) okay, fine (.)
29••Otherwise, I ask you to keep it to yourself
30••I'm talking about such things as parties and smokers (.) and all the various ways in which one can in any course in sociology, you know, acquire the stories that turn one into the party cheerleader
31••Now, I tell you that I can't take any [untranscribed]; there's nothing to be done (.)
32••If you do it, then you simply will have done it (.) and in that case, as I say, any excuse will do (.)
33••So I ask you to take particular care (.) and don't use it as an interesting sex story
34••[Omitted from this transcript]
35••And, now I give it to you to read in order that the course will be enlivened for you and, I hope, for me, if you read it
36••You can take it for granted that I'll be happy to hear any of your comments
37••That goes without saying. Okay.
This stretch of talk has some obvious features. It is monologic: one speaker addresses an assembly of listeners who do not speak in return. Also, it accomplishes a number of activities such as: "educational housekeeping" (1-16); preparations for reading (17-37); and cautions on the uses of texts (19-33). We, and the participants, can see this by virtue of a number of features of the talk. Its monologism is evident not simply from the sheer absence of turn-exchange. In addition to this, the auditors are directly characterized in a number of ways: as persons who should raise their hands rather than speak (7); as individuals such as "Terry" and "Mr Howard" who should respond by their actions rather than their talk; as students enrolled in the course; and, by contrast, as people who happen to be present but are not enrolled, people who have presumably "dropped in" to hear the lecture; as ones who listen and read and who are, potentially, "enlivened" (35); and as "adults" (19). That is, they are not characterized as speakers for the purposes of this occasion. Their talk is, however, referred to - but it is deferred to occasions outside and after the lecture; they are thought of as talking, that is, in their capacities as party-goers (30), as people who attend "smokers" (30), as possible distributors of comic books (20), as potential users of sociological texts as pornography (22), as tellers of dirty jokes (26) and as professionals (26) - or, since this seems to contrast with the other designations, as novitiate professionals who might be doing sociology.
The lecturer's version of things allows his students a number of possible subject positions then: and each has its benefits and its drawbacks. For example, using the "Sex Change" paper as a stimulus for titillation will, accordingly, have the benefit of turning them into "party cheerleaders." However, this will do the profession (sociology) no good whatsoever - thus the student is to decide, on the basis of what s/he does with the "Sex Change" paper, whether or not to be a professional or to opt for the more immediate plaudits that are to be had from being the life and soul of the party.
However the choice is formulated (and there are several options here), the audience is not simply a collection of just any listeners and potential speakers - undifferentiated and uncategorized. They have, that is they are produced in the talk as having, determinate features, typical activities, characteristics and apparently well-known or obvious ways in which these fit together. Each "type" is, however, constrained to be silent-for-now but a speaking subject of a certain type later. Some of these subject positions require those who are currently listeners to make choices at a later point, in and during some typified future. So, according to this formulation of the audience, it's almost impossible to be constructed as both an adult (19) and someone who would "pass around Toots and Caspar" (20). Categories of person, courses of action and typical narratives seem to fit each other in a fairly precise way. At the most elementary level: as "students" they are constructed as people who "read"; as "party-goers" they are constructed as people who might wish to be "cheerleaders" and so forth - and each of these types and courses of action appear to be embedded within typical narratives. For example, this version of things assumes that student parties could not be places where people read or have "professional" exchanges. That is, the lecture talk makes (and makes available) not just possible courses of action but typical sequential arrangements of events within them (narratives).
Consequently a number of activities hearable in the talk ("educational housekeeping" and the rest, listed above) are accounted so as to be designed for recipients; that is, they are accounted in terms of who is being addressed. In turn, this matter of "who is addressed" is itself a construction of the talk; that is, it is a construction of how, to take another example, "cautions on the uses of texts" should operate for just this (projected) class of persons.
Let us note another fairly obvious feature of the lecture fragment: it is discursively constructed as an "aside." By this I mean that it occurs at the periphery of the main reason for the occasion - the work of lecturing. We, and the participants, can hear this in a number of ways. It occurs at the end of the lecturing work itself: "We'll simply call our class off for today" (1). Here, the cohortive plural "we" which is routine in classroom talk, is used for a while but soon gives way to the more directive "you" in which the lecturer is differentiated from the class cohort.40 Further: the talk in the fragment assumes that the listeners ("you") will shortly leave the setting (2). Also: the talk occurs in the discursive space which Schegloff and Sacks have called the opening up of a closing.41 The formal business of the class has been closed in line 1 but, using a routine method for re-opening prefiguredly closed occasions, it is in fact re-opened: "Before you leave..." (2), "also before you leave..." (4). It is classically in such spaces, according to Schegloff and Sacks, that activities which are incidental to the main reason for the occasion are accomplished. The "before you leave" device prefigures two such peripheral activities: the "housework" ("Before you leave ... you need to go by the Sociology Office") and the work preparatory to reading ("before you leave, I'd like to have some of this stuff passed out"). With those activities duly framed - providing methodically for their intelligibility - and "under the auspices of" the work preparatory to reading, a third activity can proceed, namely the cautionary work.
This is announced via a preface which is not so routinely associated with re-openings as the "by the way" and "before you leave" types - and so it is perhaps to be heard as less incidental than the other activities, as more "substantive": "Now let me tell you what this is about..." (17), "The thing I want to call your attention to is..." (19). Note here, however, that it is possible to hear (especially from line 19) that it is not the cautionary work itself that is being framed, in the initial instance at least, by the call to "attention." That is, the lecturer says "The thing I want to call your attention to is that in that [Sex Change] paper..." - but the first "that" is never grammatically completed. Instead the lecturer moves to a topic which is "touched off" by the mention of the paper: he refers to the luridness of the title (as it were "by the way") and it is this new (and initially framed-as-incidental) topic which frames the cautionary work. Hence: the cautionary work emerges as an aside (a touched-off topic) within a re-opened substantive occasion (lecturing) within an aside ("Before you leave").
So while we, and the students, can hear that a closing has been re-opened, and that "sidework" or peripheral activity is expectable, we can also hear (within a nesting of activities) that the work of lecturing is somehow continuing with a (possibly final) substantive activity, namely cautioning. This cautioning intersects with and builds in the divisions between types of subjects (potential readers) which we have already examined: especially the division between the "professional" and the voyeur/exhibitionist ("a little bit of pornography," being "the party cheerleader," and so on). Lines 19-33 of the fragment address and construct (a) categories of persons with respect to (b) their later reading and conversational activities concerning (c) how to handle sexual discourse. The split between the categories of "professional" and, for example, "dirty story tellers" is accomplished methodically via an interlocking of that category distinction on the two terrains (b) and (c). The categories "professional" and "voyeur," from the device "types of reader," offer a polar contrast which is accomplished by the lecturer invoking parallel contrasting category-bound activities for each: "having educated interests" in sex and "having good reasons for reading" sexual histories on the one hand, versus "telling dirty stories," "reading sexual history as pornography" and "being the party cheerleader" on the other.
To refer to and construct the students as potential types of subjects (as opposed to others) means that the type ("Who I am") will emerge later depending on moral choices as to how they eventually read and talk about the "Sex Change" paper. Reflexively: to instruct the students in how to go about those readings and tellings (as well as with whom and where they should do so), is to construct them in terms of the (abovementioned) subjects types; they can in the end only be professionals or pornographers; that is the total range of possibilities. It is not difficult to hear which of the reading-types and (reflexively) subject-types the lecturer prefers. The choices are not given as morally identical or equal: one is morally recommended and the other morally discouraged. Hence, and this may or may not be typical of morality-work, the students are locked in not only to a reflexive set of subject- and activity-types but also to the respective moral valencies of each.
Over and above this, there are further aspects of the typical courses of action assumed by the lecturer for the students. The lecturer relies on the expectancy that initial courses of action (party-talk and so on) will not simply "stop at that"; rather, he assumes they will flow through into a broader community where such specific and highly local courses of action can build up into typical patterns and narratives. That is: he appears to be aware of the fact that texts and talk have potential in terms of historicity (popular memory). They are not merely occasional or occasioned events (though they are this, too) but they have effects of a more lasting and effective kind. They can, thereby, generate further courses of action with their own (typical but not necessarily predictable) consequences. By moving from subject-types to activity-types, and from those to the domain of socio-historical consequences, the lecturer constructs a version of his community (his "world") as one with a narrative structure where: "narrative is the presentation of at least two real or fictive events or situations in a time sequence, neither of which presupposes or entails the other."42
Of the two possible narratives which the students are given as choices, one goes as follows: the students read the "Sex Change" text as publicly distributable dirty stories; the person who is described in the material somehow hears about this and comes thereby to be hurt; the lecturer who wrote the paper is either sued or mortified or both; the collaborative project is halted; scandal is brought upon the University.... Here the ellipses can represent hearable but unmentioned further consequences (the professional disrepute of the lecturer in national sociological forums and so on). In the second narrative: the students treat the text as their "own property" (28); they read it for the most part in a privatized fashion; they show it, if at all, only to persons with "educated interests"; the scandalous consequences of the first narrative are avoided; the sociology course is "enlivened"; the lecturer, perhaps, gets to hear the students' professional comments in the way usually associated with collegial feedback. Note also: the first narrative allows the "Sex Change" paper's semiosic potential to proliferate. It gives it the status of a broadcast text, broadcast to who-knows-which specific communities with their own interpretive regimes. The second narrative ensures that the semiosic potential of the text remains fairly narrowly confined to a local sub-professional reading. The first narrative, in the strict sense, is after the manner of the typical cautionary tale or conte morale; the second is an adjunct of this, "the happily-ever-after" story. The latter is, clearly, the morally recommended (perhaps even required) story, though not without some wistful modulation - "If you do it [proliferate the text], then you simply will have done it" (32). No doubt the modulation could be read as a tautology.43 But we can hear it otherwise: "if you do it," that is, proliferate the text, "then you will have done it," that is, brought the first (negatively valued) narrative into existence.
So what can be heard in this lecture is a variety of professional gatekeeping, relying on an attempted "normalization" of a reading population. From a wide range of available uses/readings of texts (in principle), two narratives for their "usage" are uniquely invoked, each with its own morally (and by implication legally) sanctioned consequences. (Though note also that the publication of a "sociology" book containing exactly the same paper does not entail "a little bit of pornography that's kinda gotten loose from [The University]" - even though there is very little control the lecturer/author could have over that reading and its historical upshot.) A particular domain of sexual discourse and practice - trans-sexuality, though others would do - is thereby shown to have two dimensions: the professional/clinical and the dirty/voyeuristic. This is clearly in line with, and draws upon, more generally available selection and inclusion criteria on sexual talk as a whole. That is, when it comes to naming sexual body-parts and acts, two relatively exclusive discourses are available: the clinical ("penis," "vagina," "intercourse," and the rest) and the dirty ("cock," "cunt," "fucking"). The clinical and the dirty are at least relatively exclusive in that sentences which contain mixtures of the terms can be heard as "ungrammatical." What is important, however, is that relatively direct transforms between the two can be made. They are easily co-translatable; and so one problem for the "policing" of sexual talk is to ensure that instances of the clinical do not get readily translated into instances of the dirty and vice versa. Yet it is precisely the "dirty" form in which the secondary systems of elaboration of sexual learning take place. Consequently, sexual learners are, as we have suggested, caught in a double enfolding of the contradiction (double bind?) already surrounding their learning attempts. They are prohibited from direct instruction and similarly instructed to avoid adjacent circuits. Without the resources available to act as adults, it is nevertheless assumed that they can treat sexuality in an "adult way" (19) - that is, with discretion, as "property" (28), in a way which is responsive to ellipticals like "You know what I'm talking about" (21), and so on.44
Returning to Foucault: it would be interesting to compare the version of the student and student-life in the lecture fragment with his (Foucault's) analysis of the conditions of students in a more general social and political framework. He writes:
The student is put outside of society, on a campus. Furthermore, he is excluded while being transmitted a knowledge traditional in nature, obsolete, "academic" and not directly tied to the needs and problems of today. This exclusion is underscored by the organization, around the student, of social mechanisms which are fictitious, artificial and quasi-theatrical (hierarchic relationships, academic exercises, the "court" of examination, evaluation). Finally, the student is given a gamelike way of life; he is offered a kind of distraction, amusement, freedom which, again, has nothing to do with real life; it is this kind of artificial, theatrical society, a society of cardboard, that is being built around him; and thanks to this, young people ... are thus, as it were, neutralized by and for society, rendered safe, ineffective, socially and politically castrated.45
On the one hand, we can see that the work of lecturing we have just analyzed is geared towards this general picture of studenthood; it attempts to keep the politics of sexuality, in this case, "on the campus," in "educated" and "professional" hands. On the other hand, it appears to acknowledge that such policing (the restriction of the indexical potential of "academic" texts) will not always work. The system can and will leak, texts will get out of control, students do have lives, issues, politics, and morality "off campus." The techniques of exclusion cannot be guaranteed - and this may be why, precisely, they have to be repeated and brought into focus "for another first time," time after time.
Foucault, especially in Discipline and Punish, has shown how, historically, official scientific discourses have constructed their own positions of dominance by effectively marginalizing competing ("popular" and no doubt much more semiotically proliferative) discourses and how, at the same time and through the same techniques, they have produced relatively normalized subjects through which general "flows" of "power" can move effectively, efficiently and thus, be reproduced. What our analysis of lecturing has shown, perhaps, is that professional scientific discourses achieve this in highly localized ways, while still drawing on generally available (recursive) community resources: categories of subject, typical courses of action, narrative structure and predictability and so on. One finding, then, is that scientific discourses on sexuality (here: sociology) have built into them techniques of "enfolding." By this I mean that those discourses are not simply produced in a "linguistic" dimension or field but are also produced and reproduced in a political-moral dimension or field of moral action. To speak "sociologically" (within and as a scientific discourse) is also to recommend its forms of indexical "closure" (to retain the shorthand expression) as a morally sanctionable way of speaking, writing and acting - where "sanction" can be heard either positively or negatively. To speak and write "professionally" and "technically" is never to speak in some kind of isolation from the broader civil domain within which professional and technical talk are done; at the very least, to speak this way is to speak on behalf of the professional and the technical as "the good." This enfolding is, I would suggest, a major means by which non-professional, "popular" discourses become marginalized historically. Techniques of what Foucault would call "power" (surveillance, confession, normalization and the rest) are constituted in and as that double grounding which - and this may be news - is itself worked up through quite commonly available discursive methods. This is true at least at the level of "intelligibility" - the basic level of methods and activities - for the resources involved are such ordinary things as membership categorization devices and so on.
Traditional ethnomethodology gives us techniques for the analysis and location of these discursive methods. It allows us to see how methods and local-social activities mutually produce one another and provide for each other's intelligibility. But it can go no further than this. It puts the second level of semiotic meaning (actionability - the level of socio-logical problems and solutions) on the agenda; but ethnomethodology largely eschews concepts which look as if they might have more than local relevance, which look as though they might be "imposed" by theoreticist rather than local interests, which look (to use Garfinkel's favored term) as if they are part and parcel of "constitutive theorizing." For me, this limits, prior to any actual investigation, what is going to count as "locally relevant." As we have seen in the analysis of the lecturing transcript, what is locally relevant to the lecturer goes well outside the domain and confines of the lecture theater. Members' local relevances, therefore, do seem to be more than just restricted to local settings.
I want, from here on, to explore some of these possibilities (under the names of "actionability" and "historicity") assuming, for now at least, that the discipline of ethnomethodology can be left to the task of investigating the question of sheer intelligibility (the reflexive relation of methods and their accomplishments). Hence, in the next chapter, I take up these themes in a relatively abstract (even formalist) way, returning to the levels and forms of semiosis as relations (R1, R2 and R3) encountered earlier in chapter 5. By now it should be clear that R1 is the level of "intelligibility" (signs as methodic practices); that R2 is the level of the "actionability" of signs (their use as socio-logical problems and solutions); and that R3 is the level of "historicity" (the embedding of actionable formations in community histories such that semioses can be rendered available - in various ways - outside single localities of use).
=> chapter 8
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/7.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.