Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, incarnation and ventriloquism (Dialogue Studies)

Action and Agency in Dialogue

Dialogue Studies (DS) Dialogue Studies takes the notion of dialogicity as central; it encompasses every type of language use, workaday, institutional and literary. By covering the whole range of language use, the growing field of dialogue studies comes close to pragmatics and studies in discourse or conversation. The concept of dialogicity, however, provides a clear methodological profile. The series aims to cross disciplinary boundaries and considers a genuinely inter-disciplinary approach necessary for addressing the complex phenomenon of dialogic language use. This peer reviewed series will include monographs, thematic collections of articles, and textbooks in the relevant areas.

Editor Edda Weigand Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

Editorial Advisory Board Adelino Cattani

Marion Grein

Anne-Marie Söderberg

Kenneth N. Cissna

Fritjof Haft

Talbot J. Taylor

Světla Čmejrková

John E. Joseph

Wolfgang Teubert

François Cooren

Werner Kallmeyer

Linda R. Waugh

Robert T. Craig

Catherine KerbratOrecchioni

Elda Weizman

Università di Padova University of South Florida Czech Language Institute Université de Montréal University of Colorado at Boulder

University of Mainz University of Tübingen University of Edinburgh University of Mannheim

Université Lyon 2

Marcelo Dascal

Geoffrey Sampson

Valeri Demiankov

Masayoshi Shibatani

Tel Aviv University Russian Academy of Sciences

University of Sussex

Copenhagen Business School College of William and Mary University of Birmingham University of Arizona Bar Ilan University

Yorick Wilks

University of Sheffield

Rice University

Volume 6 Action and Agency in Dialogue. Passion, incarnation and ventriloquism by François Cooren

Action and Agency in Dialogue Passion, incarnation and ventriloquism

François Cooren Université de Montréal

With a Foreword by Bruno Latour Sciences Po, Paris

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Portions of this book appeared as “The coproduction of organizational presence: A study of Médecins Sans Frontières in action”. Human Relations 61 (10), 1339–1370, and “Arguments for a plurified view of the social world: Spacing and timing as hybrid achievements”. Time & Society 14 (213), 263–280, used by permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cooren, François. Action and agency in dialogue passion, incarnation and ventriloquism / François Cooren. p. cm. (Dialogue Studies, issn 1875-1792 ; v. 6) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Dialogue analysis. 2. Oral communication. I. Title. P95.455.C665    2010 302.3’46--dc22 2010008091 isbn 978 90 272 1023 4 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8819 6 (Eb)

© 2010 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

    

Il y a beaucoup de passions dans une passion, et toutes sortes de voix dans une voix, toute une rumeur, glossolalie (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2. Mille plateaux, p. 97)



To Nancy, my passion

Table of contents

Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction

ix xiii 1

Part I.  Agency, texts, and passion: Arguments for a reconceptualization chapter 1 For a renewed conception of action 1.1 Action: What’s in a name?  16 1.2 A little detour through science studies  20 1.3 Toward a new philosophy of action?  22 chapter 2 How texts (and other things) do things with words 2.1 Textual agency  28 2.2 Con-textual agency  32 2.3 Autonomy and intentionality  38 2.4 Conventionality, literality, and figurativity  43 2.5 The functioning of texts  49 chapter 3 Passion, animation, and decision 3.1 Passion, animation, and attachment  58 3.2 Passion, animation, and reason  62 3.3 Animation, decision, and undecidability  64 3.4 Animation as a form of staging  66 3.5 Animation, power, and authority  72 3.6 Partial conclusion  77

15

27

57

viii Action and Agency in Dialogue

Part II.  Ventriloquism and incarnation chapter 4 Ventriloquism or the ecstatic dimension of communication 4.1 Making someone or something speak  85 4.2 Downstream forms of ventriloquism  89 4.3 Upstream forms of ventriloquism  105 4.4 Cultivating figures  112 4.5 Conclusion  134 chapter 5 Incarnation 5.1 Incarnation: What’s in a name?  142 5.2 Collectives’ mode of being   150 5.3 Systems and systematicity  160 5.4 A plea for reification  165 Conclusion References Author index Subject index

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169 175 193 197

Acknowledgments

Multiple voices can be heard in a book and this one is certainly not an exception. Beyond the citations and quotes that populate it, this essay is also the product of the many authors, scholars, students, research groups, and, more generally, people and institutions who influenced its writing or made it possible. If I am – officially – its sole author, this appropriation/attribution can be easily deconstructed through all the sources of authority/authorship that were implicitly, cryptically, or sometimes explicitly mobilized while completing it. I am, of course, greatly indebted to these persons and institutions and my hope is that nobody will be forgotten in these acknowledgments. First, I would like to point out that the writing of this book was made possible through a sabbatical leave that my alma mater – the Université de Montréal – granted me from January to August 2009. I will therefore start by thanking my institution for allowing its scholars to benefit from these privileged moments in their career, moments during which they can have all the time they need to be able to think and reflect on what is animating them, that is, research and knowledge. During this sabbatical leave, I was lucky enough to be hosted by Sciences Po, Lille (the Political Science Institute of Lille, France), thanks to the generous invitation of Pierre Mathiot, its very dynamic director. I want to thank him and his institution for allowing me to retreat in the ivory tower that they very kindly allocated to me during this period. I will not forget their generosity and openness. While in Europe, I also benefited from the feedback and input of many scholars and students that I also want to thank. A special mention to Anne Mayère who invited me to give lectures and teach classes at the Université Paul Sabatier – Toulouse 3, which gave me the opportunity to test some of the ideas presented in this book. I would like to especially thank Arlette Bouzon, Bertrand Fauré, Laurent Morillon, as well as Florian Hémont for providing me with extensive feedback on previous versions of this manuscript. I am also grateful to Sylvie Bourdin and Jean-Luc Bouillon, as well as Alexia Jolivet and Marie Bénéjean for questioning some of the controversial ideas that are defended in this essay. I also want to express my gratitude to my friend and colleague, Mark Van Vuuren, as well as Erwin Seydel, both from the University of Twente, Netherlands, for inviting me to give lectures on some of the ideas presented in this volume. A



Action and Agency in Dialogue

special thanks to Peter-Paul Verbeek whose reflections on what objects do in our daily life were quite influential as I was struggling with key aspects of this essay. Throughout these seven months of sabbatical, I also got the privilege of being invited to give several lectures, which allowed me to benefit from various inputs coming from colleagues and graduate students. My deepest thanks to the following persons and institutions: Frédérique Aït-Touati and Bruno Latour (Sciences Po, Paris), Michel Berry (École de Management de Paris and École Supérieure des Mines de Paris), François Heinderyckx and François Lambotte (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Thierry Boudès (ESCP-EAP), Ang Peng Hwa and Benjamin Detember (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Christian Licoppe (Télécom Paristech, Paris), Éric Grillo and Marie-Dominique Popelard (Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 4), Catherine Lonneux and Christian Le Moenne (Université de Rennes), Bertrand Parent (Université de Nantes), Patrice de la Broise, Romain Huët and Pierre Delcambre (Université de Lille 3), as well as Franck Cochoy (Université de Toulouse). I am also very grateful to the following persons for providing me with extended feedback on former versions of this manuscript: Robert E. Sanders (University at Albany, SUNY), Jocelyne Arquembourg (Université Paris 4, Sorbonne Nouvelle), Gail T. Fairhurst (University of Cincinnati), Briankle Chang (University of Massachussetts, Ahmerst), David Goldblatt (Denison University), Sylvie Grosjean (University of Ottawa), Jérôme Denis (Télécom Paristech, Paris) and Donal Carbaugh (University of Massachussetts, Ahmerst). A special thank also to Sergeiy Sandler for giving me important inputs about Mikhail Bakhtin and to Érik Bullot for interesting conversations about ventriloquism. For the past seven years that I have been at the Université de Montréal, I always benefited from the moral and intellectual support of the colleagues, friends, and graduate students associated with our research group, the LOG (Language Organization Gouvernance). These people are James R. Taylor, Elizabeth J. Van Every, Daniel Robichaud, Chantal Benoit-Barné, Hélène Giroux, Alain Létourneau, Frédérik Matte, Mathieu Chaput, Tinel Nedelcu, Consuelo Vasquez, Émilie Pelletier, Joelle Basque, Damien Charrieras and many others that participate in our data and Ourepo sessions. A special thank you to my colleague and friend Boris Brummans as well as to Nicolas Bencherki for their very helpful comments and critiques and my deepest gratitude to Stephanie Fox for greatly improving the readability of the manuscript and to François Fayad for generating the author index. A big merci to Myriam Amzallag, Catherine Bourdages, Pierrette Brodeur, Lyne Charland, Patricia Desroches, and Odette Langlois for making this Department a very special place to work.



Acknowledgments

If this whole book project was made possible, it is also thanks to Edda Weigand (University of Münster) who invited me to give a talk in 2007 at the 11th Conference of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis (IADA), an invitation that led me to develop the idea of ventriloquism, which subsequently became one of the main topics of this book. My gratitude goes to her, as well as to Isja Conen, from John Benjamins, for encouraging me to undertake this big adventure. I also want to acknowledge two research institutions, the FQRSC (Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture, #111889) and the SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, #410-2005-1244 & #410-2009-1569) for financially supporting the research that led to the writing of this volume. As you will notice, many theses presented in this book are illustrated with excerpts taken from fieldwork completed with Médecins sans frontières (also known as Doctors Without Borders). A special thank you to this wonderful humanitarian organization for providing me with access to some of its missions around the world, especially to Jean-Sébastien Matte for making this research possible. I cannot end these acknowledgments without thanking Paule, Jean, Bruno, Sylvie, Mathieu, Benoit, Paúl, Marie, Léon, Théo, Louise, Mario, Denis, Helena, Bonnie, Scott, Denis, Luke, Frannie, Lucia, Jack, Maya and Danika. Finally, a special “merci” to my three kids, Nina, Émile, and Adrien who are the treasures of my life, as well as to my beloved wife, my passion, ma bien aimée, Nancy. This book is dedicated to you.

xi

foreword

Who is making the dummy speak? Bruno Latour Sciences Po

François Cooren has been made to speak about ventriloquism by a voice that has come from somewhere else and that he is not quite sure of mastering completely since it speaks in a strange idiom and make him utter things he, François, did not want to say. No, I mean François Cooren has written here a book about speech act theory in which, with complete mastery, he leads the reader through a vast literature to demonstrate that when “we” speak many other voices are speaking as well. No, no, no: largely influenced by ethnomethodology, speech act theory, Derridian philosophy, organization studies, actor-network theory, and his wife and kids… plus quite a bit of field work in Africa – a place ideally suited to hear voices and be manipulated by countless fetishes – a fictional character called “François Cooren”, apparently professor of communication in Montreal, tries to wrestle with all those multiple agents to destroy, one after another, all the concepts dear to the heart of communication specialists: action, voice, agency, interaction, information and, of course, communication. Like many specialists of communication studies, François Cooren has been puzzled by the centrality given to the common place idea of one human speaking agent interacting in a dialog with another human speaking agent. To be sure, the time seems far removed when those two interacting humans could not exchange with one another anything more meaningful than statements of facts about cats, mugs, mats and black swans. Thanks to Austin and Searle, it is now clear that those statements of facts, far from offering a useful base line for judging all other forms of speech, are so rare that they probably have never been entertained except in books of formal logic (where they have been mercifully replaced by ps and qs anyway). And thanks to science studies (a field that Cooren has learned to cross over skillfully with speech act theory), we have learned that it is certainly not in science that we could find cases of “purely factual” referential statement. There is indeed reference and objectivity in scientific practice, but it is obtained through

xiv Action and Agency in Dialogue

an immensely more complex set of “deambulations” as William James said, or “choreography” as Ludwick Fleck proposed to say, than what passed, earlier on, for statements of facts. And yet, is it not very strange that so many linguists and so many socio-linguists, even when they have absorbed the multiplicity of speech acts, remain so committed to the idea that all of them have the same origin, namely, a unified speaking human subject? The plurality of speech acts has not led them to pluralize the agent who remains firmly in charge when uttering the spoken words. Cooren’s book aims at pushing the puzzle further and to add to the multiplicity of speech acts the multiplicity of agencies making the human agent speak. In his able hands, speech act theory shifts from a theory of a human speaking actor to the theory of what makes the agent speak and act. After all, if it is possible “to do things with words”, it is even truer that many things make us do words… Actually, it is the conceit of an agent in command which seems now as outdated as the idea of the Sun turning around the Earth. Cooren’s solution is to abandon entirely the notion of a dialogue where two humans agents face one another, and to follow instead the drift of their common intertwined actions which are simultaneously behind and ahead of them. What he calls moving “upstream” and “downstream” of conversation – meticulously reconstructed according to the techniques of conversation analysts. But a stream of what? Conversation? Not exactly, since a tiny fraction only seems to be carried by sentences. Action? Not quite, even though the word is often used, especially by pragmatists, to describe what people do when they interact. Interaction? Not at all, since this would imply that we know in advance how many agents are present in the dialogue. Let’s say that it is a flow of agencies that are either making us say things (upstream) or that we make do things (downstream). Such is the phenomenon for which Cooren has chosen the unusual metaphor of ventriloquism. I am not completely convinced that this minor form of entertainment captures exactly what Cooren has in mind (but having “a thing in mind” is itself an even odder metaphor…). Ventriloquism is a highly mastered art form when there is no hesitation on the part of the viewer that she is being deceived – and this is precisely where the pleasure comes from. However what Cooren wishes to point out, is that the flow of agents and agencies in which we swim, float, drift or sometimes drown, is not mastered at all, even when, as we say in French, we try, before saying anything, “to turn six times our tongue in our mouth”. What is important in order to understand this book, is that it is not about a flow of discourse, but a flow of characters with their own ontology and their own weight, each distributing differently the powers to speak or to silence.



Foreword xv

Reading the book, you begin to move your attention away from speech toward the figures of speech. And then, an even stranger thing happens: the very notion of “figures of speech” reverses itself and becomes literal: we are being acted upon by those invisible entities that “haunt” us and populate (or even crowd) the interactions. At this point, ventriloquism is inverted: we, the human subjects, are the dummies toward which other entities are projecting their real voices as if they were coming from us. The creatures who are carried out by the flow have the strange ability to speak through their bellies – near which we sit, it seems, so that we end up being manipulated by those creatures as if speech was coming out of our own mouths… All the studies of metaphor, of story-telling, or staging arguments are put upside down. We are spoken or silenced by others, by aliens, toward which we should direct our attention if we want to understand what make us act or speak. What Marx tried to do with his notion of fetishism is here inverted once again – back on its feet… No doubt that linguists had considerably simplified their job: instead of interviewing “vents” (the technical term, apparently, in the art of ventriloquism to designate the real performers) they had limited themselves to interview the dummies! And the socio-linguists have been just as timid: they have added other speakers without realizing that adding dummies to dummies still does not help to uncover the real sources of speech… Even ethnomethodologists (an influence as important to Cooren as his beloved Derrida) have held a much too restricted view of who acts in an interaction: the specters, phantoms, monsters have to be granted much more agency that what has been allowed until now. When Garfinkel took great care of not treating social actors as “cultural dopes”, little could he envisage that Cooren would now say that he has confused dummies with the real speechactors: those who make the dummy speak and articulate. And those creatures in no way resemble the old familiar figures of society, system, politics, discourse and structure because speech is now distributed among too many entities to detect their exact origin points. A totally new landscape is opened to inquiry: let’s expand speech acts to now contemplate the vast zoo of agencies able to project their voices into our mouths or their silences into our limbs. Austin had directed our attention downstream (to perlocution), Cooren wants us to look also upstream to what should be called “pre-locutory” acts. The great originality of his attempt is that it is not a demolition (or a deconstruction) enterprise. The author remains firmly committed to the stock and trade of speech act theory and conversation analysis. The main empirical part of the book is the result of an extended field work and relies on the classical tools to carefully study micro interactions. In his view, to abandon the egocentric, anthropocentric, logocentric view of speech, is not to abandon any empirical terra firma. On the contrary, it is what allows to be much more realistic about what happens

xvi Action and Agency in Dialogue

when we are engaged in the flow of action and speech. What Cooren sums up in this fabulous expression by Garfinkel: “the next first time”. A perfect way to designate what it means to look simultaneously upstream and downstream of the interaction without losing it. What Cooren excels at redescribing is precisely this most important feature of interactions, namely, their relative size. And of course, for him, the size of those interactions is neither “micro” nor “macro”: their size depends on what the agents making speakers speak intend to make those spoken speakers do… and thus the very notion of the size of an interaction may change from one sentence to the next, or even from one gesture to the next (since there are many agencies who do not need to speak to express themselves through the limbs of the human subjects). The former human subject is portrayed here as the one who reacts to agencies of totally different size and energy. When reading Cooren, you realize that speech, as normally delineated, is just as meaningless as the gestures of a swimmer out of the water. And I am not talking here about the “context” or the “non verbal” communication. No, I am talking of the real agencies about the ontology of which we have so little knowledge even though they form the real flows inside which we are all gesturing. In the end, when you begin to become more familiar with agencies instead of the dummies that are made to speak (formerly known as the “human speaking subjects”), a totally different speech act theory is emerging. Although Cooren’s book has not developed it completely, it is certainly in the offing when, in the last chapter, he compares the agencies able to make us organize ourselves with those able to produce political will or even with those able to make us feel amorous passions. In order to move from the egocentric to the agency-centric view, you just have to replace, in the notion of speech-act, the human actor by what has made this humans actor act. No doubt that if we manage not to loose the empirical techniques of inquiry, a much more realistic picture of interactions will be drawn. Cooren’s book is an important step in just this direction.

Introduction

What happens when two or more people communicate or interact with each other? This is the daunting question that this book proposes to address by starting from a somewhat controversial hypothesis: What if human interactants were not the only ones to be considered, paraphrasing Austin (1962/1975), as “doing things with words”? In other words, what if other “things” could also be granted the status of actors, agents, or actants in a dialogical situation? As far as I know, this idea has never been explicitly problematized in studies on language and communication, but I would like to show that what I call “ventriloquism” – the phenomenon by which an actor makes another actor speak through the production of a given utterance – is, in fact, a ubiquitous phenomenon that deserves our attention. For too long, communication and dialogue studies have indeed been accused of being caught in a sort of “micro” straightjacket, which supposedly prevents them from going beyond what happens on the terra firma of interaction. As Bruno Latour (2005) points out, representatives of classical sociology have even invented oppositions, such as structure versus action, macro versus micro, that reinforce the strict separation between what happens in the realm of (inter-)action and what is supposed to transcend it (Bisel 2009; Conrad & Haynes 2001). . In this book, the terms dialogue and interaction will be used interchangebly. Obviously, the term dialogue is often used as a restrictive and normative concept to refer to specific interactional situations implying “more than a simple back-and-forthness of messages in interaction” (Cissna & Anderson 1994, p. 10). As these authors make explicit, “It points to a particular process and quality of communication in which the participants ‘meet,’ which allows for changing and being changed” (p. 10, quoted by Anderson, Baxter, & Cissna 2004, p. 1). Although this way of conceiving of dialogue, which can be found in the work of key scholars such as Buber (1970), Habermas (1984) or Jacques (1985), is definitely interesting (see, for instance, Grillo 2000), there is also an important body of work, especially in fields associated with linguistics, that use the term dialogue in non-normative and non-restrictive ways to refer to all the activities of co-construction that take place in interaction, whether these activities are considered positive or negative (in this respect, Bakhtin’s 1981, notion of dialogue could be considered a hybrid between normative and non-normative conceptions). In this book, I will therefore use the term dialogue in this more open and wide acceptation, although I believe that some of the reflections and analyses developed here could be useful to address normative questions (see especially the conclusion). For an interesting dialogue between these various conceptions of dialogue, see Weigand (2008a).



Action and Agency in Dialogue

After all, as soon as you start to differentiate action from structure, it means that, on the one hand, there are (inter-)actions that can be observed and analyzed, while on the other hand, there is, somewhere, somehow, a structure that is supposed to govern, orient, or generate what is happening in these interactions (note, incidentally, how this formulation implicitly attributes agency to structures to the extent that govern, orient, and generate are action verbs – the opposition is therefore undermined from the outset). Certainly, this way of presenting the problem looks a little bit like a caricature on my part – and more complex alternatives have been put forward (see, for instance, Browning, Greene, Sitkin, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld 2009; Giddens 1979, 1984; McPhee 1989, 2004; McPhee & Zaug 2000) – but even today, we still tend to think that micro-interactionists or dialogue analysts have not much to tell us about “the big picture,” about society in general, about organizational forms, precisely because they are supposedly caught in the local, the small, the here and the now (Deetz 1992; McPhee & Iverson 2008, 2009). But what if we could dislocate interaction? What if we could show that many different “things” (to be defined) invite themselves into our conversations and dialogues? What happens, for instance, when two diplomats representing two different countries negotiate with each other? Can’t we say that beyond their interaction, it is also two countries that are talking to each other, without being accused of personification? Paraphrasing the great French sociologist, Gabriel Tarde (1895/1999), isn’t it time to recognize that “everything, in the world of facts, goes from the small to the big” (p. 92, my translation), that is, that for two countries to talk to each other, one needs to have at least one interaction taking place somewhere, somehow, involving two of their representatives? As the saying goes, the rubber needs to hit the road somewhere and however big collectives (countries, societies, or organizations) are, they will only interact with each other if there exist actors who are authorized and delegated to act and speak on their behalf (Benoit-Barné & Cooren 2009; Taylor & Cooren 1997). There is therefore dis-location to the extent that interactions are never purely local. They are always dislocal (Cooren & Fairhurst 2004, 2009; Grosjean & . Although he never went as far as attributing the status of actors, agents, or actants to “things” in a dialogic situation, it is noteworthy that Goffman (1959) did not hesitate to speak of “one-person teams” in Chapter 2 of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Even if he never really developed this question further, Sanders and Bonito (in press) note that, “Goffman’s idea seems to be that individuals, like multi-person teams, act on behalf of the interests of some institution and not just their personal interests. It is likely that Goffman had in mind not only actions on behalf of formal organizations, but actions on behalf of such cross-situational cultural institutions as friendship, parenthood, a profession, citizenship, the public sphere, and the like.” To some extent, this book could be understood as an extension of Goffman’s intuitions.



Introduction

Bonneville 2009; Grosjean & Robichaud, in press), that is, they constantly mobilize entities that they contribute to re-present, making them present in the here and now. Interestingly, this way of conceiving of interaction precisely allows us to free it from the hic et nunc, from the present in both senses of the term (spatial and temporal). According to this approach, presence or even co-presence (Goffman 1959) is always an effect that is constructed on what Taylor and Van Every (2000) insightfully call the site of conversation, which means that many different things can end up being made present or incarnated by the interlocutors, whether intentionally or unintentionally. If we go back to our two diplomats talking with each other, we saw that they re-presented their respective countries, but other effects of representation/incarnation can easily be imagined. For instance, if one of the two diplomats happens to look much older than his counterpart, there is a good chance that something like “experience” or “seniority” might matter in the interaction (even if it could happen that it does not; this is an empirical question). Although speaking of experience and seniority as agents in this situation might sound completely nonsensical, I will show in the upcoming chapters that things as basic as authority and power cannot be really grasped and understood if some form of doing or even agency is not recognized in attributes such as experience, wisdom, expertise, or status (just to name of few of them). When we say, “Experience speaks,” we are indeed speaking figuratively, but as we will also see, figures precisely are key to understanding these effects of dislocation and ventriloquism. If experience indeed speaks, it means that somehow we recognize that it is not only this person who is now speaking to us, but also, through a form of ventriloquism, her experience. Note that this is not just a way of talking (although it definitely is one!). To the extent that experience matters in a given situation – because it impresses someone, for instance – it means that somehow it makes a difference, which is another way to say that it is doing something (here, impressing). Once we start to recognize that agency is not the sole privilege of humans, but that it should also be attributed to several other beings (that will be defined later), we begin to understand that any interaction constitutes a specific locus where an array of agencies or figures can deploy themselves, whether under the form of . Although it is too soon to explain why, the term figures and agencies will often be used interchangeably in this book. Even if they are not synonymous, these notions actually refer to two aspects of the same thing: While the term agency focuses on the active or actional dimension of a given being, the term figure insists on the fact that this being needs to be “made up” in a given interaction in order to be active (etymologically, figure has the same root as “to make” or “to fabricate”). Note that sociologists such as Goffman (1981) and Simmell (1972, 1981) have already noticed the key role figures play in interactional settings, although I would contend that they never went as far as exploring their agency (see also Quéré 1988).





Action and Agency in Dialogue

passions, principles, arguments, facts, values, dispositions, texts, collectives, etc. Analyzing an interaction can thus consist of identifying these effects of presence/ absence, which contribute to its dislocation. As we will see, reconceptualizing agency this way does not force us to abandon the differences between its various forms (for instance, the human ones vs. the nonhuman ones), it just invites us to pay attention to what is active (agissant in French) in a given situation. Interestingly, this perspective also invites us to reconsider our traditional ways of conceiving of action in general. Historically, dialogic, interaction, and communication studies have been obsessed by this question, whether through the paradigmatic revolution initiated by analytic philosophers such as John Langshaw Austin (1962/1975; Cooren 2000) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) or through the groundbreaking studies of sociologists such as Harold Garfinkel (1967, 2002), Erving Goffman (1959, 1967, 1974, 1981) and Harvey Sacks (1992). As we learned through these key contributions, a basic starting point to understanding and analyzing what happens in interaction is to identify what interactants are doing in these settings. As Pomerantz and Fehr (1997) argue, “Actions are central to the way that participants, themselves, produce and understand conduct; they are a fundamental part of the meaningfulness of conduct” (p. 72). In other words, understanding what a turn of talk or utterance means consists of translating what is said into the types of action that are achieved by the interactants. Although the perspective defended in the present volume does not abandon this fundamental step toward our comprehension of the mechanisms of interaction, it questions the analytical gesture that consists of reducing the meaningfulness of conduct to what people achieve in interaction and only to this. As Latour (1996) points out, “to do is causing to do” (faire, c’est faire faire), which means that people are always caught in a chain of agencies whenever they act. As I will try to show, conduct, in fact, appears meaningful to interactants and analysts precisely because action implies passion, in the etymological sense of the term, that is, activity implies, by definition, a form of passivity or animation (to be defined). For instance, a turn of talk appears meaningful because we are able to identify one or several reasons why the person who produced this turn is doing what she is doing. But identifying these reasons precisely amounts to identifying what leads the person to do what she is doing. While reasons and passions or emotions tend to be presented as opposites, we will see that they actually are intertwined (Mumby & Putnam 1992) and that this is why various forms of agency can be identified in a given dialogue or interaction. Once the action/passion couple is recognized in its full operativity, it then becomes possible to identify two basic ways by which agencies or figures express themselves in interaction, what I call upstream and downstream forms of agency. While the upstream form of agency corresponds to what leads the interactant to



Introduction

say what she is saying, whether it is principles, values, reasons, emotions, and so on, the downstream one corresponds to what thing the interactant is trying to do, that is, the utterances, gestures, facial expressions, and bodily movements produced by this person. According to this model, any interactant is always caught between what leads her to do what she is doing and the “communicational beings” (utterances, gestures, expressions, etc.) she is producing in interaction, beings that are precisely supposed to act or do things on her behalf, in her name, that is, for her. Interestingly, this approach does not force us to choose between a Foucauldian (Foucault 1977) perspective that would focus on how people are “spoken” – what Alvesson and Kärreman (2000) and Gee (1999) call “big D” Discourse – and a conversational analytic perspective that would focus on people’s talk in interaction (Boden 1994; Pomerantz 1980, 1988; Sanders 1987, 2007; Sacks 1992; Schegloff 1988, 1991, 1992, 1997, 2001) – what they call “small d” discourse (see also Fairhurst & Putnam 2004; Jian, Schmisseur, & Fairhurst 2008a, 2008b; Putnam 2008; Putnam & Fairhurst 2001). To the extent that action (activity) always implies passion (passivity) or animation and vice versa, we will see that, by definition, both phenomena always are operative in interaction. The key idea consists of never leaving the terra firma of interaction: Whether we decide to focus on how people are (or present themselves as) acted upon or how they are (or present themselves as) acting, our job will be to singularize all the agents that are (presented as) leading them to say what they say, whether upstream (principles, emotions, values) or downstream (utterances, facial expressions, bodily movements, etc.). This is what I propose to call a plurified view of the dialogic or interactional scene, a view that takes into account all the various agents or figures that potentially compose this scene. While this approach might be accused of fragmenting the interactants to the point of nonsense, I will try to show that such a fragmentation often is not the product of our analytical gaze, but of the very process we are studying. As numerous examples will illustrate, often times, it is the interactants themselves who orient to these various forms of agencies or figures or mobilize them in their talk. Taking conversation, dialogue, and communication seriously thus consists of showing that these forms of life, as Taylor and Van Every (2000), following Wittgenstein (1953), propose to call them, are some of the most important phonation devices (Latour 1987) through which a plethora of beings or things can come to act and even interact. For instance, when someone explicitly or implicitly conveys that “facts speak for themselves,” or when she appears to speak in the name of specific principles or values, why could not we say that facts, principles, and values invite themselves on the floor of our conversations? Denying this point would amount to saying that this is just “a way of speaking,” that it is “figurative speech,” as do





Action and Agency in Dialogue

many labels that tend to downplay the relevance of what interactants say in interaction. Indeed, why should not we take interactants seriously? For instance, if someone implicitly conveys that “facts speak for themselves” regarding a given situation (for instance, a war), should not we recognize that the facts presented (i.e., made present) by this person become non-negligible agents or figures contributing to the definition or framing of the situation (Goffman 1959, 1974)? Similarly, when someone argues for a given position, should not we acknowledge that the arguments presented function like as many agents or figures supporting this controversial stance? Should not we even recognize that if these arguments do support a position it is because they implicitly mobilize principles and values that are supposed to be consequential in the way a situation is defined? As it should be clear by now, this way of conceiving of interaction forces us to reconsider not only our traditional views on agency (Gunn 2009), that is, what is potentially active (agissant) in a given situation, but also our reflection on the mode of being or existence of things as diverse as collectives, passions, emotions, statuses, norms, rules, and values, just to name a few. For instance, we will see that this reflection on re-presentation and incarnation, that is, the phenomena by which something or someone is made present or incarnated in a given discussion allows us to reconceptualize collectives’ mode of existence, their communicative constitution (McPhee & Zaug 2000; Putnam & Nicotera 2009; Taylor & Van Every 2000). If we indeed never leave the terra firma of (inter-)action, it means that something such as an organization or society, for example, comes to exist and act only through the various agents who (or that) are supposed to act in its name, whether these agents happen to be logos, flags, organizational charts, spokespersons, websites, press releases, or even architectural elements. In other words, we need to acknowledge all the human and nonhuman agents contributing to the mode of existence and action of something like an organization or society, be it only through the name that “it” receives (Brummans, Cooren, & Chaput 2009; Cooren, Brummans, & Charrieras 2008; Nicotera, forthcoming). As we will see, once a collective has a name, whether it is the United States of America, Microsoft, or Joe’s Delicatessen, many things can precisely be done in the name of this artificial entity, what Hobbes (1651/1997) called an artificial person. Of course, one can also use the pronoun we and this artificial entity does not need to have any legal dimension, but what is crucial is that the plurified view of interaction leads to a plurified view of collectives. Since the rubber needs to hit the road somewhere, a collective has to be embodied, materialized, or incarnated somewhere, somehow, in action. What I propose to call ventriloquism will therefore be an important phenomenon to understand the mode of action and being



Introduction

of collectives, but also the mode of action and being of things as diverse as rules, statuses, protocols, policies, procedures, and so on. For instance, we will see that a rule can be said to act when an authorized person invokes it through the phenomenon of ventriloquism. When a clerk tells you that you have to fill out a given form in order to obtain a service, we see (implicitly or explicitly) ventriloquism in that it is not only this person who is asking you to complete this form, but also the institution she re-presents, incarnates, embodies, as well as the rule that enjoins her to do so – a rule that also happens to act in the name of the institution (Castor & Cooren 2006). Ventriloquism therefore is ubiquitous (should I dare to say “omni-present”) precisely because it is the condition of conduct’s meaningfulness. Our actions seem meaningful or accountable because we appear to be (or present ourselves as) moved by specific reasons that authorize, allow, or lead us to do what we do, whether these reasons are institutional, ethical, practical, ideological, or even, as we will see, emotional. To be sure, we all know of extreme cases where the meaningfulness or reasonability of our conducts seems to disappear, for instance when someone kills somebody else out of passion (for instance, jealousy), but this, as we will see, is an extreme case and it precisely happens when a given “reason” appear to take over all of the others (see also Fisher 1974, for a very nice Burkean analysis of a non-fictional case of multiple murder and suicide). For instance, Othello kills Desdemona because of his morbid jealousy that, as we say, blinds him to other reasons that might have prevented him from committing this crime of passion. In this fictitious case, Othello becomes the object of his own passion and the only reasoning he appears to be able to make is, “She betrayed me, therefore she has to die.” His jealousy thus is an important agent in this situation in that it participates in what drives him to kill Desdemona (in addition to Iago, the lost handkerchief, etc.). Othello’s conduct appears irrational precisely because he seems to be led by just one passion – jealousy – which suppresses all of the others (Van Vuuren & Cooren 2010). On the contrary, we will see that a behavior appears more rational, balanced, or reasonable when it seems the object of some form of calculation (which is the etymological root of the word ratio), because “all things considered,” what is done appears to be the product of a balanced judgment (Cochoy 2002). The reflection on ventriloquism and the action/passion couple will thus also lead us irremediably to issues of responsibility and ethics. While the idea of nonhuman agency is often criticized for questioning our tendency to firmly attach responsibility to action, we will see that recognizing all forms of agency precisely allows us to speak of ethics and responsibility in a very practical and incarnated way. As we all know, recognizing that somebody did something does not necessarily lead us to say that she is responsible for what happened. In this regard,





Action and Agency in Dialogue

young children are very good examples of agents whose (legal and practical) responsibility tend to be attributed to their parents or tutors. Reversely, anybody working in an organization knows that a person can be deemed responsible for something that she did not actually do, just because what happened was done under her authority, that she technically, legally was the author of what happened. Responding for an action, which is what responsibility etymologically means, therefore is a matter of (legal and practical) judgment, a position that the approach presented here helps us better understand.

Organization of the book In the first part of this book, I present a series of arguments leading to the reconceptualization of the question of action and agency. Starting from the mundane usage of the terms agent and action, Chapter 1 shows that making a difference is something that we tend to attribute to a plethora of beings, whether they be textual (as in “This policy forbids the usage of cell phones in this building”), technological (as in “This machine produces widgets”), or architectural (as in “These two rooms communicate with each other”). Instead of reducing action and agency to a performance intentionally accomplished by a human being, this acceptation of the term allows us to acknowledge the many things that artifacts, predispositions, technologies, and architectural elements do in our daily life (Semprini 2000; Verbeek 2005), while also taking into account the various situations where what we do escapes our control (for instance, when we insult someone without intending to do so). After this general introduction to the question of action and agency, Chapter 2 proposes to focus on interaction, especially in dialogic situation. By mobilizing this renewed way of conceiving of action and agency in general, I propose an alternative model of speech act theory and conversation in general, a model that questions the reduction of speech agency to what human interlocutors intend to do in interaction. Following Sbisà’s (1984, 1987, 1992, 2001, 2002) and Weigand’s (2001, 2006) work, speech acts thus become an object of potential negotiation between interactants, which leads us to recognize that talk in interaction never is under the participants’ full control. This plurified view of the dialogic scene then brings us to Chapter 3, which introduces the ideas of passion/animation and their operationality in interaction. Using the work of ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts as an illustration, this chapter shows that traditional ways of conceiving of interaction tend to reduce this phenomenon to what people do when conversing with each other. Reversely, once we recognize that there is no action without passion/animation



Introduction

(James 1997; Korichi 2000) – that is, no activity without a form of passivity (to be defined) – it becomes possible to dislocate our interactions – that is, to delocalize them – and call classical dichotomies such as action versus structure, macro versus micro, local versus global into question. Furthermore, the question of who or what is acting becomes debatable, for many types of agents or figures (such as utterances, emotions, collectives, principles, or rules) can be identified as doing something in a given discussion. Having presented this theoretical framework, I then introduce the second part, which will illustrate its analytical productivity. Chapter 4 will introduce the phenomenon of ventriloquism, which, as I will try to show, is constitutive of any interaction. Although dialogues and interactions have traditionally been conceived as mobilizing two or more human beings, I will demonstrate that interactants constantly mobilize various beings by ventriloquizing them, that is, by making them say or do things. Interestingly, this reflection on ventriloquism will then allow me to show that a certain oscillation or vacillation (Goldblatt 2006) is always at stake in interaction and dialogue. For instance, positioning yourself as speaking in the name of a principle means that this principle is supposed to animate or move you at that very moment. If one way of conceiving of interaction consists of positioning the interactants as ventriloquists who make dummies say or do things, we will see that such a positioning can be deconstructed to the extent that these interactants can also be seen as animated or moved by specific agencies (principles, values, norms, etc.) that ventriloquize them. The idea is not to reduce interactants to puppets or dummies but to show that any action implies a form of passion, of passivity, and that these traces of passivity and animation can be reconstructed in our analyses. Two forms of ventriloquism will thus be identified, what I call downstream and upstream forms of ventriloquism. While the downstream form of ventriloquism corresponds with how interactants can be said to be ventriloquized through the turns of talk they produce, a phenomenon that also allows them to convey implicit messages about people’s rights and obligations (Katambwe & Taylor 2006), the upstream form positions the interactant as incarnating or embodying something that they claim to represent, whether it is a principle, value, rule, norm or collective. According to this approach, any interaction therefore constitutes a dislocated locus where various agencies and figures express themselves through the people who communicate with each other. In addition to dislocating the interaction, such analyses illustrate how interactants manage to lend weight to their respective positions. As long as the human interactants are the only ones deemed to be doing things in interaction, effects of power and authority can remain an enigma or a blind spot to scholars interested in the detailed study of interaction (Grillo 2005). However, as soon as



10

Action and Agency in Dialogue

ventriloquism is acknowledged, it then becomes possible to show that interacting often consists of associating oneself with figures or agencies that one manages to stage in one’s turn of talk. Lending weight to one’s position thus consists of staging various figures (principles, absent persons, facts, institutions, expertise, etc.) that implicitly substantiate or corroborate what we are standing for (see also Boltanski & Thévenot 2006). As we will see, these effects of authority and power show that “authorizing is authoring,” as Joerges and Czarniawska (1998) remind us. In other words, lending weight to one’s position consists of implicitly or explicitly showing that we are not the sole authors of what is put forward, but that other things appear to support and author it too. Staging figures in our dialogues therefore amounts to mobilizing various sources or figures of authority that constitute as many authors of one’s position. It is another way to dislocate the interaction. Having recognized the role of these figures or agencies in our dialogue, we will then see how a reflection on ventriloquism also helps us renew the way we problematize the question of culture (Eisenberg & Riley 2001). According to this approach, a promising way to study what we call “culture” consists of detecting what is literally and figuratively cultivated in interactants’ discussions and conducts. In other words, acknowledging the figures that people ventriloquize in their interactions allows us to identify the values, principles, premises, norms, and ways of speaking that are typically nurtured and maintained by a given speech community. In keeping with key contributions to the ethnography of communication (Carbaugh 2005; Fitch 1998; Gumperz 1982; Hymes 1974; Moerman 1988; Philipsen 1992), a ventriloqual analysis thus shows that if such figures can function as typical resources in interaction, it is also because they haunt or inhabit interactants, participating in the definition of how interactants conduct themselves in everyday life. Lastly, Chapter 5 will tackle a key topic that animates, in many respects, the raison d’être of this book, that is, the question of incarnation and its connection with the constitution of collectives. As I will try to demonstrate in this final chapter, all these effects of ventriloquism and representation can also be understood as different manners by which various things incarnate or embody themselves in our discussions. Invoking a rule or positioning oneself as speaking in the name of a principle amounts to giving flesh to what could, at first sight, be considered abstract, disincarnated, intangible, or ethereal. Communication, according to a ventriloqual analysis, also becomes this dislocated locus where the immaterial and material features of our world merge with each other, what I propose to call im/materiality. Communication is im/material because it is both material/incarnated/embodied and immaterial/disincarnated/disembodied. A crucial move thus consists



Introduction

of never reducing one aspect to the other, that is, we need to acknowledge that things such as rules, principles, values, or collectives have an immaterial dimension, an immateriality that, as we will see, allows them to be identified, defined, and typified, but such an immaterial mode of existence cannot do without its various forms of incarnation and embodiment. Far from reproducing a form of Platonism (where the immaterial, conceptual, or ideal world would be completely severed from the material and sublunar one), we will see that one (aspect) cannot exist without the other and that studying communication and dialogue precisely allows us to understand why. As I will try to demonstrate, incarnation is especially a matter of names in that names allow us to interactively appropriate and attribute various incarnations and embodiments, whether under the form of definitions, enactments, or representations. Studying these effects of incarnation thus enables us to identify both the performative and iterative natures of what is supposed to compose our world, what I also propose to call configurations. Having acknowledged this im/materiality, I will then show how a reflection on incarnation and embodiment allows us to problematize the mode of being of collectives (groups, organizations, institutions, societies) by demonstrating their communicative constitution (Putnam & Nicotera 2009). According to a ventriloqual analysis, the terra firma of our interactions is also this dislocated locus where various collectives incarnate themselves for another next first time (Garfinkel 2002). Studying communication thus helps better understand both the performative and iterative natures of these collectives. In particular, we will see that collectives are im/material and dis/incarnated to the extent that they function according to the same aporetic logic of names and embodiments. While a name always points to something that supposedly preexists it, we will see that collectives’ names are the very means by which the things they are supposed to point to are produced and reaffirmed. As we will see, such a logic allows us to question some basic tenets of systems theory as well as questioning the evilness of the term reification.

11

part i

Agency, texts, and passion Arguments for a reconceptualization

chapter 1

For a renewed conception of action

When we are dealing and working with a given concept, two options seem a priori adoptable. You can decide to define a technical acceptation, an approach that usually prompts you to purify a given notion from its mundane and commonsensical meanings and allows you to be relatively exclusive vis-à-vis the object the concept is supposed to represent. This is, in my experience, the tendency that we find in a majority of scientific and philosophical endeavors. Or you can, on the contrary, decide to start from all the different usages that can be found for a given notion, an attitude that allows you to be more inclusive in the way you approach the phenomenon under scrutiny. As it will be clear in this chapter, I tend to favor the second option because I think it allows us to be much more specific about the concept’s limits and boundaries, while recognizing their historical and social dimensions. A good illustration can be found in the famous debate between John R. Searle (1977) and Jacques Derrida (1977a, 1977b) regarding speech act theory. While Searle’s (1969, 1979; Searle & Vanderveken 1985) objective was to define the logical foundations of speech acts, an approach that led him to circumscribe, for instance, what a true promise might look like (Searle 1969), Derrida proposed to start his reflection from the great variety of speech acts that can be produced all around us, including the ones that Austin (1962/1975, p. 22) deemed infelicitous, such as the ones involved in soliloquy, theater, or poetry (see especially Derrida 1988, p. 90). Instead of starting from ideal cases of speech act production, Derrida thus proposed to identify all the various ways by which people can “do things with words,” even in cases where what Searle (1979) calls “conditions of success” are not met. Interestingly, this approach allowed Derrida to offer what I consider to be a more inclusive version of speech act theory, a version that acknowledges, for instance, the possibility of performing a successful commissive without intending to do so (Cooren 2000). This could be interpreted as a form of relativism or nihilism – something like “everything goes,” as we often hear – but this is far from being the case. On the contrary, once we start to reflect on so-called “marginal cases,” it becomes possible to be much more specific about the functioning or modes of being of a given phenomenon. Speaking of communication, Derrida writes,

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Action and Agency in Dialogue

What is at stake here is an analysis that can account for structural possibilities. Once it is possible for X to function under certain conditions (for instance, a mark in the absence or partial absence of intention), the possibility of a certain nonpresence or of a certain non-actuality pertains to the structure of the functioning under consideration, and pertains to it necessarily.  (1988, p. 57, italics in the original)

This means that we should start from all the possible acceptations and usages of a given notion or concept because this then allows us to focus on its necessary traits or dimensions. Paradoxically, it is in the marginal cases that one can find what appears to be characteristic of a given phenomenon.

1.1

Action: What’s in a name?

So what does this concretely mean when we deal with the concept of action? First, that we have to account for all the possible meanings and usages of this term. Although I do not want to privilege dictionaries as a unique source of information in this regard, I tend to often rely on them because they acknowledge not only the technical usages of a given notion, but also the commonsensical ones. In this respect, let us look at how the 1993 edition of the Webster’s New Encyclopedic Dictionary defines the word action: ac.tion \’ak-shәn\ n 1: a proceeding in a court of justice by which one demands or enforces one’s right or the redress of a punishment of a wrong 2: the working of one thing on another so as to produce a change 3: the doing of something usually in stages or with the possibility of continuation 4a: a thing done: deed b pl: behavior, conduct c: readiness to engage in daring activity: initiative 5: combat in war 6: the unfolding of the events of a drama or work of fiction: plot 7: an operating mechanism 8: an area or state of vigorous activity <where the action is>  (p. 11)

What is striking in this series of eight definitions is that none of them refers explicitly to the idea of intention, an absence that sounds like a paradox, knowing the essential role intentionality has historically played in the way philosophers and scholars have defined this concept, especially from the 20th Century (Anscombe 1957; Burke 1945/1962; Davidson 1963/2006; Searle 1969, just to name a few; see also Gunn 2009).

. For a good illustration, see also how Derrida (1988) tackles the word communication.



Chapter 1.  For a renewed conception of action

But what is even more striking is that two of these eight definitions appear quite compatible with the idea that nonhumans could also act or do things, as Webster’s seems having no problem speaking of the action of acids on metals (definition 2) or the action of a firearm (definition 7). Intuitively, this should make a lot of sense if we just think of the number of times we are bombarded by commercials that boast about the action of deodorants or detergents! Note that this should not mean that some forms of human action do not have their own specificity vis-à-vis nonhuman ones, as we will see later. What this simply means is that the word action and all its corollaries (act, acting, active, activity, agency) can be used (and are daily used) to refer to nonhuman forms of doing. In other words, human intentionality does not appear to be an essential feature of action in general, even if some forms of human action tend to involve, of course, their author’s intentionality. Besides these nuances, these eight dictionary acceptations also allow us to implicitly define action as referring to the production of some kind of change (definitions 1 and 2), the actual process that consists of doing something (definitions 3, 4b, 5, 6, 7, and 8), the result of a doing (definition 4a), or the initiation of a doing (definition 4c). In ordinary language, action thus refers to the performing of something according to its transformative (change), durative (ongoing process), inchoative (beginning), or terminative (ending) aspects (Greimas & Courtès 1982), each of these aspects representing a specific way to account for the same phenomenon, that is, the production of change (Cooren 2000, 2004b; Taylor 1993; Taylor & Cooren 1997). According to this perspective, action can thus be minimally defined as a transformation of state operated by an agent. This transformation can exhibit reflexivity (as in “Jim is walking to the store” or “This computer is running”), transitivity (as in “Robert is building a house” or “This detergent kills bacteria”), or ditransitivity (as in “George is giving all his money to Harry” or “This website is providing us with information about what happened”) (Taylor & Van Every 2000). As we see in these series of illustrations, when we speak about action, we can focus on someone or something’s activity (walking, running) or on his/her/its performances (giving money to someone, killing bacteria). This activity–performance distinction, offered by Kenny (1963) and inspired by Aristotle, was not initially meant to refer to nonhuman agency at all, but nothing a priori prevents us from including it. As Kenny (1963) points out, examples of performance verbs are “discover, learn, find, kill, convince, grow up, think out, build a house, wash, cut, lift, decide whether” (p. 175), while instances of activity verbs are “listen to, keep a secret, weep, laugh, talk, enjoy, live at Rome, stroke, ponder on” (p. 175). As he also notes:

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Activities and states may be prolonged indefinitely or they may cease; performances come to a definite end and are finished. I can go on keeping a secret for ever; I can only go on telling a secret until it is told. Performances are brought to an end by states. Any performance is describable in the form: “bringing it about that p.” Washing the dishes is bringing it about that the dishes are clean; learning French is bringing it about that I know French, walking to Rome is bringing it about that I am in Rome. In all these cases, what is brought about is, by our crite(p. 177) ria, a state: “is clean” “knows” “is in Rome” are all static verbs. 

According to this distinction, in the sentence, “This website is providing us with information about what happened,” the verb providing is a performance verb in that providing us with information is bringing it about that we know what happened. Among the performance verbs listed by Kenny (1963) – discover, learn, find, kill, convince, grow up, think out, build a house, wash, cut, lift, decide whether – one can also note that most of them could easily be attributed to nonhumans. Here are some examples that I found (or should I rather say that Google found for me) in the Internet: – “NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has discovered 16 extrasolar planet candidates orbiting a variety of distant stars in the central region of our Milky Way” (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/exoplanet_transit.html) – “Once the computer learns the pattern of a particular artist, it can identify whether another painting is legitimately that person’s work” (http://www. infopackets.com/channels/en/windows/gazette/2007/20071112_science_ masters_art.htm) – “This document convinced skeptical New Yorkers to support the constitution” (http://www.holidaysoup.com/alexander_hamilton_birthday/jan_11) Of course, one could say that these are just “ways of speaking” and that the Hubble Space Telescope did not really discover or find anything (only the humans who used it did) or that the computer and document do not respectively learn and convince people the way humans do. But these ways of reasoning precisely consist of starting from a technical and narrow acceptation of action as performance, an acceptation that does not do justice to nonhumans’ contributions. Without the telescope, the NASA scientists would have been incapable of discovering the 16 extrasolar planet candidates. Nothing, of course, prevents us from saying that THEY, that is, the scientists, discovered them, but, as pointed out by philosophers as diverse as Anscombe (1957), Davidson (1963/2006), Descombes (2001), Kenny (1963), Peirce (1955), and Wittgenstein (1953), this is, first and foremost, a matter of description of a given event (see also Robichaud 2006). If



Chapter 1.  For a renewed conception of action

we decide to focus on what the Hubble telescope is doing in each of these 16 discoveries, then we can say that it is at least detecting something, which can be understood as its contribution to the event. To be sure, it goes without saying that there is discovery to the extent that there exist people – in this case, the NASA scientists – who are capable of reading and interpreting what the telescope is detecting or discovering. In other words, “discovering” is a collective endeavor that cannot be reduced to any of the contributors in presence. Under a specific description, it is the scientists who have the main role: They discovered 16 extrasolar planet candidates. Under another description, it is the telescope’s contribution that is highlighted: It detected – etymologically, removed a cover from – 16 extrasolar planet candidates. If we now look at the second example, one could question whether the word learning is appropriate to depict what the computer is doing. After all, we tend to think that learning is something that only humans and animals do, but, again, to the extent that learning consists of gaining knowledge or skills (which is the common definition we can find in any dictionary), there is no reason why learning should not be something that some machines also do, to the extent that they are capable of gaining knowledge or skills – in this case, the skill consisting of identifying whether a painting is legitimately a person's work. By restricting learning to humans and animals only, we run the risk of missing what Derrida would call the structural possibilities of this phenomenon (Chang 1988, 1996; Desilet 1991, 1999, 2002), that is, we run the risk of missing what learning comes down to in all its possible usages. Finally, if we look at the last illustration, we read that things like documents can be said to convince people. For what concerns us in this very book, this is certainly the most interesting of these three examples, given that convincing not only is a performance verb according to Kenny (1963), but also a speech act, and more . Note that detect and discover mean, etymologically speaking, the same thing. Detect comes from de, which means “un-” or “off,” and the Latin word “tegere,” which means “to cover.” Even if we do not tend to use the term discover to speak about what machines do, we can use the term detect to speak about their contribution, which is etymologically equivalent. . Note that if we can say that machines learn, it does not mean that the way machines learn is similar to the way humans learn. In other words, my point does not consist of reducing humans’ way of learning to a machine-like process. Whenever people use the same word to speak of the way humans and nonhumans do something, they tend to be accused of reducing humans to nonhumans, but this is a logical error. Humans and orangutans have many things in common (they both breathe, make love, practice courtship, fight with each other), but this does not mean, of course, that humans and orangutans are identical and that one can be reduced to the other. As Latour (1988) insightfully notes, “Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else” (p. 158).

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20 Action and Agency in Dialogue

precisely a perlocutionary act, according to Austin (1962/1975) and Searle (1979). It is a perlocution in that it implies the interlocutor’s reaction to what is said or put forward (Cooren 2000). While Austin and Searle implicitly or explicitly reduce this type of action to what humans and only humans do, nothing should prevent us from attributing a perlocutionary act to a text. Acknowledging this does not amount to claiming that the text becomes completely severed from its author(s). On the contrary, a text is oriented as such because we presume that it was written by one or several persons. What this type of sentence implies is that it is possible to singularize a text by attributing some kind of doing or agency to it (Bouzon 2009; Morillon 2009; Pontille 2009). For instance, if I say, “This book brought me to tears,” I am singularizing the effects a book had on me, that is, what it did to me. I could have also said, “X brought me to tears” to refer to this book’s author, but I decided to focus on what the book did, not on its author and this has some consequences in terms of how I depict or describe the situation. This way of depicting what happened consists of saying that whoever wrote it, it is this book that triggered this action in me, even if I know that someone, of course, wrote it. As we will see later, speaking of documents or other nonhuman agents as doing things often is NOT a metaphorical or metonymical way of speaking, given that metaphors and metonymies imply an act of substitution. When I say, “This argument convinced me of his good faith,” I am not substituting this argument for the person who produced it. I am just highlighting what might have made the difference in this situation.

1.2

A little detour through science studies

As we just saw, performance verbs can thus be attributed to nonhumans, and the same exercise could be done for activity verbs (running, computing, etc.). This, again, does not mean that activities or performances performed by humans are rigorously similar to the ones performed by nonhumans. It simply means that we should be allowed to speak in terms of action and agency in all these cases. Whenever one can identify someone who or something that makes a difference, whether in terms of activity or performance, there is action and agency. Although I recognize the iconoclastic character of this position, it is, I contend, far from being completely idiosyncratic, that is, particular to my own way of conceiving of action, and can be implicitly or explicitly recognized in the work of prominent scholars such as Michel Callon (1986), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1980/1987), Algirdas Julien Greimas (1987), Bruno Latour (1996), John Law (1986, 1999), George Herbert Mead (1932/1980), Andrew Pickering (1995), Taylor & Van Every (2000, 2010), and even Alfred North Whitehead (1929/1978).



Chapter 1.  For a renewed conception of action

Although it is clear that Michel Callon (1986) and Bruno Latour (2005; Latour & Woolgar 1986) made historical and crucial contributions to this renewed way of conceiving of agency (for more details, see Cooren 2000, as well as Robichaud 2006, and Taylor & Van Every 2000) – they are, as far as I know, the ones who first introduced, following Greimas (1987), the notion of non-human actors (Callon & Latour 1981) in social sciences – I think that a very productive way of illustrating the analytical potency of this conception is to introduce what Pickering (1995) calls “tuning” or “the dance of agency” (p. 21). Even though Pickering proposes these two notions to analyze scientific practices, they are, I think, very useful to capture the relevance of an extended concept of action and agency. So what does Pickering (1995) mean by “tuning” and “dance of agency”? Here is what he writes: Tuning in goal-oriented practice takes the form, I think, of a dance of agency. As active, intentional beings, scientists tentatively construct some new machine. They then adopt a passive role, monitoring the performance of the machine to see whatever capture of material agency it might effect. Symmetrically, this period of human passivity is the period in which material agency actively manifests itself. Does the machine perform as intended? Has an intended capture been effected? Typically the answer is no, in which case the response is another reversal of roles: human agency is once more active in a revision of modeling vectors, and so on. The dance of agency, seen asymmetrically from the human end, thus takes the form of a dialectic of resistance and accommodation, where resistance denotes the failure to achieve an intended capture of agency in practice, and accommodation an active human strategy of response to resistance, which can include revisions to goals and intentions as well as to the material form of the machine in question and to the human frame of gestures and social relations that surround it.  (p. 21–22, italics in the original)

As we see in Pickering’s explanation, attributing agency to materiality and machine does not amount to dispossessing humans from their strategies, their intentionality, their goal-oriented practices, or even their wit. But what it does is recognize something absolutely crucial, which is that the world acts on us as much as we act on it (Mead 1932/1980), a principle of symmetry (Callon 1986; Latour 1991) that enjoins us to redefine completely the way we study it (especially in social sciences). . In a relatively unknown essay titled “The Physical Thing,” George Herbert Mead does not hesitate to attribute actions to things. Echoing Alfred North Whitehead and Theodor Lipps, he notes, “It would be a mistake to regard this inner nature of matter as a projection by the organism of its sense of effort into the object. The resistance is in the thing as much as the effort is in the organism, but the resistance is there only over against effort or the action of other things” (p. 123–124).

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Recognizing that action and agency are not human beings’ privileges indeed allows us to decenter our analyses and show that people are acted upon as much as they act. Indeed, understanding scientific practice becomes an impossible task if we do not acknowledge what Pickering (1995) identifies as a certain passivity (which I will later problematize under the more general concepts of passion and/or animation). If it were only scientists doing things, how could we account for what machines and devices do when the latter give them specific results, results that then lead or even force the scientists to reconsider (or not) their hypotheses. This does not mean, of course, that scientists do not do anything when they read or observe the results, but if they read or observe something, it is because machines provide them with specific results, results that can, for instance, surprise them. If it were only human beings doing things, there would indeed be no surprise, no tuning, no accommodation, no resistance, no event. Following Pickering (1995) and Latour (2005), we thus need to recognize that non-human agency is irreducible to human agency. Decentering our analyses precisely allows us to offer new descriptions, that is, descriptions that will not only be focused on what humans do, but also acknowledge nonhumans’ contributions in a given action.

1.3

Toward a new philosophy of action?

Although Davidson (1963/2006) does not acknowledge nonhuman agency, it is worth quoting a passage from a famous article of his titled, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” because of what he says about descriptions of action: I flip the switch, turn on the light, and illuminate the room. Unbeknownst to me I also alert a prowler to the fact that I am home. Here I need not have done four things, but only one, of which four descriptions have been given.

As illustrated in this example, four different verbal phrases can be used to describe the same event: flipping the switch, turning on the light, illuminating the room, and alerting a prowler. But something that Davidson does not allude to is that the same reasoning could be used to account for nonhuman action. For instance, illuminating the room precisely requires the contribution of the switch, which, when flipped, closes the connection between two small electric terminals, allowing the current to flow to the light bulb. Similarly, one could highlight the light bulb’s contribution, which lights up the room, as well as the contributions of other actors that tend to be forgotten in our descriptions (the wire, the tungsten filament, the current, the inert gas inside the bulb, etc.). As Latour (2005) points out, these actors tend to be passed over in silence precisely because, most of the time, they do what they were designed to do and their contribution



Chapter 1.  For a renewed conception of action

then becomes taken for granted and transparent. They become invisible, simple intermediaries to which we do not pay attention. In these cases, no tuning appears required, since no resistance occurs and a perfect alignment or ordering seems to be taking place. However, when they fail in doing what they are designed to do, their contribution or action then becomes much more obvious to us (Callon 1986). For instance, if the inert gas comes to leak from the bulb, its action, which consists in preventing the tungsten atom to evaporate, will become more apparent to the extent that the filament will progressively disintegrate and the bulb will start getting darker. Don’t worry, my point is not to teach you how a light bulb works, but to show that recognizing nonhuman or material agency simply consists of acknowledging that we share our actions and/or activities with others. For instance, “illuminating the room” is an action that can definitely be attributed to me when I flip the switch, but such an attribution is possible because some forms of delegation occur: By flipping the switch, I make two small electric terminals connect with each other, a connection that allows the current to flow to the light bulb, which illuminates the room. As Latour (1996) points out, when one acts, others proceed to action. Depending on who or what we want to take into account in our descriptions, we will focus or not on specific actors/agents/beings partaking in this process. For instance, why could not we say that it is the bulb that is illuminating the room? From a technical viewpoint, this sounds perfectly acceptable. Similarly, one could go upstream in the chain of agency and acknowledge the connection between the two terminals as being what also illuminates the room. When Davidson contends that by flipping the switch, I have not done four things but only one, of which four descriptions have been given, one could retort that everything depends on how the process of attribution functions. As we saw, the connection between the two small terminals in the switch is also what turns on the light, illuminates the room, and alerts the prowler. Furthermore, we also saw that the bulb plays quite an important role in illuminating the room and subsequently alerts the prowler. We could go even further by claiming that it is the light in the room that alerts the prowler, to the extent that this light indicates that someone just switched it on. As it is often the case, as soon as we acknowledge nonhumans’ contributions, many philosophical enigmas tend to disappear. At least three technical agents can be identified in Davidson’s scene: the connection, the bulb, and the light (but we saw that many others could actually be taken into account). Each of these agents contributes in its own way to what happens, which means, in my vocabulary, that each of them does something. To the extent that there is a causal link between them – the connection illuminates the bulb, which brings light to the

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room, which alerts the prowler – each of their actions can be attributed to the ones that precede them in the causal chain. If one focuses on what the light does, for instance, one could say that it definitely illuminates the room. However, to the extent that it is the bulb that produces the light, one could also attribute this action to the bulb. Similarly, to the extent that it is the switch connection that causes the bulb to produce the light, it could be claimed that it is also the connection that illuminates the room. Finally, if I am the one who flipped the switch, which closed the connection, I can, of course, also appropriate this action (and any observer can attribute it to me). When Davidson (1963/2006) contends that there is just one action, he is right to the extent that equivalences can be created because of the causal chain: Flipping the switch amounts to closing the connection, which amounts to lighting the bulb, which amounts to illuminating the room, which amounts to alerting the prowler. However, he is also wrong in that nothing prevents us from singularizing each of these contributions and saying that each somewhat constitutes a separate action that I could appropriate: I flipped the switch, I closed the connection, I lit the bulb, I alerted the prowler. Each time I say “I” in these four descriptions of what happens, I am actually appropriating a nonhuman’s contribution, an appropriation that is, of course, perfectly acceptable, but that is also relative, limited, finite (like any appropriation, as we will see later). Interestingly, this reasoning allows us to identify an important point about intentional actions, which, after all, are what tends to define the specificity of living beings’ actions (and not only humans’). An intentional action is, as we know, a goal-oriented action, an action that aims at a specific result. In this case, let us say that my intention indeed is to illuminate the room; therefore it is this action that I will tend to appropriate, that is, to make mine, because it is the result I wish to obtain. Although one could definitely contend that I also closed the connection, lit the bulb, or alerted the prowler, it is not these actions that I will tend to appropriate, simply because they were not actions I was “focusing on,” if you will. One therefore understands, through this illustration, why the concept of “action” has always tended to be used to refer to intentional actions only. As actors, we indeed prefer to think that we are in control of what we do. What we call our actions, that is, what should be proper to us, usually is what we are aiming to for, what we want to obtain, what we intend to do. Intentionality therefore appears to have a lot to do with appropriation in that an intentional action is what I will tend to attribute to myself in a chain of agency I appeared . Here, it should be clear that I am not using intentionality in the technical sense used by Brentano (1995) and Husserl (1995). My usage is closer to Searle’s (1983) even if I tend to disagree with his conclusions.



Chapter 1.  For a renewed conception of action

to initiate. Intention comes from the Latin word intendere, which means to tend (tendere) toward (in-) something. If I tend toward fulfilling a specific outcome and if this outcome obtains, I will first tend to appropriate this outcome and then possibly all the actions that led to it. This explains why philosophers and scholars in general have always been tempted by reducing actions to intentional actions (Searle 1969, 1979, 1983). For them, a true action is an action that is aimed for by the person who performed it. Davidson (1963/2006) himself struggles with this point when he notes: We might not call my unintentional alerting of the prowler an action, but it should not be inferred from this that alerting the prowler is therefore something different from flipping the switch, say just its consequences. Actions, performances, and events not involving intention are alike in that they are often referred to or defined partly in terms of some terminal stage, outcome, or consequence. The word ‘action’ does not very often occur in ordinary speech, and when it does it is usually referred for fairly portentous occasions. I follow a useful philosophical practice in calling anything an agent does intentionally an action, including intentional omissions. What is really needed is some suitably generic term to bridge the following gap: supposed ‘A’ is a description of an action, ‘B’ something done voluntarily, though not intentionally, and ‘C’ is a description of something done involuntarily and unintentionally; finally, supposed A = B = C. Then A, B and C are the same – what? ‘Action’, ‘event’, ‘thing done’, each have, at least in some contexts, a strange ring when coupled with the wrong sort of description. Only the question, ‘Why did you (he) do A’ has the true generality required.  (p. 24)

“Alerting the prowler” is indeed problematic for philosophers, given that it is not something that I want to appropriate, to make mine, that is, for which I want to claim ownership. However, to the extent that my flipping the switch is causally linked to the light in the room alerting the prowler, there can be attribution, which is precisely what Davidson does when he says that I alerted the prowler, however he wants to call what I did: action, event, or thing done (for an interesting critique of the intentionalist perpective on action, see also Giddens 1984). At this point, one could contend that all this discussion comes down to a matter of definition and that I am just splitting hairs by focusing on nonhuman contributions and calling these contributions action. Indeed, everything is a matter of definition, but definitions are, after all, all we have to apprehend the world in a meaningful way. Most important, all things considered, is what analytical payoff we can get from such a position, especially when we deal with dialogue, interaction, and communication. This is what I propose to tackle in the next chapter.

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chapter 2

How texts (and other things) do things with words

So far, I have only focused on the concept of action, trying to show that it would be worthwhile to open up the intension and extension of this notion to account for a variety of contributions, whether human, animal (Callon 1986), or technological (Knorr-Cetina 1997; Orlikowski 2007; Suchman 2007; Taylor, Groleau, Heaton, & Van Every 2001). What remains to be shown, however, is to what extent this new conception allows us to say anything new and interesting about interaction, dialogue, and communication in general. This is what I propose to do in this chapter. As I showed previously, thinking of action as something that a variety of beings can be said to perform allows us to decenter our analyses. Human beings are no longer the sole focus of our attention to the extent that they share their actions with others. For instance, we saw that scientists share their actions with the technologies they work with to the extent that they cannot do anything without mobilizing machines that will do things for them (calculating, detecting, purifying, etc.). I now contend that the same reasoning can be applied to any semiotic production, whether in the interpersonal context or not. If it holds that whenever one acts, some other enters into action (Latour 1996), one should be able to apply this principle to verbal and nonverbal communication. After all, whenever interlocutors communicate, signs must be somehow produced and recognized, which means that, by definition, an activity of delegation obtains. Incidentally, this is precisely what Derrida (1988) had in mind when he proposed to conceive of any act of communication as an act of telecommunication. Indeed, whenever X interacts with Y, X and Y will communicate with each other to the extent that they can produce a series of signs or marks (gestures, intonations, facial expressions, texts) that will act on their behalf, in their name, in their stead. Whether it is a smile, an exchange of hellos, or an angry tone, all these signs need to be somehow produced (whether intentionally or not) and recognized by interlocutors to be able to speak of communication at all. Although such a vision of communication and dialogue could be accused of reducing these phenomena to the emission and reception of “messages” (Shannon & Weaver 1947) – a sin that we, as discourse and dialogue analysts, have learned not to

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commit anymore – I agree with Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer (1994), Derrida (1988) and Taylor (1993; Taylor & Van Every 2000) that the material dimension of communication is absolutely irreducible, that is, that whenever communication obtains, there needs to be a production of marks, of signs, of texts. This is why any act of communication is, by definition, an act of telecommunication, even in situations of face-to-face interaction. There is telecommunication to the extent that various “things” are going to act on our behalf, in our stead, as our proxy, as our delegates, whenever we speak or write to each other. Even when we speak to each other, we tele-act (we act from a given distance) or we tele-communicate (we communicate from a given distance). Of course, most of the time, we do not pay attention, as interlocutors, to these “beings” that we create in interactional settings – a little bit like how we tend not to pay attention to all the intermediaries that contribute to the illumination of a room when we flip the switch – but no communication would obtain without them and I contend that we, as analysts, need to take this key phenomenon into consideration whenever we study interaction and dialogue.

2.1

Textual agency

Of course, this phenomenon appears particularly obvious when we deal with the production of written texts, that is, documents, letters, memos, notes, books, messages, and so on. As an illustration, let us use the following example taken from fieldwork I completed with Médecins sans frontières (MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders) while I was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2005. During this stay and armed with a video camera, I followed various representatives of this humanitarian organization in order to study their activities, especially from an interactive perspective. One day, I was following Carole, who was at that time MSF’s medical coordinator for the whole country, as she was showing me a hospital that her organization had recently decided to support. Throughout the visit, we entered a laboratory and she showed me various devices that were used to decontaminate the medical instruments. As we were leaving the premises, the laboratory’s chief technician, who had remained silent until now, finally said: 59 Chief Technician 60 61 62 Carole 63 Chief Technician 64 Carole

In any case, Maman, we thank you for the note ((showing it on the wall)). It has- it has been honored. (1.0) Oh yes, I see. It is even written there Yes ih ih I understood. Yeah it’s- it’s good



Chapter 2.  How texts (and other things) do things with words

Here is what the note read (the passages in bold were written in red ink in the original): Cycle of Instrument Decontamination Right after its use, the soiled material must be placed in a dry plastic container with a lid. It must stay there the least time possible to avoid the drying out of the organic matters that otherwise are very difficult to remove. To avoid the proliferation of germs, one should not dip the soiled material into non-chlorine water immediately after its use. It is imperative to wear a mask, a hat, protective glasses, and an apron for all the operations that are described above. Several interesting things can be identified in this passage. First, if we concentrate on what the Chief Technician says in lines 59–60, we notice that he is orienting to the note – what Kuhn (2008) would call a concrete text – posted on the laboratory wall as something that they honored. In this context, the fact that they “honored” the note means that they followed its instructions, which implicitly positions the note as having done something: providing them with directives. One could, of course, retort that this is just a “way of speaking” and that the note did not do anything, only the author of the note did. We are now used to this type of reasoning, which consists of denying any form of agency to nonhuman agents, here, the note and its instructions. According to this reasoning, the note does not make a difference. It is reduced to a simple tool, an intermediary, which is supposed to passively carry the author’s intentions. However, if we listen carefully to the Chief Technician, we realize that, at least to him, this note did appear to make a difference, given that he is implicitly telling us that they followed what it says, that is, that they honored it. Furthermore, if we look at the content of the document, we also realize that everything has been done to make the presumed author of this note absent from its content. As is usually the case for instructions, policies, procedures, directives, protocols, rules, and so on, this note does not contain any reference to a specific author, whether under the form of an “I,” a “we,” or even a name. As pointed out by Hoskins and McLean (1998), this type of

. In his communicative theory of the firm, Timothy Kuhn (2008) proposes an interesting distinction between concrete and figurative texts. While concrete texts “are signs and symbols that are inscribed in some (relatively) permanent form, such as policy/technical documents, products, images, rules, instruments, emails, or memoranda” (p. 1234), figurative texts “are abstract representations of practice sites, communities, and firms” (p. 1234). In this book, the term text will however be used to refer to both written and oral texts.

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text thus functions as a de-authored text to the extent that any trace of authorship has been erased from the document (see also Yates 1993). One could therefore contend that this text has been precisely designed to be regarded as an agent acting for a principal. Everybody indeed understands that it is someone’s or something’s agent (e.g., Carole and, through her, Médecins sans frontières), but as any agent, it does something even if it acts in the name or on behalf of Carole and MSF. Note again that all the obligations mentioned in this text are expressed in terms of states of affairs and modalities and not in terms of action: “The soiled material must be placed…” “It must stay…” “One should not dip,” “It is imperative to…” The note thus appears to have been designed to remind and/or define what the technicians must do. But then, one might retort, where do such obligations come from? Certainly not from the note itself! one could be inclined to say. Although I agree that the note does not do anything in and of itself, I contend that nobody and nothing does either. As mentioned in the previous chapter, action is something that is shared between actors, which means that such obligations can be said to not only come from the note, but also from its author (the person who wrote it, which happens to be Carole) and the principal that she is representing, which, we can speculate, could be Médecins sans frontières (although nothing in the note allows us to confirm this interpretation). As it is the case whenever action is shared, ownership is at stake: it is Carole’s note and it is even MSF’s note, and it is because of these associations/appropriations/attributions that the note can indeed be said to make a difference. Had an unauthorized person posted this note (we might wonder why, but this is for the sake of the demonstration), chances are that the laboratory technicians would have removed it from the wall. The note makes a difference because it is MSF’s and Carole’s note. It is their agent. They are its principals. Imagine, for instance, that Carole had made a mistake and simply written, “Right after its use, the soiled material must be placed in a plastic container” without specifying that the latter had to be dry and equipped with a lid. Had she then complained that the technicians did not use a dry container equipped with a lid, they could have retorted that her note did not specify this information. As pointed out by Callon (1986) and Callon and Latour (1981), we start to pay attention to nonhuman contributions when they do not do what they were designed or meant to do (see also Chapter 1). Although Carole might have meant that the technicians are to use a dry container with a lid, it is not what the note said in this fictitious case and the technicians would then be entitled to complain. Since it is not what the note said, they could retort, they cannot be accused of anything that it did not specify (except, of course, if Carole contends that they should have known this, despite what the note says). The note was supposed to act as Carole’s



Chapter 2.  How texts (and other things) do things with words

and MSF’s faithful agent, but it did not. It made Carole and MSF say things they did not mean. It betrayed them. Traduttore, traditore, as the Italians say (translator, you are a traitor). As we see in this illustration, whenever we write something (and we will see later that the same reasoning applies when we, of course, say something), what is produced displays a certain autonomy without which no communication could obtain (see also Fraenkel 2007). This is what Derrida (1988) calls the (im)possibility of communication (see also Chang 1988, 1996), that is, what makes communication possible – the iterability of the signs we produce when we write or say something – is also what makes it, to a certain extent, impossible. Communication is, to a certain extent, impossible precisely because the signs, marks, and texts mobilized to communicate were not designed, so to speak, for the purpose of what is indexically meant by the interlocutors, in the here and now of their interaction. In other words, what they mean depends on the meaning of what they say, write, or perform. As Derrida (1988) reminds us, any textual or semiotic production implies the mobilization of sounds, gestures, expressions, or marks that need to be recognized in order to function. What is key in this argument is the prefix “re-” of recognized, which presupposes the iterable character of what is produced, its repeatability, its iterability. As Derrida (1988) notes, For a writing to be a writing it must continue to “act” and to be readable even when what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written, for what he seems to have signed, be it because of a temporary absence, because he is dead or, more generally, because he has not employed his absolutely actual and present intention or attention, the plenitude of his desire to say what he means, in order to sustain what seems to be written “in his name.”  (p. 8)

In other words, we have to recognize, as analysts, that a certain conventionality (always relative, limited, and evolving) is at play in any textual or semiotic production, otherwise communication would be impossible. Again, what I mean is always at the mercy of the meaning of what I say or write. Certainly, conversation analysts and ethnomethodologists have repeatedly shown us that we have, as conversationalists, quite sophisticated mechanisms of repair to deal with misunderstanding for all practical purposes (Garfinkel 2002), but the existence of such mechanisms precisely shows that we can be betrayed by what we say or write precisely because of this relative autonomy of the signs we produce (see Section 2.3).

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2.2

Con-textual agency

Communication is possible for all practical purposes (Garfinkel 2002) because the texts and signs we produce have a life of their own so to speak, which means that they can continue to function in other contexts even in the absence of their producers. This is what makes this very book readable (this is my hope at least!), but also what makes any transcript or video recording analyzable. One could, of course, retort that such reasoning denies any influence of new contexts of iterability, but this is absolutely false. Contexts do influence the way we understands texts (Sillince 2007), but they do not determine it. In other words, such reasoning does imply a certain autonomy or relative severance of any text or sign from their context of production (otherwise no communication could obtain), but this does not mean that other texts, signs, or background information (which is what we tend to refer to when we speak about context) do not have some bearings on what is understood (but such a bearing must be qualified). For a good illustration, let us look at a classical example used by Heritage (1984): (Sacks 1968, 17 April) A: I have a fourteen-year-old-son B: Well that’s alright A: I also have a dog B: Oh I’m sorry

Without knowing its context of occurrence, one could indeed be puzzled by this interaction. A tells B that she has a fourteen-year-old-son, which is acknowledged by B as something acceptable (“Well, that’s all right”). Then A goes on to mention that she also has a dog, to which B reacts by apologizing (“Oh I’m sorry”) (see also Cooren 2007). It is when we learn that A is a potential tenant and B a landlord that this interaction really starts to make more sense. We now understand why having a fourteen-year-old-son might be okay for B, but also that B’s expression of regret functions as a way of declining A’s request: He10 does not seem to want any dog in the apartment he owns. Such an illustration could, at first sight, be used to demonstrate that context defines what an interaction means, but I would contend that it actually demonstrates what Heritage (1984) and Schegloff (1992, 1997) call the endogenous character of talk and what Derrida (1988) would call, more broadly, the engendering 10. For the purpose of this demonstration, I hypothetically decided that A was a woman and B was a man.



Chapter 2.  How texts (and other things) do things with words

effect of any sign (see Cooren 2009a or b). First, we just saw that there is a way to minimally describe what is happening between these two interlocutors without knowing anything about the context of their interaction. We do not understand necessarily why B is expressing regret in the fourth turn, but we understand that A is telling B about some aspects of her situation (she has a fourteen-year-old-son and a dog) and that B is reacting to what she says by first telling her that having a fourteen-year-old-son is acceptable and then by expressing regret. But what is even more interesting is that it is actually quite easy to guess what the interaction is about. Just show this transcript to someone who does not know anything about this interaction and I am quite confident that, in most cases, this person will be able to reconstruct some aspects of the context of this interaction. I did this (unscientific) experiment myself and most of my “subjects” were able to provide the context of a tenant–landlord interaction (some mentioned a traveler–bus agent interaction). In all cases, they were all able to guess that A wanted something from B and that she was checking with the latter if her situation made her request acceptable to him. They were also able to guess that the expression of regret was a way for B to decline A’s request. As any conversation analyst knows, it is often quite easy to reconstruct certain aspects of the context of an interaction even if, of course, other aspects can remain indeterminable. Far from defining what an interaction means, a context can thus often be generated from the text (transcript) itself. Furthermore, Schegloff (1997) elegantly shows that interactants themselves are orienting to specific aspects of their context that they deem relevant and that it is these aspects of the context that we ought to take into account as analysts. Although I do not go as far as saying, like most conversation analysts, that only the contextual aspects introduced by the participants themselves should be the ones that we, as analysts, should attend to (see also Wetherell 1998), it remains that contexts are, in many respects, endogenously generated by the texts produced by interactants. They are, as Heritage (1984) nicely puts it, talked into being, or, as I prefer to say, communicated into being. If contextual influence exists, it is only through other texts, other signs, specific background information that can add (this is a key notion) to our (and the participants’) understanding of what is happening. For instance, it is when we know that A is a potential tenant and B a landlord (whether we are able to reconstruct this information from the transcript or are told about it) that we can understand why B says, “Oh I’m sorry” in the fourth turn. It is indeed common knowledge that some landlords tend to refuse tenants with dogs in their rental properites, which might explain why B is expressing regret in the fourth turn (although we can, of course, never be completely sure that this indeed is the reason). Sacks (1992) would have said that declining requests this way is a “category-bound activity,”

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that is, an activity that is typically associated with “being a landlord.” Furthermore, as conversation analysts have shown us, declining an offer is a dispreferred move (Heritage 1984; Pomerantz 1984), which explains why B expresses regret vis-à-vis A to convey that he cannot or does not want to have her as a tenant. Expressing regret in this (reconstructed) context means apologizing for having to decline A’s request to be his tenant, which is an implicit and indirect way to decline her request. Every sign, mark, and interaction, whether written, oral, or gestural, is severed from a given context, not only because, in many respects, it engenders its own context, but also because it can be reinscribed in an infinity of new contexts without losing its (minimal) readability and functioning. As Derrida (1988) notes, “This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring” (p. 78). For instance, reading the tenant–landlord interaction transcript always occurs in a specific context that will differ again and again each time this transcript is read. From the moment this interaction was recorded to the moment it is read and analyzed, contexts are never something absolutely identifiable, definable, and circumscribable, and yet, we can read this interaction and minimally understand what it is about (though not necessarily what it is all about, but can we ever be certain that we understand what anything is all about?). To the extent that any context is made and composed of other texts, other marks, other signs, each of these texts, marks, and signs must, logically and by definition, be recognizable as such, not only in their singularity, but also in their iterability and (always limited, finished, historical) conventionality. Speaking of (con-)textual agency does not undermine the role of (con-)texts in the functioning of interaction or of reading, but implies a relative autonomy of any (written or oral) text from its conditions of production. We are therefore dealing with a logic of addition, of assemblage (what will later be called configuration), not determination. For instance, it is when we add or assemble the information about A’s and B’s identities (the fact that A is a potential tenant and B a landlord) that we can indeed understand why B expresses regret in the fourth turn (he is, in fact, apologizing for having to turn down A’s request), but such an interpretation does not cancel the fact that we understand that B is expressing regret. It just means that in this context, expressing regret tends to mean that the request is refused (Searle 1969, 1979, 1995). Furthermore, we saw that such an addition often is generated from and engendered by the text itself (see also Gumperz 1982; Kecskes 2008). Although texts, signs, and marks can be severed from each other and still continue to function and to act, they also often come in “packages,” “ensembles” or “configurations,” so to speak. This is extremely well documented by Kecskes’s (2003) work



Chapter 2.  How texts (and other things) do things with words

on situated-bound expressions, that is, expressions that are typically associated with specific situations. For instance, let’s look at the following interaction borrowed from Kecskes (2008): A: B: C: A: C:

What’s going on here? He hit my car He stopped short for no reason How fast were you going? I don’t know. Maybe forty. 

(Genzel 1991, p. 8)

Without knowing anything about the context of this interaction, it does not seem difficult to reconstruct (a) that B and C were just involved in a car accident, (b) that the back of B’s car got hit by C’s, and even (c) that A is a police officer who just arrived on the scene and is questioning the two protagonists about what happened. Why is such an interpretation possible? Simply because A, B, and C are themselves orienting to these specific aspects of their context, what Schegloff (1997) would call “the relevancies to which they show themselves to be oriented” (p. 174). For instance, what allows us to say that A must be a police officer is that she precisely allows herself (or appears allowed) to be relatively inquisitive about what happened and quite direct vis-à-vis B and C. This is especially marked when A is asking C how fast he was going, a request for information that is typically and relevantly made by police officers11 and that happens to be immediately followed by C providing her with the response that is accountably due, given A’s question. Had A not been in a position of authority, chances are that C would have been more reluctant to respond to A’s inquisitive question (“That’s none of your business” could then have been a candidate response). As we see in this illustration, context is something that is, in many respects, co-generated or co-constructed by the participants’ turns of talk. It is indeed not only produced by A’s two turns of talk (“What’s going on here?” and “How fast were you going?”), which implicitly mark and reaffirm her authority, but is also confirmed by B’s and C’s responses, which implicitly acknowledge and recognize such authority. For instance, it is noteworthy that B and C respond to A’s first question by mutually accusing each other, which is also a move quite typical of people who have to respond for their acts in front of someone in position of 11. As pointed out by Robert Sanders in a personal communication, the question about speed pertains to a question of liability and blame (tied to the prior claim of “he stopped short”). A bystander would not pursue liability while a policeman and perhaps an insurance adjuster would. It is therefore a question being asked on behalf of institutions that have interests in the answer and not the speaker’s own interest, which explains the typified nature of this intervention.

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authority (think, for example, of two children in front of their mother as she comes to see what happened after hearing that some fight apparently took place between her son and daughter). Of course, this does not mean that such a reconstruction is absolutely sure, since we could imagine situations where such an interaction would take place without A being a police officer or person of authority. For instance, such an interaction could have taken place between three kids impersonating a police officer and two drivers, or we could imagine situations where B and C would be very young adults and A a more mature person with some authority (a parent or teacher). What is key in this reasoning is precisely what Derrida (1988) calls iterability or what ethnomethodologists would call “ethnomethods” (Garfinkel 1967, 2002). There are indeed typical or typified ways of conducting oneself as a police officer and protagonists at the scene of a car accident “for another next first time” (Garfinkel 2002), and it is precisely these ethnomethods, these iterable ways of doing things for another next first time, that we, as analysts and participants, can recognize here. Any event’s “haecceity” (its uniqueness, its whatness, its eventness, its indexicality) therefore is, by definition, contaminated or violated by its iterability, its uneventfullness, its repeatability, its replicability, that which makes it recognizable and assessable. For instance, the car accident scene involving A, B, and C happened just once – it is, in many respects, absolutely unique in terms of spatiotemporal conditions – however, the way this scene is performed into being mobilizes various features that are also typical or characteristic of such scenes (Schütz 1966, would speak of typification) and it is these features that make such scenes recognizable and assessable (whether to participants or analysts). We have seen these scenes before and we will certainly see more like these ones in the future (even if they will certainly evolve). There are typified ways of performing car accident scenes into being, whether as a police officer or as the protagonists and this is precisely what A, B, and C happen to be doing in this interaction, making our reconstruction of their context possible. Speaking about performative utterances (but his reasoning could be applied to any performance whatsoever), Derrida (1988) writes, Could a performative utterance succeed if its formulation did not repeat a “coded” or iterable utterance, or in other words, if the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable in some way as a “citation”? Not that citationality in this case is of the same sort as in a theatrical play, a philosophical reference, or the recitation of a poem. That is why there is a relative specificity, as Austin says, a “relative purity” of performatives. But this relative purity does not emerge in opposition to citationality or iterability, but in



Chapter 2.  How texts (and other things) do things with words

opposition to other kinds of iteration within a general iterability which constitutes a violation of the allegedly rigorous purity of every event of discourse or every (p. 18, italics in the original) speech act. 

Interestingly enough, this notion of “iterable model” does not imply an opposition between a sort of ethereal or Platonic ideal and what would be its various sublunary and iterable incarnations (see more on this in Section 2.5). On the contrary, and this is a key point, any model is also always already incarnated or embodied, whether in specific images, traits, formulas or interactions (see also Kecskes 2003, in this regard, as well as Chapter 5). In other words, such a model (or ideal in the non-platonic sense that Derrida would use this term) can evolve and is historically defined. It also is at the mercy of iteration. As Derrida (1988) notes, “No process [procès] or project of idealization is possible without iterability” (p. 71). In other words, what interactants (and analysts) consider to be normal, ideal, ordinary, standard, typical, natural, expected, predictable ways of doing things is the product of the iterable character of practices, texts, signs, gestures, marks, and so on. It is because all these “things” are repeatable, iterable, that some specific iterations come to be considered more ideal, natural, normal, conventional than others. All our ways of doing things, whether it is launching a ship, acting as a police officer, pronouncing a word, laughing or making a request, all have ideal conditions of production (Cooren 2000), but these conditions must always be historically incarnated in specific characteristics that interactants can produce, recognize, and evaluate and that analysts can (sometimes) reconstruct. This is what Austin (1962/1975) would have called “the appropriate circumstances” (p. 13), or “the right words in the right circumstances” and what Garfinkel (1967) identified in his famous breaching experiments. As Heritage (1984) reminds us, interactants constantly orient to their lifeworld normatively, which means that (implicit or explicit) sanction (whether positive or negative) is always at stake, whether when people play tick-tack-toe (Garfinkel 1967), salute each other in the street (Heritage 1984), or pronounce two people husband and wife (Austin 1962/1975). There is therefore a “relative purity” at stake, as Derrida (1988) contends, but such purity or ideality emerges from iterability, that is, from what is precisely supposed to contaminate, pollute, or taint it (we will go back to this logic of emergence in Chapter 5). In other words, the iterability of practices, texts, gestures, marks, performances, and so on is what constitutes their conditions of (im-)possibility. It is what makes them possible because in order to be performable and recognizable, these performances must be repeatable, iterable for another next first time. However, it is what makes them, to a certain extent, impossible precisely because their purity, their ideality, their normality is always at the mercy of or is haunted by a “miss,” so to speak, a

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misperformance, a citation “out of context,” an embezzlement, which, by the way, would be the mark of a true event. As mentioned previously, texts, signs, marks, and interactions tend to come in typified or ideal “packages,” “ensembles,” or “configurations” that not only define their “normal” or “usual” conditions of production, but also make the reconstruction of contexts possible. But such packages can always be perverted, violated, embezzled, contaminated, imitated, redefined precisely because of this logic of iterability, which makes the reconstruction always fallible and any performance impure. What was presented above as a logic of addition or assemblage (which is also a logic of subtraction and deconstruction) thus functions not only in terms of time (for another next first time), but also in terms of space (what comes with). What comes with a specific text, turn of talk, or performance can not only add to the comprehension of what is happening, but also go as far as progressively redefining the so-called “natural” or “ideal” conditions of production, not only for the participants, but also for the observers or analysts (Butler 1997). As long as we conceive of context as something that defines or determines what a text, performance, mark, or gesture is all about, there seems to be no room for evolution, progression, and historicity. However, if we adhere to this logic of addition/assembling/configuration, then packages can evolve precisely because texts, performances, gestures, and marks can function in a potentially infinite number of incarnated (re-)configurations. Even if some of these (re-)configurations are considered normal and ideal, and are sanctioned as such by participants and observers, such a normality and ideality is by definition always threatened by the eventful character of its production for another next first time.

2.3

Autonomy and intentionality

Now that the relative autonomy of (con-)texts, signs, and marks has been established, we can try to describe consequences for the functioning of interactions and dialogues, especially regarding the question of intentionality. My point is not to deny any role to interactants’ intents, goals, plans, objectives, or projects in the functioning of interactions, but to resituate them within a logic of iterability, as presented previously (see also Cooren 2000). After all, ethnomethodologists, conversation analysts, and language and social interaction (LSI) scholars have repeatedly shown that interactants are not judgmental dopes (Garfinkel 1967) and tend to be quite sophisticated in their ways of interacting (Sanders 2007). However, I would like to show that what they say, write, or communicate in general can sometimes make them say things they did not intend for all practical purposes.



Chapter 2.  How texts (and other things) do things with words

A good illustration of this phenomenon can be found in the following interaction (but see also Cooren 2005, 2008). Marty: Loes, do you have a calendar Loes: Yeah ((reaches for her desk calendar)) Marty: Do you have one that hangs on the wall? Loes: Oh, you want one. Marty: Yeah 

T1 T2 T3 T4 T5

(Schegloff 1992, p. 1321)

Schegloff uses this excerpt to illustrate what he calls a fourth position repair. While the “trouble-source” turns out to be at T1, the initiation of repair indeed occurs only at T4, that is, in a fourth position vis-à-vis this trouble source, which is considered first position. Why is there initiation of repair at this turn of talk? Because Loes appears to realize, upon hearing Marty’s question at T3, that she misunderstood what Marty meant at T1, which prompts her, at T4, to initiate a repair sequence. Repairing here means displaying what she now understands Marty wants (Oh, you want one.), an understanding that Marty confirms at T5 (Yeah). At T2, we see how Loes implicitly displays her understanding of T1 as an indirect way of asking if he can borrow her calendar (she is marking compliance by saying, “Yeah,” and reaches for her desk calendar), while at T4, she provides what Schegloff (1988) calls a “marker of enlightenment” (also called “change of state” token by Heritage,1984) by saying “Oh,” followed by a display of what she now understands Marty initially meant at T1 (“you want one”). She now understands that T1 actually was an indirect way of asking her for a calendar that he could hang on the wall. Interestingly enough, we see that T3 does not display any repair sequence, which means that Marty appears to still think at this point that Loes understood what he meant at T1. In other words, T3 implicitly shows that Marty orients to T2 as an appropriate response to what he considers to be his request for a calendar at T1. By saying, “Do you have one that hangs on the wall?” he is producing what Schegloff (1992) calls a “follow-up request” (p. 1321), which consists of specifying the type of calendar he actually wants (and implicitly means that the one that Loes reached for does not hang on the wall).12

12. For an interesting analysis of this type of situation, see also Trognon and Brassac (1992), as well as Brassac (2000). As Trognon and Brassac note, the satisfaction (in the Searlean sense of the word) of a given speech act has strong connections with its actual comprehension. Furthermore, they both note that interactants should be seen as co-responsible for the conversational scene they are co-constructing through their exchanges. See also Gighlione and Trognon (1993).

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As Schegloff (1992) insightfully demonstrates, this type of excerpt shows how talk-in-interaction displays interactants’ understandings of each others’ conduct, which ultimately shows how intersubjectivity is incarnatedly displayed in interaction (Heritage 1984). But what is, I think, even more interesting is how such an interaction illustrates what I proposed to call textual agency. For instance, let us look at how Schegloff analyses this episode: Marty’s question at T1 can be understood as doing either of at least two actions. It can be the vehicle for a request for a calendar, or it can request to borrow a calendar (e.g., to check the day on which some future date falls). Loes apparently understands T1 to be doing the latter of these actions, and in T2 she offers as her answer a compliance marker and initiates the appropriate action (built as a “follow up by its use, e.g., of “one” to refer to calendar, requiring reference to his earlier utterance for the understanding of this one). This follow-up request triggers in Loes a reanalysis of T1, a reanalysis whose product she proffers at T4.  (p. 1321, my italics)

As indicated by my numerous italics, this quote is interesting not only for the analysis it provides, but especially, I would contend, for the way it implicitly attributes agency to speech acts and turns of talk without necessarily referring to the interactants who produced them. For instance, we see how Mary’s question is said to be “doing either of at least two actions” (p. 1321), one of which being that “it can request to borrow a calendar” (p. 1321) and we even see how a follow-up request “triggers in Loes a reanalysis of T1” (p. 1321). While most conversation analysts would strongly resist the idea of attributing agency to speech acts per se and, more generally, turns of talk, we see that such an attribution is at least implicit in the way Schegloff (1992) analyzes this episode (and implicit, I should say, to so many data sessions I have attended in my career). This should be of no surprise given that conversation analysts, like ethnomethodologists, are interested in exploring and identifying the ethnomethods mobilized by interactants to interact with each other. Whether these methods are intentionally or unintentionally mobilized by the participants does not really matter to them and this is actually why they can indeed analyze what is happening. Whatever the interactants’ intentions, this is what these turns of talk make them do and say in these specific circumstances (see also Arquembourg, in press). Speaking of what he calls a “differential typology of forms of iteration” (p. 18), Derrida (1988) confirms this approach when he writes, In such a typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance [l’énonciation]. Above all, at that point, we will be dealing



Chapter 2.  How texts (and other things) do things with words

with different kinds of marks or chains of iterable marks and not with an opposition between citational utterances, on the one hand, and singular and original event utterances, on the other. The first consequence of this will be the following: given that structure of iteration, the intention animating the utterance will be never through and through present to itself and to its content. The iteration structuring it a priori introduces into it a dehiscence and a cleft [brisure] which are essential. The “non serious,” the oratio obliqua will no longer be able to be excluded, as Austin wished, from “ordinary” language.  (p. 18, see also Cooren 2000, p. 37)

Indeed, as we see in Schegloff ’s excerpt, Marty’s intention at T1 is to request a new calendar he can hang on the wall (this is at least what Loes and we understand at T4 and what Marty confirms at T5). But to express this intention, Marty asks Loes, “Loes, do you have a calendar,” which is, strictly and literally speaking, a request for information, the information being whether or not Loes has a calendar. What can make this request for information relevant is that Marty would either want to look at Loes’s calendar (i.e., to borrow it from her in order to check a date) or to get a new one from her (otherwise why would he be asking for a calendar?). As Derrida points out (and as is implicit in Schegloff ’s analysis), we are here dealing with a chain of iterable marks (“Do you have X”) that can be used to express/translate/vehicle (at least) two different kinds of intention. Searle (1979) would say that questioning someone about a request’s preparatory conditions, that is about what is presupposed when one asks someone for something, is a way to generate what he calls an indirect request (see also Cooren 2000, 2005). As we all know, “Are you wearing a watch?” tends to be an indirect (and conventional/idiomatic/formulaic) way to ask someone for the time. Conversation analysts would say that this is what “Are you wearing a watch?” does in most contexts. In other words, it is an ethnomethod people tend to use to request the time (there are, of course, many others, e.g., “Do you have the time?”). However, it is easy to imagine situations where “Are you wearing a watch?” would be meant literally, meaning that the producer of this utterance would just want to know whether or not her interlocutor has a watch. For instance, imagine two persons who are about to leave for a trip in the wilderness and have to be back at a specific time. If one of them asked the other, “Are you wearing a watch?” it could then be meant to ask if the person indeed has a watch, which could be quite useful when they would be in the middle of nowhere without a way to know the time. As we see, the key notion here is relevance, something that has, of course, already been noted by several scholars (Clark 1987; Grice 1975, 1989; Sperber & Wilson 1987, 1995; see also Cooren & Sanders 2002). But what is key in this argument is that the speaker’s intent or the context of production does not determine how “Are you wearing a watch?” functions. For instance, we could

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imagine a situation where “Are you wearing a watch?” would be produced just before the trip to the wilderness, but where the speaker meant that he wanted to know the time (and not just know if his interlocutor had it). In this case, we could have a third position repair sequence as follows: A: B: A: B: A:

Are you wearing a watch? Yes No, sorry, I meant if you could give me the time Oh, it’s five a.m. Thanks

As we see in this illustration, the category of intention does not disappear; it has, as Derrida (1988) points out, its place, but from this place it cannot govern the entire scene and system of utterance (otherwise, no repair would have been needed). As also noted by Derrida (1988), the iteration structuring any utterance “a priori introduces into it a dehiscence and a cleft [brisure] which are essential” (p. 18). One of the ethnomethods that one tends to use repeatedly/iteratively/ formulaically to ask for something indeed consists of saying, “Do you have X?” which is precisely the same ethnomethod one also tends to use repeatedly/iteratively to know whether or not someone has something. This dehiscence, this cleft, therefore is due to the fact that the same ethnomethod can be used for different purposes in different contexts. My way of putting it would be to say that each text, gesture, facial expression, mark, and sign we mobilize to speak or write to each other is an agent to the extent that it has, in many respects, been instituted, conventionalized, established (through iteration) to convey specific meanings, specific intentions (see Arquembourg, in press; Descombes 1996, 2001; Peirce 1955; Robichaud 2006), but such meanings and intentions are not exclusively ours. As interlocutors, we tend to be, of course, quite gifted in anticipating what these (textual and gestural) agents will do, but there are, as we all know, moments when they precisely make us do things that we had not anticipated (insulting, insinuating something, shocking, indirectly meaning something we did not mean, etc., see also Mey 2000, especially pp. 291–295, as well as Cooren 2009a or b, Fairhurst, Cooren & Cahill 2002, and Giddens 1984, on the unintended consequences of intentional conduct). This is the severance, cleft, dehiscence that Derrida is talking about. When we communicate with each other, we produce textual/gestural/facial/kinesic agents that are going to speak and act on our behalf, in our stead, in our name, that is, for us. What is achieved in interaction is therefore something that is always negotiable between the interactants, in action and reaction, as Weigand (2006) insightfully notes. Sometimes these agents



Chapter 2.  How texts (and other things) do things with words

appear to do what they were meant to do for all practical purposes, that is, they appear to faithfully translate what was meant by the producer of the utterance (no repair takes place), but sometimes they betray their principals, making them say something they had not meant, making them do something they did not want to perform, which brings about repair sequences.

2.4

Conventionality, literality, and figurativity

As we saw so far, conventionality plays, of course, an important role in the functioning of dialogue, interaction, and language in general. It is indeed because the meaning of words and expressions in general is (always relatively) instituted, stabilized and established (i.e., conventionalized) that we can communicate with each other (Descombes 2001; Peirce 1955). But we also saw that such institutions and conventions are always incarnated, embodied, materialized in specific and iterable situations, which explains why they can evolve (Kesckes 2002). As Kecskes notes, child language acquisition implies the extensive use of what he calls “ready-made chunks” or “formulaic expressions” (what he also calls “situated-bound utterances”). In other words, children tend to learn language more functionally than lexically or syntactically, which means that they are going to associate specific expressions to situations that they have to deal with (for instance, saying “I want water” or “Mummy, please” when they are thirsty or want to be held by their mom). It is only progressively that they will be able to deconstruct or disassemble these “chunks” or “assemblages” to progressively dissociate them from specific situations and dissociate the words themselves from each other (see Cooren 2004a). If formulaic and conventional expressions are first learned functionally, they are also progressively understood compositionally, hence the capacity to create an infinite number of sentences (Chomsky 1957, 1965; Searle 1994). As Kecskes (2002) also notes, the older the child, the more she will tend to learn language syntactically and lexically, whether she learns a first or second language (incidentally, this is why it is so hard for adults to learn a new language: they tend to approach it compositionally while a young child will learn it functionally). For instance, the child will progressively understand that the term water can be used in many different situations to mean this clear, colorless, odorless, and tasteless liquid that keeps being referred to by others when they use this term. Of course, she will not be able to define it right away as a “clear, colorless, odorless, and tasteless liquid” but she will progressively learn how to recognize it whether visually, olfactorily, tactilely, gustatively, or even aurally and she will be able to define it indexically by pointing at it.

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The lexical definition will come later as she will progressively be able to assemble various words – always indexically and sensorially incarnated – to define what something means, definitions that will, of course, be the object of sanction and evaluation by others. There is therefore an (always relative) conventionality, institutionality, stability, restance of meaning – what Kecskes (2002) proposes to call coresense – because word usage is not only incarnated, embodied, materialized in specific iterable chains of experiences and situations, but is also sanctioned, evaluated, assessed by participants, by what Hymes (1974) would call a speech community.13 But why is this important to us? Precisely because this implies that any formulaic or conventional expression will always also already be haunted, so to speak, by its literal meaning and vice-versa. This point is quite crucial given the position defended in this book regarding the question of textual agency, a position that tends to relativize a certain form of functionalism implicit in traditional approaches to conversation analysis. To illustrate the limits of this functionalism, let us look at the following excerpt analyzed by Schegloff (1988, p. 59; see also Cooren 2005 for a similar analysis of this question): (TC) A: Hello. B: Mister Lodge. A: Yes. B: Mr Ford. A: Yes. B: Y’know where Mr. Williams is? ← T1 A: What? B: hhhahhhhah. A: Do I know where who? B: Leo is. ← T1 A: No. ← T2 B: Oh. Okay. ← T3 A: ‘s he down in Mexico or some’in ← T2 B: I don’t know ← T3 A: Oh [You’re [looking [for him. ← T4 B: [Y- [Y-….… [YB: Well Leo’s brother called me up ‘n uh…

13. As Butler (1997) notes, “The speaker renews the linguistic tokens of a community, reissuing and reinvigorating such speech. Responsibility is thus linked with speech as repetition, not as origination” (p. 39).



Chapter 2.  How texts (and other things) do things with words

Schegloff uses this excerpt to illustrate what he contends are the limits of speech act theory, especially its model of indirection (Searle 1979). As he notes, taken literally, “Y’know where Mr. Williams is?” (T1) would be analyzed, according to speech act theory, as a request for information about the state of the recipient’s knowledge, that is, whether or not A knows where Mr. Williams (i.e., Leo) is. Indirectly or figuratively, such a request would also function, according to the same theory, as a request for the information mentioned in the embedded question, that is, asking A where Leo is. As Searle (1979) indeed notes, “S can make an indirect request (or other directive) by either asking whether or stating that a preparatory condition concerning H’s ability to do A obtains” (p. 45). Given that the preparatory condition of a directive is that the recipient should be capable of fulfilling what is requested of her, the preparatory condition of a request for information (which is a form of directive, in Searle’s classification) is that the recipient should be capable of providing the information, which means here that he should know it. “Y’know where Mr. Williams is?” thus consists of asking whether the preparatory condition of a request for information about where Mr. Williams is obtains, which means that it can also function as an indirect question regarding where Mr. Williams is. Searle calls “secondary illocutionary act” the direct speech act by which the “primary illocutionary act” (or indirect speech act) is performed. In other words, “Y’know where Mr. Williams is?” can be understood both as a question about A’s knowledge regarding Mr. Williams’s whereabouts (secondary speech act) and as a request for information about where Mr. Williams is (primary speech act). This is a crucial point because Searle (1979) contends that both meanings – the literal meaning (also called direct speech act) and the figurative meaning (also called indirect speech act) – are conveyed. A less technical way to put it would be to notice that what makes “Y’know where Mr. Williams is?” relevant in this context is that it is an indirect way to ask where Mr. William is (otherwise why bother asking?). Schegloff (1988) insightfully demonstrates the limits of such an analysis by showing that, in fact, A initially orients to T1 as a preannouncement, that is, a sequence that is supposed to precede an announcement to be made by B. Such an orientation (and understanding) is incarnatedly displayed not only when A responds, “No” at T2, a response that typically invites the author of the preannouncement to “go ahead” with his announcement, but especially when A responds with a guess (“’s down in Mexico or some’in”) about what B might be about to announce (second T2). It is only upon hearing B saying, “I don’t know” at T3 that A realizes that T1 was meant as a simple request for information. By saying “I don’t know,” B positions himself as not having anything to announce. While Searle’s (1979) model of indirection only explains why a request for information about the state of the recipient’s knowledge can be indirectly meant as

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a request for the information mentioned in the embedded question, it does not explain, Schegloff contends, why A first orients to T1 as a preannouncement and then to the same turn as a request for the information mentioned in the embedded question. As Schegloff (1988) writes: There are two different analyses of the target utterance by its recipient, one of them provided by speech act analysis, the other not. Here… the one provided is not the priority one employed, but is the second analysis arrived at by the recipient after the first is not sustainable… The analysis which is missed is a “presequence” analysis of the utterance. What a rudimentary speech act theoretic analysis misses, and I suspect a sophisticated one will miss as well, is that parties to real conversations are always talking in some sequential context.  (pp. 60–61)

According to Schegloff, A initially orients to T1 neither as a request for information about where Mr. Williams is (the primary illocutionary act), nor as a request for information about whether or not A knows where Mr. Williams is (the secondary illocutionary act). In fact, Schegloff notes, A’s response at the second T2 (i.e., “’s down in Mexico or some’in”) shows that he initially understands B’s question to be a pre-announcement. It is only because he orients to this question as anticipating an announcement to come that A can offer a candidate response such as this one. When A realizes his error, he orients to T1 as being a request for the information mentioned in the embedded question (the primary illocutionary act), an orientation displayed through the fact that, at T4, he says “Oh. You’re looking for him.” Whereas for Searle (1979), both literal (direct, secondary) and figurative (indirect, primary) meanings are conveyed (the first being an inferential means to convey the second), Schegloff implicitly rejects the existence of such a mechanism. Following Schegloff ’s critique, speech act theory could thus appear ill equipped to apprehend what is happening in this interaction. However, I contend that such a critique does not hold after a more detailed analysis. Indeed, if somebody intends to make an announcement or to inform people of something, this person normally presupposes that the recipients do not know the content of the announcement/information, otherwise the latter would run the risk of being infelicitous, unhappy, or unsuccessful (Austin 1962/1975; Searle 1969). There is, of course, no point announcing something already known, that is, it is not relevant. Using speech act theory vocabulary, a more technical way to put it would be to say that the preparatory condition of announcing or informing is that the recipient does not know the informational content.



Chapter 2.  How texts (and other things) do things with words

As we see, speech act theory can, in fact, perfectly explain what is going on in this interaction. Upon hearing B’s question, A initially infers that B might be checking to see if what he is about to say is newsworthy for A, that is, if A already knows what he is about to announce. Asking “Y’know where Mr. Williams is?” could thus consist of checking if the preparatory condition of an announcement to come obtains and this is the interpretation A initially appears to privilege when he first orients to this utterance. B is not indirectly performing an announcement (Schegloff 1988, is correct to note that this does not function as an indirection), but he might be checking if his announcement to come is worth making (which is the condition of success of such a speech act according to Searle). Schegloff is right to note that the mechanism of indirection proposed by Searle is inadequate to account for what is happening here, but he is wrong to presuppose that speech act theory cannot explain what is happening. Furthermore, although A does orient to this question as anticipating an announcement to come, this orientation does not prevent the speech act from also functioning as a request for information about the state of the recipient’s knowledge. In other words, such a request can be used as a preannouncement and it is precisely what is happening here. Contrary to what Schegloff (1988) appears to say in his analysis, A’s answers (“No.” and “’s he down in Mexico or some’in?”) implies, by definition, that he presupposes that there might be a sort of information deficit on his part, that is, that B could be about to tell him of an unexpected place where Mr. Williams might be. For him, this question functions as a sort of puzzle: He thought he knew where Mr. Williams was (in Mexico), but such a location does not seem to merit an announcement. Therefore, he infers that he might not know something that B could know. For A, the relevance of A’s preannouncement is supposed to be based on the eventfulness of the announcement to be made. This explains why “Y’know where Mr. Williams is?” does function as a request for information about the state of the recipient’s knowledge. It is precisely because A does-not-know-if-he-knows that he offers a candidate response, “’s he down in Mexico or some’in?” To imply, as Schegloff does, that A only orients to B’s question as a preannouncement is an oversimplification that does not do justice to the inferential mechanisms that speech act theory can precisely help us reveal. Searle (1979) is therefore right to establish a distinction between literal (direct, secondary) and figurative (indirect, primary) meanings and to point out that both are conveyed each time we interact with each other, the first being an inferential means to convey the second. This is the limit of a certain form of functionalism implicit in conversation analysis, a functionalism that tends to reduce what a turn of talk means to what its function appears to be in a specific interaction.

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As we saw in the previous illustration, if A is able to first orient to T1 as a preannouncement, it is because “Y’know where Mr. Williams is?” also functions literally as a request for information about his state of knowledge. To a restrictive form of functionalism, we could then oppose a more open one, which would focus on the functioning of texts in interactional settings. As we saw in this example, T1 does function (literally) as a request for information about A’s state of knowledge, but it also functions (indirectly) for A as a preannouncement, that is, as a turn of talk that anticipates an announcement that is about to be made by B. As A and we understand at T3, T1 was actually meant by B as a request for the information mentioned in the embedded question, that is, it was the way B thought this turn of talk would function for A. Miscomprehension comes from the fact that a request for information about the state of the recipient’s knowledge can function either (a) as a preannouncement or (b) as a request for the information mentioned in the embedded question. Another way to put it would be to say that, to make a preannouncement and a request for the information mentioned in the embedded question, interactants tend to use the same ethnomethod or formulaic expression, which consists of making a request for information about the state of the recipient’s knowledge.14 As mentioned previously, any formulaic or conventional expression is always also already haunted by its literal meaning and vice-versa. Although Searle (1979) does not, of course, coin it this way, this is what is implied when he notes that indirect speech acts are idiomatic expressions, but not idioms such as, “It’s raining cats.” Here is what he writes: The most powerful evidence I know that these sentences are not idioms is that in their use as indirect directives they admit of literal responses that presuppose that they are uttered literally. Thus, an utterance of “Why don’t you be quiet, Henry?” admits as a response an utterance of “Well, Sally, there are several reasons for not being quiet. First,…”  (p. 41)

A purely functional approach to “Why don’t you be quiet, Henry” would consist of saying that the literal (secondary) meaning sort of disappears while only the indirect (primary) meaning obtains. As exemplified by Searle, an idiomatic expression like “Why don’t you be quiet,” which tends to be used to invite the recipient

14. Having said that, it is noteworthy that A must have a reason to interpret the question as a pre-announcement or not. In other words, it is not arbitary. In this case, A must have had some reason to think that Leo’s whereabouts would be newsworthy, and some reason to not think that someone would be looking for him. So it is the assessed relevance to the speaker-hearer situation of the alternate interpretations that leads the hearer to call it the way he does. I would like to thank my colleague Robert Sanders for pointing this out.



Chapter 2.  How texts (and other things) do things with words

to calm down also functions as a literal question, even if this functioning is less salient (see also Kecskes 2002).15 In terms of textual agency, one could then notice that it is precisely because texts and expressions also function literally and conventionally that there can be such a thing as misunderstanding. This is what happened between A and B and this is what happens everyday because speakers and writers produce texts that are meant to function in a specific way, but end up functioning in another way for their recipient. But this, of course, does not mean that such a functioning comes from an arbitrary decision taken by the recipient. On the contrary, any misunderstanding is the product of two (or more) conventional, established ways of understanding the same text (what could be called ethnomethods). A had good reasons to think that B was about to make an announcement (he thought B knew something he did not know) while B also had good reasons to think that “Y’know where Mr. Williams is?” would function for A as a request for the information mentioned in the embedded question. Furthermore, and more generally, active efforts are made by speakers to compose utterances that take into account what hearers might do and that try to head off unwanted reactions and understandings. Utterances are not fully within the control of speakers, that is, they have their own doings, but this does not mean that speakers are helpless or entirely passive about it (Sanders 1987, 1997, 2007).

2.5

The functioning of texts

Although I showed that Searle (1979) was right to insist that literal meaning survives, so to speak, in any indirect speech act or formulaic expression, I will now show that he remains, however, caught in his intentionalist and monological approach to speech acts, an approach that prevents him from recognizing textual agency (Brummans 2007; Cooren 2004b). This is especially evident in the following excerpt: … in any actual speech situation, what matters for the identity of the speech act is the speaker meaning, and that is what sentences are for. Sentences are to talk with. A sentence type is just the standing possibility of an intentional speech act. So in one fundamental sense, speaker meaning is prior, since the speech act is the 15. Although I do not have the space to develop this point further, one could also notice that even an idiom such as “it’s raining cats” somehow maintains its literal, basic meaning to the extent that this figurative or metaphoric expression functions because people can figure out what raining cats would consist of should this happen. A dead metaphor, if there is such a thing, precisely is a case where the figurative meaning has replaced, so to speak, the literal one.

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basic unit of communication, and the identity criteria for the speech act are set by speaker meaning. (Searle 1994, p. 646)

A crucial distinction made by Searle is indeed the one he makes between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. By sentence meaning, Searle means “its literal sentence meaning” (p. 645) while speaker meaning is defined as “what the speaker means in the utterance of the sentence” (p. 645). Although there are cases where our speaker meaning coincides with the sentence meaning (for instance, when I say “Please, give me this book” to ask someone to give me a book I am pointing to), Searle is right to notice that there are many cases where sentence meaning differs from speaker meaning. This is, as we saw, what happened when B said “Y’know where Mr. Williams is?” where he asked A not only if he knew where Mr. Williams was (secondary or direct speech act), but also where Mr. Williams was (primary or indirect speech act). However, this example also shows us that what matters for the identity of the speech act is not the speaker meaning to the extent that A precisely understood B’s question as a preannouncement. It was, of course, a misinterpretation on his part, as he understood at T3, but for him that is what B’s question made B say at T1, even if this interpretation was subsequently repaired. To Searle’s (1969, 1979) intentionalist and monological approach to speech acts, what Sbisà and Fabbri (1980) call the “one-place model,” we should then oppose what they name the “two-place model,” that is a model according to which what is performed can not only be defined by the speaker/writer, but also by the hearer/reader (see also Brassac 2000; Trognon & Brassac 1992). We could even go further by proposing a “three-place model,” so to speak, to the extent that what is meant or done can not only be defined by the interlocutors, but also by whoever witnesses the event or read what was written. It is precisely because texts display a certain agency that they can make people say things that they did not mean even if repairs can then take place to correct any misunderstanding that might have taken place, as we also saw in the A-B interaction about Mr. Williams. As Searle (1994) points out, “Sentences are to talk with” (p. 646), but the uttering of a sentence or, more broadly, of a text consists of producing an agent that will act in our name, on our behalf, in our stead. It can sometimes translate faithfully what the speaker/writer meant for all practical purposes, but it can also “betray” her, as again we saw in the A-B interaction about Mr. Williams. While conversation analysts do recognize a certain form of textual agency (at least implicitly in the way they speak about interactions), Searle is far from acknowledging this phenomenon. Speaking of the distinction he makes between sentences and utterances, here is what he writes:



Chapter 2.  How texts (and other things) do things with words

Though every sentence involves the production or use of a token, the same token can function in quite different utterances. To take an example from real life, there is a man who stands on a street corner at a school near my house, and every so often he holds up a sign on which it says “STOP.” He is protecting small children from passing motorists. Each time he holds up the stop sign, he is making a separate utterance and thus is performing a separate speech act. But he uses one and the same sentence token for each different utterance.  (p. 643)

But another way to analyze what is happening in this situation would be to say that the man (intentionally) appropriates what the stop sign is doing, that is, inviting motorists to stop at this intersection when the man displays it to them. It is noteworthy that Searle (1994) does not use the other, more common, example of a stop sign that would not be held by a man, but just standing by itself at an intersection at the end of a pole. This sign also is supposed to make a difference, that is, to do something, to the extent that it indicates that motorists should stop at its location. Certainly, its illocutionary force might not be as strong as if someone was holding it (and this is why the man is certainly offering better protection than a simple stop sign), but it does make a difference in that most people will stop (or at least slow down) at this intersection upon seeing it. Note that I am not claiming that this sign only functions by itself, given what I said previously about the sharing of action. If a stop sign standing at an intersection makes any difference, it is also because motorists presume that it was installed there by a governmental body and that it is also this body that enjoins them to stop at this intersection. Once we recognize textual agency, that is, a certain autonomy in the functioning of texts, certain sharp distinctions start to be problematized or deconstructed; for instance, the distinction between sentences and utterances or even, as we will see, the one between types and tokens. Searle notes that, “A sentence, type or token, is a purely formal structure. Sentences are defined formally or syntactically. But an utterance of a sentence is typically an intentional action. To utter a sentence is to engage in a piece of intentional behavior” (p. 643). Of course, nothing prevents Searle from defining sentences the way he wants (he is offering here what I would call a technical or formal definition of what sentence means, a definition that is shared by many analytic philosophers), but such a purified and formal meaning does not do justice to our common understanding of the term. After all, sentences like “No smoking” as we often see them posted on walls cannot be reduced to formal structures. They are supposed to do things, for example, remind people that they should not smoke in the area where the signs have been posted. Technically, they have not been uttered, although they have definitely been produced and placed on a wall for a specific purpose. Once produced and posted on a

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wall, they are supposed to do their job, so to speak, without anyone standing there to help them do what they do. Searle (1994) is therefore right to notice that the man with the stop sign “uses one and the same sentence token for each different utterance” (p. 643), but what I think he fails to recognize is that the said token does something too, something that is intentionally appropriated by and attributed to the man. Recognizing textual agency thus problematizes the technical distinction between utterances and sentences, but interestingly enough it also deconstructs the opposition between type and token. In this regard, Searle writes, If, for example, I write the word “dog” on the blackboard three times, have I written one word or three? Well, I have written one type word, but I have written three different token instances of that word. That is, the token is a concrete physical particular, but the type is a purely abstract notion. We need this distinction because the identity criteria for types and tokens are quite different. What makes something a case of “the same token” will be different from what makes it “the same type.”  (p. 642–643)

Searle then goes on to say that Derrida seems unaware of this basic distinction (originally introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce) with his notion of iterability. As he writes, [Derrida] speaks of “marks” and “signs,” but actual marks and signs, that is actual physical tokens, are precisely not iterable. It is, rather, the type of mark that can have different instantiations. This is one way of saying that it is types and not tokens that allow for repeated instances of the same. Derrida lacks a clear answer to the question, “What is it that gets iterated?” in part because he seems unaware of this distinction.  (p. 643)

But Derrida was actually perfectly aware of this distinction and we could even say that his whole oeuvre is somehow organized around the deconstruction of such an (apparently easy and obvious) opposition. For Derrida, any type, any model (type comes from the Greek túpos, which means blow, impression, model) has, by definition, to be itself a token, otherwise how could we reproduce, copy, duplicate, imitate, replicate, repeat, cite, reiterate it? Searle himself appears to implicitly acknowledge this fact when he notes, “When Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises he produced a token, which inaugurated a new type, his novel, of which your copy and my copy are two further tokens” (p. 643, my italics). Any radical distinction between type and token actually reproduces a form of (Platonic) idealism that Derrida’s philosophy has fought throughout his life, from his critique of Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (Derrida 1962). This does not mean, of course, that the concept of type disappears or that



Chapter 2.  How texts (and other things) do things with words

the difference between type and token vanishes. This simply means that a type is a token that can be used as a model to reproduce or identify other tokens. When Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises, he produced a token (his manuscript) that was then used as a model to produce all the books that now have The Sun Also Rises as their title. The same logic works for any kind of textual or nontextual production. Children who learn language are first confronted with tokens and it is from these tokens that they will progressively construct (proto-)types. Rosch’s (1978, 1999) work, in this respect, shows that any prototype is what she calls “the judged best examples of conceptual categories” (1999, p. 65), that is, that we always develop and have in mind what constitutes the best representative of a given category (for instance, a sparrow will, in Western societies, usually be classified as the best representative of a “bird” while an ostrich will be considered a marginal representative), which means that concepts and categories are organized according to a gradient structure. My point is not to develop an argument about cognition, but to point out that types, models, or ideals are also always already incarnated, embodied, materialized in specific tokens. The type is not, as Searle (1994) contends, a “purely abstract notion” (p. 642). In terms of textual agency, it means that any textual production will tend to generate, as we already saw in 2.2, its own typical and incarnated context. This is what conversation analysts and ethnomethodologist have shown us for the past 40 years and this is what makes textual agency possible. Let us examine the following excerpt: (Levinson 1979, pp. 380–381) A: …you have had sexual intercourse on a previous occasion haven’t you? B: Yes. A: On many previous occasions? B: Not many. A: Several? B: Yes A: With several men? B: No A: Just one? B: Two A: Two. And you are seventeen and a half? B: Yes  (Heritage 1984, p. 289)

As pointed out by Heritage, we do not need any contextual information to reconstruct/recognize this scene as being a relatively hostile cross-examination taking place in a courtroom.

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These turns of talk are typical or typified ways of conducting oneself as a lawyer (A) and a witness (B) “for another next first time” (Garfinkel 2002; see also Cooren 2009a or b) and they project a scene that we are all able to reconstruct. Two children or actors who would decide to play “lawyer and witness” would rely on such generative power of language to reproduce this scene, to perform it into being, so to speak. In other words, they would rely on a model, a type, for sure, but a model, a type that is also always already incarnated, embodied, materialized in a given token, a given text, a given interaction (see also Butler 1997).16 So, when Searle (1994) writes, The intentionality of the speech act covers exactly and only that particular speech act. The fact that someone might perform another speech act with a different token of the same type (or even another speech act with the same token) has no bearing whatever on the role of speaker’s utterance meaning in the determination of the speech act.  (p. 660, his italics)

Given that the type is, by definition, an incarnated model (and a model that can, of course, evolve), it has some bearing in the determination of the speech act and this is precisely why speakers and writers never have complete control over their speech productions. Let me end by what I consider to be one of the best illustrations of textual agency and the functioning of text, which happens to be irony. Before Sigmund Freud was authorized to leave Austria in 1938, Gestapo agents required him to sign a document that would certify that he had not been ill-treated after he was arrested by the Nazis. Freud accepted to sign the document, which officially amounted to an appropriation, on his part, of the content of the statement, but he added, close to his signature: “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone” (“Ich kann die Gestapo jedermann auf das beste empfehlen”). This recommendation was, of course, ironical and Searle would therefore contend that this constitutes a clear example of a situation where speaker meaning obviously differs from sentence meaning. However, and this is precisely the force of irony, one could have as well concluded that Freud did praise the Gestapo without, of course, really meaning it. Whether the Gestapo representatives understood it or not (but we can imagine that they were not fooled by Freud’s note, which means, of course, that Freud took 16. In this regard, Butler (1997) writes, “Racist speech could not act as racist speech if it were not a citation of itself; only because we already know its force from its prior instances do we know it to be so offensive now, and we brace ourselves against its future invocations. The iterability of hate speech is effectively dissimilated by the ‘subject’ who speaks the speech of hate” (p. 80).



Chapter 2.  How texts (and other things) do things with words

a lot of risk in writing it!), irony functions because an act (here, Freud’s recommendation) was performed, which could a priori prevent the Nazis from accusing him of anything (how could they blame him for such a recommendation?). As we see, once the phenomenon of textual agency is acknowledged, the mechanism of irony seems relatively easy to explain. Each time we produce a text, this text is supposed to act in our name (stating, declaring, ordering, etc.), but irony precisely consists of questioning such an affiliation, such identification, such appropriation. Irony thus consists of disaffiliating oneself from the speech acts we produce, whether these acts consists, for instance, of blaming, encouraging, praising, or congratulating someone. While the text we produce makes us (conventionally) do something that looks like praising or blaming someone, everyone (hopefully) understands (because of the situation, as in Freud’s case, or because of a laugh, smile, or blink that accompanies or follows the performance) that what is meant precisely is the opposite of what was said.17 Irony thus consists of playing, so to speak, with the attribution/appropriation that tends to be implicit regarding the (speech) acts we produce. What we said made us do something (praising, blaming) that appears irrelevant or at odds with the situation, which prompts the interlocutor or the audience to attribute the opposite meaning (for more details on the functioning of irony, see Cooren & Sanders 2002). Interestingly, such a reflection on irony paves the way to what will later be identified as ventriloquism (Chapter 4), that is, the manner by which interlocutors precisely manage to play with what or who is saying or doing something in a given interaction. As we will see, something like irony is possible precisely because of a vacillation, oscillation, or undecidability between appropriation and expropriation, what Derrida (1994) proposes to call exappropriation. That is, Freud’s irony consists of playing with the undecidable character of his statement: Did what he 17. In this respect, I cannot help but notice what recently happened with the release of a controversial front cover for the July 21st (2008) issue of The New Yorker, a US left-wing magazine. On this cover, we see Barack Obama, dressed in Muslin garb with a turban, doing the fist bump in the oval office with his wife, shown dressed with military pants and shoes, with an Afro and an AK-47, while the American flag is burning in a fireplace, with a portrait of Osama bin Laden hung above it. Titled “The Politics of Fear,” this cartoon made by Barry Blitt was supposed, according to the magazine’s news release, to “satirize the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the Presidential election to derail Barack Obama’s campaign.” This type of cartoon could be considered the pictorial version of irony, but even if it was definitely meant as satirical and ironical, the cartoon started to have a life of its own. For instance, Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton did not hesitate to say that, “The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s rightwing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.” The problem with irony and satire precisely is that whatever our intentions are, the message/text/speech act/icon we produce also (conventionally) speaks for itself.

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wrote really mean what he meant? Of course not! But this “Of course not,” this expropriation is always haunted or disturbed by a form of appropriation, otherwise there would not be any irony. But before going any further in this direction, we first need to explore what I consider to be both key and neglected aspects of interaction, that is, passion, animation, and decision.

chapter 3

Passion, animation, and decision

In the first chapter, I tried to show why it could be fruitful, analytically speaking, to widen the extension and intension of the concepts of action and agency to include beings that tend to be reduced to passive intermediaries, means, vehicles, or tools that are mobilized in our activities. While traditional approaches to language and society tend to center their analyses on what humans and only humans perform, do, and accomplish, I showed that there was some analytical payoff in conceiving of the world we live in as filled with agencies, what I propose to call a “plenum of agencies” (Cooren 2006). This world is what Latour (2004b), following William James, would call a pluriverse, that is, a world made of beings with variable ontologies, whether they are technological, textual, architectural, animal, vegetal, and so on. It is, as Latour (2005) puts it, plural but common. It goes without saying that humans play a big role in such a plenum (we just have to think of how we are currently altering the future of our planet!..), but this important role does not preclude other forms of agencies that come to share this world with us, even when these agencies happen, as it is often the case, to be the product of our own doing. This is especially true, as we saw in Chapter 2, in interaction and dialogue, to the extent that the textual beings we create on the spot, so to speak, always develop a certain autonomy, whether we like it or not. They are, as we saw, our delegates, proxies, agents, surrogates, but as any representatives, they can translate what we appear to mean, but they can also betray us, making us do and say things we did not intend. By focusing on what I call “textual agency,” I showed that what people do when conversing with each other can also be attributed to what their turns of talk or texts make them do. But so far, our focus has been essentially on what happens downstream from the interlocutors, that is, on the signs they produce, whether under the form of texts, gestures, kinesic expressions, and what they do or make interlocutors do. But we could also focus on what happens upstream, that is, not only what appears to bring into being interlocutors’ behavior and action, that is, what animates them, but also what these interlocutors make present, that is, represent in their interactions. This is another controversial topic because it forces us to analyze interaction and action in general in terms of what I propose to call “animation”

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or, more strongly, “passion,” in the etymological sense of “passivity,” as in contrast with action (and activity). As I will try to show in this chapter, any action (activity) involves in one way or another a form of passion (passivity) to the extent that any interlocutor can position herself or be positioned as animated, moved, motivated, led, inspired, enthused, stirred, forced, constrained, affected by specific beings (to be identified). One could, at first sight, think that this approach forces us to look into interlocutors’ psychology, but this does not need to be so. As we will see, we can remain at the level of communication by analyzing how interactants enact or stage these beings in interaction by invoking, evoking, calling upon, or expressing them. Interestingly enough, this will then allow us to tackle, in Chapter 4, another important phenomenon, which I propose to call, metaphorically, “ventriloquism,” the phenomenon by which an agent makes another agent speak through the production of a given utterance or text. The question of who or what is acting will then become an object of debate and negotiation, for many types of agents (such as emotions, collectives, principles, or rules, for instance) can be identified as doing something in a given discussion, whether by the participants or the analysts. But let’s start by exploring the concept of passion and its lesser version, animation.

3.1

Passion, animation, and attachment

Tackling the topic of passion is, a priori, as daunting a task as exploring the one of action. But given that we tend to conceive of these two notions as mirroring each other, let’s look, as we did in Chapter 1, at how the 1993 edition of the Webster’s New Encyclopedic Dictionary defines this word: pas.sion \’pash-әn\ n 1 often cap: the sufferings of Christ between the night of the Last Supper and his death 2a pl: the emotions as distinguished from reason b: violent, intense, or overmastering feeling c: an outbreak of anger 3a: ardent affection: love b: a strong liking c: sexual desire d: an object of desire or deep interest [Old French, from Late Latin passio “suffering”, from Latin pati “to suffer”]

As we see in these three sets of definitions, passion is related to suffering, emotion, affection, desire, (deep) interest, which all have in common the idea that someone appears, somehow, to be acted upon, to undergo or be animated by something that can be considered positive (euphoric) or negative (dysphoric). Suffering presupposes that one feels or endures pain; emotion implies that one is moved by a feeling (fear, desire, anger, joy) or touched by something or someone; affection relates to the idea of being attached to something or someone; as for desires and interests,



Chapter 3.  Passion, animation, and decision

they refer to objects that we long or wish for because they appear to make a difference, to import to us, to stand out (interest etymologically means “to be” (esse) “between” (inter-), as pointed out by Callon 1986). Of course, all these definitions relate to what Wittgenstein (1953) would have called a case of “family resemblance” to the extent that they are not perfectly synonymous of each other (there is, anyway, no such thing as a perfect synonym, given the economy of language). An emotion, for instance, tends to be short-lived and sudden, while a passion tends to refer to a state, condition, disposition that somehow endures, lasts, persists, lives on. The dictionary speaks, for instance, of the passion for cars, which conveys the idea that someone appears to have developed a strong interest, desire, want, longing, craving, or yearning for this kind of technological object, to which she appears to be attached. But beyond these important nuances, all these notions portray someone as attached to, or moved, affected, effected, animated by something (Fitch & Foley 2007; Putnam 2007; Tracy 2007). We find this idea in the Greek term Pathos, which also means “suffering, feeling, emotion,” but also in the terms patient, passivity, and passiveness. But note that somebody who appears passive is supposed to be subjected or to have submitted to an action without responding, objecting, or resisting in return, a situation that appears in direct contrast with someone passionate who looks, on the contrary, very active, energetic, vigorous, full of life, animated, in other words, the exact opposite of passiveness (animated comes from the Latin anima, which roughly means “breath,” “soul”). But such a paradox, as I will show, can be explained in that someone who is passionate somehow surrenders, abandons herself, submits, or yields to her passion, which leads her to be and look very active. The passionate person is also passive precisely because she is moved, led, animated by her passion, a passion to which she cannot resist. If she looks very animated and active, it is precisely because she abandons herself to her passion. As pointed out in Chapter 2, all depends on the way we end up describing what is happening. If we focus on the person who appears animated by a given passion, we then cannot help but notice that she, as a whole, is indeed very active. For instance, a philatelist might do everything she can to buy a very rare stamp: seducing someone, threatening him, imploring, selling her house, travelling to remote areas, and so forth. If we observe her behavior, she will look extremely active and even reactive or resilient, obsessed as she is by her object of passion. By singularizing this person as an individual (i.e., etymologically, someone that cannot be divided), one then is struck by her verve and energy. However, one could go upstream in the chain of agency and precisely focus on what appears to lead this person to do what she does, that is, her (excessive) passion for stamps. Interestingly, this then enjoins us to open up the black box that

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we call individuals to discover that indeed even they can be divided, fragmented (and not only analytically). If there is such a thing as passion, it indeed means that something leads or drives her to do what she is doing. The person might look very active, resilient, energetic, but it is because of what animates or moves her, in other words, her passion. If we analytically fragment the person, we then realize that her activeness – as an individual – does not come from nowhere and can be ascribed to this passion that somehow burns in her. According to this description, the person is certainly very active, but it is because she is now acted upon, moved, spurred by her passion, as many ways of speaking of her (always relative) passiveness in this situation. Although I acknowledge that passion might be too strong a term to speak of states and dispositions as diverse as emotion, interest, motivation, desire, envy, affection, attachment, I decided to keep it as one of my umbrella terms precisely because of its etymology, which allows me to insist on the passive dimension of any activity.18 As pointed out in the first chapter, action is something that is shared (Latour 1996, 2005), which means that depending on the way we describe a situation or event, we should be able to highlight to what extent a given activity (action) implies a form of passivity (passion). Othello, alluded to in the introduction, constitutes, of course, the epitome (dare I say the prototype?) of such a situation, but we do not need to delve into dramaturgy to account for such phenomena. As I will try to show, the couple passion/action (or passivity/activity) is operative in any doing, in any process. But we need for that a more mundane acceptation of what we mean by passion, that is, we need to be able to think of “little passions” so to speak, that is, what could be also called, perhaps more prosaically, animations (the other umbrella term I propose). What animates us can be an emotion, a passion, a desire, an interest, a sentiment, a feeling, but interestingly enough, one can also be animated by ideas, principles, ideals, or values, what Burke (1945/1962, 1969), might have called, more broadly, a motive. This step is crucial in that all these sources of animation can constitute as many reasons explaining our behavior, conduct, action, or activity. In other words, the idea of passivity implied in the concepts of passion and animation does not preclude us from recognizing what Garfinkel (1967, 2002) 18. For an alternative viewpoint on activity and action, see, of course, representatives of activity theory, especially Engeström (1987, 1990, 1995, 1996; Engeström & Middleton 1996). Although I tend to share many viewpoints with this approach (especially when it insists on the key role played by operations and activities in the mode of being of organizations), I think that this perspective suffers, as implied in its very name, from focusing too heavily on action and activity without taking in account the role passion and passivity play in the process of organizing. It is also this very focus that prevents them from fully acknowledging the agency of artifacts and objects (but see Groleau 2006).



Chapter 3.  Passion, animation, and decision

and other ethnomethodologists would call the accountable, understandable, describable, recognizable, reportable character of our conducts and practices. In a way, one could even go as far as saying that animation, as a lesser form of passion, is what makes our conduct accountable, reportable, responsive, and even – I would dare to say – responsible to others, since accounting for a given action or activity amounts to providing the reasons that led us to do what we do, did or will do, that is, why we do, did, or will do something (see also Quattrone 2004, 2009; Simon 199519). Interestingly, this reasoning can be applied as much to Othello’s morbid jealousy as to any mundane activity. For instance, if Othello kills Desdemona, it is because he thinks she betrayed him. This is one of the reasons why he killed her, even if most people would think that this is indeed a very bad reason. Another reason, related to the first one, is that he is terribly jealous, or rather angry and scared by the idea of losing Desdemona, of whom he claims exclusive ownership. This state of jealousy, which inhabits him, also explains (without, of course, justifying) why he ends up murdering her. Since he cannot stand the idea that she could be someone else’s lover (which is what jealousy tends to be about), she has to die. A figurative (or metaphorical, albeit a little cliché) way to speak about this murder would consist of saying that “jealousy struck again.” It is figurative because offering such a description amounts to going upstream in the chain of agencies in order to ascribe Othello’s action to what appears to control, to some extent, his mind, in other words, his jealousy. Because such an expression is deemed figurative or metaphorical, one could be tempted to say that it is not true or factual, that it is “just a way of speaking.” My point, again, is that it is certainly a (figurative) way of speaking, but that this does not prevent this kind of expression from having a veridictory dimension (Greimas & Courtés 1982), that is, it claims to say something true or factual about an aspect of the world’s reality (even if this world is, in the case of Othello, fictive). “Jealousy struck again” is true to the extent that what appears to make a difference in this kind of situation is the murderer’s jealous character. Had he not been predisposed to this morbid passion, we could imagine that Othello would not have murdered his lover. A strong (or true) passion is precisely what appears to somewhat control someone’s mind and behavior in specific circumstances. Certainly, it is someone’s passion – in other words, it is part of what defines a given person as a whole – but everything happens as though this person was so strongly attached to something or someone (his object of passion) that all other forms of 19. As Simon (1995) rightly points out, “By a weak definition of rationality, virtually all human behavior is rational. People usually have reasons for what they do, and if asked, can opine what these reasons are” (p. 45). See also Hémont (forthcoming).

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potential attachment could no longer count. Killing Desdemona means, for instance, that Othello would rather kill his lover than see her live with someone else. Although one could a priori presuppose that he could also be attached to Desdemona as a person (for example, by respecting her right to live and love someone else), this kind of reasoning does not seem to make a difference, or at least not enough not to murder her. Someone animated by a strong passion therefore is almost programmed to do things that are supposed to assuage, alleviate, or satisfy his or her passion (Greimas & Fontanille 1993; Vasquez & Cooren, forthcoming). In the case of jealousy, we see that this form of passion is mainly about ownership: We are so strongly attached to something or someone that, in some extreme cases, we would rather destroy this thing or kill this person than seeing it belonging to someone else, whatever the consequences. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the vocabulary we use to speak about strong passion is very close to the one employed for mental illness or addiction: We speak of someone who is possessed, haunted, inhabited, consumed, trapped, devoured by his passion/madness/addiction. These latter appear to dictate the person’s conduct, as if s/he was not able to balance things anymore, or to reason in a complex way.

3.2

Passion, animation, and reason

A priori, what seems to be reproduced here is a classical opposition between reason and passion (Korichi 2000; Mumby & Putnam 1992; Solomon 2003; de Sousa 1987), but things are not that simple, as passion also is, as I just pointed out, a form of reason (Cooren 2008). To the extent that a reason is anything that leads us to adopt a specific conduct or behavior, any form of passion qualifies as a reason (and, as we will see, vice versa). My reason to buy this very expensive stamp is that I am a passionate philatelist. I have a passion for stamps and this is why I am ready to sell my house, destroy my family life, or fly to the end of the world to have this very rare token, which I have always dreamed about possessing. To be animated by a strong passion therefore means that certain objects (which do not need to be artifactual like stamps, they can also be ideal like principles, values, etc.) will precisely function like absolute objectives or goals, that is, they will make our conduct accountable, providing reasons for what we are doing and thinking. So why do we tend to (intuitively) oppose passion and reason? Because what we call a true or strong passion will tend to annihilate, supersede, or supplant any other forms of reason that might make us deviate from our object(-ive). Let’s take again the mad philatelist example as an illustration. Apparently, one could think that destroying one’s family life or spending all one’s money could be considered



Chapter 3.  Passion, animation, and decision

good reasons not to buy an expensive stamp. Other sources or objects of attachment would make other people hesitate in similar circumstances. But the person who is truly passionate does not tend to reason that way, precisely because, as we saw earlier, he tends to be taken over/possessed/devoured/consumed by his (object of) passion, his only and single (object of) true attachment. Although he madly wants to have, hold, or possess this stamp, it is also this stamp, this object of passion that strongly has, holds, or possesses him (Hennion 2004, 2007; Hennion, Maisonneuve, & Gomart 2000; Hennion & Teil 2004). Possession (always) goes in both directions, as Tarde (1895/1999), Whitehead (1929/1978) and Latour (2002) remind us, all in their own respective ways (see also Debaise 2006b). Reasons for our conduct thus constitute as many objects of attachment. In other words, making one’s behavior accountable or answerable consists of identifying everything that precisely counts or matters for us in given circumstances. Whether it is our face (Brown & Levinson 1987; Goffman 1967), our thirst for justice, the person we love, or a simple artifact, they are experienced and/or presented as what we are attached to, what counts, what matters (Benoit-Barné 2007). It is precisely when specific objects appear to be taking us over that we speak of the true, strong, real passion. The vocabulary we then use when this happens is also telling in that we speak of the heat of passion or the boiling, burning, or searing passion or desire. Our attachment then appears so strong, so intense, so hot that it becomes almost exclusive to the detriment of other potential objects. To this world of heat and passion, one could a priori oppose the cold world of calculation and reason (Hirschman 1977; Latour & Lépinay 2009). Why speak of coldness in this case? Precisely because calculation and reasoning a priori imply that we balance, ponder, or evaluate our various sources of attachment, since they might not all be compatible. Sure, I am strongly attached to this very rare stamp, but can I really afford it? What will happen if I sell everything to buy it? Can I really jeopardize my family life for this devouring passion? As we see through these examples, we are here in the world of scruples, qualms, and misgivings, which marks the existence of other sources of attachment that can make us hesitate, hem and haw, or dither. Assessing, judging, or evaluating a situation therefore implies that we weigh or balance our objects of attachment, our objects of passion. This also means that the heat hopefully becomes diffuse, so to speak, since there is no longer one exclusive passion, but several that might not all be compatible and which we try to balance, respect, and value in our conduct and decisions. From the monolithic world of the singular passion, we progressively move to the plural world of passions (with an s), which irremediably comes with more sophisticated and complex forms of reasoning. While in the former, our conduct was dictated solely by an obsession, making our reasoning terribly simplistic – she betrayed me, therefore

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she must die; I want this stamp, therefore I have to buy it – we now take into account other forms of attachments, other passions, trying to make them compatible in our conduct. Going one step further with the temperature metaphor, one could also notice that the heat of passion generates, by definition, coldness. As noticed previously, being exclusively attached to something or someone indeed presupposes that other potential objects of attachment do not count or matter, which implies a form of detachment from them. Interestingly, what we tend to call “a cold calculator” shares with the passionate person such a detachment. His calculation, his reasoning, however complex it might be, will indeed lead him to always opt for conduct that will assuage his passion, his obsession, his objective. The cold calculator – Iago, for instance – therefore is impassioned by something (which can be his self interest, a principle like justice, an objective like revenge, etc.), but his passion does not lead him to act hastily or mindlessly. On the contrary, all his moves will be calculated to fulfill his objectives, whatever it might take in terms of sacrifice and detachment.

3.3

Animation, decision, and undecidability

Between the cold calculator and the hotly passionate person who both create, in their own ways, coldness and detachment around them, we thus find another type of reasoning where several sources of animation attempt to co-exist. As mentioned previously, this is the world where heat can possibly become diffused, where we can become animated or moved by several reasons or objects of attachment, which cannot always be compatible, but which we try, in our conduct, to render compatible. This is, incidentally, where a form of undecidability can also be experienced, precisely because we come to realize that even if our conduct appears to be moved or dictated by beings we are attached to (whether they be principles, people, values, artifacts, etc.), it can also detach us from other beings that we should also care for, that should also count or matter. In this regard, Derrida’s (1992, 1995) reflection is again enlightening when he notes that, paradoxically, any true decision will, by definition, imply the experience of a form of undecidability. As he points out, a decision where no undecidability is experienced cannot be a real decision, since we end up following a sort of program or algorithm that more or less dictates what we ought to do in a specific situation. Although we might experience qualms, misgivings, or hesitation, we let ourselves be led by something or someone. In contrast, a true decision is a decision where we experience undecidability precisely because we then realize that a form of sacrifice or detachment might be at stake.



Chapter 3.  Passion, animation, and decision

One of the most telling illustrations can be found in William Styron’s (1979) book, titled “Sophie’s Choice.” At the end of the book, the readers learn that Sophie Zawistowska, one of the leading characters who survived the extermination camps of World War II, experienced a terrible event that marked her life forever. Upon arriving at Auschwitz, she recounts that she was asked to decide which of her two children – a son and a daughter – would be immediately gassed, while the other would be allowed to live in the extermination camp. Beyond the absolute cruelty of this situation, this case illustrates, as an extreme form of decision, Derrida’s thesis: Sophie is placed into an impossible situation, as she is asked to choose which of the two beings she cherishes the most will die. But she cannot not choose; otherwise both of them will die (as the man who forces her into this situation, sadistically reminds her). Although she feels she cannot decide, she decides and it is this decision that will haunt her for the rest of her life. Following her decision, her daughter will be gassed, while her son will live. Sophie’s choice constitutes the epitome of the impossible decision, but it is precisely because her decision is experienced as impossible that it becomes so abjectly archetypical and emblematic. Note that Derrida’s (1995) reasoning should not be reduced to a game in which he would simply be playing with words, as one could, at first sight, be tempted to think. He speaks of experiencing undecidability, an experience, an ordeal, which for him marks what a true decision is supposed to be about. It is because Sophie experiences the impossibility of her decision – how could she decide between two absolute sources of attachment/ passion – that this decision becomes the most important and cruel she makes in her life (a decision that ultimately leads her to commit suicide). This is the “leap of decision” identified by Kierkegaard (1983), who is Derrida’s (1992) source of inspiration in this case, which associates decision with a form of madness “because it must always interrupt the cognitive and rational deliberation which precedes it” (Clegg, Kornberger, & Rhodes 2007, p. 400). Incidentally, coming to a decision, in French, can also be expressed by the verb trancher, which literally means, “to slice,” “to cut off,” or “to sever.” Deciding therefore presupposes a form of sacrifice that will create or maintain both attachment (heat) and detachment (coldness). Undecidability therefore comes from the ordeal that consists of not only knowing what will be sacrificed in the various choices or courses of action we think we have at our disposal, but also of not knowing all the consequences these choices might lead to, what Derrida calls the “unknowability of the future” (Derrida 1994, quoted in Clegg, Kornberger, & Rhodes 2007). Deciding thus implies that I go beyond these beings we call programs, rules, and calculation, precisely because it cannot be their decision, but mine, so to speak.

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In contrast with Styron’s Sophie, we could mention Adolf Eichmann, who was insightfully analyzed by Hannah Arendt (1963) and, more recently, Clegg, Kornberger, and Rhodes (2007). Eichmann, as pointed out by Arendt, was, like many Nazis, wholeheartedly attached to a principle of absolute obedience to the Führer’s orders. As he pointed out in his own trial, “the Führer's words had the force of law” (Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft), which could explain (but, of course, not justify) why, even in 1944, he kept on signing documents that would coldly send more Jews to their death, while Himmler – suddenly more “moderate” because of what he saw as the Nazis’ upcoming defeat – was sending him counter orders to prevent him from doing so. Until the very end of the war, Eichmann therefore demonstrated an incredible zeal or passion vis-à-vis the “final solution” as ordered by Hitler, even when it could have been seen to be to the detriment of his own egoistical interests. Interestingly, Arendt (1963) speaks of Eichmann’s “thoughtlessness.” Eichmann was indeed a specialist (Brauman & Sivan 1999a, 1999b), an expert, the head of the Gestapo Department IV B4 for Jewish Affairs, and his way of reasoning and even speaking often looked bureaucratic, full of clichés and ready-made formulaic expressions. The banality of evil, for her, is precisely this incapacity to think outside the bureaucratic box, so to speak. Although Eichmann was perfectly aware of what he was doing, that is, actively contributing to the death of millions of people, he was also and especially “following orders” in a very meticulous and bureaucratic way, complying with the principle of absolute obedience to Hitler’s words. Thoughtlessness, in this case, consists of not counting what should have absolutely counted: the lives of millions of people.

3.4

Animation as a form of staging

But why this detour through decision, reasoning, and undecidability? First, to point out that any animation is a form of reason and vice versa, which also means that any action, any activity, will always be accompanied by a form of animation or passivity, which is precisely supposed to function as the reason(s) why we do what we do. Second, to show that the chain of agencies not only goes downstream – through the texts that come to speak and act on our behalf (what was explored in Chapter 2) – but also upstream – through what appears to lead us to do what we do, in other words, what animates or, more strongly, fascinates or inflames us. As pointed out by Taylor and Van Every (2000, 2010), acting always presupposes that we act for something or someone, that is, our agency – i.e., our condition of being an agent – implies the existence of a principal in the name of



Chapter 3.  Passion, animation, and decision

which or whom we are doing what we are doing (even when this principal happens to be ourselves or what we perceive to be our own interests).20 Interestingly enough, Goffman (1981) partly acknowledged this phenomenon by introducing the concept of footing, by which he meant that a given interactant can always position herself (or be positioned by others) as an animator, author, and/or principal vis-à-vis what is said in a specific turn of talk. By animator, Goffman meant the person who is actually speaking (or, we could add, writing) in a specific situation (the “sounding box” as he calls it, p. 144), while the term author refers to the person who actually designed the words that are expressed by the animator. Finally the term principal refers to the person whose viewpoint or position is expressed by the author and animator. The same person can of course combine all three roles (Goffman 1981; see also Clayman 1992). Although this is an interesting starting point for investigating the question of animation and, as we will see later, authority, it is noteworthy that Goffman (1981) only spoke of persons as animating, authoring, or delegating a given message (see, for instance, the other participation statuses he proposes: addressee, overhearer, audience, etc.). In other words, Goffman did not acknowledge, for instance, the fact that the principal could be a principle or policy or that the animator could be a text (but see Sanders & Bonito, in press). Going back to the question of animation, it is therefore crucial to note that if we do act, it is thus also because we are acted upon, that is, we are led to adopt specific forms of conduct over others. Note that such reasoning, as we will see later, does not imply that we act like robots or automatons, precisely because of the leap of decision analyzed previously, the madness of decision, which reaffirms what should be the irreducibility of this event to programs, rules, calculation, and principles. The vocabulary used to speak about this acting upon is also quite important: I am indeed speaking of something that guides or leads us to adopt specific forms of conduct over others, not something that makes us adopt them. Reasons precisely functions like guides, directions, instructions, to which we would be able to not orient, or not take into consideration, should we decide to do so. However, once a decision is made, it can then be justified, explained, or accounted for in saying that it was made for or in the name of something or someone, that

20. We could also refer to Milgram’s (1974) famous experiments on authority, especially what he calls the agentic state, by which he means “the condition a person is when he sees himself as an agent for carrying out another person’s wishes” (p. 133). Although I tend to conceive of the agentic state in much broader terms (for instance, an agent can see herself as acting in the name of a principle or policy, not necessarily another human being), Milgram’s study constitutes a wonderful illustration of some of the ethical questions addressed in the present book, especially in its conclusion.

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is, something or someone appears to have made a difference by leading us to act the way we did. Therefore, it is only retrospectively – and we will see later that this point is key for any question related to responsibility – that we can say that something or someone made us do something. Interestingly, this idea of being acted upon, of being animated, is often staged in our conversation, whether implicitly or explicitly. For an illustration, let’s go back briefly to Eichmann and his system of defense during his Jerusalem trial. In the following excerpt, one of the judges asks him a series of questions in order to understand the ways decisions were made in his department, as well as his official relations with his immediate superior, Heinrich Müller. 499 Judge Raveh: Do I understand, therefore, that there were three categories: one 500 category of cases where there were already precedents, where 501 you did not ask anything? 502 Eichmann: Yes 503 Judge Raveh: Second category – matters where there were no precedents. 504 Eichmann: I had to ask 505 Judge Raveh: Did you ask him without proposing anything to him? 506 Eichmann: Yes 507 Judge Raveh: Third category – somewhere in between, perhaps yes, perhaps 508 no. 509 Eichmann: Where I did not know. 510 Judge Raveh: Did you make some form of proposal, or how would you define 511 this? 512 Eichmann: No, not some form of proposal; rather, I had to draw his 513 attention to the fact that here a…that here he had taken a 514 particular decision days or months earlier, whether this case, 515 which was similar, whether this case should also be applied on 516 the basis of his decision three months earlier. In turn, the 517 Official-in-charge had to draw my attention to this.  (Session 106, part 2, The Nizkor Project http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/e/eichmann.adolf/transcripts/ftp.py?people/e/ eichmann.adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-106-02)

Whether Eichmann’s responses depicted what really happened in his department or were simply made up to decline any form of responsibility is an open question.21 However, beyond the veridictory quality of his accounts, one is 21. Arendt’s (1963) thesis about the banality of evil was precisely a way to take seriously Eichmann’s responses, rather than simply reducing it to a system of defense where he would make things up to illustrate his lack of responsibility for the genocide. For Arendt, it, indeed,



Chapter 3.  Passion, animation, and decision

struck by Eichmann’s capacity to position, in his responses, what led him to act the way he did. As we see, the judge is trying, through a series of questions, to establish whether or not Eichmann had any decisional power or could at least influence the decisions that his immediate supervisor – Heinrich Müller – would make. In his responses, however, Eichmann stages situations where he is always following something or someone, that is, he never positions himself as initiating or influencing any kind of decision, a positioning that would have, of course, increased his responsibility in the genocide. In what is presented by the judge as the first category of decisions (categories that he draws from Eichmann’s previous responses during his cross-interrogation), Eichmann confirms that he was indeed acting alone when there was a precedent (line 103). The staging of the precedent thus allows him to implicitly position himself as animated or moved, in this case, by a procedure that consists of enjoining or leading administrators to follow what was decided previously in similar situations. Although the judge’s question stages Eichmann as “not ask[ing] anything” (lines 500–501), which allows him to implicitly insists on the defendant’s contribution, the invocation of a precedent in this case downplays, of course, Eichmann’s responsibility, in that the former SS is implicitly positioned as acting in the name of a classical bureaucratic procedure. In a way, one could even contend that Eichmann is actually not “acting alone” since he is also following a procedure that is supposed to enjoin him (and others) to make similar decisions in similar cases across time. As illustrated here, the bureaucratic system allows him to shortcut any form of undecidability, at least in his account (Clegg et al. 2007). According to this logic of the precedent, the only decision Eichmann appears to make concerns whether or not a given case looks like a previous one, which then allows him to know what to do in the current situation. But note that this type of decision does not directly concern what should be done, but whether or not there is a precedent. In other words, it is essentially bureaucratic and does not address the question as to whether or not these decisions are just or ethical. Once such identification is made, it is as if it were the procedure that, in fact, was deciding about what should be done.22 Following Derrida’s reasoning, we are here in the realm of algorithms, rules, and policies, which allows us to share our action was the way things, in many respects, worked in this department, as well as in the whole bureaucratic machine that the Nazis had designed. 22. It is noteworthy that Turing’s (1936) famous article titled, “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” is a direct answer to the problem Hilbert posed in 1928 regarding the decidability of axiomatic theories (Entscheidungsproblem means the decision problem in German).

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and decision (if this can still be called a decision) with these textual agents. There is therefore no real decision on Eichmann’s part to the extent that it is, to some degree, already made by the procedures and bureaucratic routines. Once his mind is made up about the similarity of a given case with a precedent, that is, once this type of technical decision has been made (which implies a judgment of comparison on his part: whether this case fits with a precedent), it is the preceding case that tells him what has to be done. If we now turn to the second and third categories of decisions – the ones where there were no precedents or where the case was considered borderline – we notice that here again, Eichmann does not stage himself as deciding anything regarding what should be done: “I had to ask,” he replies (line 504). Once the case has been categorized as being with no precedents, the procedure thus requires that he refer to his immediate superior, who then tells him how to proceed. When the judge asks him if he was asking Müller without proposing anything to him, Eichmann responds in the affirmative, confirming what he implicitly presents as his total absence of contribution to the process, except as a sort of “underling,” what we call an “exécutant” in French. In these second and third categories of decision, it is therefore Müller who is portrayed as the one initiating what should be done regarding Jewish affairs, what Goffman (1981) would call the principal. As we see in this excerpt, Eichmann does tend to portray himself as a robot or automaton whose only task consisted of calculating or evaluating whether or not such and such cases fit such and such categories. Whether this way of staging the situation was invented to provide him with an effective system of defense or whether it somewhat reflected what did happen in this service is certainly a crucial question, but beyond this critical point, this excerpt also shows how Eichmann almost systematically positioned or staged himself as moved or animated by something or someone, that is, as the agent acting in the name of a principal: There were things he had to do, procedures he had to follow, and people to whom he had to listen to. Interestingly, having to do something means, by definition, that what we do is performed in the name of something or someone, which amounts to saying that it is also this thing or person who is acting through me. Eichmann was actually very clear about how he saw the situation and even mentioned his interpretation of Kant’s definition of duty in his defense: Judge Raveh: Adolf Eichmann:

I shall ask you a few questions in German. Do you remember at one point in your police interrogation talking about the Kantian imperative, and saying that throughout your entire life you had tried to live according to the Kantian imperative? Yes.



Judge Raveh: Adolf Eichmann: Judge Raveh: Adolf Eichmann: Judge Raveh: Adolf Eichmann: Judge Raveh: Adolf Eichmann:

Chapter 3.  Passion, animation, and decision

There is no need to show this to you; do you remember it clearly? Yes, I remember it clearly. What did you mean by the Kantian imperative when you said that? I meant by this that the principle of my volition and the principle of my life must be such that it could at any time be raised to be the principle of general legislation, as Kant more or less puts it in his categorical imperative. I see, therefore, that when you said this you were precisely aware of Kant’s categorical imperative? Yes, I was. And so, do you mean to say by this that your activities in the course of deporting Jews corresponded to the Kantian categorical imperative? No, certainly not, because these activities…at that time I had to live and act under compulsion, and the compulsion of a third person, during exceptional times. I meant by this, by the…by this living according to the Kantian principle, to the extent that I am my own master and able to organize my life according to my volition and according to my wishes. This is also quite obvious, in fact it could not be meant any other way, because if I am subjected to a higher power and a higher force, then my free will as such is eliminated, and then, since I can no longer be master of my free will and volition, I cannot in fact adopt any principles whatsoever which I cannot influence, but, on the contrary, I must, and also may, build obedience to the authorities into this concept, and then the authorities bear the responsibility. In my judgment, that also belongs to it.

Although Arendt (1963) claimed that Eichmann distorted Kant’s categorical imperative, it is noteworthy that his version was surprisingly not that far from Kant’s original, which reads, “Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” As pointed out by numerous scholars (Arendt 1963; Lausten & Ugilt 2007; Onfray 2008), given that for many Nazis, Adolf Hitler’s words literally incarnated the universal law, it is not unthinkable that this imperative could indeed be understood as a principle of absolute obedience.23 23. Although my point is not to make a philosophical argument, it is noteworthy, as Onfray (2008) reminds us, that nowhere can we find a right to disobey in Kant’s writings. On the contrary, Onfray convincingly shows us that Kant almost systematically invites people to obey

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Once Eichmann pledged his absolute obedience to the Führer and his words, which he did as any Nazi bureaucrat would have, he could indeed claim that he was just “obeying orders,” as he did throughout his trial. Once this decision had been made, once for all, that he had to follow any legal orders that would be addressed to him, the rest could be experienced as the deployment of a program, a procedure, or an algorithm to which he was both passively and actively contributing. Although Eichmann did say that he often experienced remorse, sorrow, and shame, especially after 1942 and his travel to Auschwitz, this was obviously not enough for him to disobey. He was so obsessively attached to the Führer’s words (or so he said) and to this principle of absolute compliance that nothing else could apparently count or matter enough to make him deviate from his death path.

3.5

Animation, power, and authority

What we just saw with the Eichmann case illustrates how people can implicitly or explicitly stage in their account that which appears to lead them to do what they do. Although Eichmann used this staging device to demonstrate what he considered to be his lack of responsibility in the genocide – he thought of himself as being guilty, but not responsible (Arendt 1963; Onfray 2008) – it is noteworthy that the invocation (implicit or explicit) of what animates us, what leads us to say what we say, can have other effects, especially in terms of power and authority. As we saw previously, providing reasons that explain or justify our conduct consists of staging in the name of what (which is another way to say “why”) we do what we do (the “what” in question being, among other things, our reasons, but this is just a way to depict our reasons, just one aspect of their being in relation to our reasoning), which means that we position or stage ourselves as moved or animated by them. For instance, even if invoking a policy in order to turn down a request certainly consists of providing (possibly legitimate) reasons to do so, it also amounts to staging the policy as what makes the difference in this situation. For instance, the policy is here positioned as what precisely authorizes, permits, or allows the employee to turn down a request. Similar to what happens with Eichmann, we do see effects of deresponsibilization – “It is not my fault, it is the policy that’s responsible!” (which amounts to a responsibility disclaimer) – but what we also see are effects of authority. In this respect, Taylor (1993) rightly noticed that author and authority both come from the same Latin root auctor, which means that ascribing authority to any source of legal power, even if this power happens to commit what they would consider evil deeds.



Chapter 3.  Passion, animation, and decision

something or someone usually consists of identifying who or what is authoring something at a specific moment (Benoit-Barné & Cooren 2009). If indeed it is in a policy’s name that someone turns down a request, it means that this policy is positioned as what author(-ize)s this decision. The person therefore implicitly stages herself as being the agent for a principal, the principal being the policy. Note that the human agent is not reduced here to what Garfinkel (1967) would call a judgmental dope, as she is also the one who is able to assess the situation and make the decision, even if this latter is presented as made in the name of the policy (in a way similar to Eichmann with his three categories of decision). In other words, it is as if the decision were shared between the policy and her. She does make a decision, but since this decision is presented as having been made in the name of a policy, it is also, by definition, this policy that decides through her. Questions of authority and legitimacy therefore imply questions of authorship and this is precisely why Eichmann’s system of defense could be seen as so powerful and depressingly effective. Each time he was portraying himself as having to do something, he was not only implicitly sharing his authorship with someone or something else, but also attributing responsibility to this person or thing. Acting legally for a principal indeed presupposes that it is the said principal that or who is portrayed as being legally responsible for what happens (of course, such a reasoning only holds when the question of legality or morality does not come to be questioned itself, which was precisely what should happen with Eichmann, making him responsible for his zealous and active participation in the extermination of 6 million people). But beyond this crucial question of responsibility, authorship also allows us to seem more powerful and authoritative. We seem more powerful precisely because our actions and decisions appear to be shared with others. For instance, when an employee tells me, “According to our policy, we cannot provide you with this piece of information,” it is as if it were not only he who was turning down my request, but also (and maybe especially) his organization (through its policy). Going upstream, it is indeed the policy that appears to motivate/prompt/author-(ize) his refusal, which means that, for now, at least two beings appear to be involved in this decision: the employee – who sets himself up as the agent acting in the name of a principal – and the policy, which is implicitly portrayed as the principal by the agent-employee. But note that the reasoning does not need to end at this stage as this policy is itself supposed to be the agent for another principal: the company or institution this person is working for and representing. Instead of two beings, we now have three, implicitly voicing – through the human agent who claims to be their faithful representative – their (legitimate) incapacity to grant my request. As we see, power is the result of associations (Latour 1986) or what we could also call attachments (with the passionate touch that this notion implies).

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It is not only (a) the employee who is turning down my request, but also, through him, (b) the policy, which, according to him, forbids his granting my demand, and (c) the organization he belongs to and represents.24 As just pointed out, the notion of attachment insists on the passionate character of this activity of representation/association. Technically, the employee is indeed bound by the policy he is supposed to represent and enact in his professional interactions. Another way to describe this situation would be to say that he is held liable by his organization for applying and even enforcing the said policy. This type of vocabulary – binding or holding – thus presupposes that the relations that link the employee, the policy, and his organization are far from neutral. They are both passive and active. The policy is supposed to bind the employee to turn down my request while his organization is supposed to hold him liable for enforcing this policy. Again, animation and passion/passivity are therefore at stake to the extent that being bound by a policy or being held liable by an organization implies that one ought or has to do things in the name of this policy and on behalf of this organization. Authority thus consists of presenting oneself as able, allowed or authorized to do things in the name of someone or something else, but such potency, right, and power – what Greimas (1987) would categorize under the modality of “being able to do” (savoir faire, in French) – often come with constraints, duties, and obligations (Sanders & Fitch 2001) – what Greimas would call the “having to do” category (i.e., devoir faire in French) – which tend to position the agent as relatively passive (cf. the Eichmann figure). Positioning oneself as an expert, for instance, implies that it is not only the socalled expert who is speaking, but also a certain expertise, which is supposed to speak through her. The expert’s authority comes from the fact that she is supposed to be the voice of expertise/knowledge: She sets herself or is set as allowed/authorized to speak on its behalf. But such power and potency (being able to do) also comes with duties and obligations (having to do) to the extent that voicing a certain expertise implies that one be held or attached to certain principles, standards, truths, or knowledges. One could even contend that being an expert presupposes that we be moved by that in the name of which we claim to speak, that is, one’s expertise/knowledge.

24. Using the footing categories proposed by Goffman (1981), we could then say that the employee positions himself as the animator, who is simply voicing what the policy, the author, says, which itself represents the interest of the organization, i.e., the principal. However, such a description does not do justice to the way Goffman defined these three categories, given that a policy cannot be an author, but has to be a human, according to his perspective.



Chapter 3.  Passion, animation, and decision

This form of legitimate power that authority constitutes thus consists of sharing our authorship, our action, our decisions with other beings that (a) we are supposed to represent, embody, and incarnate (making us more powerful and rightful) but also that (b) hold or attach us to certain obligations and principles. We look more powerful (and we may indeed be) because we are recognized or acknowledged as mobilizing these beings when we act, author something, or make a decision. But such power is supposed to come with obligations, which defines the legitimacy of authority. Power and authority, according to this viewpoint, are the effect of these associations/aggregations/relations/attachments, which mark, as noticed by Latour (2005), the hybrid character of our actions (Meunier & Vasquez 2008). Interestingly, such authority is not only performed into being, so to speak, it also has to be recognized and acknowledged as such and therefore co-constructed, which explains why dialogue, interaction, and communication in general constitute the very nexus of this enactment. It is indeed not enough for the employee to mobilize the policy in his account. Such mobilization must be also acknowledged by his interlocutor. I could, for instance, tell her that this is not what the policy says, which would consist of setting myself up as speaking on its behalf (and therefore becoming more powerful, having the policy on my side, so to speak). Legitimacy and authority therefore have to be negotiated and co-constructed by the interlocutors to the extent that they are the ones who will define (or fail to define) collectively what their world is made of, what agencies happen to make a difference in it. While authority has traditionally been understood as relatively static and predefined, whether by management theorists (Barnard 1938; Crozier & Friedberg 1980; Fayol 1916/1949; Hong & Engeström 2004; Stohl & Schell 1991), sociologists (Sennett 1980; Weber 1922/1968), or rhetorical scholars (Farrell 1993; Murphy 2000), what I propose here is a more dynamic and processual view where various sources of authority – understood as forms of agency – can be invoked or mobilized in a given interaction or dialogue (Taylor & Van Every 2000, 2010). Following Kahn and Kram (1994), as well as Hoogenboom and Ossewaarde (2005), one could contend that it is indeed more productive, analytically speaking, to acknowledge the distributed and negotiated nature of authority (Benoit-Barné & Cooren 2009). Once authority is understood as a form of authorship that can be voiced (explicitly or implicitly) in interaction, it cannot be reduced, for instance, to rationallegal forms that would derive from position (Weber 1922/1968). What gives interactants authority can indeed be position and status, which function as relatively stable figures of institutional power, but many other forms of authorship/authority can, of course, be invoked in a given exchange. In this book’s introduction, I

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used the example of two diplomats speaking to each other on behalf of their respective countries, noticing that at a specific moment, something like experience or seniority might matter. If indeed “experience is talking” at a specific moment, it means that one of the two diplomats appears to gain the upper hand regarding specific questions for which she might appear more qualified. One could retort – and we are now certainly used to this objection – that “experience is talking” is just a figurative or metaphorical way of speaking, implying that such an account does not really say anything true or factual about what is happening in the interaction. But to the extent that experience appears to matter to or count for the interlocutors in this exchange, it means that it is implicitly oriented to (by the analysts or interlocutors) as having some bearing or effect on what is at stake in the discussion, that is, it appears to make a difference, which is what agency is supposed to be about. A figurative way of speaking precisely consists of staging figures that will be positioned as doing something in a given situation, whether these figures are dispositions, emotions, passions (in the narrow sense of the term), policies, rules, principles, values, or even facts.25 “Jealousy struck again” or “experience is talking” thus are figurative ways of accounting for a given situation, which consists of positioning two figures – jealousy and experience – as doing something, respectively striking and talking. According to these two descriptions (which are, of course, always partial and aspectual, as seen in Chapter 2), jealousy and experience can therefore be considered the (always partial) authors of what is happening.26 What makes a difference, however, is that, here, only experience is usually considered as positive, which is why it can add to its bearer’s legitimacy. By displaying her experience, whether strategically or not, one of the two diplomats comes to stage a figure that her interlocutor can now associate with (or attach to) her. Because she is referring to various events or situations she has had to deal 25. In this regard, we could point out that Goffman (1981) also uses the term figure, but to refer to “an agent, a protagonist in a described scene, ‘a character’ in an anecdote, someone after all, who belongs to the world that is spoken about, not the world in which the speaking occurs” (p. 147). In contrast, if I am also using the term figure to refer to agents and protagonists in a described scene, such agents do not have to be human, but can incarnate themselves in policies, principles, facts, and ideas. Furthermore, my point is precisely to somewhat blurr this distinction between what Goffman calls “the world that is spoken about” and “the world in which the speaking occurs,” given that “the world that is spoken about” also becomes “the world in which the speaking occurs.” 26. It is noteworthy that I am speaking in terms of descriptions, which always consist of selecting a given figure in a chain of agencies and positioning it as the agent. In other words, it is taken for granted that such descriptions do not claim to exhaust the situation and that many other forms of authorship could be selected.



Chapter 3.  Passion, animation, and decision

with in the past and because she appears to display a certain know-how vis-à-vis what had to be done in these occasions (or maybe simply because she looks older than her interlocutor), she seems experienced, or she looks like she has some experience. When she speaks, it is thus as if it were not only she who was speaking, but also, through her, a form of experience, that is, a certain trait/competency/disposition that tends to be looked for, respected, and appreciated, what Weigand (2004, 2008b) could call “competence-in-performance.” By comparison, even if jealousy appears to be authoring something in a given situation – for instance, by driving a husband to be inquisitive vis-à-vis his wife – it is not a source of authority because jealousy’s agency is usually not valued, treasured, or respected. Its bearer lacks rights and obligations (Fitch & Sanders 1994; Sanders & Fitch 2001), which the bearer of experience presupposes. Jealousy tends to be considered a flaw, a defect, a deficiency, which renders its bearer weaker instead of making him stronger. In both cases – experience and jealousy – authorship is at stake, but only in the first case can authority, so to speak, grow, precisely because this spectral author (which speaks through its bearer) is one that we respect and value. But from this, one should not infer that authority is jeopardized as soon as emotions or passions (in the restricted sense of the term) are expressed. Being angry, for instance, can be associated with authority to the extent that it appears to be, again, legitimate. As shown by Greimas (1987), anger – as a passion – is the product of what is claimed or experienced to be a form of injustice or inequality, which means that when one appears to be angry or mad, it can also mean that one claims to speak or act out of a certain passion for justice, fairness, or righteousness. In other words, anger can have authority effects because the angry person positions herself or/and can be positioned as being moved or stirred by her thirst for the figures of justice and equity, which are then associated with or attached to her.

3.6

Partial conclusion

As I hope the previous chapters – and especially this third one – have shown, acknowledging that many different types of beings (whether textual or passional) populate our interactions does not seem, after all, nonsensical. Taking interaction and dialogue seriously indeed consists of showing that the way interactants implicitly or explicitly present situations constitutes the manner by which their (and our) world is performed and acknowledged into being. If this means that strange entities such as procedures, emotions, facts, or dispositions must be acknowledged as “doing something” in a given situation, we as analysts should not

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hesitate to take this (bumpy) road, given that it is the one that interactants take in order to account for (and therefore enact) their world. Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis have historically been key in insisting on this incarnated and embodied aspect of our interactions (Garfinkel 1967, 2002; Heritage 1984; Lynch & Bogen 1996; Pomerantz & Fehr 1997; Schegloff 1997), but I would contend that their almost exclusive focus on orientations, positionings, repairs, and/or invocations have had the tendency of somewhat blinding them from precisely what make these moves possible, that is, passions and animations. This omission appears all the more unfortunate or even ironical, given the crucial role passions/animations appear to play, as we saw, in the accountable and reasonable character of people’s conduct. As implied by the downstream/upstream metaphors, I therefore contend that it would be analytically and theoretically more productive to view and analyze interactions as streams, flows, or processes (McPhee & Iverson 2008; McPhee & Zaug 2000). According to this view, participants and their actions/moves cannot be positioned, analytically speaking, as the ultimate origin of what is happening in a given interaction, precisely because these participants are themselves moved or acted upon by specific reasons that they come to stage (or not) in their discussions. Although speaking in terms of stream/flow is, I think, analytically productive, it is noteworthy that this notion should not uniquely imply passivity, but also activity. If this is a stream, it is one made of passivities and activities, of passion and action, which is the very condition of eventfulness, marking the irreducibility of action to passion and vice versa. I feel, in this respect, very close to Latour (1996) and Hennion (1993) who speak in terms of mediation and mediators to refer to these “passers” who/that are both passive and active, both acted upon and active, but the idea of stream should also be understood in connection with Derrida’s concept of différance. Here is what Derrida (1982) writes: In a conceptuality adhering to classical strictures “différance” would be said to designate a constitutive, productive, and originary causality, the process of scission and division which would produce or constitute different things or differences. But, because it brings us close to the infinitive and active kernel of différer, différance (with an a) neutralizes what the infinitive denotes as simply active, just as mouvance in our language does not simply mean the fact of moving, of moving oneself or of being moved. No more is resonance the act of resonating. We must consider that in the usage of our language the ending -ance remains undecided between the active and the passive. And we will see why that which lets itself be designated différance is neither simply active nor simply passive, announcing or rather recalling something like the middle voice, saying an operation that is



Chapter 3.  Passion, animation, and decision

not an operation, an operation that cannot be conceived either as passion or as the action of a subject on an object, or on the basis of the categories of agent or patient, neither on the basis of nor moving toward any of these terms. For the middle voice, a certain nontransitivity, may be what philosophy, at its outset, distributed into an active and a passive voice, thereby constituting itself by means of this repression.  (pp. 8–9)27

Thinking in terms of stream thus presupposes that we maintain undecidability between the active and passive form of all the events that participate in its enactment. Certainly, people are led or driven to adopt specific behaviors, but they can also choose or decide to privilege some over others, altering the stream of their lives toward another direction. This is the madness or leap of decision, which marks the eventful character of our lives. Having acknowledged this passive/active dimension of interactional streams, our work, as analysts, can then be reconceived as an attempt to reconstruct the logic of the staging practices by which interactants come to implicitly or explicitly select among these various passivities and activities (Castor & Cooren 2006), especially because it is through them that the world comes to be (re-)configured (and I insist here on the term figure, which is embedded in this notion). Taking interaction seriously thus consists of acknowledging and reconstructing all these figures that populate our interactions because they also compose our world, not only “we” (whoever “we” are!). One of the key contributions of actornetwork theorists (Callon 1986; Latour 1994; Law 1991) is that they showed us, through their insightful analyses, how we, the human beings, share our worlds/ collectives with other beings whose agency ought to be analytically acknowledged, but, paraphrasing the Marquis de Sade, we need yet another effort, if we are to fully analyze the interactional mechanisms by which these (re-)configurations are taking place (Brassac, Fixmer, Mondada, & Vinck 2008; Brassac & Le Ber 2005; McLean & Hassard 2007). This is what I propose to tackle in the second part of this book. As we will see, one way to account for the various agencies that populate our conversations is to speak (metaphorically or figuratively) in terms of ventriloquism, that is, the activity that consists of making specific beings speak while communicating with an interlocutor. As yet pointed out in the previous chapters, speaking often consists of implicitly or explicitly staging beings that are then positioned as making a difference in a given situation. Whether it is a secretary referring to a policy, a politician invoking tradition, a debater calling upon principles or a scientist mobilizing facts, all come to stage themselves as acting in the name of beings

27. I would like to thank Consuelo Vasquez for pointing out this passage to me.

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that they claim to represent, which they make present in their interaction. If they call upon them, it is because they think these beings – whatever or whoever they are – (might) make a difference, that is, that they (might) have some bearing on the interactional stream. Focusing on this activity of ventriloquism thus helps us understand that conversations and dialogues are phonation devices (Latour 2004a) by which many different beings come to speak and act through our interactions, whether these beings be facts, principles, values, rules, emotions, and so on. Instead of remaining local, micro, limited, these exchanges thus become dislocated, dislocal (Cooren & Fairhurst 2004, 2009; Grosjean & Bonneville 2009; Grosjean & Robichaud, in press) or even ecstatic (in the etymological sense of “being out of place”), that is, the very nexus where beings with variable ontologies come to be incarnated and re-presented, made present. What remains to be shown is how this is taking place, which is what I propose to do in the next chapter. But one could wonder about the theoretical and practical payoff of such an analytical gesture? Speaking of ventriloquism might look trendy and maybe cute, but why should we care? I think we should care, and for several reasons that will be developed in the two remaining chapters. First of all, I think that seeing interaction as a ventriloqual system allows us to address the question of the mode of being or constitution of the collectives we live and work in (Putnam & Nicotera 2009). With the help of authors such as Latour (2005), Chia (1999) or Tsoukas (Tsoukas & Chia 2002), we came to realize that our world is indeed performed into being (see also Carayol 2004), but their analyses have remained, in many respects, too abstract and not sufficiently interactional. These authors acknowledge the performative nature of our world, but they somewhat fail to acknowledge that this world not only has to be performed, but also acknowledged into being. As Taylor and Van Every (2000) remind us, communication constitutes the very nexus in which our worlds co-constructs themselves, which means that performance can just be one part of the puzzle (Taylor, Cooren, Giroux, & Robichaud 1996). Facts can be mobilized, principles called upon, emotions be expressed, values incarnated, traditions invoked, but this does not mean that interlocutors necessarily acknowledge their presence, existence, and effects. Ventriloquizing implies an interlocutor or audience that is supposed to acknowledge the said performance and this appears even truer when two or more ventriloquists happen to interact with each other, which is the way I propose to understand how communication works. Such a view allows us to acknowledge the eventful character of interaction because our world always has, in some respects, to be performed AND acknowledged for another next first time, as Garfinkel (2002) would put it. Communication thus is where reconfigurations take place and evolve, that is, it is where the



Chapter 3.  Passion, animation, and decision

various figures that populate our world come to be co-incarnated, whether these figures are rules, laws, values, principles, ideas, facts, emotions, traditions, and so forth. Interestingly, what is proposed in the second section of the book does not force us to choose between materialism and constructivism, since these figures can have many forms of incarnation. A policy, for instance, incarnates itself not only through the people who invoke it in an interaction, but also through the official documents that are are understood as defining it. Theoretically speaking, and this is the second reason why I think we should care about this notion, ventriloquism thus allows us to acknowledge this logic of incarnation/embodiment/materialization/presentification, which also contributes to the opening up of the interactional scene (Cooren 2008; Grosjean, Huët, & Bonneville, in press). Interlocutors indeed ventriloquize their world, but they are not the only ones doing so, precisely because humans are very good at creating and designing (textual, architectural, artifactual, or technological) beings that are themselves intended to incarnate and represent other figures such as collectives, principles, or values, to just name a few. Interaction should therefore be conceived of very broadly. We, as human beings, are not only interacting with our alter egos, but also with a plethora of beings that also speak or act for other figures that can participate in the definition/circumscription/delimitation of what is understood as happening.28 Finally, and this is the third reason why we should care, I think that such a way of conceiving of collectives and interaction is of practical import, not only because of what it tells us, as we will see, about the question of ethics and responsibility, but also because of the role ventriloquism can play in the enactment of new configurations. Showing empirically how interactants stage various figures for which they set themselves as speaking and acting indeed allows us to conceive of a world where not only old configurations are reiterated and reaffirmed, but also new ones are or can be created and acknowledged. As we will see, as long as one speaks in terms of action and structure, one tends to separate, whether we like it or not, the realm of action from the realm of structures. However, once this old and sterile opposition is questioned, that is, 28. Although obvious parallels could be drawn with Goffman’s (1974) way of conceiving frames, as well as his way of analyzing how interactants actively define situations (Goffman 1959), I would contend that the notion of figure allows us to materialize/concretize a little more what is meant by frame and framing. While the notion of frame appears borrowed from a visual metaphor and can be interpreted cognitively (see especially Brummans, Putnam, Gray, & Hanke 2008), the notion of figure invites us to focus on what is mobilized or invoked by interlocutors to define a given situation. Mobilizing or invoking figures is indeed a way to frame a situation, given that framing amounts to pointing out what should matter or count in it, i.e., the figures that are implicitly or explicitly staged in their exchanges.

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once we realize that we live in a plenum of agencies (a plenum that is, of course, structured, i.e., configurated), we then come to realize that this world of figures, these configurations always have to be interactionally produced or reproduced for another next first time in order to exist and be acknowledged.

part ii

Ventriloquism and incarnation

chapter 4

Ventriloquism or the ecstatic dimension of communication

Speaking of ventriloquism in a book devoted to communication and dialogue could at first sight looks suspicious. After all, the art of ventriloquizing – literally, belly speaking – is often associated with a lower form of art and entertainment, a comic show meant to arouse laughs, which shares many features with magic performances and vaudeville. In American culture, this art was especially popularized through Edgar Bergen, the ventriloquist, and Charlie McCarthy, his dummy, whose lasting success was all the more impressive that their “conversations” were aired from 1937 to 1955 through radio shows (!), which, to say the least, could not do justice to Bergen’s performance, making the recognition of Bergen’s achievement an “act of faith” (Goldblatt 2006, p. 33). As Godblatt noticed, “what can be more ridiculous than a dummy except someone willing to converse with it” (p. 44), to which I could add, unfortunately for me, “and study it!” Comparing communication with ventriloquism also seems problematic to the extent that it appears to be a fake dialogue. Although the dummy looks like he is talking to the ventriloquist, the audience is, of course, aware that it is the latter who is “throwing his voice,” a performance creating the illusion of a dummy talking and interacting. Although ventriloquism is, at least in its show business version – “illusion without deception,” as Goldblatt (2006, p. 37) nicely puts it, its tricky nature makes it, a priori, a poor candidate to explain the logic of conversation. But despite this negative connotation, I would contend that ventriloquists – also called engastrimanteis (literally, belly prophets) by the Greeks – have a lot to “say” about how communication works, especially if we focus on their relationships with the dummies they manipulate.

4.1

Making someone or something speak

Although ventriloquism is the art of “making voices,” an art that consists of speaking in such a way that the sound coming from one’s mouth appears to come from a distance, or at least from another source than the speaker (Connor 2000) – which is why people wrongly thought that it was actually coming from the belly – I will

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not use this notion to talk about this type of physical performance, however uncanny and interesting it might be. Instead, my approach will be more aligned with what Goldblatt (2006) proposes in his wonderful book on art and ventriloquism. As he insightfully notes, the logic of ventriloquism can indeed be extended to any activity of production, whether artistic or not (although art is the main focus of his book), making it an interesting starting point for unveiling aspects of creation that tend to be analytically neglected. As he notes, when we produce something, whether it is a painting, a book or a building, the thing produced somehow acts back on its producer, creating something that looks a lot like the dance of agency (Pickering 1995) mentioned in the first chapter. What fascinates Goldblatt (2006) is not so much the art of throwing the voice – what he also calls speech dislocation (an interesting notion, given what was said previously about the dislocated nature of interaction) – as it is the parallel he sees between art production (especially the work in progress) and the figure – the term used by ventriloquists to refer to their dummies – talking back to his vent – the term these artists use to call each other. In his critical commentary on Goldblatt’s book, Hagberg (2006) explains this parallel by alluding to Bergen and McCarthy: The act Bergen presents … exhibits a double aspect: because of all the foregoing considerations, we can, as the first aspect, see ourselves in the position of Bergen. But – and Goldblatt comprehends this deeply – we can also, to the extent that the “logic,” the teleological unfolding, the sequential development of the other “voice” is seemingly independent (we express this in art as “where the work wants to go,” in action as “what seemed to be called for,” and in speech as “the words that seemed necessary”), see ourselves in the dummy, in McCarthy, as well. Goldblatt incorporates Heidegger’s claim that the artist constitutes the origin of the artwork but also that the artwork is the origin of the artist.  (p. 18)

For Goldblatt, the work in progress can therefore be considered a “ventriloqual exchange” (p. 48), which means that anything we are producing can, to some extent, retroactively affect us. As Foucault noted in a 1982 interview, “Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?” (Riggins 1997, p. 131, quoted by Goldblatt 2006, p. 79). But what is especially interesting in Goldblatt’s (2006) argument, at least for the purpose of this book, concerns his reflection on some key dimensions of Socrate’s dialogues, which he proposes to call “Socratic ventriloquism.” In these dialogues, Goldblatt indeed discerns “a certain vacillation of Socrates from ventriloquist to dummy” (p. 99) and vice versa. While in Crito, one of Plato’s dialogues on justice, “Socrates ventriloquizes the laws, that is, speaks for them, as if they were speaking to him, were he intending to choose escape over his imminent



Chapter 4.  Ventriloquism or the ecstatic dimension of communication

execution” (p. 98), in other dialogues such as Apology, we see the great maieutician positioning himself as a simple intermediary, voicing what his daimon lets him to say. In Crito, Socrates thus acts as the ventriloquist, giving a voice to the laws of Athens, which are implicitly positioned as the dummies/figures. Reversely, in Apology, he implicitly stages himself as the dummy, controlled by his daimon, who then becomes his ventriloquist. Commenting on the second positioning, Goldblatt (2006) notes, The irony is that Socratic rationality is perceived as a fringe discourse, imposing itself upon the reasonableness of everyday language and traditional thinking. But here, too, we have the familiar Socratic diversion summed up in the transparent know-nothing, midwife metaphor, that Socrates is merely an aid in seeking knowledge. Socrates himself makes the claim that what he is thought to have done to others, is actually being done to him: Socrates, in effect, promotes himself (unconvincingly) as dummy while appearing to others as ventriloquists. The effacement and the disbelief are all part of the act.  (p. 100)

Although I do not necessarily concur with Goldblatt on the artificial character of Socrates’ positioning – after all, we will see later in this chapter that we all have, to some extent, our daimons! – his analysis paves the way to what could be called a ventriloqual analysis of interaction. Socrates is indeed a ventriloquist to the extent that he makes certain things speak – in this case, Athens’ laws – in his dialogue with Crito, the friend who is trying to convince him to escape from his jail before his execution. Also called prosopopeia, this figure of speech used by Socrates thus consists of positioning oneself as speaking as another person or thing. Using this figure, Socrates thus stages himself as called upon by the laws, which are presented as reminding him that he never left the city and that escaping from his imminent execution would amount to destroying them and the city (see Goldblatt 2006, p. 98–100). Everything thus happens as though there were three protagonists in this dialogue: Socrates, Crito, but also the laws, staged by Socrates. Interestingly, we also see how Socrates positions himself as responding to the laws he himself staged, which creates a direct parallel with the Bergen–McCarthy interaction. Socrates is Bergen, McCarthy, and the laws, and Crito, the audience. But the figure of the daimon, also mobilized by Plato/Socrates in their dialogues, allows Goldblatt (2006) to show that the Athenian also often positions himself as the dummy, prop, or figure, enthused or filled by something that tells him what to do or warns him about something he should not do. In this type of staging, Goldblatt insightfully notes that Socrates positions himself as an intermediary, speaking for his daimon, a daimon which is itself positioned – for instance in Symposium – “in an intermediary position, a messenger, like the cicadas,

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between a higher divinity and a person” (p. 100). In my vocabulary, a chain of agencies is thus reproduced here: The divinity tells the daimon what to say to Socrates, who is then guided in his actions and speech. Although the phenomenon of ventriloquism has rarely been mobilized to analyze the functioning of dialogue and interaction, it is noteworthy that a few authors dared to explore this question and its connection with dialogism. Holquist (1981), for instance did not hesitate to draw interesting parallels between Bakhtin’s dialogic theory and the ventriloquist’s figure, positing “the author as a ventriloquist who tries out and even exploits the voices of others in order to express his true intentions, the particular message of truth…he wishes to communicate” (Carroll 1983; see also Wall 2005). In a way similar to what happens with Socrates in Crito, making characters and figures speak allows the author to create a distance (and a form of undecidability) between what is affirmed in the text and what she or he is supposed to believe or think (in a way similar to what happens in irony). The phenomenon of polyphony, identified by Bakhtin (1994) in Dostoievsky, for instance, is a way for an author to ventriloquize characters whose viewpoints are then relativized (see also Ducrot 1984; Authier-Revuz 1995; as well as Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1987, especially Chapter 4). Commenting this parallel, Carroll (1983) notes, In Holquist’s interpretation of ventriloquism, the other is simply a way back to the self; all voices are made to serve the authority and intentions of the master author-ventriloquist. If this is dialogism at all – and there are moments of Bakhtin’s texts that tend to support such a view – it is a weak form of dialogism, one that is more an appropriation of the other than an opening to or an affirmation of alterity. I would agree with Holquist that for Bakhtin, “all utterance is ventriloquism” [p. 181], but I would also argue that a much more radical view of ventriloquism must be taken than the one he puts forth: one in which the intentions of the ventriloquist himself cannot be given a special status outside and preceding the dialogue of voices, where the ventriloquist himself must be seen as ventriloquated as much as ventriloquating.  (p. 74, my italics)

Although Carroll does not mobilize the figure of the dummy in his argument, his position appears perfectly compatible with Goldblatt’s (2006) to the extent that a certain vacillation or undecidability is identified between the ventriloquist and the dummy.29

29. I want to thank my friend and colleague Boris Brummans who was the first to point out this vacillation and oscillation between the ventriloquist and the dummy.



Chapter 4.  Ventriloquism or the ecstatic dimension of communication

To make someone or something speak is indeed an activity that we tend to attribute to ventriloquists, but Goldblatt (2006) rightly notices that things are (always) a little more complicated. As he notes, The ventriloquist must not simply speak in another voice she must efface herself as speaker while simultaneously promoting herself as listener. Gertrude Stein’s cryptic remark is relevant here that, “One may really indeed say that that is the essence of genius, of being most intensively alive, that is being one who is at the same time talking and listening.” It is almost as if “being most intensively alive” was something of an awareness that overflowed the self, of being two selves simultaneously, of being conscious of oneself and beside oneself as well. With a certain effort, the ventriloquist must act as if listening to another while, at the same time, speaking for that other.  (p. 39, my italics)

A radical view of ventriloquism, as put forward by Carroll (1983), thus presupposes that we go beyond the monological view of a vent making a figure speak, but that we also dwell on the figure as it retroactively talks back to the vent, making the vent react to what it just said, even if what was just said was the product of the vent’s artful performance.

4.2

Downstream forms of ventriloquism

As we just saw, some interesting parallels have already been identified between ventriloquism and dialogism, but we still appear to be relatively remote from the realm of naturally occurring interaction. For instance, prosopopeia (or personification), as a figure of speech, seems, at first sight, quite foreign from our day-today conversations. We usually do not see interactants explicitly staging laws by pretending that they are literally speaking to them as Socrates does in Crito: “Tell me, Socrates, what you are intending to do? Do you not by this action you are attempting intend to destroy us, the laws, and indeed the whole city, as far as you are concerned?” (Plato 2002, p. 54, quoted by Goldblatt 2006, p. 99). Similarly, the figure of the daimon, however interesting it might be, could be considered quite “exotic” to scholars interested in the detailed study of interaction. Authors who have historically been interested in ventriloquism as a productive metaphor to think about dialogue tend indeed to be uninterested in studying interaction, as this form of empiricism appears relatively foreign to their theoretical preoccupations. Reversely, scholars interested in the detailed study of naturally occurring interaction could a priori be put off by this type of metaphor, to the extent that mobilizing it would amount to intellectualizing, so to speak, in a field that tends to be very wary of theoretical constructs (Pomerantz & Fehr 1997).

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In a way, we find here the classic divide between social sciences and humanities, a divide that tends to be unfortunately made of mutual contempt or ignorance. In the remaining parts of this chapter, I would like to show that such a divide is somewhat sterile, as both camps could really learn a lot from each other. So why should people interested in the detailed study of interaction and dialogue care about ventriloquism? And, reversely, why should people interested in ventriloquism care about naturally occurring interaction? To answer these two questions, we first need to briefly review what was argued in this book so far. As I tried to show in the first chapter, I think there is some analytical payoff in acknowledging the broad intension and extension of the concepts of action and agency in order to recognize all the various things that things do (with or without words), whether these things are documents, artifacts, machines, architectural elements, or procedures, to just name a few. As long as we do not acknowledge that we live in a world that is, in many respects, active, that is, that we share our human agency with other beings whose contribution needs to be analytically acknowledged, we run the risk of misunderstanding how this world functions. The first step was therefore meant to acknowledge this variety of agencies that populate our world. Having done that, I tried to explore the interactional consequences of this theoretical move. This led me, in Chapter 2, to show that when interactants speak or write to each other, they actually produce textual, gestural, or kinesic agents that speak and act on their behalf, in their name, for them. The textual, gestural, or kinesic beings that people create in communicating have a certain form of autonomy that we, as analysts, should acknowledge in order to better understand how interaction works (Cooren 2008). As I will now try to show, this is our first implicit move toward ventriloquism to the extent that these semiotic beings, whether we like it or not, make us do things (we are then their dummies while they are our ventriloquists) as much as we make them do things (in which case, they are our dummies while we are their ventriloquists). Most of the time, they appear to translate more or less faithfully what we mean, but we saw examples where we can be betrayed by what we say or write, which means that what was said or written can put the person who wrote or said something in positions that she had not anticipated or foreseen. As we saw previously, ventriloquism always consists of a form of vacillation between the dummy/figure, on one side, and the ventriloquist/vent, on the other (Goldblatt 2006). Interestingly, and this is what I will try to demonstrate here, such a vacillation appears operative with what happens downstream when people communicate with each other, that is, in their respective relationship with what they say, write, or communicate to each other.



Chapter 4.  Ventriloquism or the ecstatic dimension of communication

In order to illustrate this point, I now propose to analyze an excerpt taken from fieldwork I completed in November 2005 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders), the famous Nobel Prize winning humanitarian organization. Marius is the head of an MSF mission located in a mid-size town of North Kivu, a region in the northeastern part of this country. This region has, for many years, been devastated by numerous conflicts and wars, which explains the presence of the humanitarian organization. Robert, his immediate superior, and he scheduled a meeting with the director of a local hospital that MSF has been supporting for the past few months, a situation that created some tensions between the representatives of the humanitarian organization and this director. MSF indeed officially supports this local hospital by not only providing equipment and human resources (administrators, doctors, and nurses), but also by paying the hospital staff a much higher salary than they would otherwise receive, as well as introducing its own medical protocols. Even if MSF and the hospital officially speak of “support” (soutien, in French) on the part of the humanitarian organization, the financial and technological resources that MSF mobilizes are so great in comparison to the resources mobilized by the hospital that it is as if MSF was, in fact, taking over the hospital. Aware of this situation, the director of the hospital thus often tends to reaffirm his authority whenever he feels it is threatened. The (relatively long) excerpt I am going to now analyze is, I think, indicative of what was at stake. It begins as the meeting between Marius, Robert, and the hospital director has just started, while they are talking about an incident that took place the day before, an incident during which people got shot. Given that the interaction took place in French, the conversation has been translated in English: MSF Excerpt #1 1 Director …by bullets? 2 Robert Uhum 3 (0.3) 4 Director Woaw 5 (0.3) 6 Director And the attack on the road, what was it. ((taking his notebook to 7 write down what Robert is about to tell him)) 8 (0.3) 9 Marius We don’t know much [about it 10 Robert [We don’t know much [about it 11 Marius [It’s not very clear (.) 12 what happened

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13 Director Huhum 14 Marius So we are going to see. 15 (1.0) 16 Marius There were three wounded people. One who died uh? during the 17 night. 18 Director Huhum 19 Marius And now we are sending the ambulance to= 20 Director =Yeah= 21 Marius =pick them up 22 (3.0) ((The Director is writing in his notebook what Marius and 23 Robert are telling him)) 24 Director It’s starting again ((writing in his notebook) 25 Marius (uhum) 26 (3.0) ((While the director is writing in his notebook, Robert noisily 27 drops an MSF report on the left end side of the director’s desk and 28 then lays down gently another copy of the MSF report in the middle 29 of the desk, at the director’s level)) 30 Marius Did you think about :::: uh ah here it is ((indicating with his head the 31 MSF report that Robert has just put on the director’s desk)) 32 (1.0) 33 Marius About the internal bylaws? 34 (0.2) 35 Director Pardon= 36 Marius =The internal bylaws 37 (1.0) 38 Director Mm Well (.) I haven’t asked yet ((reading the MSF report)). We need 39 clarifications ((raising his eyes toward Marius)) 40 (0.2) 41 Marius No but uh:: to make me the::: copy of the internal bylaws (.) of the 42 hospital 43 Director Yes this uh we can print uh this is in the computer at the hospital. 44 ((glancing through the MSF report)) 45 Marius Uhm XXX 46 (2.0) ((The director keeps glancing through the MSF report)) 47 Marius Could I ask them by going down later? 48 (0.8) ((The director keeps glancing through his notebook)) 49 Director Mmm Maybe after the discussions I can go- I can go [print that for 50 you 51 Marius [Yeah 52 ((nodding his head)) mmum Well yeah= 53 Director =That way I give you that [directly



Chapter 4.  Ventriloquism or the ecstatic dimension of communication

54 Marius  [That way we can talk= 55 Director =Mmmh= 56 Marius =To read that (.) quietly 57 (3.0) ((The director finishes reading a page of the MSF report in 58 silence and then closes it and puts it down)) 59 Director Well okay Robert? ((quickly turning his head toward Robert and then 60 looking back to his notebook as if he was ready to write down Robert’s 61 response)) 62 (1.5) 63 Robert Well here I am handing you our activity report uh our activities in 64 North Kivu. Here this is for the month of June, July (1.0) uh:::: June 65 July August? 66 Marius No, July, August, September

What is happening in this sequence? First, we can note how the director asks two questions about an incident that took place the day before (from lines 1 to 24). Each of these requests for information is followed by what can be considered as accountably due or conditionally relevant in these circumstances, that is, by his interlocutors (Marius and Robert) providing the information or confirmation requested. As also expected, each time Marius or Robert provides the information or confirmation requested, the director acknowledges what has just been said either by marking his astonishment (“Woaw,” line 4), by acknowledging what was said, (“Uhum,” lines 13 and 18), or by responding (“Yeah,” line 20). Each time, these reactions appear to mark the closure of a mini-sequence to the extent that each consists of acknowledging what has just been said. Note that these triadic sequences – (1) request (here, request for information) → (2) response (here, giving of information) → (3) sanction30 (here, acknowledgement) – which are typical of organizational interactions (Cooren 2000; Cooren & Fairhurst 2004; Quinn & Dutton 2005; Quinn & Worline 2008), and are not only enacted verbally, but also nonverbally, especially when we see the director of the hospital writing down what Marius and Robert are telling him. As we see in this first part of the discussion, the fact that the director initiates and closes these mini-sequences implicitly positions him as the one who appears to dominate and exert relative control over the discussion. In terms of ventriloquism, one could say that this is what these various moves make him do, whether 30. Note that I am using the term sanction in the broad sense also used by Greimas (1987, Greimas & Courtés 1982). By sanction, I therefore mean that once the response has been provided, it has to be implicitly or explicitly evaluated, whether positively or negatively. For instance, “Thanks!” is a positive sanction, while “No, this is not what I asked you to do” is a negative one.

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he meant to or not. Marius and Robert are positioned not only as the ones who are supposed to answer the director’s questions, but also as the ones whose responses are each time evaluated/sanctioned/acknowledged by him. This effect is, I would contend, reinforced by the fact that the director appears to be writing down what they are saying. By positioning himself as noting their responses, he indeed appears to objectify, reify their accounts, which stages Marius and Robert as being much more accountable for what they said: Marius and Robert are not just answering the director’s questions, their responses are now part of (or inscribed in) the hospital’s documents and archives. Their subjection can therefore be considered twofold: they are being subjected to the director’s questions (we could even contend that they are being embedded between his questions and acknowledgements), but also subjected to (and embedded in) the hospital that both the director and his notebook represent, or incarnate. Why speak of ventriloquism here? Because I would contend that, to a certain extent, it does not really matter whether or not the director of the hospital intended this, that is, whether or not he was aware of these effects of submission/ embedding. What is key is that his questions, his interlocutors’ responses, and his writing down their responses and acknowledgements all contributed to the unfolding of these effects of control and power. It is therefore as if they all made him implicitly say, “I am (for now) conducting this interaction. I am in charge” and “You are telling me the information I am asking you to provide.” One could object that such an interpretation is tendentious or highly speculative and that it is just meant to serve my demonstration/illustration, but this analysis is confirmed by what other authors such as Greimas (1987) or Taylor and Van Every (2000) have already said about effects of embedding and submissions (Cooren & Fairhurst 2002; Fairhurst & Cooren 2004; see also Filliettaz & Roulet 2002; Jönsson & Edström 2003). While Taylor and Van Every speak of imbrication, Greimas notes the hierarchical character of such sequences, which, by definition, stages the initiator of the request in a higher position than the requestee (Cooren 2000; Cooren & Fairhurst 2004). And note that the logic, as always with ventriloquism, can be reversed: The director (and we could imagine that this is indeed the case, given the contentious character of his relationships with MSF) could be perfectly aware of these effects, which would then position him as the ventriloquist, the vent, making his and his interlocutors’ turns of talk imply that he is in charge. Interestingly, we see this logic of imbrication suddenly interrupted when Robert noisily drops a copy of their MSF report on the left side of the director’s desk and then lays down gently another copy of the MSF report in the middle of the desk, at the director’s eye level (lines 29–29). Although I have no way to prove my point, we could speculate that this noise could be meant as a way to somewhat



Chapter 4.  Ventriloquism or the ecstatic dimension of communication

disrupt this logic of relative subjection, even if it paradoxically consists of Robert submitting his report to the director (but note that he looks at Marius when doing so, as if this submission was, in a way, downplayed). This interpretation is confirmed by what follows immediately after as Marius now appears able to initiate a new sequence by asking the director if he has given any thought to the internal bylaws (lines 30–31), something that we later understand as being actually about photocopying the bylaws (lines 41–42). What is noteworthy in this request is that it orients to two sequences at the same time. First, of course, it projects a specific course of action on the director’s part. The director is indeed supposed to tell Marius whether he has remembered about the internal bylaws. This remembering is what is accountably due in these circumstances. However, we could also note that another course of action is reasonably being implied by this question, that is, that the director should have thought about the bylaws before. In terms of ventriloquism, it is thus hard not to hear this question as an attempt to know if the director did what he was supposed to do for Marius (and, therefore, for MSF), that is, providing him/them with the bylaws. One way to make sense of this question therefore consists of seeing that it functions as a sanction phase vis-à-vis a triadic sequence that Marius initiated some time before. This question therefore projects a double form of submission. Whether it was Marius’s intention or not, this line of questioning thus seems to have face-threatening potential (Brown & Levinson 1987). We therefore see how a question can come to make an interactant do what she or he was not necessarily planning to do, in this case, offending or face threatening the director. I would indeed contend that it is almost always difficult not to hear “Did you do…” or “Did you think of doing…” as not potentially offensive or facethreatening, especially if it is clear that it is about something that had been promised by the interlocutor, to which she or he had (implicitly or explicitly) engaged her- or himself or that she or he was simply expected to do. For instance, “Did you do the dishes?” or even “Did you get my email?” are, in most contexts, potentially offensive precisely because they are understood as participating in a sanction/ evaluation phase, that is, they implicitly position the interlocutor as subjected to, embedded, or imbricated in a program of action for which the speaker/writer positions himself or herself as the potential evaluator. Of course, the speaker/writer can always say that it was just a question, that is, some repair can take place (as shown in Chapter 2), but even if it was indeed just meant as a question, it is almost impossible not to hear it as participating in the process of sanctioning or evaluating what was done or not done. This illustrates for me the extent to which what is said or written always escapes the control of the speaker or writer, which is at the core of ventriloqual logic.

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As pointed out in Chapter 2, what we say can translate more or less faithfully what we mean, but it can also betray us, that is, make us do things that we did not necessarily intend, which could be what happens with Marius here. In this case, we can indeed speculate that it was not necessarily Marius’s intention to position himself as sanctioning what the director did or did not do. However, we see how his request for information cannot not function as a sanction/evaluation phase in these circumstances, which automatically positions him as embedding the director’s actions, that is, as subjecting him again to a program of action that Marius previously initiated. The subjecting character of this turn of talk is confirmed by the way the director reacts to Marius’s request for information, a reaction that I interpret as a form of resistance to this question. We may note how he does not immediately respond to Marius’s request, first by answering, “Pardon” (line 35), which then prompts Marius to partially repeat his question (line 36) and then by deferring his response by one second (line 37). When he finally responds to Marius, he orients to the initial request as a request for action and not simply as a request for information (“mm Well (.) I haven’t asked yet,” line 38) followed by a sort of justification/explanation (“We need clarifications,” line 39), which can actually be understood as a counter-invitation addressed to Marius to provide more information. The director thus displays his understanding (it is about something he was indeed supposed to do), but also implicitly shows that he is not ready to subject himself to Marius’s proposed course of action. While in other circumstances excuses could have been considered accountably due (Heritage 1984), only justification/explanation are provided by the director, which implicitly positions Marius as the person who has actually committed some kind of fault by not providing enough clarifications. Marius then seems to imply that the director might have misunderstood the nature of his request and makes it more explicit by referring to a photocopy of the internal bylaws of the hospital, photocopies that the director, we now clearly understand, was supposed to make for him (lines 41–42). The director finally responds to this request by telling him that they can print the bylaws from the hospital computer (“Yes this uh we can print. This is in the hospital computer,” line 43, my italics), which is then acknowledged by Marius (line 45). Two things are particularly interesting in this sequence because they reinforce the apparent resistance displayed by the director: First, we can note the director’s behavior as he is answering this specific question (line 43). We indeed see him glancing through the MSF report without looking at Marius, as if he were not really paying much attention or attributing much importance to what his interlocutor is ultimately asking.



Chapter 4.  Ventriloquism or the ecstatic dimension of communication

Second, we could dwell on the way the director answers Marius’s question by using the pronoun we and the modal verb can. By saying we instead of I, he is not only positioning himself as speaking on behalf of the members of his hospital, that is, as ventriloquizing them, but also implicitly making the question fuzzy as to who will be in charge of printing the bylaws. In other words, the responsibility is now attributed to a fuzzy we that Marius has no way of identifying precisely, making the question of accountability hard to resolve. This lack of accountability is reinforced when the director uses the modal verb can instead of will. While Marius’s request makes a commitment on the director’s part conditionally relevant (e.g., “Yes this uh we will print”), the director’s use of can instead of will does not, of course, say anything about his (and the hospital’s) willingness to proceed according to what appears to be Marius’s expectation. They can indeed print the bylaws, but will they ever do it? When? And who will ultimately be the person(s) who will act on behalf of they? Marius reacts to this lack of interest and accountability when we see him going back again to the question of the hospital bylaws (“Could I ask them by going down later?” line 47). This request for permission implicitly positions the director’s previous response as incomplete and insufficient. In terms of closure and sanction, we could then say that Marius appears to consider that the question of the bylaws is, as far as he is concerned, still open. While he was implicitly relying on the director’s good offices in his previous request, he now positions himself as ready to directly intervene in the process of retrieving the copy of the bylaws without relying on his interlocutor. Although the director is positioned as the person of authority who has to be asked for such a course of action, note that this request for permission also consists of implicitly questioning the director’s credibility and accountability. Asking for such permission thus consists of recognizing the director’s authority, but also of questioning his reliability. While Marius is going back to the bylaws question, we see the director glancing through the MSF report without once raising his eyes to look at Marius. This lack of visual orientation continues as he finally answers Marius’s question, not without pausing a little less than one second (line 48), which could be interpreted as another display of resistance. Note finally how his response does not explicitly answer Marius’s question (in other words, he does not say whether or not Marius may indeed go ask his employees for a copy of the bylaws). On the contrary, he says that he – the director – might go print the bylaws for Marius (“Mmm Maybe after the discussions I can go- I can go [print that for you,” line 49), which clearly positions him as the one who can provide Marius with the bylaws (not his employees). Interestingly, this move implicitly discards Marius’s request for permission, but positions him as now subjected to Marius’s course of action. However, it is noteworthy that, again, he does not say that he will print the bylaws, but that

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he might do it after the meeting, a move that implies that this ultimately depends on his good will. This time, Marius acknowledges emphatically what the director just said (“Yeah ((nodding his head)) mmum Well yeah=” lines 51–52), which marks the beginning of the closure of this sequence which he opened on line 30, a sequence that will finally close on line 56. After a three-second pause during which the director appears to finish reading a page of the MSF report, we see him closing the report, raising his eyes toward Robert, and positioning himself as ready to write in his notebook as he says, “Well okay Robert?” (line 59). His interlocutor’s subjection is this time even more salient in that his way of addressing Robert is extremely direct and brief, as if it was taken for granted that this latter knew that he now had to report something to the director. Through this turn of talk, it is as if Robert was interactively positioned as having to report to a superior, a situation that of course does not fit with the status of partners that MSF and the hospital have vis-à-vis one another. I would therefore contend that the director does not only appear to resist MSF’s subjection, but also counter-attacks, in turn, by subjecting one of his interlocutors to his and the hospital’s agenda. We could again note the 1.5-second pause between his question and Robert’s response, a long pause that could be interpreted as an act of resistance, this time on MSF’s part. As we see throughout this excerpt, the triadic character of the identified sequences allows us to highlight what could be called, following Pickering (1995), a dance of agencies made out of subjection, accommodation, and resistance, a phenomenon that tends to be neglected in conversation and dialogue analysis. But what is even more interesting is what this interaction tells us about the contentious character of the relationship between Marius and Robert, on one side, and the hospital director, on the other. Again, we need not speculate about the interlocutors’ intentions and motives (although this is not, of course, an uninteresting question) as we can reconstruct what these turns of talk appear to make them say and do. While Marius’s repetitive questions to the doctor can be interpreted as so many ways of implying that he is entitled to have these bylaws, the doctor’s responses (or lack thereof) – what was interpreted as his resistance – could be interpreted as so many ways to question such entitlement. The downstream form of ventriloquism that has just been explored thus allows us to highlight a key aspect of interaction and analysis in general, that is, interpretation. Interpreting or analyzing a situation like this one, according to a ventriloqual analysis, indeed consists of making it speak. At no point in this interaction does Marius explicitly say that he is entitled to get the bylaws, and likewise at no point in this same interaction does the director explicitly say that he does not want to submit to Marius’s request. But analyzing or interpreting this interaction precisely consists of showing that one of the key aspects of this situa-



Chapter 4.  Ventriloquism or the ecstatic dimension of communication

tion might be related to the interlocutors’ rights and obligations (Fitch & Sanders 1994; Katambwe & Taylor 2006; Labov & Fanshel 1977; Sanders & Fitch 2001; Taylor & Van Every 2000). There is ventriloquism to the extent that even if the director never addresses this issue explicitly, we saw that his responses systematically position him as implicitly questioning Marius’s right to tell him what to do (in this case, provide him with the bylaws). Reversely, although Marius never explicitly alludes to it, his repetitive questions position him as implicitly reaffirming his right to get the bylaws and the director’s obligation to give them to him. This is what Katambwe and Taylor (2006) would call, following Labov and Fanshel (1977), the subtext of this interaction, that is, the “tacit assumptions about the [interlocutors’] rights and responsibilities” (p. 63). Although we can speculate that both the director and Marius perfectly understand that this subtext of rights and obligations is what is also at stake, they, of course, never mention this issue, letting their turns of talk speak for them, so to speak. Interpreting this kind of situation, from the analysts’ or the interlocutors’ perspective, thus mainly consists of making or, perhaps more precisely, letting the interaction/conversation/exchange speak for itself. As Katambwe and Taylor (2006) astutely note, “What is important in the conversation is what people are doing, but what they are doing is only indirectly communicated by what they are saying” (p. 70). One could even add that if what they are doing is indeed only indirectly communicated by what they are saying, it is because what they are saying (and also, as we will see, not saying) – each turn of talk they produce – precisely does something that goes beyond what is explicitly said. In this respect, let’s go back to a short excerpt taken from the interaction between Marius and the director: 41 Marius 42 43 Director 44

No but uh:: to make me the::: copy of the internal bylaws (.) of the hospital Yes this uh we can print uh this is in the computer at the hospital. ((glancing through the MSF report))

As noticed before in our analysis, the fact that the director answers Marius’s question by using the pronoun we and the modal verb can is consequential in that (t)his response makes it uncertain as to not only who will print the bylaws but also when they will be printed. In a way, this exchange tells us something about the relationship not only through what is said, but also (and maybe especially?) through what is not said. As pointed out before, a conditionally relevant answer on the director’s part could have been, “Yes this uh we will print,” which would have marked his (and the hospital’s) willingness to proceed according to Marius’s expectations. The fact that he opts for “Yes this uh we can print” marks indeed a

99

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certain resistance (will they ever do it? When?), but such a resistance also appears because of what is not said, which becomes spectrally present in the discussion. Furthermore, we also noticed that at no point in this brief exchange is the director looking at Marius, as we rather see him glancing through the MSF report. In a way, it could be contended that his non-verbal behavior also speaks for itself, as it also contributes to marking his resistance, that is, his apparent unwillingness to attribute or pay much attention to what Marius is asking him. The subtext – something like, “I am not paying attention to you or what you are saying” or “I will ultimately do what I want and decide when I want to do it” or, more simply, “You won’t tell me what to do” – therefore is the text that the director can be said to be ventriloquizing in this exchange. Now, let’s compare this interaction with an excerpt taken from The Charlie McCarthy Show, quoted by Goldblatt (2006). In this exchange, the ventriloquist Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy are joined by W. C. Fields, the famous American actor, who is known, as Goldblatt rightly points out, as “a match for McCarthy as a fount for insult” (p. 42): 1 2 3 4 5 6 

Fields: Charlie: Fields: Bergen: Charlie: Fields:

Tell me, Charles, is it true your father was a gateleg table? Well, if it is, your father was under it. Quiet, you flophouse for termites or I’ll sic a beaver on you Now, Bill… Mr. Fields, is that a flame-thrower I see or is it your nose? Why, you little blockhead, I’ll whittle you down to a coat hanger. (cf. Bergen 1984, p. 23, quoted in Goldblatt 2006, p. 42)

As we see, the interaction appears to be mainly taking place between W. C. Fields and Charlie McCarthy, although the audience is, of course, aware that Bergen is making McCarthy speak to Fields. Two questions can thus be raised: (a) Is it Bergen or McCarthy that Fields is insulting in this exchange? And reversely, (b) Is it Bergen or McCarthy who is insulting Fields? To question (a), one could respond that Fields appears to be clearly speaking to McCarthy, not Bergen. The type of insult he is voicing – “gateleg table” (line 1), “flophouse for termites” (line 3), “coat hanger” (line 6) – all can be said to refer to the “woody” nature of the dummy. Although W. C. Fields, of course, knows that he is speaking to a “shaped wood,” as Goldblatt (2006) calls it, a shaped wood that happens to be animated by Bergen, it is to this shaped wood that his insults and conversations appear to be addressed. As Goldblatt notes, “Here we have Charlie as personality and Charlie as shaped wood as two quite compatible levels, the audience enjoying the free-play between them and pleased to be on the inside of that joke” (p. 42).



Chapter 4.  Ventriloquism or the ecstatic dimension of communication 101

Indeed, if this exchange can be considered witty or funny, it is at least partly because we feel a sort of vacillation – a free-play, as Goldblatt (2006) calls it – between McCarthy as a dummy controlled by Bergen and McCarthy as a character capable of voicing opinions and insults to his interlocutor. Bergen could, of course, be held responsible (by Fields, the audience, and us) for what McCarthy says, but the ventriloquist could as well say that it is McCarthy – not he, Bergen – who is insulting Fields, which brings us to question (b). As we see, ventriloquism’s free play or vacillation creates an uncanny experience, as we feel unable to truly decide, once for all, who – of Bergen or McCarthy – is really speaking. This brings us back to the question of description, as pointed out in Chapter 1. “Under a description,” it is McCarthy who appears to be speaking to Fields as he is not only the one to whom Fields addresses his question and insults (“Tell me, Charles, is it true your father was a gateleg table?” line 1), but also the one who then replies to his interlocutor by another insult (“Well, if it is, your father was under it.” line 2), which then does not fail to degenerate into an argument between the two protagonists, leaving Bergen out of the loop (“Now, Bill…” line 4). Under another description, however, we could go upstream in the chain of agencies and then focus on Bergen’s artful manipulation of McCarthy, which would then prompt us to say that it is also Bergen who, through McCarthy, is speaking to Fields, pretending he is left outside this heated dialogue. Depending on who or what we want to take into account in our descriptions, we can focus or not on specific actors partaking in this process. Now, if we compare this dialogue with what happens between Marius and the director, we can then notice that, in a way, the same form of undecidability, oscillation, or vacillation is taking place. As noticed, at no moment does the director explicitly tell Marius that he has no right to ask him to do anything, but we also see how his responses and nonverbal behavior definitely display some form of resistance. I would therefore contend that one interesting way (but certainly not the only one!) to analyze this situation consists of comparing the director with Bergen and what the director is saying (and not saying) with McCarthy. At first sight, one could question the idea of comparing the director’s verbal and nonverbal behavior with McCarthy, that is, “semiotic beings” with a shaped wood dummy. But again, what matters is how we end up describing the situation: If we focus on the director’s (verbal and nonverbal) responses throughout his conversation with Marius, we cannot fail to notice that they display a form of resistance or opposition, which can then also be attributed to the director himself (after all, they are his responses). The hospital director is ventriloquizing – as we all do in any aspect of our conversations – to the extent that he also lets his verbal and nonverbal behaviors speak for themselves. Should he be accused of resistance or noncooperation by his interlocutors, he could always say that he just “ha[s]n’t

102 Action and Agency in Dialogue

asked yet” (line 38), that he simply “need[s] more clarifications” (lines 38–39), that, of course, the hospital “can print uh [the bylaws]” (line 43), and that “Maybe after the discussions [he] can go- [he] can go [print that for [Marius]” (line 49). Certainly, everyone understands that he is resisting, that he is not cooperating, but because such a resistance is never explicitly voiced, staged, or on the record in his responses, he is in a very good position to deter any accusation of this sort. In a way similar to what Bergen could have answered regarding his insults towards Fields, the director could easily deter any accusation of resistance or non-cooperation, even if his (verbal and nonverbal) responses (obviously) stage him as withstanding Marius’s repetitive requests. Going back to Derrida (1994) for a moment, one could contend that we are dealing here with the phenomenon of exappropriation, which is precisely meant, as already pointed out at the end of Chapter 2, to express the vacillation, undecidability, or oscillation between appropriation and expropriation (Bencherki & Cooren, forthcoming). Although the assertions and responses we voice often tend to be identified as our assertions and responses (but note that it is not always the case, as for instance when we position ourselves or are positioned as someone’s spokesperson), it is always possible (although not always as equally easy) to dissociate ourselves or to be dissociated from what we said or wrote. A ventriloqual analysis explains this phenomenon to the extent that it insists on the delegative or proxy aspect of communication: If we do communicate with each other, it is always through specific “things” – for instance, our responses, our assertions, our behavior, and so on – that are supposed to act on our behalf, in our name or stead, that is, for us, but from which we can also dissociate ourselves. While appropriation and attribution could, at first sight, be thought to be “the norm” in conversations, the case of ventriloquists is extremely interesting because they especially play on the figure of expropriation or what we could also call extribution31 (in contrast with attribution). Even if everybody is indeed aware that the ventriloquist is the one who makes the dummy speak, everything is staged so that the figure become disassociated, disaffiliated, seceded, independent from his vent, that is, that what the ventriloquist is saying be identified and singularized as what his or her dummy is saying. Except in cases where he would be explicitly positioned as such by his ventriloquist, the dummy never speaks or acts for or in the name of his vent. He is staged in such a way that he is supposed to speak or act for himself.

31. Used in the anonymous Elizabethan play “Edmond Ironside, The English King,” the word extribute means “redeem” or “repair,” which, among other things, expresses the idea of removing what was previously attributed.



Chapter 4.  Ventriloquism or the ecstatic dimension of communication 103

In mundane conversation, ventriloquism thus appears to be especially obvious when such a disaffiliation or dissociation is highlighted, that is, when at least one of the interlocutors attempts to make something he says or does not say speak for itself, which then allows him or her to be always capable of denying that this is what he or she meant: What you think this (i.e, something I said or did not say) means cannot be what I meant, since I did not say it (even if we both know that this is indeed what I meant!). Exappropriation and/or what I would call exattribution are at stake because the speaker/writer can either appropriate or expropriate what he said or wrote while his interlocutor can either attribute to or extribute from him what was said or written. Freud’s anecdote in Chapter 2 can therefore be reidentified as a form of ventriloquism. By writing “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone” on the form, he knows that he is creating an infernal vacillation, oscillation, or undecidability between what this sentence means and what he meant. Of course, nobody was fooled by what Freud did – including, of course, the Nazis – but Freud knew that the sentence he wrote does make him recommend the Gestapo (appropriation/attribution) while everyone understands that he, of course, meant the opposite, given what he knew of the Nazis and what they did to him and his family. In other words, Freud makes his sentence mean something else, the opposite of what it says: He, of course, does not recommend the Gestapo to everyone (expropriation/extribution). Interestingly, this anecdote also allows us to see that ventriloquism always goes in both directions, creating another form of oscillation, depending on how we end up describing/seeing the situation. If Freud, positioned as the ventriloquist, makes this sentence, positioned as the dummy, say something for him, this sentence, now positioned as the ventriloquist, will also make Freud, now reduced to the dummy, say something. Irony precisely functions because of this double appropriation, which was already remarked upon by Gabriel Tarde (1895/1999): What is society? One could define it according to our viewpoint: the reciprocal possession, under very various forms, of all by each… Subscriber to a newspaper, I possess my journalists, who possess their subscribers. I have my government, my religion, my police force, as much as my specific human type, my attitude [tempérament], my health; but I also know that my country’s ministers, my cult’s priests or my county’s policemen count me in the number of the herd they are in charge of, just as the human type, should it personify itself somewhere, would only see in me one of its particular variation.  (p. 85–86)

Applied to dialogue and interaction, the idea of reciprocal possession can then become: Interlocutors have their positions/stances/statements while positions/ stances/statements have their holders.

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In the case of Freud’s irony, Freud’s statement makes him say the opposite of what he makes it say for him, which, I would contend, corresponds to the general functioning of irony. As an illustration, let’s use the example provided by Grice (1975) to explain the flouting of his maxim of quality “Irony: X, with whom A has been on close terms until now, has betrayed a secret of A’s to a business rival. A and his audience both know this. A says, “X is a fine friend.” (p. 75, see also Cooren & Sanders 2002). One way to analyze the mechanism of irony in this situation would consist of noticing that when A says, “X is a fine friend,” this statement makes him say that he finds X to be a good friend (appropriation/attribution), a description that insists on A as the holder of this statement. But of course, knowing the context, everyone understands that A makes his statement say the opposite, in other words, that he finds X to be a traitor, a description that marks the statement’s expropriation/extribution from A. From this analysis, one should not think that such a vacillation or oscillation between appropriation/attribution on one side and expropriation/extribution on the other side, is always an easy task. In the case of irony, it tends to be obvious (when irony is understood, of course!), but in many cases, expropriation/extribution is not necessarily evident. Given that interlocutors tend to be held responsible or accountable for what they say (pointing to Garfinkel’s 1967, 2002, principle of accountability), appropriation/attribution tends to be the “default” mode, so to speak, but, as Derrida (1994) points out, if there can be appropriation/attribution, it is, by definition, because such a gesture is haunted by expropriation/extribution (and the opposite is, of course, also true), otherwise no appropriation would ever be at stake (it would not be even a question). From this, one can conclude that the downstream form of ventriloquism that we investigated so far is operative as soon as we say, write, or, more generally, communicate something and that it should not be reduced to irony or clear cases of expropriation/extribution/disaffiliation. I would even dare to say that ventriloquism is one of the laws of communication and dialogue to the extent that producing semiotic beings (gestures, facial expressions, body positionings, words, sentences, discourses) is an intractable and unconditional aspect of communication. In other words, even when speakers/writers/communicators appropriate (or are attributed) what they say, write, or communicate, they have to (or cannot not) ventriloquize, which marks the haunting of expropriation/extribution, or what Derrida (1994) calls the law of exappropriation (which we could also call the law of exattribution).



4.3

Chapter 4.  Ventriloquism or the ecstatic dimension of communication 105

Upstream forms of ventriloquism

Now that I have illustrated what happens downstream when people communicate with each other, that is, in their respective relationship with what they say/write/ communicate, I propose to see what happens upstream, that is, in people’s relationship with what they themselves represent, personify, incarnate, or stand for. In order to do that, I will have to reintroduce the figures of passion and animation, as developed in Chapter 3, that is, the various “things” or “beings” that are staged or positioned as driving, leading, or even making us (to) do what we do. But before going any further, let’s look at another excerpt taken from the same meeting that took place between Marius, Robert, and the hospital director. In this excerpt, Marius and Robert raise what they consider to be an important issue regarding the way the hospital functions at a specific moment of the week. Every Monday, a meeting is indeed held at which all members of the hospital staff are required to be present, a situation that Marius and Robert deplore because it consequently leaves the various services unattended by doctors and nurses, which, as a result, could be dangerous for the patients. Here is how the conversation evolves: MSF Excerpt #2 1317 Marius =Because meanwhile it’s the same, it’s a meeting that lasts thirty to 1318 forty-five minutes, as you were saying last time and we have no one 1319 in the services anymore ((smiling)) 1320 (1.0) 1321 Marius And [at that moment1322 Director [Yes well:: there are always uh mechanisms uh there are people 1323 who always call us and we dispatch a nurse if there is a problem 1324 because these are important briefings. 1325 Marius It’s not always [like that 1326 Director  [and uh: 1327 Marius ((repetitively pointing backward with his pen over his shoulder)) 1328 There was- Monday there was a problem there and it’s uh it’s the 1329 expat who was passing by ((repetitively pointing forward with his 1330 pen)) who saw that there was a problem and who had uh to- and 1331 who had to call the nurse otherwise (.) there was nobody who could 1332 see it, the problem. 1333 Director Yes, no but it’s often the mothers they have uh the instruction (.) 1334 when we are in a meeting if there is a problem (.) of fever, of convul- 1335 sion (.) the mother must come inform us. 1336 Marius Hum

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1337 Director 1338 1339 Marius 1340 Director 1341 Marius 1342 Director 1343 1344

And then we dispatch a nurse to go over there (.) Well maybe this mother was absent-minded. Huhum Possible= =Thinkable= =And uh I think that we must always communicate, so always communicate ((speaking to someone who just arrived)) Good morning Kanga.

As we see in this first excerpt, Marius and the director basically disagree about the status that the meetings should be given. While Marius points out that they are putting the patients at risk, the director retorts that mechanisms exist to prevent potential accidents while such weekly meetings are taking place. But what can be said in terms of ventriloquism? Let’s look at Marius’s intervention from lines 1317 to 1319. As we see, Marius presents a reason why he thinks the way these meetings are held should be reconsidered by invoking something that, according to him, the director would have previously said. As he points out, “Because meanwhile it’s the same, it’s a meeting that lasts thirty to forty-five minutes, as you were saying last time” (lines 1317– 1318). Interestingly, it is as if it was not he, Marius, who was stating something about the length of the meeting, but his interlocutor, the director, who is explicitly staged as having already said something about this question. A first case of ventriloquism is therefore at stake to the extent that we see Marius make the director speak within his own argument, a positioning that, of course, is supposed to lend weight to what he puts forward. Lending weight in this case can be interpreted in two different ways. First, as form of self-effacement, which is typical of classical form of ventriloquism: It is not he, but the director who is presented as saying that the meeting lasts 30 to 45 minutes, which means that what is put forward about these meetings cannot a priori be considered tainted by Marius’s own bias against them. Lending weight here consists of attributing an assertion to one’s interlocutor, a move that is then supposed to augment its “objectivity,” so to speak. But lending weight to this assertion can also be interpreted in a second way by marking an oscillation, vacillation, or undecidability that is also typical of ventriloquism. If self-effacement is at stake, we (his interlocutor, us, any witness) indeed know that Marius is, of course, also the one who is saying that the meeting lasts 30 to 45 minutes. Although his turn of talk consists of staging the director as the one who said that, another description is possible, which positions him as ventriloquizing his interlocutor, marking his contribution vis-à-vis what is put forward. Lending weight to an assertion in this case thus amounts to staging two voices instead of one, which



Chapter 4.  Ventriloquism or the ecstatic dimension of communication 107

is also supposed to increase its potential objectivity, or the factuality of what is asserted (see also Boltanski & Thévenot 1991/2006).32 Having ventriloquized his interlocutor, Marius can then present what he considers to be the problematic situation: “And we have no one in the services anymore ((smiling))” (lines 1318–1319). Interestingly, this move allows him to position this situation as resulting from the facts that the director himself previously presented, which also creates effects of objectivity: You are (not I) the one who is saying that the meeting lasts 30 to 45 minutes, a situation that results in having nobody in the services during this long period. But note that this move can also be interpreted as Marius letting the facts speak for themselves. Facts can indeed be said to be speaking to the extent that Marius does not explicitly draw any conclusion from what he is putting forward in this assertion. The fact that they “have no one in the services anymore” speaks for itself in that it is supposed to lead his interlocutor (and any witness) to realize that this meeting does not make any sense. As we see, ventriloquism is operative in this intervention to the extent that it is not only Marius who can be positioned as speaking, but also, through their respective invocations, the director and the facts. Instead of one speaker, it is therefore as if we had at least three figures in this turn of talk, three figures that Marius, the vent, makes speak. Once Marius’ turn of talk ends, a 1-second pause then follows, which marks an absence of response on the director’s part, a non-reaction to which Marius responds by getting on with his account of the situation (“And at that moment-” (line 1321)). This move could be interpreted as the implicit acknowledgement of a failure, to the extent that the facts previously presented were apparently not telling enough (i.e., they did not speak enough) to trigger any reaction on the director’s 32. As shown in Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1991/2006) landmark contribution, justification is a matter of invoking a plurality of forms of justice that is called “worth” in the English translation of their book. The original term used in the French version – grandeur (literally size or scale) – better conveys the idea that justifying actually consists of becoming bigger, so to speak, which is another way to speak about “weight.” Justifying ourselves consists of lending weight to what we say or do to the extent that we come to stage figures of authority that make us bigger (in terms of size, for Boltanski and Thévenot, and in terms of weight, if we allude to what is said or done). If I had to compare my perspective to theirs, however, I would say that, contrary to what is developed in the present essay, their concern is not ontological, but mainly rhetorical or argumentative. As they say, “We should like to emphasize that, except as it related to our interest in justification, the question of the existence of things in the universe is not our concern. We shall consider the ontological problem of the existence of beings and the modalities of their presence in the world only to the extent that these beings may be said to be engaged by the justifiable acts in which persons are implicated” (p. 133). As we will see in Chapter 5, the reflection on figures and ventriloquism leads to an ontological positioning.

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part, which prompts Marius to go forward in his description. If the previous facts were not convincing enough, maybe these ones will be… But Marius is interrupted by the director who retorts, “Yes well:: there are always uh mechanisms uh there are people who always call us and we dispatch a nurse if there is a problem because these are important briefings” (lines 1322– 1324). In his response, the director is thus invoking the hospital’s ways and customs (a move marked by the two occurrences of the adverb “always”) while reminding Marius of the importance of the meetings. It is therefore in the name of a certain tradition, practice, or habit that the director implicitly calls into question the problematic character of these meetings. But beyond this first effect of ventriloquism, one could also notice how these figures of tradition and custom can trigger potential effects of authority. It is indeed these figures, implicitly invoked by the director, that are supposed to somehow allow or authorize him to object to the way Marius depicts the situation. While we saw that Marius had just allied himself with his interlocutor and certain facts to criticize these meetings, the director now responds by mobilizing a certain tradition that is supposed to mark the established (and implicitly unquestionable) character of these reunions. Incidentally, we see how these two turns of talk illustrate what I consider to be a key connection between ventriloquism, reason and authority. It is indeed not by chance, as Taylor and Van Every (2000) reminded us, that authority and author have the same Latin root (auctor), in that it means that whoever or whatever is explicitly or implicitly positioned as a figure of authority will also be staged as authoring what is asserted or put forward. As Joerges and Czarniawska (1998) remind us, authorizing is a form of authoring. If the director implicitly invokes (i.e., etymologically speaking, gives a voice to) the ways and customs of the hospital, that is, if he provides his interlocutors with this reason to counter what they say, it is because this reason, this tradition is supposed to allow or authorize him to do so. Speaking in the name of a certain tradition logically means that it is this tradition that, figuratively, speaks through him. As we now know, speaking in terms of figures does not mean that the tradition and ways and customs are not really speaking. It just means that it is the director who makes them speak, by implicitly invoking them in this situation, creating what could be called a configuration. The director’s response can appear reasonable to the extent that “good” reasons (Charland 1990/1999; Fisher 1978; Prelli 1989; Wallace 1963) appear to be provided and “good” reasons always consist of mobilizing or invoking figures of authority to the extent that these figures precisely authorize or allow him to promote his position. Ventriloquizing these figures thus consists of positioning them as authoring/authorizing his rebuttal. As we see in these two turns of talk, many voices thus appear to be made present, or represented, presentified (Gumbrecht & Pfeiffer 2004) in this short



Chapter 4.  Ventriloquism or the ecstatic dimension of communication 109

exchange, something that authors such as Bakhtin (1994) or Derrida (1986) have already noticed, but which has never really been illustrated empirically, at least at the level of conversations. It is thus as if it were not simply Marius and the director who were speaking to each other through these two turns of talk, but also many other “beings” or figures whose voice are represented, made present, ventriloquized. If we now move to the next turns of talk, we see Marius questioning the established character of what the director implicitly presented as a practice or custom: “It’s not always like that” (line 1325), which means that Marius implicitly orients to the figure of tradition previously mobilized by his interlocutor. He then carries on: 1327 Marius 1328 1329 1330 1331 1332

((repetitively pointing backward with his pen over his shoulder)) There was- Monday there was a problem there and it’s uh it’s the expat who was passing by ((repetitively pointing forward with his pen)) who saw that there was a problem and who had uh to- and who had to call the nurse otherwise (.) there was nobody who could see it, the problem.

To the established character of the tradition invoked by the director, Marius thus opposes what is implicitly presented as an anecdote or event that took place a few days earlier. This anecdote, as recounted by Marius, thus comes to contradict the generalizability of the practice invoked by the director. To the authority or “law” of the tradition, Marius therefore retorts by invoking a very specific event or fact, which is again supposed to speak for itself – note how he does not draw any conclusion – by contradicting the principle the director just put forward. But note this fact is not the only one speaking, as it also allows Marius to stage an expat who, as he says, “was passing by … who saw that there was a problem and who had…to call the nurse” (lines 1329–1331). Ventriloquizing is again taking place to the extent that it is not only Marius who says that there was a problem, but also an expat who actually saw it happening and intervened. Making a fact or person speak can thus also consist of staging, within this event, a figure that ends up lending weight to one’s position. In this turn, at least three figures can be said to speak: Marius, as well as the facts and the expat he is invoking/ventriloquizing. Let us now dwell on the director’s response: 1333 Director 1334 1335 1336 Marius

Yes, no but it’s often the mothers they have uh the instruction (.) when we are in a meeting if there is a problem (.) of fever, of convul- sion (.) the mother must come inform us. Hum

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1337 Director And then we dispatch a nurse to go over there (.) Well maybe this 1338 mother was absent-minded.

Interestingly, we see the director reacting to Marius’s anecdote by this time invoking not only the patients’ mothers, but also a rule. As he says, the mothers have an instruction, as they have to come and inform the personnel if they see a problem. This response is interesting at least for three reasons. First, one could note that invoking this instruction or rule is, of course, supposed to allow the director to justify the holding of the meetings. In other words, the mere existence of this directive given to the mothers should, according to him, authorize or allow the personnel to hold these reunions. At this stage, it could be noticed that both Marius and the director implicitly position themselves as speaking in the name of the patients’ health, that is, this interaction would not make much sense if this principle were not at least implicitly staged as what ultimately counts or matters in all this discussion. It is because the patients and their health are potentially at stake that such a directive exists. Invoking this directive is therefore an implicit way to thwart Marius’s attempt to position himself as speaking in the name of the patients’ interest and health. As we see in this ventriloqual analysis, multiple beings or figures (patients, principles, facts, rules, traditions) can be said to be staged in this dialogue, as many beings that are supposed to lend weight to Marius’s and the director’s respective stances. In terms of passion or animation, both position themselves as moved or animated by specific reasons, principles, or imperatives that are supposed to justify their opposite takes on the issue. For instance, we just saw that Marius’s intervention makes sense because he implicitly sets himself up as being moved or animated by the patients’ interests. Reversely, it is the director’s job to show him that the meetings do not go against these interests (i.e, that he is, of course, also animated by the patients’ interests) and that these reunions are important because they are held in the name of another imperative: the personnel’s continuing education. While the director implicitly contends that these two imperatives (the patients’ health vs. the personnel’s continuing education) do not contradict each other (at least in the case of these meetings), Marius’s objections amount to saying that holding these meetings put the patients’ health at risk. For him, it is therefore as if two logics were clashing in the case of these meetings while for the director, these two logics appear compatible. Going back to the director’s response, it is interesting for another reason, which concerns the figure of the mother. Mobilizing the mothers indeed allows him to not only invoke a rule, but also address what allegedly happened on Mon-



Chapter 4.  Ventriloquism or the ecstatic dimension of communication

day by deflecting responsibility to them. As he says, “Well maybe this mother was absent-minded” (lines 1337–1338). The existence of a rule/instruction authorizes, for him, the holding of this meeting, but this rule is, of course, at the mercy of people who would not comply with it. In other words, we, the hospital, are doing what we ought to do, always acting in the name of the patients’ interests, but it is possible that sometimes incidents happen when other people – here, the mothers – do not act according to the same principle. They are the ones to be blamed, not us. In terms of ventriloquism, it is noteworthy that this mother does not speak, in both senses of the term: She did not speak to them while, according to the director, she should have, and she is not speaking now as the director does not make her speak in this turn of talk. While ventriloquizing someone or something can consist of adding a voice in order to lend weight to one’s stance, we see here a figure that is staged as voiceless, absent-minded, distracted, passive, precisely because it does not really add anything, except by deflecting responsibility. She has to respond, but she does not speak. Finally, the third reason why this turn of talk is interesting is that invoking the mother’s role and the rule/instruction also allows the director to implicitly establish or reaffirm his knowledge of the hospital. By this move, it is therefore as if he were revealing something that his interlocutors did not know (otherwise, why would he mention this rule to them?), which incidentally allows him to reaffirm his authority. Reestablishing his authority indeed consists of showing that, through him, it is a certain reality of the hospital that, figuratively, speaks and expresses itself. In terms of subtext, it is also as though he were ventriloquizing, “You dare accusing me of putting my patients at risk, but I can show you, because I am knowledgeable of my hospital, that it is not so.” This confirms that the subtexts we ventriloquize often are about tacit assumptions regarding the interlocutors’ rights and responsibilities (Katambwe & Taylor 2006). Invoking the instructions given to the mothers indeed amounts, for the director, to not only confirming his right to hold the meetings, but also questioning his interlocutors’ right to utter accusations in this case. It is, finally, a way to remind Marius and Robert that he is, of course, aware of his obligations vis-à-vis the patients and that he complies with them. If an obligation was not respected, it was the absent-minded (and voiceless) mother who should be blamed. This excerpt ends as the director and Marius first exchange their reactions regarding what might have been the mother’s state of mind 1339 Marius Huhum 1340 Director Possible= 1341 Marius =Thinkable=

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1342 Director =And uh I think that we must always communicate, so always 1343 communicate ((speaking to someone who just arrived)) Good 1344 morning Kanga.

While Marius does not seem convinced by the argument (“Huhum,” line 1339), the director reacts by reasserting the possibility of what he just put forward (“Possible,” line 1340), to which Marius immediately responds by saying “Thinkable,” with a rising tone at the end, as if to mark that if this absent-mindedness invoked by his interlocutor is indeed thinkable, it could be anticipated, which could be interpreted as a disguised/ventriloquized way to question the relevance of the instructions given to the mothers.

4.4

Cultivating figures

As we saw through these ventriloqual analyses, many figures populate the interactional scene. While at first sight, only Marius, Robert, and the director appear to be speaking to each other, we actually realized that through their respective interventions, a series of entities and figures are convoked, invoked, and evoked in their interaction (but is it still only their interaction?), that is, a voice is given to these figures by the human interactants in presence. One way to analyze interactions, conversations, and dialogues thus consists of revealing these staging practices through which interactants make or let figures speak for them (a downstream form of ventriloquism illustrated in Section 4.2) or, reversely, position themselves as moved, animated, or led by specific figures (an upstream form of ventriloquism illustrated in Section 4.3). Of course, it should be clear by now that the division between upstream and downstream forms of ventriloquism is analytical and that both forms always happen conjointly. Communication is ecstatic (in the etymological sense of “being out of place”) in that it is the very nexus where figures with variable ontologies come to be incarnated, embodied, and re-presented, in other words, made present. For instance, we saw that one way to make sense of the conversation between Marius and the director consists of showing that both set themselves up as speaking in the name of the patients’ interests. It is indeed in their name that Marius can allow himself to criticize an established hospital practice. Although he never explicitly stages himself as speaking on their behalf, or for them, his intervention does not make sense if we (analysts and participants) cannot reconstruct such a staging practice, as implicit as it might be. Similarly, one way to make sense of the director’s responses amounts to showing that he also sets himself up as representing their interests. In other words, if he is able to call Marius’s criticisms into question, it



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is because he can demonstrate, through his responses, that he also cares for the patients and that he is therefore committed to making sure that these Monday reunions never put their health and safety at risk. The patients and their interests are made present in this discussion because these two figures function as (partial) sources of intelligibility/accountability/reasonability for the respective interventions of two protagonists, Marius and the director. As mentioned previously, implicitly or explicitly positioning oneself as moved or animated by rules, principles, values, people, interests, and the like amounts to showing that our intervention is reasonable, accountable, intelligible, sensible. According to such a perspective, we can never be the only one speaking, since polyphony is, in many respects, what authorizes/allows/permits us to hold specific positions or stances. Being the author of what is put forward presupposes that we be or appear authorized, which precisely means that we share authorship with what or who authorizes us to say what we say. If the patients’ interests are made implicitly present in this scene, it is because they are supposed to author and authorize both the holding of the reunions (the director’s positions) and their questioning (Marius’s position). This is, for sure, a figurative way to account for what is at stake, but we saw that figures are precisely key to understanding the logic of conversation. Dislocating interaction, that is, making it ecstatic, is something that we, analysts, can do, but if this can be done, it is also because interactants themselves are doing it. Communication is out of place and time – what Derrida (1994) would call, in reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “out of joint,” disjointed – because interactants are, in a haunting and ghostly fashion, staging figures that come to incarnate/represent/embody themselves in their interactions. Echoing the ideas of exappropriation and exattribution, it is therefore as if it were not only their interactions (the interactions of the human interactants speaking to each other), but also the interactions of the textual, ideal, collective, or passional figures that they are staging/invoking/evoking/convoking. Interestingly, such reasoning allows me to acknowledge other figures that, some readers might contend, appear to be cruelly missing from my analyses. Focusing on what is implicitly or explicitly invoked by the interactants indeed allows me to reveal various sources of authority that the participants appeared to invoke or to call upon in their conversation. However, one might retort that such figures cannot exhaust what seems to be at stake in this exchange. After all, can we really claim to analyze this meeting without taking into account that Marius and Robert both are white occidentals who, even if they are working for MSF, are not physicians themselves, while the director is a black Congolese physician representing not only his hospital, but also in many respects his country and culture?

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But we already know what the objection to such an objection might look like. As pointed out by most conversation analysts (Heritage 1984; Pomerantz & Fehr 1997; Schegloff 1997), if something is not the object of an implicit or explicit orientation by the interactants – in other words, if it is not implicitly or explicitly invoked or oriented to by conversationalists – it should not be part of our analyses. Studies have, however, shown that it is possible to find markers of cultural traits in interaction even when participants do not appear to explicitly or implicitly invoke them as such, that is, as cultural traits (Carbaugh 2005; Fitch 1998; Gumperz 1982; Moerman 1988; Philipsen 1992). For instance, Sanders and Fitch (2001) have illustrated how studying the actual practice of compliance-seeking allowed them to identify “shared premises that apply across interactions: premises about the rights and obligations, and ascribed meanings and motives, of interacting persons of particular kinds in particular situations” (p. 265). As they note, such shared premises often have a “cultural basis” (Sanders & Fitch 2001, p. 265), even though they recognize that they may have a “narrower basis, as ethnomethodologists have shown, such as established codes and conventional practices that develop in families, workplaces, and the like” (p. 265; see also Labov & Fanshell 1977). So what does this mean for a ventriloqual analysis? If we dwell again on the interaction between the two MSF representatives and the hospital director, one could first notice how premises do not appear to be always shared, which precisely explains the (cultural) clash we identified between the interlocutors. One premise that appears to be shared, however, is that they both seem to implicitly invoke the patients’ interests, even if their mutual disagreement comes from what “caring for the patients” might mean. In other words, a shared premise is that “patients’ health counts,” that is, the figure of the patient and/or his or her health is something that is implicitly convoked and recognized on both sides to define the situation, even though they disagree about the other figures that should be practically convoked to make this one count. One could point out that “patients’ health counts” is a principle, a value, what Sanders and Fitch (2001) call a premise or what Craig and Tracy (1995; Tracy 2005) call a situated ideal, that is, in some respects, cultural to the extent that it is supposed to be widely shared in the practice (medicine) and professions (physicians, nurses, health professionals) that both the director and the MSF representatives represent (see also Agne & Tracy 2001). If, as Donal Carbaugh (2005) points out, “in every conversation, one or more culture is at work” (p. 1), analyzing an interaction from a ventriloqual viewpoint would thus consist of identifying what kind of figures are typically, traditionally, or usually invoked or convoked by the respective participants. Whether we speak of cultural premises (Carbaugh 2005), conversational inferences (Gumperz 1982), or cultural bases (Sanders & Fitch 2001), all these expressions point to figures that are supposed to be typically in



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the background of conversations and interactions, figures that we have to learn, as analysts, to detect, recognize, and identify (Eisenberg & Riley 2001). Speaking of cultural premises, Carbaugh (2005) notes, When formulated, cultural premises of belief and value – in and about conversation – provide a way of talking about the deeper, often taken-for-granted meaningfulness of expressive acts and sequences to participants, a typically unspoken yet expressively active resource for the practices to be indeed what they are. Cultural premises are, therefore, in sum, analysts’ formulations of conversants’ beliefs about the significance and importance of what is going on, both as a condition for that practice of conversation, and as expressed in that very practice.  (p. 5, my italics)

Studying an interaction from a ventriloqual perspective thus consists of identifying what this “typically unspoken yet expressively active resource” (p. 5) looks like, except that it is key not to reduce this figure to a resource. Indeed, we saw that studying ventriloquism in interaction amounts to acknowledging the constant oscillation or vacillation between the vent and her figure. From one perspective, the human interactant looks like the vent who is implicitly or explicitly making figures speak, is staging them, in her turns of talk. This is, for instance, what happens when the director ventriloquizes the ways and customs of his hospital or when Marius lets or makes the facts speak for themselves. But if such positionings make sense, it is also because they presuppose that the human interactant is him- or herself animated by these ways and customs or facts, that is, that he or she is himself or herself a figure animated, enthused, driven, stirred, motivated, or inspired by his or her (cultural) “daimons.” As we saw in Goldblatt’s (2006) analysis of Socrates, Socrates can sometimes position himself as enthused or driven by his daimon (who is itself enthused by the Gods), but if such positioning can indeed be deemed to be strategic on Socrates’ part, it would be, I think, a mistake to reduce the daimon figure to a resource. Although I recognize that this figure is a priori problematic, since it postulates the existence of a sort of “demon” that would tell us what to do and what not to do, it could also be interpreted as the Socratic way to speak about all the “things” that lead or drive us to say what we say. In other words, it could precisely be interpreted as the Socratic manner of talking about cultural premises, ideologies, values, presuppositions, beliefs, principles, and so forth. Going back to our MSF example, if the director is invoking the ways and customs of the hospital to justify holding the Monday reunions, such an invocation presupposes that he holds to these figures, that he values them, that he is attached or bound to them. But, as Tarde (1895/1999) pointed out, possession goes in both directions, which means that these figures are also supposed to hold or possess him as much as he

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holds to them. Of course, the director could be purely strategic, coldly invoking figures that he does not care about, but even then he could be still considered to be animated or driven by specific interests, whatever they would be (the promotion of his authority, for instance). What I mean is that the staging practices that we unveiled in our previous analyses allow us to constantly vacillate or oscillate from the vent to the figure and from the figure to the vent. Sure, we could imagine interactants who would be completely cynical and detached from the figures they implicitly or explicitly stage, but we already saw that even these interactants would be attached to something, be it only their self interest or whatever egoistical objectives they might have. Going back to the question of cultures in interaction, we see how the ventriloqual perspective thus allows us to analyze interactions while accounting for what apparently holds the interactants or what they hold to – which is often (not always) another way of saying the same thing. Cultural figures, according to this perspective, therefore are things that are typically, traditionally, or usually invoked or convoked in our conversation. In a word, they are literally cultivated in our interactions and this is why we can indeed speak of culture. To illustrate this point, let’s look at one of the key contributions in the field of ethnography of speaking, Gerry Philipsen’s (1992) landmark book Speaking Culturally. Here is what he says in the first pages of his book: After spending several months in Teamsterville, I began to notice there a practice, a habitual way of speaking, reinforced by the expressions of Teamstervillers. It was difficult to detect and not much easier to describe, but it was salient enough that it was hard to ignore, both practically and theoretically. That practice consists of infusing a concern with place into every conversation. In Teamsterville, to my surprise, if one’s interlocutor did not know one’s “nationality” it would be asked at the beginning of the conversation, and it seemed that every reference to a person included a reference to that person’s ethnicity. The same is true for residence: references to where the person lived, or was from, permeated everyday speech. In addition, where persons stand in relation to each other according to a social code of power and position – a person’s place in the social hierarchy – was mentioned directly or indirectly in virtually every conversation in which I participated.  (p. 4)

Although reproducing this sole excerpt does not do justice to the quality and insightfulness of Philipsen’s analyses, this allows me to summarize in one paragraph how a given culture can indeed be detected in interactions. As implicit in Philipsen’s (1992) account, detecting a cultural trait implied his spending several months in Teamsterville, several months that allowed him to notice something that Teamstervillers kept doing and reproducing in their conversations, in this case, “infusing a concern with place into every conversation”



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(p. 4), whether this place concerned matters of nationality, ethnicity, residence, or social hierarchy. What does this mean from a ventriloqual viewpoint? Simply that interactants kept invoking such matters, whether to explain something, argue for a given position, or simply introduce themselves to someone. Implicitly or explicitly invoking such figures was therefore a way to express what mattered or counted for them. Furthermore, the fact that these figures kept being staged in the discussions undermines the “cynical hypothesis,” given that their mobilization in “virtually every conversation in which [Philipsen] participated” (p. 4) proved that they clearly animated the Teamstervillers’ discussions. To speak of such figures or matters only in terms of resources would therefore be a mistake to the extent that their invocation “across interactions” (Sanders & Fitch 2001, p. 265) proves that they also define, in many respects, how these people see themselves and others. In other words, they hold to the Teamstervillers as much as the latter hold to them. These figures are significant – they count, they matter for them – because it is implicitly or explicitly in their name that such and such behaviors will be justified, explained, or accounted for. Using an example taken from Philipsen’s (1992) fieldwork, introducing oneself as a Sicilian, or invoking this figure to speak about oneself, can become a way to justify/explain/account for one’s going to cut an interlocutor’s throat – in this case, Philipsen himself! – because this is what Sicilians are supposed do to “men who invaded their territory and ‘messed with their women’” (p. 3). Sure, invoking the figure of the Sicilian can be seen as a resource in this conversation, but its iteration and reproduction across interactions precisely show that it is more than a resource. This identity, to which he is attached, is supposed to make him say and do things as much as he makes it say and do things. It is because he sees himself as a Sicilian that he can allow himself to say what he says and do what he does. This figure that haunts and inhabits him is supposed to define and authorize, in many respects, his conduct because it proposes as many programs, as many “rights and obligations” that Sicilians ought to follow, according to him. But one could object that speaking of figures in this case is tendentious, given that we are actually talking about identities. According to such an objection, this Teamsterviller does not invoke the figure of the Sicilian, but rather his identity as Sicilian to explain what he is about to do to Philipsen. As long as one speaks of figures such as procedures, rules, collectives, values, and so on, the reasoning seems to hold, one might retort, but here we are dealing with something a priori far less objectivable than an ideology or a principle. This objection is important, and I would even say crucial for the approach I am trying to defend. At this point, it is I think useful to return to Gabriel Tarde (1895/1999) and what he says about having and being:

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So far, all of philosophy has been founded on the verb To be, whose definition seemed to have been the Rosetta’s stone to be discovered. One may say that, if only philosophy had been founded on the verb To have, many sterile discussions, many slowdown of the mind, would have been avoided. From this principle 'I am', it is impossible to deduce any other existence than mine, in spite of all the subtleties of the world. But affirm first this postulate ‘I have’ as the basic fact, and then the had as well as the having are given at the same time as inseparable.  (p. 86, Latour’s 2002 translation)

Such reasoning, which was later implicitly echoed by Greimas (1987, see also Cooren 2000), consists of noticing that whenever we say that A is B (for instance, “I am rich,” “I am naked,” or “I am a professor”), there will always be a way to translate this sentence into A has C or A does not have D (for instance, “I have a lot of money,” “I don’t have any clothes,” or “I have the rank of professor”). Although I do not go so far as saying that being should be reduced to having (or having should be reduced to being, for that matter), Tarde’s teaching is crucial because it invites us to notice that any statement of identity (I am something) can be translated into a statement of possession (I have something). Furthermore, such reasoning allows us to show that any question of identity is a matter of relation to an object, a relation implied by the idea of possession. My being rich implies my possessing money, or more generally, richness; my being naked presupposes my dispossession from clothes; and my being a professor presumes my having this identity or rank, a rank that comes with specific rights and obligations that are supposed to be typical of such distinctiveness, which therefore means that I am also supposed to have such rights and obligations. According to such reasoning, an identity is therefore a figure to the extent that the invocation that one is Sicilian consists of implicitly mobilizing a figure in the name of which one is saying or doing what one is saying or doing. To be sure, this is different from a secretary invoking a policy to turn down someone’s request, but this difference does not imply that in one case, the secretary’s, we are dealing with an objectivable figure (the policy) while in the other case, the Sicilian’s, the “subjective” character of this identity prevents us from speaking in terms of figures. In both cases, being and having are involved. If the secretary can invoke a policy, it is because it is supposed to be his policy, that is, his organization’s policy, and that, as a secretary, that is, as having the identity/status of secretary, he has the obligation to follow it and therefore the right to turn down this request. Acting in the name of this policy allows the secretary to share his turning down the request with the figure he is invoking, that is, the policy, to the extent that this latter authorizes him to do so, to share authorship. According to a ventriloqual analysis, an oscillation is taking place between the secretary and the policy as neither of them can be identified as the absolute origin of the refusal. It is the policy that



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(retrospectively) makes the secretary say what he is saying as much as it is he who makes the policy says what it is, according to him, supposed to say. If Philipsen’s interlocutor can invoke his being a Sicilian, it is because it is supposed to be his (ethnic) identity, an identity that happens to be shared by some other people (hence, its objective dimension) and that also comes with specific rights and obligations (according to him, his obligation to defend “his women” from men like Philipsen and his right to cut invaders’ throats). Acting in the name of this identity thus allows him to share his cutting someone’s throat with this identity figure he is invoking. Speaking of sharing in this case makes sense precisely because this identity comes with rights and obligations, and it is these rights and obligations that, according to him, authorizes or allows him to say what he says and to do what he says he will do.33 The secretary has a policy that he thinks he has to honor and enact while Philipsen’s interlocutor has an identity that he also thinks he has to honor and enact, for another next first time. All identities are figures that can be implicitly or explicitly invoked. Reversely, if all figures are not identities, they imply ones: The secretary is not his policy, but it is as a secretary that he has one to follow. We therefore see that possessions and attributions are varied, even if they all involve figures. While identity figures are supposed to directly define who people are (statuses, ranks, professions, nationalities, genders, sexual orientations, etc.), other forms of figures (procedures, rules, policies, plans, collectives, organizations, desires, etc.) also express an attachment, but it is only indirectly that they express an identity. For instance, we all know of the situation where someone will set herself up as speaking “as a chair” or “as a physician” in order to lend weight to what she is about to say or to specify in what capacity she is speaking. Doing that, according to a ventriloqual analysis, thus consists of invoking figures that are supposed to

33. Some readers might retort that such reasoning implies a form of deresponsibilization. You are saying that this person shares authorship with his figure, which is a way of saying that this figure could also have been considered responsible for the cutting of Philipsen’s throat, had this (very unfortunate) event happened. We will deal with this specific question in the final chapter, but at this point, we could note that indeed this figure of ethnicity/identity could indeed be invoked by this person (or his lawyer) to put his responsibility into perspective. For instance, this person could say, “It’s not my fault, I am a Sicilian! And that’s what Sicilians do to people like Philipsen!” Whether this argument would hold in a court of justice is another question, but we can notice that the sharing of agency does not imply that the person completely loses responsibility. It just qualifies responsibility, by showing that it can also be shared. In a court of justice, responsibilities have to be decided (you are responsible vs. not responsible; you are guilty vs. not guilty), but such decisions have to be made on the basis of specific circumstances (extenuating or aggravating), which, as we will see, are precisely ways of invoking and recognizing circumstantial figures.

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grant some authority to what is put forward. It is not only me, Ms. X, who is now speaking, but also a physician or the chair, with all the rights, obligations, competencies, and expertise typically associated with this identity figure/status/rank. For instance, it is “as the director” that Ms. X can remind her colleagues that they ought to make a decision on a specific issue, which is a way of granting herself the authority to do such reminding; she is authorized/allowed to do so. Similarly, it is “as a physician” that she will advise a friend to consult a specialist, so as to lend weight to her suggestion/invitation. Note also how oscillation/vacillation is taking place, as there is no way to decide who or what is ultimately speaking (the director/physician, Ms. X, her expertise, the obligations she is implicitly voicing, etc.). Furthermore, if she makes her identity figure speak at a specific moment, it is also because such figure is supposed to make her or lead her to speak: As a chair, she knows/thinks she has to remind her colleagues that a decision needs to be made on a specific issue. As a physician, she knows/believes she has to enjoin her friend to consult a specialist. If she is a ventriloquist, a vent, she is also supposed to be a figure, dummy, or prop animated and moved by specific duties/desires/motives typically associated with her identity/status/rank. It is because such an animation is supposed to be happening that authority can be constructed for another next first time. Going back to the interaction between Marius, Robert, and the director, analyzing this exchange from a cultural point of view would therefore consist of identifying the figures that would be typically invoked by these participants, whether implicitly or explicitly. Methodologically speaking, this poses some problems to the extent that I did not spend, contrary to Philipsen, several months with these three participants, which, of course, limits my capacity to identify the iterable, repeatable, typical character of the figures they invoked. However, despite such limitations, we could indeed speculate (and I gladly recognize the speculative nature of what follows) that there was indeed, in the two interactions analyzed in this chapter, typical/iterative/repetitive ways of invoking figures on both sides. For instance, throughout the 3 days I spent in this hospital, I was able to see how the MSF representatives were repeatedly or iteratively positioning themselves as implicitly moved or animated by principles of operativeness and healthiness, something my research assistants and I also noticed throughout the fieldwork we completed with MSF. Reversely, I was also able to notice how the director often tended to invoke various figures (principles, traditions, rules) that could be seen, from MSF’s viewpoint, as slowing down their interventions. This is, for instance, what we saw happening in Excerpt #2 when we noticed that Marius’s intervention about the way the Monday meetings were held could not make sense if he were not positioning himself as speaking in the name of the patients’ welfare and a certain operativeness of the hospital services. Reversely, the director’s defense



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of the Monday meetings consisted of invoking specific instructions (given to the mothers), as well as positioning himself as attached to specific ways and customs and to the necessity of training the personnel. But we could also point to other excerpts to illustrate this typical positioning. In what follows, I will analyze three consecutive excerpts taken from another sequence where Marius, Robert, and the director speak about a nurse that must be hired. Although my analysis runs the risk of being tedious and repetitive, it is I think the price we have to pay if we want to be able to speak of both interactions and cultures. That is, if something like culture does exist (and, of course, it does!), it means that it has somehow to be incarnated/embodied/materialized/cultivated in the interactions we study. MSF Excerpt #3 512 Marius =I have hu practical points uh [on- on the hospital 513 Director [Yeah 514 Marius Uh (.) as usual ((breathing and smiling)) I515 (3.0) ((Marius then has a fit of laughter while looking at the director. 516 He immediately joins both hands on his face as to recompose 517 himself)) 518 Marius Uh ((looking at the director, seriously this time)) Regarding the 519 reorganization at the surgery level= 520 Director =Yeah= 521 Marius =At the surgical service, we brainstormed with the team (.) regard- 522 ing uh:: Papa Nestor= 523 Director =Hmhm 524 Marius Uh so we would have a solution= 525 Director =Hmhm 526 Marius It would be to recruit an additional nurse= 527 Director =Hmhm 528 Marius To uh to put in the roll ((swallowing)) and use the:: old Nestor there 529 to uh to make bandages in fact= 530 Director =Hm= 531 Marius During the day shift (.) and who would be in charge of the bandages 532 because we will certainly have a lot of bandages to make (.) if we do 533 more operations, there will be more post-operation bandages (.) 534 both for the- for the people who are in the service and the people 535 who come- who have been discharged from the service and who 536 come back for the bandages. 537 Director hmhm 538 (1.0) 539 Marius So it’s our idea

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Let’s first note how Marius presents what he is about to say as “practical points uh on- on the hospital” (line 512), which, we could speculate, could be meant as a way to imply that MSF is, of course, animated by practical and operative matters (and not by bureaucratic ones, for instance). In interviews and throughout my observations, Marius indeed kept complaining about the director’s “bureaucratic attitude,” an attitude that Marius considered to be a way of resisting anything MSF was trying to achieve in the hospital. Note also how he says, just after, “Uh (.) as usual” (line 514), which marks the iterative and repeated character of the type of situation he finds himself to be in. It is therefore as if he were implying or ventriloquizing that again he has to talk about practical matters, matters that again run the risk of being slowed down by the director’s attitude. This interpretation, which could be considered too speculative, tends to be confirmed by his quick fit of laughter on lines 515–517, a fit that he immediately tries to control and repress by putting both hands on his mouth (given, of course, the face threatening potential such an “explosion” might have). A way to make sense of this nervous laughter, which animates him at that moment, is that it marks what appears to be the somewhat discouraging character of the situation (as if he were ventriloquizing, “Here it is again!”). Having managed to recompose himself, he then looks, this time seriously, at the director and tackle his first point: what he presents as “the reorganization at the surgery level” (lines 518–519), especially regarding the case of an old nurse called Papa Nestor, a reorganization for which he says, “we would have a solution” (line 524, my italics), which would be to recruit an additional nurse. Note how he immediately justifies this hiring by implicitly invoking the hospital’s operativeness: “If we do more operations, there will be more post-operation bandages” (lines 532–533). But note also how Marius presents this solution as their solution, that is the solution that MSF and the surgery team came up with (“we brainstormed with the team (.) regarding uh:: Papa Nestor” [lines 521–522, my italics]; “Uh so we would have a solution” [line 524, my italics]; “So, it’s our idea” [line 539, my italics]). Throughout this first intervention, punctuated by the director’s “Yeahs” and “Hmhms,” we then see Marius implicitly positioning MSF as moved or animated by practical concerns not only for the hospital’s operativeness, but also for its employees’ welfare. The old Papa Nestor and the other nurses run indeed the risk of being unable to cope with the rising number of bandages to be made and we therefore have to hire a new nurse. As we saw in our previous analyses, such positioning allows him to grant himself some authority. If he allows/authorizes himself to put forward a solution regarding the reorganization of the surgery service, it is because he presents or positions himself as authorized to do so, that is, as sharing authorship with other



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figures that lend weight to what he is putting forward. Here, these other figures turn out to be (a) the operativeness of the hospital, (b) the (members of the) surgery service (for whom/which he implicitly positions himself as their/its spokesperson), and (c) the welfare of the hospital employees. If he ventriloquizes these three figures in this excerpt, that is, if he makes them speak, it is also because they are supposed to make him speak, to ventriloquize him, to animate him. Indeed, it is supposed to be out of concern for them that he is now putting forward this solution. In other words, it is as if he were saying that the operativeness of the hospital, the surgery service, and the welfare of the hospital employees required the solution he/they now propose. In terms of culture, we thus see Marius implicitly cultivating the figures of healthiness and operativeness, something that was noticed in the previous excerpt. Note, at this point, that we do not need to choose between a cultural and a conversational analysis to the extent that implicitly invoking these figures in these specific turns of talk is far from being neutral or inconsequential. In other words, we can imagine that if Marius invokes them to justify what he is putting forward it is also because he thinks that such figures are supposed to also animate his interlocutor. However, reducing such figures to mere resources would be, I think, a mistake to the extent that the repetitive/iterative character of their invocation/ mobilization implies a relative attachment, on Marius’s part, for these figures. If he appears to hold to them, it seems also that they hold to him. But here is how the conversation unfolds: MSF Excerpt #4 539 Marius So it’s our idea 540 (3.0) 541 Director Yes I think uh this was the first idea?= 542 Marius =Yeah I [think that543 Director  [We said that we needed to have an additional nurse uh to 544 fill uh= 545 Marius =The- Well= 546 Director =The void= 547 Marius =Well, [the void 548 Director [Left by Papa Nestor= 549 Marius =But uh what we did not know is what we were doing uh with Papa 550 Nestor (.) but now= 551 Director =Uhum= 552 Marius =The team thinks that it is a good idea uh to keep him in the surgery 553 service. 554 Director =Mm=

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555 Marius 556 557 558 Director 559 Marius 560 Director 561 Marius 562 563 Director

=For the bandages because it- it will certainly be an activity that will also be uh (.) intense= =intense= =Yeah= =The fact is that uh the number of operations that increases (.) hmhm

As we see, while Marius was presenting his proposition of hiring a new nurse as their (MSF and the surgery team’s) idea, the director responds by implicitly redefining what was just proposed as the idea that was already discussed during their previous meeting. As the director points out, this is actually an idea that both MSF and he already talked about (“We said that we needed to have an additional nurse uh to fill uh,” lines 543–544, my italics), which marks a form of (partial) reappropriation on the director’s part. The director is therefore quick to reframe/reconfigure the situation in such a way that the idea/solution put forward now is also his idea/solution, a move that implicitly stages him as participating in the resolution of the hospital’s problems (i.e., he is one of the key figures, a figure that was missing from Marius’s presentation). Furthermore, such a reframing/reconfiguring allows him to implicitly convey that if MSF is animated by practical concerns related the hospital operativeness and its employees’ welfare, he is too. In other words, such a move allows him to balance, so to speak, the forces involved. While we saw that Marius was implicitly speaking in the name of three figures and thus lending weight to his proposition, the director’s reaction allows him (the director) to side with these very figures. In other words, he can also appropriate them. We then see Marius responding by specifying that he was more precisely referring to Papa Nestor’s case, a case that, contrary to the hiring of a new nurse, had not been settled during the last meeting (“But uh what we did not know is what we were doing uh with Papa Nestor (.) but now,” lines 549–550). This precision then allows him to reposition himself as speaking in the name of the surgery team, which “thinks that it is a good idea uh to keep him in the surgery service… for the bandages” (lines 552–555). By once again ventriloquizing the surgery team, Marius can thus stage himself as animated/moved by this team’s concrete and practical needs, needs which he then justifies by invoking the intensity of the bandage activities (line 559) and the increasing number of operations (line 561).



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We therefore see that Marius implicitly presents again the hospital operativeness as an important figure that needs to be dealt with. It is such operativeness that requires that Papa Nestor be retained for the bandages and that a nurse be hired. But if such a figure is again cultivated by Marius, we can contend that it is also because he hopes that his interlocutor cultivates it too, that is, that he is also concerned by/attached to it, be it only because he is not only the hospital director, but also a physician, two statuses that come with specific rights and obligations, which, of course, include the imperative to maintain the hospital operativeness and the employees’ welfare. If these are good reasons to make these propositions, it is because these reasons are assumed to be shared, that is, they are part of what is supposed to be the hospital culture. The exchange then carries on:

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MSF Excerpt #5 563 Director hmhm 564 Marius So now for the nurse that is missing since you still had some names 565 to propose to us the last time 566 Director hmhm 567 (1.0) 568 Marius I look at the files euh the files and the people’s names 569 Director hmhm 570 Marius So- so that we can have an interview with these people (.) to uh (.) 571 well to choose the additional nurse 572 (0.5) 573 Director OK uh [for us there is no problem= 574 Marius  [We have575 Marius =We said the last time that you had= 576 Director =mm= 577 Marius =to respect a little uh at the ethnic level 578 Director hmhm 579 Marius Here (.) in- in the region 580 Director hmhm 581 Marius That you had some people uh [of uh 582 Director [I am going uh 583 Marius =[of 584 Director  [to select some [uh 585 Marius [Hutu origin 586 Director And send them to you 587 Marius Yeah 588 Director but of Hutu origin= 589 Marius =OK= ←

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590 Director =((turning his head towards Robert)) So that there be a balance 591 because in the region uh we must always have [uh ((moving his 592 palms from right to left and from left to right as to express the ques- 593 tion of balance)) 594 Robert [This, we com595 pletely agree on this point [uh 596 Director  [a balance 597 Robert We= 598 Marius =Well this is why, since you had names [we are going to start with 599 these ones 600 Robert [As far as possible we hire 601 (.) locally uh 602 Marius Yeah 603 Robert We want to work with the people locally this is::

Marius finally gets to the point where he alludes to what he needs from the director. But note that no explicit request is made as he just mentions “some names” that the director “had to propose to [MSF] the last time” (lines 564–565), which implicitly and incidentally marks the fact that the director was supposed to do something for them, specifically provide MSF with a list of names for the nurse to be hired, something that he apparently did not do. At this stage, one cannot help but notice how Marius is very careful, this time, not to position his interlocutor as subjected to, embedded in a program of action for which Marius would be implicitly positioned as the potential evaluator, a “mistake” we saw him making in MSF Excerpt #1. Seeing no explicit response from his interlocutor (an absence marked by a 1.0 silence on line 567), Marius then carries on by telling him what he will do when these names are communicated to him (“I look at the files euh the files and the people’s names… so- so that we can have an interview with these people (.) to uh (.) well to choose the additional nurse” (lines 568–571)), as to mark the missing link in the program of action he is alluding to. In keeping with what appeared to be one of the typical positionings of MSF throughout all the interactions I observed, Marius’s intervention thus appears again marked by a real concern for the operative character of their interventions. Some programs of action have to be carried out in order to ensure the operational functioning of this hospital and it is, in many respects, in the name of these programs that Marius positions his various requests to the director throughout the excerpts we studied so far. Interestingly, we then see his interlocutor responding by marking the unproblematic (or even uneventful) character of what is requested (“OK uh for us there is no problem,” line 573), which implicitly defuses the potentially contentious aspect



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of the situation. In a way, it is as if the director were telling Marius and Robert that this is “much ado about nothing” and that the hiring is not interrupted or slowed down by his lack of action, contrary to what Marius might have implied up to this point. While Marius appears animated by a concern for this hiring, a concern related to the fact that the director should have already selected a nurse since the last meeting, the director responds by affirming the absence of a problem, at least for them (“for us there is no problem”). In other words, there might be a problem for you, MSF, but for us, the hospital, there is none. In terms of figures and balance of power, such a move on the director’s part is interesting to the extent that it again amounts to countering Marius’s implicit positioning. As we saw, throughout this sequence (and throughout many sequences I recorded), Marius repeatedly positioned himself as speaking in the name of a certain operativeness of the hospital and on behalf of the working conditions of its employees, a positioning that not only is supposed to lend weight to what he is putting forward, but also amounts to implicitly setting up his interlocutor as not necessarily concerned by these two questions (otherwise, why would Marius have to remind him of such imperatives/obligations?). By responding that “for [them] there is no problem” (line 573), the director thus “deflates the balloon,” so to speak, that is, he reconfigures the situation by questioning the implicit opposition that Marius has set up between their respective interests. Since there is no problem, as far as they (the hospital) are concerned, the balance of power/figures can indeed be reestablished. You, Marius, were implying that the operativeness of the hospital and its employees’ working conditions required that I, the director, proposed some names, something I haven’t done yet, which you seem to interpret as a problem. But since there is no problem, I cannot be identified as an obstacle for you and these two figures you are setting up. I am on their side too and being on their side means that I will, of course, propose names, given that I am also animated by those concerns. Marius then mentions something he says they discussed during their last meeting, which is that the director has to respect the ethnicities represented in the hospital in each hiring (“We said the last time that you had…to respect a little uh at the ethnic level,” lines 575–577), in this case, a Hutu nurse must be hired. It is hard to know why Marius raises this question at this point (maybe to indirectly remind the director what he is supposed to do regarding this specific hiring), but beyond this question, this turn of talk informs us that the director raised or invoked the question of ethnicity during their last meeting. In other words, while MSF just wanted to hire a new nurse for the surgery service (a plan they made out of concern for the operativeness of the hospital and the working conditions of its employees), the director mentioned that this nurse had to be a Hutu, an imperative he put forward in the name of a principle of equal representation of the

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various ethnic groups at the hospital. We even see the director turning his head to remind Robert, Marius’s boss (who was not present during the previous meeting), of this principle when he says, “So that there be a balance because in the region uh we must always have uh… a balance” (lines 590–596). The question of ethnicity thus matters or counts for the director in any hiring, which is, of course, perfectly understandable given the atmosphere of tensions and wars that this region of the world has experienced, especially over the past 10 years. North Kivu is indeed the Congolese region that borders Rwanda, which was, as we know, the theater of genocides between Hutus and Tutsis from 1994 to 1996. Following this conflict, 2 million Hutus fled from Rwanda, marking the Great Lakes refugee crisis, which led to the first and second Congo Wars (respectively from 1996 to 1997 and from 1998 to 2003), two conflicts that mainly took place in this region. There is no doubt then that the principle of equal representation inhabits or haunts the director’s mind, which could certainly explain why this figure was staged during the last meeting and is staged again during this one. In terms of culture, one could therefore contend that being sensitive to the question of ethnicity is, of course, almost “natural” in this kind of environment (and note here that I purposely associate nature and culture in this same sentence as to deconstruct this (too obvious) opposition. If culture becomes a question of “typical figures,” it means that such figures inhabit one’s world, that they are part of one’s physis, the word Greeks used to speak of nature, i.e., they are natural elements of one’s environment). Anybody who lives in this area learns that she or he has to naturally cultivate/care for/attend to/take into account this question/figure in most interactions. This figure counts or matters, which means that its reality, its affordance, its objectivity is a priori as obvious and factual as the numbers of civilians and fighters who daily die of the conflicts in this region. Note also how this question is immediately acknowledged by Robert when we see him responding, “This, we completely agree on this point uh” as to mark the fact that, for once, they appear to agree on something, which is that the question/ figure of ethnicity and the principles associated with it are indeed important and that they should without doubt count or matter in the process of hiring. Among the figures that can potentially populate this interaction, this one thus appears to be the object of consensus around the table. The principle of equal representation of the ethnic groups at the hospital therefore has a say on the hiring of the nurse; both parties agree. In other words, it is part of the landscape or what Keenoy and Oswick (2004) insightfully call the “textscape.” Through the explicit recognition of this figure/question, MSF, through one of its representatives, Robert, thus marks its sensitiveness to the cultural and even political context of its humanitarian intervention.



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Interestingly, we then see Marius jump into this exchange by rearticulating this question/figure of ethnicity with his program of action – “Well this is why, since you had names we are going to start with these ones” (lines 598–599) – while Robert seizes this opportunity to reaffirm one of the key principles of his organization, which is that they should try to hire local people whenever possible (“As far as possible we hire (.) locally uh,” lines 600–601; “We want to work with the people locally this is::” lines 603). To the figure of the principle of ethnic representation invoked by the director, Robert thus responds by implicitly staging another figure, which could be called “the local hiring principle,” that was also very familiar, that is, iterated several times throughout the interactions I observed and the documents I read about the humanitarian organization. Both parties are supposed to be animated by their respective principles, which here happen to be compatible: Hiring a Hutu, according to the ethnic principle invoked by the director, is a way to hire locally, which happens, according to Robert, to respect one of MSF’s principles. As we see through this specific example, agreeing on something means that some kind of translation can be found between the principles, premises, values, in other words, figures that each party is supposed to represent/incarnate/embody (see also Giroux 2006; Giroux & Taylor 2002). Hiring a Hutu respects both the director’s principle of ethnic representation and MSF’s hiring principle, offering a passage point (Callon 1986) where both parties can collaborate. Following this agreement, here is how this sequences ends.

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604 Marius Because we have other uh we always have other people to call in also 605 we= 606 Director =Hmhm= 607 Marius =Since you have some, we are going to start with yours 608 Director Hmhm 609 Marius And then after subsequently we’ll see 610 Director OK (.) That way, we set uh ((pointing his pen on his notebook as to 611 imply that he is ready to write something)) a deadline? 612 Marius Well this if you could give me the names of- the names of these 613 people’s files uh today uh 614 (.) 615 Marius That [would be great 616 Director [Today uh this will be difficult because we must grade their 617 exams 618 Marius hmhm 619 Director And after uh the grading now I can send you uh the people for uh 620 the interview or we can do them together, this way uh 621 Marius hm

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622 Director The: malaria the theoretical level and the practical level and after we 623 choose one that we appoint to the surgery 624 Marius We might not have the same uh schedules so therefore evaluate on 625 your side and send us the= 626 Director =hum= 627 Marius =the files (.) we will do the interview and we’ll see 628 Director OK [so uh:: 629 Marius [This is not= 630 Director =During the next week? 631 Marius Beginning of next week then 632 Director OK= ((writing on his notebook)) 633 Marius =Because we, in fact, we have to:: meanwhile the service, it does not 634 run very well. 635 (1.0) 636 Marius We work it out with the nurses but we would like (.) it to work a lit- 637 a little better 638 Director hmhm 639 Marius We are going to settle this thing

←

As we see, Marius carries on by reintroducing, once again, his program of action in the discussion, mentioning that other candidates can always be called in by MSF (“Because we have other uh we always have other persons to call in also we,” lines 604–605), which signals to the director that their getting the Hutu candidates from him could be understood as a kind of detour vis-à-vis MSF’s normal procedures, a detour that somehow demonstrates their good will and the fact that they care for their collaboration (as he points out, “Since you have some, we are going to start with yours,” line 607). At this point, we might again note a polarization in the discussion, given that we now have, on the one hand, the hospital candidates and, on the other hand, the MSF candidates, and that the candidate(s) selected by the hospital will then be evaluated by MSF (“And then after subsequently we’ll see ” line 609, meaning we’ll see if your candidates measure up to our criteria of selection). We then see the director pointing his pen to his notebook as he asks if they could “set uh a deadline” (lines 610–611), that is, a date by which he should have selected the Hutu candidate. This idea of a “deadline” is then somehow countered by Marius who immediately points out that today actually “would be great” (line 615). Although apparently insignificant, this brief exchange is a clear illustration of the (cultural) divide between the two parties: While the director is ready to (bureaucratically) inscribe a deadline in his notebook for the selection of his candidate, the MSF representative want to have it right now, moved as he



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appears to be by what he says is the relative urgency of the situation (as he will mention at the end of the excerpt. See lines 633–634 and 636–637). This divide is confirmed by what follows, as the director retorts that, “Today uh this will be difficult because we must grade their exams.” It is therefore as if the two parties were again ventriloquizing two “logics” that appear to confront each other: the MSF logic of “getting things done quickly and effectively” versus the hospital’s one, which proceeds in its own pace, according to its own bureaucratic procedures. As the director will say twice later in the discussion, “let’s give time to time” (Laissons le temps au temps, lines 1665 and 1689), which can be understood as a way of saying that things have to be done their own time, that is, without precipitation, contrary to what Marius appears to be pushing for. The director thus positions himself as speaking in the name of a certain respect for the due (bureaucratic) procedures. It is indeed only “after uh the grading” that he “can send [MSF] uh the people for uh the interview or we can do them together, this way uh” (lines 619–620). Note how this response also allows him to implicitly question the procedure that Marius proposes, as he proposes to “do [the interviews] together” (line 620). The due procedure of selection is then reaffirmed when the director carries on by saying, “The: malaria the theoretical level and the practical level and after we choose one that we appoint to the surgery.” Things take time and we cannot choose these candidates today. Interestingly, we then see Marius retorting that selecting together the candidates will not be possible (“We might not have the same uh schedules so therefore evaluate on your side and send us the… the files (.) we will do the interview and we’ll see,” lines 624–627), which again marks the divide and polarization between the two parties. It is therefore as if Marius were ventriloquizing, “You are moved by your own constraints and procedures, we have our own, so do your work, we will do ours,” which could be another way of saying, “You are throwing a wrench into our work. Don’t count on me to work with you closely on this hiring.” The director finally acknowledges the procedure Marius put forward and proposes a rough deadline (“During the next week,” line 630), to which Marius symptomatically replies by proposing “Beginning of next week then” (line 631), again marking the relative urgency of this matter. We then see the director writing the information in his notebook, while Marius justifies why this might indeed be urgent (“Because we, in fact, we have to:: meanwhile the service, it does not run very well” lines 633–634; “We work it out with the nurses but we would like (.) it to work a lit- a little better,” lines 636–637). Again, it is in the name of a certain operativeness that his request is made. In other words, it is what makes him so pushy vis-à-vis this question. So what about culture? Or more precisely what about cultural figures? Again, responding to this question would normally imply that I had spent several weeks

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or even months not only in this hospital, but also in the region where this interaction took place, which was not the case. It is only after spending enough time with these speech communities that I would have been able to detect a certain iteration or repetition in their respective discourses and interactions. Having said that, I can safely say that MSF’s way of presenting the situation was typical of its normal way of proceeding during their humanitarian interventions. In other words, the various fieldwork experiences that my students and I had with MSF interventions allow/authorize me to say that the concern for operativeness and effectiveness that unfolded or was revealed in this interaction analysis was indeed typical of MSF’s discourse. Throughout the many trips into the field that we completed with this humanitarian organization (whether in Sri Lanka, Niger, Paris, Bordeaux, or Jordan), we were indeed able to observe how MSF representatives appeared to be driven or guided by these figures, making these figures typical “matters of concern” for this organization. What is, however, more difficult to define is the extent to which the figures that the director implicitly invoked in the interaction I observed were typical of a given speech community that he would represent. Even trickier would be to identify what speech community we are talking about, that is, whether this way of invoking the bureaucratic procedures was, for instance, typical of what a hospital director of this region would do in similar circumstances. But beyond these methodological difficulties (which are real and definitely limitative), what seems important is what a ventriloqual analysis can help us identify in terms of cultures. The key idea here is “cultivating,” that is, the fact that given figures appear to be looked after, maintained, nurtured, developed, cared for, or sustained by what sociolinguists and ethnographers call speech communities. Throughout our analyses, we saw that some figures did seem to be respectively cultivated by the two parties, to the extent that these figures were repeatedly/iteratively invoked and convoked, whether implicitly or explicitly, by the interactants. Staging or ventriloquizing the figure of ethnicity is, for instance, typical of this region of the world, given what we know of the numerous wars and conflicts that are and have been plaguing North Kivu at least for the past 40 years. It is a figure that counts and must be attended to if one does not want to run the risk of creating potential sources of conflicts. To be culturally sensitive, on MSF’s part, thus consists of acknowledging the importance of this figure/question, which, as we saw, is precisely what Robert and Marius did in the previous interaction we studied. Acknowledging the existence of a figure thus amounts to recognizing that it indeed counts or matters and that many decisions made in this region of the world must take it into account. In terms of methodology, we can therefore distinguish between different types of figures. Some of them will tend to be attended to in almost every discourse or



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interaction taking place in a given region, which means that they become part of the landscape/textscape and function as what could be called a cultural trait. For instance, attending to questions/figures of ethnicity can be typical of a given region of the world, which then marks the fact that these figures are valued or respected by the members of this speech community. If we therefore start to hear that they keep being staged (implicitly or explicitly) in the various interactions we witness, there is a good chance that these figures therefore qualify as cultural figures, that is, figures that count or matter for a given speech community. But note that a figure could also remain at a more personal level. In other words, a figure can be cultivated by one person because this person thinks that it should count or matter in various situations. Can we speak about culture in this case (given that we speak of “cultivating”)? I presume that most of us would respond in the negative, although Umberto Eco (1979) did not hesitate to speak in terms of culture to account for the repetition of a practice at an individual level. Indeed if someone starts to cultivate a given figure (whether under the form of a value, practice, principle, procedure, etc.), the very fact that she is cultivating it in her discourse or practice means that this figure starts to exist and count, at least for her, which would then mean that it is her culture (in the broad sense of the term culture that I am using, i.e., anything that is cultivated). But of course, such figures really start to count or matter when they become shared, discussed, attended to, cared for, or co-constructed by a speech community. In other words, it is only when these figures start to be cultivated by others that their existence become relatively unproblematic and taken for granted. Methodologically speaking, this means that we indeed have to spend some time with a given speech community to start to recognize the figures that they stage and cultivate in their interactions and practices.34 In my case, I was not able to see if the bureaucratic figures mobilized by the hospital director were indeed typical of what, for instance, hospital directors of this region (and others) of the Democratic Republic of the Congo would typically cultivate. In other words, is 34. As Boris Brummans pointed out in a personal communication, we, as analysts, need to become ventriloquated like the people we are studying, yet also be able to point out/to this ventriloquation. Going native would mean in this regard that one can no longer ventriloquate the people one is studying (or other figures), that one has become entirely ventriloquated – see Borges’ (1999) story The Ethnographer. In this case, there is no more (or little) vacillation. Being aware of or raising awareness about the vacillation that occurs between vent and figure is thus something we seem to be trying to do as analysts, yet we always risk losing our perspective, becoming enveloped by what we are studying. We could even contend that we are always already enveloped, which makes our ventriloquation questionable. Perhaps the only thing we can do as analysts is to follow Derrida and to recall that ventriloquating and being ventriloquated, both in terms of the figures we study and ourselves as figures, always are in deconstructrion.

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it typical to be overly35 concerned with rules, policies, ways and customs, protocols, and procedures while your interlocutor seems mainly motivated or driven by matters of operativeness and effectiveness? Some might retort that any hospital director put in a similar situation would have reacted in a similar way, which would then mean that it would not be so much a matter of culture as it would be a matter of institution and profession/responsibilities/status. Being a hospital director means that you are supposed to be the advocate of the hospital procedures, protocols, and ways and customs, which would explain why the director cultivates them in his discourse. One could even go so far as saying that, to a certain extent, such bureaucratic figures do not need to be cultivated in order to exist, as they have been and are instituted, in other words, established and stabilized (for instance, most of them have been written down in documents). According to such a perspective, for the director to cultivate such figures is “normal,” “instituted,” “taken for granted,” and such attitudes are expected whether we live in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or in any other part of the world. It is part of what it means to be a hospital director. My point is not to take sides on this issue, as I do not have the data to support one hypothesis over the other, but it is rather to point out that a ventriloqual analysis can help us solve these issues in a very concrete way as we can unfold in various discourses and interactions typical ways of speaking and writing, that is, typical ways of staging figures and typical figures. Whether these figures (or ways of staging figures) are cultural (i.e., cultivated by one or several persons and not by others) or even institutional (i.e., instituted in a given society, profession, or practice) is an empirical question that can be solved if some time is spent to attend to their staging.

4.5

Conclusion

As I have tried to show in this chapter, ventriloquism appears to be a ubiquitous phenomenon in interaction and dialogue as any act of communication consists of implicitly or explicitly making beings speak or say things, beings that, inversely, 35. Of course, I am aware that the term overly implies that I am taking MSF’s viewpoint in this situation. For the director, as I learned in an interview I conducted with him, it is not a matter of being overly concerned by procedures and rules as it is a matter of making sure that they are respected and attended to. I am still using the term overly to mark what could count as a cultural trait or figure, since it is precisely in the difference of concern/value/attachment that a figure usually appears “cultural.” In other words, it is when a figure appears overcultivated (or at least more cultivated than we are accustomed to) that we tend to recognize what appears to be representative of a given culture.



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also make us speak or say things. As we saw, two forms of ventriloquism were identified, what I called downstream and upstream forms of ventriloquism. In the downstream form of ventriloquism, we, as analysts, focus on what is said, written or, more generally, expressed (by an intonation, a gesture, a body position, etc.) by a given interlocutor, which then allows us to identify what a specific turn of talk, text, intonation, or gesture makes its producer say, or inversely, what a given interlocutor makes a specific turn of talk, text, or intonation/gesture say. As pointed out in our analysis of ventriloquism, a vacillation or oscillation is always taking place as whatever or whoever is positioned, as the figure can, under another description, become the vent. Focusing on the downstream form of ventriloquism thus helps us to see that we are, to a certain extent, at the mercy of what we appear to say, write, or express, given the conventional/institutional character of meaning (cf. Chapter 2). Whether it was Marius’s intention to position the hospital director as having to do something for him or for MSF, that is, as being subjected or submitted to MSF’s program of action, does not ultimately matter, as we saw that it was how it could be reasonably and accountably interpreted, not only by the director himself, but also by whoever observed this interaction. Whether we like it or not, the semiotic beings we produce in interaction make us do things (we are then their dummies while they are our ventriloquists) as much as we make them do things (in which case, they are our dummies while we are their ventriloquists). Of course, we have ways of repairing misunderstandings, but the very fact that such repairs exist proves the relative autonomy of the semiotic beings we produce in interaction. Furthermore, we also saw how this relative autonomy allows the interactants to let what they say or write speak for itself, that is, it allows them to vehicle messages that cannot always be overtly expressed. What Katambwe and Taylor (2006) call the subtext of any interaction becomes, in our vocabulary, the text that interactants ventriloquize in their discussions. It is very often a text about rights and obligations, as pointed out by Katambwe and Taylor, a text that often needs to remain implied, folded, or implicit in our discussions. For instance, we saw how the director could ventriloquize a certain resistance to what Marius (and MSF) was proposing, a resistance that he, of course, never explicitly mentioned. A ventriloqual analysis, in its downstream form, thus focuses on what various turns of talk, (oral and written) texts, and gestures/intonations/facial expressions literally do or perform in a given interaction, which then allows us to reconstruct the work of exappropriation or exattribution that is constantly at stake in any discussion. Reversely, focusing on the upstream form of ventriloquism amounts to reconstructing the various beings that get implicitly or explicitly staged in interactions. Methodologically speaking, this consists of identifying in the name of what or whom a given interlocutor appears to speak. As we saw, the list of beings that

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interactants ventriloquize is a priori infinite, even if we were able to recognize some types or categories. Based on the MSF interactions we studied, we could see that people often position themselves as speaking in the name of principles, values, or ideals (equity or operativeness, for instance), in the name of facts (facts that are often presented as speaking for themselves), in the name of other people or collectives (the surgery team, for instance), or in the name of policies, contracts, norms, and rules (a protocol, for instance). My point is not to offer a typology of the various beings that can be ventriloquized in our discussions, but just to highlight this ever-present activity that consists of (often implicitly) positioning ourselves as acting or speaking for other beings, whether they are collectives, conceptual, contractual, factual, or human. As pointed out in this chapter, one of the analytical payoffs of this type of upstream analysis is that it allows us to identify effects of authority/power to the extent that speaking in the name of other beings allows interlocutors to lend weight to what they are putting forward in their turns of talk (see also Grillo 2005). While conversation analysis and ethnomethodology have often been accused of being ill-equipped to deal with questions of power and authority, we see that recognizing ventriloqual effects amounts to identifying the various beings/figures that are presented as speaking with the interactant who stages them. Instead of reducing conversations to two or more interactants speaking to each other, this type of analysis thus allows us to acknowledge all the various beings/figures that, by their implicit or explicit staging, are also talking or saying things. Lending weight to a given position or stance thus amounts to staging/ventriloquizing beings/figures that also appear to support what is put forward, whether they be facts, other people, documents, collectives, values, or principles. All these beings are supposed to add their own weight (importance, significance, worth) to the balance of power that can be at stake in any discussion. To a certain extent, the reason why conversation analysis and ethnomethodology could appear illequipped to deal with these questions is that these approaches never went as far as acknowledging these various beings/figures that are often folded into our conversations. But once they are unfolded, that is, once we can, as analysts, make implicit beings more explicit, we see that such effects of power/authority are constitutive of the interactional scene.36 Having said that, it is also important to acknowledge that some effects of authority or power do not rest on what is said or written in a given interaction, and this is where Derrida’s (1994) notion of spectrality becomes especially interesting. The scene of dialogue and communication is a scene haunted by various beings 36. On these notions of fold and folding, I cannot but refer to Deleuze’s (1988) book titled, The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque.



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that are sometimes (explicitly or implicitly) staged in what we say, but that also sometimes remain mute or voiceless. For instance, at no point did Marius and Robert position themselves as speaking in the name of MSF. Similarly, at no point did the director presented himself as speaking in the name of the hospital. In other words, such figures did not have to be explicitly or implicitly staged in what was said in order to be (spectrally) present and effective. The director, of course, knew that Marius and Robert were representing MSF, while Marius and Robert, of course, knew that the director was representing the hospital. To a certain extent, having to remind his interlocutors that he was the director of his hospital would have been a bad sign for his authority in that it would have amounted to questioning the taken-for-grantedness of this status/rank/ title/identity.37 Any ventriloqual analysis should therefore be very sensitive to the fact that some specific figures can remain silent or voiceless in a given interaction, which does not prevent them from being active in a specific debate or conversation (for more details on these effects, see Benoit-Barné & Cooren 2009, as well as Faihurst & Cooren 2009). Being sensitive to these effects of spectrality thus consists of noticing how a specific figure (a rank, for instance) appears to be consequential in the way a situation is defined or evolves. As long as this figure appears to be recognized by the interactants, it can become part of the scene, it can matter, it can count, even if at no point, the said figure was explicitly or implicitly voiced by at least one of the interlocutors (see also the excellent article by Aakhus 2001). What this means is that such figures do not need to be ventriloquized to the extent that they literally speak for themselves through what interlocutors know of the situation at hand. What this reflection on power and authority also leads us to recognize is that the figures that interactants ventriloquize do not necessarily add the weight their producer think they might have. In keeping with Taylor and Van Every’s (2000) 37. Here, I am reminded of an anecdote that took place in a 1986 televised debate between Laurent Fabius, who was then the prime minister of France, and Jacques Chirac, who was the leader of the official opposition. At a certain point in the debate, Chirac complained about the fact that his adversary kept interrupting him, which prompted him to say, “Then, be kind, be kind, and let me speak, stop intervening constantly like the yappy little dog, will you?” (“Alors, soyez gentil, soyez gentil de me laisser parler, de cesser d’intervenir incessamment un peu comme le roquet, n’est ce pas?”), to which Fabius famously replied, “Listen, I remind you that you are speaking to the prime minister of France” (“Écoutez, je vous rappelle que vous parlez au premier ministre de la France”). This reply proved to be disastrous for Fabius whose rating plummeted in the polls, while Chirac’s started to increase (see Ghiglione 1989). Invoking the figure of the prime minister in a debate that was contractually supposed to stage two party leaders was interpreted by many as a fault on the prime minister’s part. Some figures, even if they are hauntingly present, tend to be better kept silent…

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reflection on co-orientation, we should not forget that figures and their respective weight/importance/worth will have to be negotiated between or at least accepted by the various parties in presence. Staging or ventriloquizing a given figure does not necessarily mean that it will end up counting or mattering in the discussion or debate. As any rhetorician knows, reasons are good because they are considered to be good not only by the person who put them forward but also and maybe especially by her audience or interlocutors (Fisher 1978; Wallace 1963). Since any reason invoked by an interactant is a potential figure, a key aspect of our analyses will consist of noticing whether or not these figures appear to be recognized and accepted by the interlocutors. The type of analysis I propose in this book thus helps us repopulate the interactional or dialogical scene, but it should be well understood that people have to agree on who or what populates this scene. For instance, we saw that, throughout the excerpts we studied, the MSF representatives and the hospital director appeared to disagree about the values, worth, and importance of the figures that each party was respectively invoking. For instance, invoking the ways and customs of the hospital could have appeared to be a good move on the director’s part, but it did not seem to make much difference in the way Marius saw the situation. In some cases, we saw, however, that some figures appeared to be acknowledged by both parties, for instance, the principle of equal ethnic representation. This reflection on figure recognition brings us to the question of culture, which was also addressed in this chapter. As we saw, one of the interesting ways to mobilize this approach to discourse and interaction consists of noticing that figures can be cultural to the extent that they appear to be cultivated by the people we observe. In keeping with Sanders and Fitch’s (2001) and Carbaugh’s (2005) reflections on cultural premises, we saw that typical figures can be reconstructed or unfolded from the way people talk with each other. According to a ventriloqual analysis, these figures should not only be seen as typical resources or figures that can be invoked, but also as the vents that make interlocutors say or do specific things. In other words, the oscillation/vacillation that was noticed in any form of ventriloquism allows us to counter, so to speak, the instrumental vision of culture that is sometimes implicit in ethnographic studies of communication. Hence, identifying cultural figures in a given stretch of talk does not force us to reduce a discussion to a strategic endeavor where interactants only mobilize beings (principles, values, norms, facts, etc.) that help them defend their own stance or promote their own position. On the contrary, it also allows us identify what appears to inhabit or haunt the people we are observing. As we saw, if someone implicitly or explicitly invokes a given principle (equity, for instance) – in other words, if she positions herself as speaking in its name or for it – it also often means that she is moved by this principle because she is attached to it. Speaking



Chapter 4.  Ventriloquism or the ecstatic dimension of communication 139

only in terms of resources does not do justice to the fact that these figures also are full-fledged actors that influence the way people talk and behave. Studying culture, according to a ventriloqual perspective, thus consists of identifying these beings that people cultivate/nurture/promote/develop not only in their conversations, but, more generally, in their practices and behaviors. These beings can indeed be artifactual (a specific type of pottery, weapon, or comb), conceptual (a specific value like the concern with place that Philipsen 1992, identified in most conversations he studied in Teamsterville), or even behavioral (a typical gesture like the one that consists of holding your own forearm with your left hand while shaking someone else’s hand, a practice I noticed when lower-level employees were greeting me when I was in the Democratice Republic of the Congo). They are all figures because, etymologically speaking, they are literally made or fabricated (the term figure comes from the Latin fingere, which means to form, to build), but they are also – and this is crucial – vents to the extent that people are supposed to be attached to these figures, an attachment that makes people (re-)produce them for another next first time. As we see, speaking of these beings as vents and figures allow us to acknowledge their respective modes of existence without having to choose between various forms of culture that could or should be privileged in our studies. If something cultural is defined as anything that is cultivated by a given community, we can account not only for artifacts, styles, and behaviors, but also for values, concerns, and norms. Furthermore, it allows us to identify a continuum between something that is cultivated by only one person and something that is cultivated by an entire community. In keeping with Tarde’s (1895/1999) ontology, which consists of stating that “everything, in the world of facts, goes from the small to the big” (p. 92, my translation), it seems crucial to acknowledge the genetic character of anything that is cultivated. In other words, it is through mimesis (another favorite concept of Tarde’s!) that a given being will come to be cultivated or even instituted/established by a given community. Starting from the small to get to the big thus consists of studying these effects of re-production through which a given being will be mimetically diffused. What is crucial, however, is that such diffusion does not happen magically or instantly, but has to be worked out for another next first time throughout all the interactions that will participate in its dissemination (see Latour 1986). In other words, we never leave the terra firma of interactions, which means that any iteration, any repetition, any routine, any mimesis will also be an occasion for the beings/figures to differ through their appropriation for another next first time (see also Feldman 2000; Feldman & Pentland 2005). Speaking in terms of beings to refer to these cultural traits or artifacts does not therefore mean that they become hypostatic or immutable (immutability, as we saw with Latour 1987,

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requires very specific conditions), it just means that they participate in all their forms, all their translations, all their incarnations in the world we inhabit. Repopulating the interactional or dialogic scene therefore is another way of repopulating our world. It is also a way of deconstructing the classical (and too obvious) separation between nature and culture. As we saw with the case of ethnic representation in Excerpt #5, invoking the figure of ethnicity in North Kivu is quite natural, given the circumstances in terms of wars and conflicts. But what does “quite natural” mean? It means that the figure of ethnicity is considered to be almost omnipresent in every aspect of people’s interaction, which is another way of saying that it can potentially count or matter in any discussion or conduct. It has to be taken into account. Its existence thus appears non-problematic and natural to many and it participates in the plenum of agencies that today compose the physis that is called North Kivu. Sure, there is a distinction to be made between, on the one hand, a volcano, a bamboo stalk, or a gorilla found in the National Park of Virunga (the main park located in North Kivu) and, on the other hand, the figure of ethnicity as implicitly or explicitly mobilized in interactions in this region. The latter needs to be made, fabricated, cultivated, and maintained by inhabitants of North Kivu in order to exist in their conversations and worlds, while the former do not a priori need such nurturing to exist and live. But is this distinction that clear? Saying that bamboo, gorillas, and volcanoes are part of North Kivu’s culture is a way of saying that these figures, as natural as they may be, also count or matter for the people who live in this region, that is, that the question of their existence can also be cultivated in people’s discussions. The idea is not to equal nature (etymologically, the engendering force) with culture (what is cultivated), but to question this radical distinction by showing that something cultural is usually considered natural by the people who cultivate it, and that something considered natural can be cultivated. A ventriloqual analysis thus allows us to account for such hybridity.

chapter 5

Incarnation

As we saw in the last chapter, understanding communication as a form of ventriloquism allows us to dislocate our interactions, that is, to put them “out of place.” Communication is ecstatic or disjointed because communicating consists of speaking in the name of various things – what I also called figures – that get mobilized in our discussions. If an employee asks for a promotion and invokes her accomplishments to justify this request, one way to analyze this situation is to note that her accomplishments are implicitly presented as “speaking for themselves,” which means that it is as if it were not only the employee who was speaking at that very moment, but also her accomplishments. What might her accomplishments say (for themselves), according to her? They might say that she is highly competent and reliable, two qualities (what I would call two figures) that deserve, in her opinion, to be recognized through a promotion. This figurative or ventriloqual way of analyzing such a situation consists of noticing that making the figure of her accomplishments speak (for itself), that is, to ventriloquize it, also allows this employee to stage two other figures that she is supposed to incarnate, represent, or embody: reliability and competency. I use the word supposed because her supervisor could, of course, call such incarnations and embodiments into question by invoking, for instance, errors of judgment she might have made in the past, errors that would allow him to justify his refusal to promote her. While her accomplishments were supposed to lend weight to her request for promotion, these errors of judgment, mentioned by her supervisor, would then be supposed to remove weight from her demand, so to speak. A discussion can then be engaged, which will define what figures appear to count or matter in this situation. A way of studying communication thus consists of analyzing these effects of co-construction or co-orientation (Taylor & Van Every 2000) through which specific figures come to be incarnated or not, for another next first time, through participants’ talk in interaction. As we saw, implicitly or explicitly invoking figures allows participants to make themselves more powerful through the authority that these very figures confer to them. As Latour (1986) noted more than 20 years ago, power is a matter of association, which is another way of saying that becoming or looking more powerful or authoritative consists of associating oneself with other

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agents, actors, or figures who or that are supposed to support one’s positions, creating a configuration that appears to be in favor of what is put forward. Implicitly invoking the figures of reliability and competency thus allows the employee to claim that she is authorized or allowed to ask to for promotion. Being authorized indeed means that it is not only she – whoever “she” is – who is staged as establishing a case for promotion, but also the figures she invokes or ventriloquizes, even if these figures happen to be her competency and her reliability, that is, traits that are supposed to define who she is. As we now know, human beings themselves are collectives, what Tarde (1895/1999) and Whitehead (1929/1978) call societies, which means that we, as analysts, should not be afraid of acknowledging the fragmentation of the human subjects whose behaviors we observe. As pointed out in our previous analyses, such fragmentation often is the product of interactants’ talk, given that it is often they who promote or recognize specific traits that are then supposed to act by defining who the interlocutors might be. Analyzing these effects of presentification and dislocation thus consists of recognizing effects of embodiment, incarnation, or materialization. But what do these concepts mean or imply and why should we care about the phenomena they point to? This is what I propose to address in this final chapter.

5.1

Incarnation: What’s in a name?

The term embodiment or its Latin version, incarnation, etymologically refers to the act of being made flesh (carnis means flesh in Latin) or being given a body. In terms of usage, we can note that we tend to speak of embodiment and incarnation to refer to several types of action in various contexts. While the term incarnation is often used in a religious context – for instance, when people speak of Vishnu’s several reincarnations or about how the Christian God took a human form in the body of Jesus Christ – it is noteworthy that Garfinkel (1967, 2002) did not hesitate to use this terminology to refer to the incarnated character of “things” as diverse as rules, norms, mutual understandings, and even institutions to the extent that they are shown to be “incarnately displayed” in interaction (Cooren, Brummans, & Charrieras 2008; Heritage 1984). But what does “incarnately displayed” mean? It means (at least implicitly) that things such as rules, norms, mutual understandings, and institutions appear, at first sight, to be relatively immaterial (otherwise, why would they need to be incarnated, materialized, or embodied?), but that interactions precisely allow us to witness how these rules, norms, mutual understandings, and institutions embody or incarnate themselves in our discussions. For instance, let’s look briefly at this interaction between Marius and the hospital director:



Also at the same time uh we are going to certainly take again two more hygienists (.) for the block (0.5) to work on sterilization (.) and on::: hygiene in fact becau::se (0.5) the two persons there are (0.5) they won’t be able to cope anymore. (1.0) ((Marius turn his head toward Robert)) hhh (0.3) Overwhelmed? Yeah overwhelmed (.) there are many many- well, there are more operations so more sterilization to do (1.0) So we we have- we already have identified two- two persons (1.0) Hmhm= =to work with us already on the hospital to clean up who are people that(1.5) But we need to be able to see them (.) according to (.) the spirit of the protocol = =>Of course ah but that’s why we we identified them now we are going to propose to you < ←

←

720 Marius 721 722 723 724 725 726 Marius 727 728 Robert 729 Marius 730 731 732 733 Director 734 Marius 735 736 737 Director 738 739 Marius 740

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As we see, through his first turn of talk, Marius positions himself as informing the director of a decision that they (MSF) apparently made about the hiring of two employees. As he says, “we are going to certainly take again two more hygienists (.) for the block (0.5) to work on sterilization (.) and on::: hygiene in fact” (lines 720–722), which implies, especially by the use of the future tense, that their decision has already been more or less made about this matter. Note also how Marius subsequently justifies this decision by implicitly invoking the personnel’s welfare in the same turn of talk (“becau::se (0.5) the two persons there are (0.5) they won’t be able to cope anymore” (lines 722–723)). Whether he meant it that way or not, we can notice how this turn of talk thus amounts to presenting this hiring almost as a fait accompli (Cooren 2008). In other words, this is what his turn of talk makes him say at this point, whether he likes it not. We can then notice how the director does not react to what Marius just announced (a 1.0 second pause on line 724), which prompts the latter to look for some support from Robert, his immediate superior, by turning his head toward him. Robert then says, “Overwhelmed?” (line 728), as if to invite Marius to confirm the reason why this decision was made, to which Marius responds by confirming that this is indeed the reason, allowing himself to also invoke the need

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←

to assure a certain operativeness of the surgical service (“Yeah overwhelmed (.) there are many many- well, there are more operations so more sterilization to do,” lines 729–730). Marius then ends his turn of talk by repeating, “We have- we already have identified two- two persons” (lines 730–731), which is again followed by a 1.0 second pause. Finally, the director breaks his silence by mildly acknowledging what Marius said (“Hmhm,” line 733), to which Marius immediately reacts by specifying what these two new employees will do in the hospital (“to work with us already on the hospital to clean up who are people that,” lines 734–735). Another long 1.5-second silence then follows, which is finally broken by the director who retorts with a sort of killing statement, “But we need to be able to see them (.) according to (.) the spirit of the protocol ” (lines 737–738), which immediately prompts Marius to redefine as a simple proposition what he initially presented as an announcement of a fait accompli (“>Of course ah but that’s why we we identified them now we are going to propose to you <” lines 739–740). Why is this excerpt interesting for addressing the topics of incarnation and embodiment? To answer this question, let us focus on the most obvious case, that is, the invocation of the protocol by the director in lines 737–738. As we see, the protocol plays a role in this discussion because the director manages to mobilize/invoke it at a specific moment in the interaction. In terms of ventriloquism, we see how he makes the protocol speak to the extent that it is not he, the director, who is staged as the one who claims that they (the hospital) “need to be able to see them” (line 737), but the protocol, and, more precisely, its spirit. This form of selfeffacement, typical of ventriloquism, is, of course, an effect to the extent that we understand that it is also he, the director, who is reminding Marius that they – the hospital – need to see the two employees (see Chapter 4). Interestingly, we also find here the typical form of oscillation/vacillation that was already noted about ventriloquism. If the director is able to mobilize or animate the figure of the protocol, it is also because he implicitly positions himself as moved or animated by what he presents as its spirit. In other words, he is both the vent and the figure: the vent because he animates/mobilizes the protocol to remind his interlocutor what the rules are supposed to be about any hiring done in the hospital, and the figure because doing so implies that he be moved/animated by the protocol’s requirements (which are then implicitly positioned as his vent). But what about incarnation, embodiment, or materialization? First, one could notice that for a thing such as a protocol to be able to act or do something, it indeed needs to be animated by someone or something. In other words, the spirit of the protocol can be said to incarnate or embody itself through what the director claims it says, that is, that the hospital needs to be able to see the candidates. Note that such an incarnation/embodiment can always be called into question ←



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by his interlocutor, which is always the case whenever someone or something is positioned as incarnating, presentifying, or embodying something else. Interestingly, Marius does not question this embodiment. On the contrary, we see, on lines 739–740, how he is very quick to redefine as a proposition what he initially presented as a fait accompli, which means that he implicitly agrees with what the director says the protocol says, that is, that the hospital should indeed be able to see the candidates. A form of co-orientation and alignment is thus taking place regarding what the protocol is supposed to say about the present situation. Repopulating the interactional scene thus means that it is not only the director and Marius who are speaking here, but also the various beings that they manage to animate. But the question remains as to what the protocol’s mode of existence consists of and to what extent the phenomenon of incarnation/embodiment plays a role in this mode of existence. First, one could notice that an obvious mode of existence consists in its incarnation in the document that both MSF and the hospital representatives signed a few months prior to this meeting. The protocol has indeed been written down and signed by both parties, creating a binding document that is supposed to commit its signatories (Cooren 2004b, 2006, 2008, 2009a). The expression writing down a protocol is interesting, since, in many respects, the protocol did not really exist before it was written down and incarnated/embodied in this document. We could even be tempted to reduce its mode of existence to this incarnation, that is, to its material dimension as written down in this document, which was then signed by MSF and the hospital representatives. Why should we resist such a reduction? Precisely because this protocol can have other incarnations, other forms of embodiment, which is exactly what we witnessed in the interaction we just analyzed. Someone such as the hospital director can, for instance, start to speak on its behalf, in its name, incarnating its spirit for another next first time. Similarly, other people could do the same and a discussion could even start about what the protocol really says (Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren 2009). But, as implied in the terms incarnation, embodiment, and materialization, for something to incarnate/embody/materialize itself, it means that it has to somehow have an immaterial dimension. So what is this immaterial dimension? In the case of the protocol, it is, as mentioned by the director, its spirit, that is, what it is supposed to mean or say today to the parties who are present beyond its inscription in this document. Far from reproducing a classical opposition, dualism, or duality between what could be called the spirit and the letter of the protocol, it is crucial to note that the spirit contaminates the letter as much as the letter contaminates the spirit (in other words, it is not a matter of opposition, dualism, or duality but of différance, as Derrida 1970, would point out). There is, by definition,

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never a pure spirit, a pure meaning of the protocol, to the extent that it will also always already have to be embodied, materialized, inscribed, incarnated in letters to be expressed and communicated. Inversely, any letter, word, utterance, or document – precisely because they are letters, words, utterances, and documents (or signifiers, if you will) – will always be contaminated by spirits to the extent that they are designed to mean something. We are, as Derrida (1994) would say, in a spectral or ghostal logic, a hauntology. This reflection on incarnation thus allows us to address the question of what could be called the im/material dimension of our world. Our world is im/material to the extent that it is both material and immaterial, a paradox or aporia that cannot, by definition, be solved. It is material because, as we will see, we constantly deal with various forms of incarnation/embodiment/materialization, but our world also is immaterial because these various forms of incarnation/embodiment/materialization point to something that they substantiate or cause to be, so to speak. This is a logic of emergence, as pointed out by Taylor and Van Every (2000) in that there cannot be spirits, significations, or meanings without incarnations (letters, words, signs, traces, or bodies) but the former should never be reduced to the latter and inversely (Massumi 2002). The spirit/meaning of the protocol is therefore an open question (and will always remain an open question), since its emergence will depend on the various ways it incarnates or embodies itself, whether through specific documents, utterances, or even enactments. In terms of its mode of existence, we thus see that it is also an open question to the extent that the protocol exists through the people who speak in its name, through the document where it has been written down or even through its actual enactment when people decide to apply it for another next first time. The idea of its spirit or meaning is therefore essential because it is one of the conditions of the openness of its mode of existence, since the spirit of something like a protocol always depends on the letters, words, signs, traces, or bodies we choose to express, incarnate, or embody it. This reflection on incarnation/materialization/embodiment thus brings us to the question of naming, designing, or labeling (Brummans, Cooren, & Chaput 2009; Cooren, Brummans, & Charrieras 2008). Once something has been named or called a protocol, this “thing” that is now called the protocol can incarnate, materialize, or embody itself in various representatives. But again, what this thing (and I insist on its thingness, since we saw that a protocol has, by definition, a material dimension, be it only through its name) is or means – what the hospital director calls its spirit, for instance – will always depend on what is done or said in its name. The name is therefore crucial in our reflection on the protocol’s mode of existence, since it is because it has a name that this logic of im/materiality can unfold. Calling upon the protocol consists of invoking its name (at least implicitly),



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a name that functions, because of its iterable dimension, as an identifier, that is, as something that reaffirms the sameness of what is actually differing for another next first time in all its various incarnations. But let us now focus on other aspects of the interaction in order to see how this logic of incarnation might apply to them. For instance, we saw how Marius implicitly positioned himself as speaking in the name of a certain operativeness of the hospital and in the name of its employees’ welfare, two figures he managed to mobilize by mentioning that the people who are currently working as hygienists are overwhelmed because of the important number of operations, a number that increases the number of sterilizations. If he allows himself to announce such a hiring, it is because he claims to be implicitly speaking in the name of these two values or principles, which not only mark an attachment on his part and, by proxy, on MSF’s part, but also lend weight to the decision that has apparently been made. As we noticed previously in our reflection on ventriloquism, it is therefore as if it were not only he, Marius, who was speaking, but also the employees’ and the hospital’s interests, their respective interests being, according to him, to work in good conditions and to be operational, two principles or values that appear to animate Marius at this moment of the conversation. The employees and the hospital are therefore supposed to speak through him because it would be in their interests, according to him, to support such a decision. Another way to put it would consist of noticing that Marius’s position is presented as incarnating/embodying/materializing the interests of the hospital and its employees. Why a logic of incarnation? Because it is always for another next first time that these interests, principles, and values will, of course, be defined and expressed. In a way similar to what happens with the protocol, things such as, for instance, the interests of the employees or the hospital cannot be defined once for all. Although they do exist, their existence depends on who or what positions himself/herself/itself as speaking on their behalf, in their name. It could be, of course, the employees themselves, but other people could also claim to represent/presentify, or to make present (again) these interests, invoking them in their turns of talk. The fact that one speaks of the employees’ or the hospital’s interests presupposes their existence, but we see that their existence also depends on their incarnation in the here and now of a given discussion. At no moment will there be a situation where one person will be able to define once for all what these interests are or look like even if many people can claim to speak on their behalf. Again, we see how the name is important as it allows a priori to identify or define something that one calls the hospital’s or the employee’s interests even if such identifications and definitions are always open and will depend on the way they are defined for another next first time.

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So what are these analyses telling us about the way incarnation, embodiment, or materialization function? First we noted the key role played by the name of the thing that is supposed to be incarnated, materialized, or embodied. Whether it is a given principle, protocol, value, or interest, it is supposed to have a name and it is this name that allows people to refer to it for another next first time in their discussion, whatever it is. Although this sounds a priori obvious, this is crucial for the logic of incarnation because this name is, as Derrida (1988) would notice, iterable, repeatable and it is this iterability that actually defines its functioning as a word referring to and meaning something (see Chapter 2). Using a given word is, of course, not a product of chance. For instance, if we take the word protocol as an illustration, we can imagine that Marius, Robert, and the hospital director know not only what a protocol means in general, but also what specific document the director is referring to for all practical purposes. Conventionally, a protocol is supposed to be a text that defines how people should proceed in a given context, which means that anything people will call “protocol” will normally and accountably have these specific characteristics, which are supposed to define it. But what is this specific thing that the hospital director call “the protocol,” in its haecceity, as Garfinkel (2002) would put it, that is, its uniqueness, whatness, eventness, indexicality? At first sight, it is the document as signed by the two parties, a document that has some binding properties and is supposed to commit its signatories. But if what is called “the protocol” embodies itself in this document as signed by the two parties, we also saw that its mode of existence cannot be reduced to this formal existence, given that people are going to mobilize or animate it in their discussions for another next first time, as the director did in the excerpt we analyzed. By speaking in the name of the protocol (and its spirit), he positions himself as presentifying/incarnating what it is supposed to say, making it present in the discussion, a way for him to allow the protocol to tele-act (i.e., act from a distance) in this situation (Cooren 2006). As pointed out in Chapter 2, the protocol as signed by both parties might be the type, the model, but even this model or type is also always already incarnated/ embodied in a given text, that is, it is also always already a token. Furthermore, it will have other incarnations or embodiments to the extent that it will be made present to influence the course of a discussion. It has therefore a material and immaterial dimension, the immaterial dimension referring to what it is, means or says, that is, what the director explicitly calls its spirit, while the material dimension refers to all its incarnations, embodiments, materializations, which actually define its spirit (and this is the paradox). Again, as pointed out before, the idea is not to reproduce a (Platonic) dualism, duality, or opposition, but to develop a



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logic of emergence that insists on the im/material aspect of things that are named, for instance, protocols. Protocols are both abstract/conceptual/intangible/nonfigurative (disincarnated) and concrete/material/tangible/figurative (incarnated) entities because they have a name, and this name can remain a sort of empty shell as long as it is not incarnated in various definitions, identifications, invocations, visualizations, and mobilizations, for another next first time. What is crucial in the reasoning I propose is that we never have a pure abstraction, as we never have pure concreteness. This is all a matter of degree or hybridity. To illustrate this position, let us borrow an example taken from physics: string theory. For most of us, string theory appears to be just a name, an empty shell, a mere abstraction. We do not know what this theory is about, although we could guess, precisely because of its name, that it has something to do with objects that look like strings and that these strings are supposed to explain something. A way for us to represent/incarnate this theory would therefore consist of visualizing sorts of string and their role in fundamental aspects of nature. So we see that something as abstract, intangible, and disincarnated as string theory can, even for the lay person, be the object of various incarnations and materializations, as unsophisticated and mundane as they might be. Of course, physicists and mathematicians have much more sophisticated ways to represent or incarnate what these strings might look like. They have developed, over the years, theorems, geometrical figures, and mathematical developments that are also supposed to show what these strings might consist of and their fundamental role in a general theory of gravity. What is key in this reasoning is that string theory is supposed to refer to something, hence its relative abstractness, an abstractness that from the onset is contaminated by the thingness of this thing, even if we do not know what this thing really is. If we now turn to a principle such as justice for instance, the same reasoning obtains. Something a priori as abstract as justice will have to be incarnated for another next first time in a decision, a definition, a law, a courthouse, a judge, a sentiment, an expression of anger, and so on. This does not mean that the concept/principle/idea of justice is completely indeterminate and that any incarnation will do, but it means that the number of its various forms of embodiment will remain, by definition, always open. Furthermore, it also means – and Derrida (1992) has a deep understanding of this even if he did not express it with the same words – that no incarnation, no embodiment will ever exhaust the idea of justice, what justice is or how it can be incarnated or expressed. The same aporia thus remains: In order to be expressed, defined, and even felt, what we call or name justice has to be incarnated, embodied, materialized (be it only in a definition) and yet justice cannot be reduced to any of these incarnations.

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Interaction and action in general is therefore this dislocated locus where many things or figures incarnate or embody themselves, but it is key not to reduce these figures to these various forms of incarnation as it is always on the terra firma of interaction that their mode of being will be discussed and debated. The phenomenon of incarnation thus helps us understand the performative and negotiated aspect of definitions, expressions, meanings, which also mark the performative and negotiated aspect of things we call or name principles, values, protocols, but also projects, procedures, or programs (see Vasquez 2009; Vasquez & Cooren, forthcoming).

5.2

Collectives’ mode of being

As we saw in the previous section, the phenomenon of incarnation or embodiment points toward the key role that names play in the mode of existence of beings as various as principles, theories, or protocols. We also remember that Tarde (1895/1999) and Whitehead (1929/1978) insist that any being is a collective (what they call a society) to the extent that it is also made of various things whose configuration produces its emergence for another next first time (Bencherki & Cooren, forthcoming; Kupiec & Sonigo 2000). For instance, the person whose name is Barack Obama is a configuration of things whose list is, by definition, unlimited. It is, of course, a body, a face, a voice that we all learned to recognize (a body that is itself a collective configuratively made of flesh, bones, nervous system, brain, blood, etc.),38 but it is also all the things that this person embodies or incarnates: hope, fear, power, authority, diversity, smartness, expertise, wisdom. Again, one might retort that this is a figurative way of talking, but who would deny that, for millions of people around the world, the person named Barack Obama literally incarnated, represented, or embodied all these things? Who would deny that this is even what, in many respects, defines who he is for these people? As claimed throughout this book, we have to take figurative speech seriously because it is precisely through figures that key aspects of what exists in the world express themselves. Analyzing the “Obama phenomenon” (which is, unfortunately, not something I will be able to do in this book, for lack of space) could thus consist of accounting for all the things that this person manages 38. Although I cannot develop this point any further, it is noteworthy that some biologists have recently developed an approach that parallels, in many respects, the bottom up approach advocated by Latour (2005), Tarde (1895/1999), Taylor and Van Every (2000), Whitehead (1929/1978) and this book. For more details, see Kupiec and Sonigo (2000).



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(consciously or unconsciously) to convey, express, incarnate, or communicate (whether through his speeches, decisions, or even his mere presence). This could be, in other words, a new way of addressing the question of leadership or charisma (Fairhurst 2007; Fairhurst & Cooren 2009), since it consists of acknowledging what this person we call Barack Obama ventriloquizes or animates in his discourses, his decisions, or, more generally, his conduct. Ventriloquism is therefore a key aspect of these incarnations, since recognizing the collective nature of this politician consists of acknowledging all the various things that are supposed to literally animate him (his courage, wisdom, vision, etc.). All these dispositions, competencies, traits, characteristics have a mode of existence and it is from this configuration of traits that the person we call Barack Obama emerges. This, of course, does not mean that what this person incarnates or embodies can be defined once for all. What this person is has to be defined or negotiated communicatively for another next first time through co-orientation. In other words, it is through each of his decisions, behaviors, and discourses that all these traits will be spectrally or ghostly recognized or not. Recognizing the collective dimension of Barack Obama – and, for that matter, of any individual – presupposes that these traits evolve, change, or, on the contrary, remain more or less the same throughout his life (and beyond his life through the reinterpretration of who he was). Furthermore, the figures that Obama animates not only depend on him, but also on us (journalists, editorialists, laypeople, adversaries, etc.), that is, their communicational or relational nature implies that their performative aspects be also recognized, acknowledged, or identified. But what can this reasoning tell us about the mode of being of these other collectives that we tend to be very familiar with, that is, groups, organizations, institutions, departments, states, countries, or societies? Starting from Barack Obama, one could notice that among all the things that he incarnates or embodies, the figure of the United States of America might certainly count among the most prominent and obvious. In some circumstances, when Obama is speaking, it is, in many respects, the USA that is speaking, that is, it is the United States of America that is voicing its position, defining its policy or expressing its opinion. While the logic of emergence has been so far analyzed to speak of what appear to be infra-individual entities (the principles, values, programs, traits that are supposed to configuratively inhabit and animate us), we now see that this logic can also be identified for what we tend to call “supra-individual entities,” that is, collectives whose emergence depends on a configuration made of human beings and the other beings that humans manage to produce and institute. For instance, what is this thing that we call the United States of America? To answer this question, one could first point to a given location and say, “This is the United States,” showing it to our interlocutor (let’s pretend that we are in Canada

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and close to the border or that we are looking at a map). This indexical dimension, as obvious and commonsensical it might be, has the advantage of indicating the thingness of this country, its incarnated dimension. Such thingness and localization is reinforced by its borders that delimit its territories, by the immigration and custom officers who are supposed to control who and what is getting in and out, and by the walls and barriers that can be built to reinforce such control. All these (human and material) agents are supposed to represent or presentify the United States, their principal, that is, to literally make it present or incarnate it to whoever decides to enter this territory. When a US immigration officer checks your identity (e.g., by granting or not granting you access, he controls your identity as visitor, etc.), he is supposed to be acting in the name of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is itself supposed to be acting in the name of (the interests of) the United States (“We are the face of the nation” as we can read in the caption from an official poster at a U.S. immigration office). It is this effect of representation/incarnation/presentification that gives to this person his or her authority to the extent that when this person is controlling your identity, she is also supposed to be acting in the name of the United States, which is another way to say that it is the United States that is also checking your identity at that moment, tele-acting for another next first time (Cooren 2006). Understanding the mode of being of collectives thus presupposes that we take into account these effects of incarnation that, to my knowledge, have never been problematized as constitutive of the mode of being of societies, organizations, institutions, and groups (but see Charland 1987, 2001, 200339). But one might then wonder to what extent we can speak of incarnation or embodiment given that this terminology presupposes that what is incarnated or embodied also has an immaterial or disincarnated dimension? In a way similar to principles, values, and protocols, one then needs to address the question of the collectives’ immaterial dimension, even if this immateriality can never be a pure immaterial dimension, that is, an immateriality that would be completely severed from what makes it (im-)possible, that is, materiality. A good illustration of this paradox can be found in Jacques Derrida’s (1986) wonderful analysis of the United States’ Declaration of Independence. Commenting on the signatures40 of this document, Derrida wonders whose signatures it is exactly: 39. As Charland (1987, 2001, 2003) rightly points out, figures such as legal or foundational texts can have a crucial role in the way a people is defined and identified, i.e., constituted. See also Chaput (forthcoming). 40. For an interesting reflection on signature as a performance/event, see also Fraenkel (2007).



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Take, for instance, Jefferson, the “draftsman [rédacteur]” of the project or draft [projet] of the declaration, of the “Draft,” the facsimile of which I have before my eyes. No one would take him for the true signer of the Declaration. By right, he writes but he does not sign. Jefferson represents the representatives who have delegated to him the task of drawing up [rédiger] what they knew they wanted to say. He was not responsible for writing, in the productive or initiating sense of the term, only for drawing up, as one says of a secretary that he or she draws up a letter of which the spirit has been breathed to him or her, or even the content dictated. Moreover, after having drawn up a project or a draft, a sketch, Jefferson had to submit it to those whom, for a time, he represented and who are themselves representatives, namely “representatives of the United States in General Congress assembled.” These “representatives,” of whom Jefferson represents a sort of advance-pen, will have the right to revise, to correct and to ratify the project of draft of the Declaration.  (p. 8–9)

Derrida thus notes a first aporia to the extent that Jefferson is supposed to be a simple intermediary acting in the name of or for the representatives who have delegated to him the task of sketching the declaration. As he points out, even if he does appear to be writing this draft, he cannot be deemed the sole author/writer of the declaration to the extent that he is supposed to also write up what the persons he represents want to say. But a little bit like the MSF protocol, the declaration does not appear to really exist as long as it has not been written up by Jefferson and then signed by the different parties. Until Jefferson drafts it or draws it up, the Declaration of Independence remains a project, a promise, a relative abstraction. Is it completely abstract or disincarnated? Certainly not, since conversations and debates had been taking place between the founding fathers, discussions that launched the idea of writing this document. In other words, the declaration had already been anticipated, incarnated, imagined in their discussions. The founding fathers started to refer to it, as they were referring to this other “it,” the country that they expected they would be creating through this document. Again, we see this is also a matter of names. Having called or named it (whether by speaking of the Declaration, the document, or “it”), the founding fathers were able to refer to something even if this thing was, at this point, just an idea, a project, what could already be called its spirit. As mentioned before, this does not mean that we fall into a form of Platonism where something like the “spirit of the declaration” existed completely independently of its incarnations. By definition, the fact that they used words to refer to it meant that a certain form of iterability was already at play. We can imagine that they knew, for instance, what a declaration could look like, that is, they could figure it out, by imagining it, for instance,

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creating an image that would typify what declarations are supposed to resemble (cf. Chapter 2). Whether through definitions, images, figures, or illustrations, they could incarnate or give flesh to what it might look like. They each had a type in mind even if this type also was a token, that is, a typified or ideal token that would represent or incarnate what a declaration was supposed to be. As we see in this analysis, something like “the declaration of independence” had to be incarnated in one way or another, whether through people’s visual representations, through their talks, through their definitions, and the like. Although it was somewhat disincarnated before Jefferson drafted it, it already had a spirit through all the various ways the founding fathers could figure it out. But let’s look at how Derrida (1986) continues his analysis: As for the “representatives” themselves, they don’t sign either. In principle at least because the right is divided here. In fact, they sign; by right, they sign for themselves but also “for” others. They have been delegated the proxies, the power of attorney, for signing [ils ont délégation ou procuration de signature]. They speak, “declare,” declare themselves and sign “in the name of…”: “We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled, do in the name and by authority of the good people of these […] that as free and independent states…”. By right, the signer is thus the people, the “good” people (a decisive detail because it guarantees the value of the intention and of the signature, but we will see further along on what and on whom such a guarantee is founded or founds itself). It is the “good people” who declare themselves free and independent by the relay of their representatives and of their representatives of representatives. One cannot decide – and that’s the interesting thing, the force and the coup of force of such a declarative act – whether independence is stated or produced by this utterance. We have not finished following the chain of these representatives of representatives, and doing so further complicates this necessary undecidability. Is it that the good people have already freed themselves in fact and are only stating the fact of this emancipation in [par] the declaration? Or is it rather that they free them(p. 9) selves at the instant of and by [par] the signature. 

As implied in Derrida’s analysis, the creation of any social collectivity implies a coup of force that blurs the distinction between producing and stating, that is, between what Searle (1979) would call an assertive and a declaration (see also Brummans, Cooren, & Chaput 2009; Cooren, Brummans, & Charrieras 2008; Cooren, Fox, Robichaud, & Talih 2005) or what Austin (1962/1975) initially named a constative and a performative (Taylor & Cooren 1997). Even if, at first sight, this declaration brought “The United States of America” into being, Derrida’s analysis shows us that in order to declare the birth and



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existence of these people and country, the representatives did have to stage in their declaration the very people and country on behalf of whom and which they were making the declaration. In order to be authorized or legitimate, they thus had to presuppose the existence of the people and country they were supposed to create and found. But what was the mode of being of these people and country, given that they officially did not exist before the declaration of their birth and foundations? Again, they did exist but through other incarnations, that is, through the forms of project, programs, ideas, mental images, and so on. Because of the iterable dimension of language, things such as “the good people” or “The United States of America” could thus be spectrally anticipated, imagined, and projected, making them im/possible. They were possible because of these various incarnations, but they were also impossible to the extent that none of these incarnations could exhaust and circumscribe what this thing that would be called the United States of America would be and is today. The same aporetic logic functions for any collective, that is, that any collective exists through its various incarnations and embodiments, but, and this is the paradox or aporia, a paradox or aporia that can never be solved, each and every one of these incarnations presuppose its existence, an existence that cannot be without them. For instance, what is the United States of America? It is (literally and figuratively) a configuration of its various incarnations, whether through a location that we are pointing to on a map, a territory surrounded by borders, a president who speaks on its behalf, a house of representatives and a senate that vote its laws, simple citizens who voice its opinion, a declaration of independence that proves its date of birth, or a constitution that defines its foundations in terms of rights and duties (Putnam & Nicotera 2009). Although all these things are supposed to reaffirm, in many respects, the existence of the collective, they also produce it for another next first time. For instance, the border of the United States is actively guarded with helicopters, immigration officers, dogs, devices, and guns, which reaffirm the existence of this country but also perform it each time they are brought to action. Interestingly enough, each of these “things,” as pointed out before, are themselves collectives or configurations whose mode of existence depends on the same logic of emergence or spectrality. What is called the United States of America thus emerges for another next first time through all its various incarnations/embodiments/materializations. In a famous passage on category mistake, Gilbert Ryle (1949) writes, A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks, ‘But where is the University? I have seen where the

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members of the Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in which reside and work the members of your University.’ It has then to be explained to him that the University is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices which he has seen. The University is just the way in which all that he already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their coordination is understood, the University has been seen. His mistake lies in his innocent assumption that it was correct to speak of Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the University, to speak, that is, as if ‘the University’ stood for an extra member of the class of which these other units are members. He was mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that to which the other institutions belong’. (pp. 17–18, emphasis in the original)

Although this example is supposed to illustrate what Ryle calls a category mistake, that is, the fact that the visitor mistakenly takes the university to be “an extra member of the class of which these other units are members” (p. 18), this anecdote is also interesting because it shows how presentification/incarnation functions. For the person who is showing the visitor around, the colleges, members, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments, and administrative offices configuratively are incarnations/representations of what is called the university, that is, each time she sees them in their respective configurations, she literally and figuratively sees the University. As Ryle (1949) notes, “When they are seen and when their coordination is understood, the University has been seen” (p. 17), at least by the person who is guiding the visit (and by whoever knows what the University is supposed to be). But such an incarnation/presentification is far from being obvious to anyone, as shown by this illustration. It has to be not only performed/reaffirmed, but also recognized/acknowledged for another next first time, which explains why the performance/reaffirmation first remained invisible to the visitor. In many respects, the university still was a relative abstraction to the visitor at the end of his visit as he thought he had not seen it. Although we could imagine that he could figure it out (since he knew what a university usually is and consists of), he did not understand that all the things he had seen were standing for the university, making it spectrally present to him. What the visitor did not understand is that what is called the University exists through the faculty members he certainly met, through the many parks that compose its territory, through the armories or logos that he might have seen and through any kind of representatives (president, spokesperson) that would have reaffirmed its existence (Cooren, Fox, Robichaud, & Talih 2005). As pointed out by Callon and Latour (1981) many years ago, any collective is a variable geometry monster whose mode of existence depends on all its (official and unofficial)



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representatives, be they material, architectural, human, or textual, and their configurations or assemblages (see also Brassac, Fixmer, Mondada, & Vinck 2008, and Brassac & Le Ber 2005, for an illustration of this point at the level of collaboration). This, of course, does not mean that it is a sort of “free for all” and that any incarnation or representation will do. Incarnation is a matter of control/definition/ circumscription by the persons and devices that are supposed to defend the University’s identity and reaffirm its existence (Nicotera, forthcoming). It is, again, a question of authority or authoring. Who or what is allowed to act and speak on behalf of the organization is controlled, even if this control is also the product of an incarnated configuration. For instance, who is allowed to speak in the name of the university is defined by this organization’s bylaws or policies, which specify, for instance, that only the president and his or her delegated representatives are authorized to voice what the organization thinks, believes, or wants (Taylor & Van Every 2000). Following the chain of authority thus consists of following what or who authorizes a given declaration, creating a chain of agencies that can go from the declaration itself through the spokesperson who made it, through the authorization that allowed this declaration, through the president (or one of her representatives) who authorized this declaration and up to the reasons/motives/ principles that supposedly motivated her to do so. As we see, such a chain is made of humans (the spokesperson, the representatives, the president), texts (declarations, authorizations, protocols), and motives; in other words, it is hybrid or plural, a hybridity or plurality that is further illustrated if we start to focus on the phone calls and emails that participated in the production of this declaration, as well as the passions, frustrations, and feelings that might have expressed themselves through it. All these figures (artifactual, passional, textual, human, etc.) assemble themselves for another next first time each time the university is deemed to be acting in a specific way. The logic of incarnation is therefore a plural logic, what has been called elsewhere a logic of plurification (Cooren, Fox, Robichaud, & Talih 2005). While Ryle (1949) uses his university example to speak about category mistakes and classes, we therefore see that a university should never be reduced to a conceptual reality that would be called “The university,” and that would be of a higher logical type (à la Russell 1911/1992), since my point is precisely to reject this form of conceptualism/Platonism that undermines sociological and organizational thought. Although the vocabulary I utilize – incarnation, embodiment, materialization – might be considered “loaded” (especially with its religious connotation), it actually parallels up to a certain point what Garfinkel (2002) presents as ethnomethodology’s fundamental program. As he points out, the central claim

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of ethnomethodology is to work out Durkheim’s (1895/1964) aphorism, as presented in The Rules of the Sociological Method: The fact that “the objective reality of social facts” (p. 45) is sociology’s fundamental principle. Commenting on this aphorism, Garfinkel notes: Ethnomethodology took this to mean the objective reality of social facts, in that and just how it is every society’s locally, endogenously produced, naturally organized, naturally accountable, ongoing, practical achievement, being everywhere, always, only, exactly, and entirely member’s work, with no time out, and with no possibility of evasion, hiding out, passing, postponement, or buyouts, is thereby sociology’s fundamental phenomenon.  (2002, p. 118)

As pointed out by Rawls (2002) in her “Editor’s Introduction” to Garfinkel’s book: It is Garfinkel’s position that sociologists have ignored this aphorism and treated social facts as theoretical, or conceptual, constructions for more than a century. It has been Garfinkel’s aim to restore Sociology to the pursuit of Durkheim’s aphorism, through an insistence on the concreteness of things, and on the claim that the concreteness of things necessarily depends on, and is produced in and through, complex mutually recognizable social practices enacted by participants in social scenes.  (p. 2, my italics)

In other words, reducing society or organizations to conceptual constructions consists of falling into the trap of abstractionism and Platonism, that is, to claim that their mode of being is purely conceptual. Where I depart from Garfinkel, though, is that I contend that this reflection on embodiment and incarnation should be extended to so called nonhumans, as artifacts, machines, and documents, for example, contribute, in their own way, to this materialization. While Garfinkel and other ethnomethodologists keep centering on humans to account for these effects of embodiment,41 what I propose is to decenter the analysis by showing how humans share this incarnation and much of their agency with the artifacts they produce (Cooren 2009a). Taking up Garfinkel’s previous quote, we could then specify that yes indeed, we need to start from practical achievements, but that such achievements are not only local, but also dislocal, that it is not purely endogenous (if by endogenous, 41. For instance, Rawls (2002) notes that Garfinkel argues that “sociology should be engaged in explaining how phenomena of social order are achieved and recognized by participants in the first place” (p. 52). This focus on human achievement explains, in many respects, why ethnomethodologists, despite the key contribution of their work, continually have difficulty accounting for dislocal phenomena. Everything happens as though they were “stuck” in the local, while we contend that this local is constantly dislocated not only by the way discourse functions, but also by the technologies and artifacts that humans constantly mobilize in their practices.



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we mean, produced by humans), but also exogenous (that is, also produced by nonhumans), not only naturally organized, but also technologically organized. By highlighting how we are acted upon (passivity), as much as we act (activity), how we are led by rules and protocols as much as we follow them, how we are reminded of things to do as much as we understand them, how our action is also made of passion, in the etymological sense of the term, we end up showing that we live in plurified world, a world in which humans share agency with other entities, whether these entities are man-made or natural. Ventriloquism, according to this approach, therefore becomes the way by which collectives say and do things. Whether through a secretary who applies her institution’s policy, a CEO who voices her company’s position, or an immigration officer who enjoins a visitor to answer his questions, all these activities consists of making a collective (respectively, an institution, a company, a country) say and do things, a collective that each of these persons ventriloquizes and incarnates. This, of course, does not mean that what these collectives do is non problematic or taken for granted. On the contrary, it is precisely because there is incarnation/embodiment that what collectives do can become debatable and negotiable (and this reasoning also applies, by the way, to the collectives that we, human beings, are). Take, for instance, the torture and prisoner abuses that took place in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Was it the United States that tortured and abused these prisoners? Were the personnel of the 372nd Military Police Company of the US Army, as well as the personnel of the associated governmental agencies, acting in the name of/for/on behalf of the United States when they committed these horrible acts? Although the US secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, took full responsibility for what happened, he also called these acts of torture and abuse “un-American,” marking an attempt to establish a clear dissociation between what these soldiers did and what the United States might have done through them. My point is not to argue for one position or another (although I, of course, do have an opinion about this event), but simply to mark that, because of their plural or plurified dimension, what collectives do always remains at the mercy of what their representatives do, especially when they are on duty, as was the case in Abu Ghraib. Of course, one can always claim that, while orders of torture or abuse were not given at the higher levels, it remains that these events did happen and that these members of the personnel were supposed to act in the name of the United States. As we see, incarnation and ventriloquism can be very serious matters as they define, in many respects, the mode of being and acting of collectives, for the better or the worse. This is, incidentally, what makes communication so crucial, as incarnation and ventriloquism are not just a matter of performativity, but also of recognition and acknowledgement. In other words, it is not enough for some US representatives

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to claim that their country was not involved in this torture and abuse and that only the incriminated people (who were condemned, expelled, and/or demoted) were acting, what the US did or did not do also depends on how the situation is perceived and understood by the general public. In other words, incarnation is not just a matter of exappropriation, but also of exattribution, as mentioned in Chapter 4. As Stohl and Stohl (forthcoming) insightfully point out, such questions become crucial when dealing with clandestine organizations where there is precisely no transparency in terms of who or what is supposed to be acting in the name of a given collective. Taking al Qaeda as an illustration, they show that a key debate is taking place, among scholars, between those who argue that the al Qaeda is a large scale, global organization threat vs. those that would argue that the threat is not “the” al Qaeda organization but many different smaller scale, less organized groups and/or leaderless resistance who are more likely to produce smaller and less coordinated attacks and thus a lower strategic threat (Hoffman 2008 and Sageman & Hoffman 2008). The former suggests a counter terror response that requires major mobilization of the department of defense and the military, homeland security, the enormous counter terror machine that has been created. The latter suggests marshalling resources through the law enforcement machinery, the intelligence agencies and cooperation with like organizations abroad.  (p. 23)

As we see, beyond effects of ventriloquism and incarnation, one then needs to question the extent to which such activities of representation embody clear lines of authority that would then allow people to decide whether they are dealing with a global organization or a fragmented resistance that claims to be globally organized.

5.3

Systems and systematicity

As we see through these examples, collectives and societies are assemblages or configurations, but what is key is that we never fall into a systemic approach (Bateson 1972, 1979; Schein 1980; von Bertalanffy 1968; Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson 1967; Wiener 1967) or a form of functionalism (Luhmann 1994; Parsons 1949; Putnam & Pacanowsky 1983), at least in the traditional way we conceive of wholes and systems. Given the performative and iterative dimension of collectives, any system should be understood as an effect of assemblages and configurations, that is, we need again to start from the small in order to understand the big, as Tarde (1895/1999) recommended.



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What does it mean concretely? It means that if something looks like a system or like something organized, it is because certain configurations or assemblages happen to do things in a systematic, regular, orderly, or patterned way. However, this order or systematicity does not come from thin air, but from specific agents who or that create these effects of repetition/iteration/recurrence. Systems do exist, but they have to be produced for another next first time through ventriloquism and incarnation, that is, patterns and orders have to be enacted from the terra firma of interactions. This is where not only policies, procedures, rules, norms, protocols, programs, regulations, laws, bylaws, directives, and principles (what could be called regulatory agents), but also projects, plans, tasks, tactics, and strategies (what could be called projective agents) become crucial, as one of their raisons d’être is precisely to produce such ordering effects (Vasquez 2009; Vasquez & Cooren, forthcoming). How do they do that? By saying the same thing repeatedly, iteratively, over and over, time after time. Of course, they can be ignored, altered, and/or cancelled, but as long as they aren’t, they will be saying the same thing for another next first time, which means that some ordering effects will tend to be created. My point is not to go back to a pre-ethnomethodological position where rules and norms would completely determine and anticipate people’s behavior, but just to mention that these regulatory and projective agents (that act in the name of the collectives they incarnate) will be non-negligible and even key contributors to the mode of being and acting of collectives (see, for instance, what Karl Weick 1979, says about rules and their negative correlation with equivocality). In many respects, these agents will incarnate and embody a collective’s identity as they will precisely allow it to repeat/duplicate/replicate itself for another next first time, each time people will be acting in their name (and, by proxy, in the name of the collective these regulatory and projective agents represent). With these regulatory and projective agents/figures, collectives are, in many respects, written in advance (hence, the term pro-gram, pro-cedure, pro-ject), even if they need to be enacted for another next first time each time people position themselves as following, voicing, or enforcing them. Again, what these agents say is not a given and my point is not to advocate for their univocality, but simply to recognize that they will tend to faithfully say the same thing over and over, at least in their letters, even if they will have to be incarnated, translated, and interpreted in their spirit by the humans who claim acting or speaking in their name. What does it mean in terms of systems theory? It means that any attempt to account for the systemic and systematic character of a collective will have to account for everything that happens to alter or make a difference in its configuration. As we can imagine, this is no easy task as this implies to account for a plethora of agents with variable ontologies. If Tarde (1895/1999) is right, this would mean, for

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instance, that such abstract things as ideas, feelings, or beliefs could, for instance, influence the configuration of a collective. Analyzing collectives from this bottom up perspective thus implies that humans are not the only ones involved, but that we also need to account for all the other agents that might influence the development of a collective. Although the reflection on autopoietic systems paved the way to a more bottom up approach to systems (Taylor 2008), especially through Maturana and Varela’s (1987, 1991) key contributions, the problem remains that the idea of selfproduction (which is what autopoiesis etymologically means) implies that systems manage to organize or produce themselves. What is the problem with such a position? Simply that it tends to hide the heteronomous dimension of any system or organization, a heteronomy that is partly acknowledged by Maturana and Varela, but that their systemic approach fails, I think, to fully understand and acknowledge. Again my point is not to claim that there are no systems or that they do not have an autonomous dimension, but to notice that their relative autonomy always feeds itself on a form of heteronomy. To understand what is at stake here, we first need to problematize the usage of reflexive pronouns (myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves), since it involves a matter of description, something we already dwelled on in Chapter 1. Let’s take, for instance, the following statement: Denis burned himself by accidentally spilling a cup of boiling coffee over his chest.

As we see, the usage of a reflexive pronoun implies that someone called Denis did something to himself, that is, he burned himself. But as it is always the case with reflexive pronouns, such reflexivity actually hides another agent whose contribution is somehow hidden in this description, namely here the (cup of) boiling coffee. Without this agent’s contribution, no burning would have taken place, which means that another way to describe or account for what happened could consist of saying that: The boiling coffee burned Denis when he mistakenly spilled it on his chest.

A priori, no description is better than the other as it simply consists of acknowledging the contribution of specific agents within a chain or configuration of agencies that contributed to the accident. The first description insists on Denis’s contribution, while the second focuses on the cup of coffee’s. Again, we face a logic of exappropriation or exattribution: When we insist on Denis’s contribution to the accident, what the boiling coffee did becomes what Denis did, but such appropriation/attribution is always partial and relative as we



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could also highlight the boiling coffee’s action. Action, as pointed out repeatedly in this book, is something that is always shared, delegated, deferred. The usage of a reflexive pronoun thus insists on a specific aspect of a given situation, but it in no way exhausts the reality of what is happening. And this logic works, as mentioned earlier, for any form of reflexivity (e.g., “I see myself in the mirror” vs. “the mirror reflects my face”; “Bob hurt himself with a hammer” vs. “the hammer crushed Bob’s finger”). What are the consequences of this reflection regarding the question of selforganization or self-production (autopoiesis)? To address this question, let’s look at what tends to be hidden when one says, “They are organizing themselves,” or even, “A system is organizing itself,” to refer to a group of five friends who decide to help one of them – let’s call her Nina – to move from her apartment? First, one could note that if these persons appear to organize themselves, it is because they somehow manage to distribute various tasks and responsibilities to each other. For instance, we could imagine that Nina, the person who is moving, will propose that three of her friends will be in charge of carrying the boxes and pieces of furniture, while two of them will be responsible for loading the boxes and furniture into the moving truck. So if they can indeed organize themselves (and remember that my point is not to claim that they do not, but simply that such a description hides other contributions or aspects of the situation), it is because Nina manages to create and mobilize regularory and/or projective agents that will function as programs of action for each participant. These agents are roles, programs, projects, and they, in many respects, participate in and contribute to the organizing (Robichaud 2001, 2002, 2003; Robichaud, Giroux, & Taylor 2004). For instance, one person must feel authorized enough to suggest that the tasks and responsibilities be distributed in the way she proposes. In the case I invented, it is Nina, the person whom the friends decided to help, since we can imagine that people will tend to naturally attribute such authority to the person who not only initiated the moving, but also will benefit from it (but, of course, this is an invented case and other possibilities could obtain). Once some form of agreement is reached (implicitly or explicitly) regarding the roles, tasks, and responsibilities, people should start to operate according to what was decided: Three of the friends will take care of the boxes and pieces of furniture, carrying them or passing them to each other, while two of them will load the boxes and pieces of furniture in the truck. These roles, tasks, objectives, programs of action, and projects participate in the organizing to the extent that without them no ordering would be taking place (Latour 2008; Vasquez 2009). Furthermore, if asked to account for what they are doing, each of these persons could invoke their respective roles and tasks (what could also be called figures), which would explain why they are doing what they

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are doing, that is, what leads them to do what they are doing. By distributing the tasks and responsibilities the way she did, Nina indeed created or produced a system, a form of systematicity, an organization, but such a system precisely is also the product of these projective and regulatory agents/figures that she created and produced for another next first time. There is therefore self-organization or auto-production (autopoiesis) to the extent that a configuration is produced, a configuration that cannot be reduced to the people who participate in the moving process. Another way to describe what is happening would thus consist of saying that the tasks and responsibilities that Nina distributed define/identify/delineate what each of her friends are supposed to do, a definition/identification/delineation that, in many respects contributes to the organization and systematization of what will (hopefully for her) happen during the moving. As we see through this illustration, my point, again, is not to prevent us from speaking in terms of autopoiesis, self-organization, or even systems, but to point out that if self-organization or autopoiesis is there, it is because many figures are involved, and especially regulatory and projective ones. Saying “they organized themselves” is, of course, acceptable, since in many respects self-organization did take place in the fictitious example I invented, but such a description can be deceiving to the extent that it tends to privilege human agency over other forms of agency that also contribute to the organizing (Denis 2007). The case is even worse with “the system organizes itself,” since this description, which is not, of course, completely wrong, tends to imply that the thing called “the system” is a non problematic form that would manage to (re-)produce itself almost magically, a little like the Baron of Munchhausen who, according to Rudolf Erich Raspe, managed to pull himself out of a swamp by his bootstrap (hence the term bootstrapping effect, Bardini 2000). Although bootstrapping is (in its pure form) impossible (to the extent that this amounts to affirming the non existence of other entities that would be hidden in this description – for instance, the fact that if he indeed pull on his bootstrap, it could have been through the means of a pulley that allowed him to drag himself out of the swamp), there is a form of truth in saying that a system organizes itself, but such a truth is possible only because many different figures, things, or agents incarnate/represent/embody for another next first time such a system, and that each of these figures, things, or agents cannot be reduced to these incarnations/representations/embodiments. Again, and this is true for any kind of collective, system, society, or organism: no autonomy without heteronomy, no autopoiesis without heteropoiesis, no appropriation without expropriation, no attribution without extribution. Each system, collective, or society has to be produced, enacted, constructed for another next first time, a production/enactment/construction that always is the result of a



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configuration of agencies whose contributions can never be reduced to their participation in this process. A system, yes, but a system made of effects of systematicity, effects that are produced by agents that are deemed as acting and speaking in its name. If a system can organize itself, it is because a plethora of agents acting and speaking in its name will produce repetitive and iterative effects of configuration and assemblage and that these effects will be attributable to the system itself (Bencherki & Cooren 2009).

5.4

A plea for reification

As it should be clear by now, the position defended in this book consists of advocating for an incarnated or embodied approach to interactions, language, and collectives. But one might retort that arguing for the recognition of phenomena such as incarnation or embodiment amounts to falling into the trap of reification, which arguably is considered the worse sin that a scholar could commit nowadays! In its classical (non-Marxist42) definition, to reify is to treat an abstraction as though it had concrete or material existence, that is to make it a thing (= res in Latin). Tompkins and Wanca-Thibault (2001), for example, denounce what they call the “fallacy of reification,” from a communicative point of view, arguing that organizations are not entities in which communication is situated, but that “communication constitutes organizations” (p. xxi, our italics). Similarly, Deetz (2001) defines reification as a phenomenon by which “a social formation is abstracted from the ongoing conflictual site of its origin and treated as a concrete, relatively fixed entity” (p. 27). He argues, that, in turn, “the illusion that organizations and their processes are ‘natural’ objects protects them from examination as produced under specific historical conditions (which are potentially passing) and out of specific power relations” (p. 27; see Cooren, Brummans, & Charrieras 2008). Reification is thus something that many scholars tend to deplore because it makes people “view existing arrangements as natural (inevitable) and normal (expected and morally correct)” (Conrad & Haynes 2001, p. 62). But as we saw, organizations, collectives, and societies are (in the strongest sense of the term) a multitude of things, if by things we mean the generic term that consists of speaking of buildings, operations, documents, humans, machines, and so forth. For instance, Apple is incarnated or embodied as much in Steve Jobs when he speaks on behalf of his company, as in the buildings that belong to his organization, or the 42. As we know, for Marx, reifying consists of turning a human being into a physical thing deprived of qualities or individuality, which amounts to reducing labor to a commodity. We are, of course, not using the term reification in this technical sense, despite its analytical value.

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processes that are daily operated in its name. Incidentally, recognizing this does not amount to saying that organizations, societies, or collectives are defined once for all, that what is done in their name is unproblematic, normal, or inevitable, or that this position denies the importance of historical conditions or power relations (Cooren, Brummans, & Charrieras 2008). Where does this idea come from that buildings, machines, documents, ranks, hierarchical lines, processes, and even human beings for that matter, would be unchangeable or inevitable? If organizations are, at least, partially “things” (if by thing, we restrictively mean this time artifacts such as documents, machines, and buildings), we do not see why this would amount to saying that organizations cannot be changed or that they are naturalized. Even nature changes, as we all know so well today! But what is even more problematic with the term reification is that it is based on what I consider to be a complete misunderstanding of what a thing is. Here, again, the etymology of this notion is very instructive. As Latour (2004a, Latour & Weibel 2005) reminds us, the term thing (also ting in Scandinavian or Ding in Dutch or German) was initially used to refer to a meeting or assembly where topics and subjects were deliberated. This original sense is preserved in the term hustings (i.e., a meeting gathering the men who formed a nobleman or sovereign’s household) and the Icelandic Althing, which still today is Iceland's general assembly. It is only later that people started to use the term thing to refer to entities, beings and matters that were subject of deliberation in an assembly. Interestingly, the same evolution exists in Latin languages where the term “chose” in French or “cosa” in Spanish come from the Latin causa, which was used to refer to something that was deliberated in a court of law or in public. A synonym in Latin precisely is res, which we still find today in the term republic, literally the public thing, the res publica. People therefore used to form things, i.e., general assemblies, in order to speak about things, i.e., objects of deliberation. This would explain why the word “thing” can indeed be used today to speak about so many different… things, that is, things as diverse as dreams, tables, statuses, ideas, societies, organizations, ghosts, etc. All these things are things precisely because we talk about them, we deliberate on them, we think about them, we imagine them. But I, of course, understand that when scholars denounce the sin of reification, they rather have in mind the idea of treating something apparently abstract (like a collective, an idea, a feeling) as if it were something tangible, concrete, material, corporeal. But two things appear highly problematic here. First, we saw that something like a collective, for instance, has, by definition, concrete dimensions to the extent that it ought to be embodied/incarnated/materialized in order to exist. My point is not to claim that there is no difference between, say, an organism



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and a social organization, for instance, but the difference does not lie in the fact that the first is concrete while the second is abstract. Both are concrete, real, actual, tangible, but while the body of an organism (a bacteria, a dog, a human being, for instance) can be relatively circumscribed and identified (i.e., their existence can, at first sight, appear to be non-problematic, even if modern biology actually questions such “evidence” (see especially Kupiec & Sonigo 2000; Kupiec 2009)), social entities (a society, an organization, a group) are more problematic in terms of circumscription and identification, especially because humans actively contribute to their mode of being, acting and defining. Social organizations or human societies appear more abstract to us because of their fictive dimension. They are, as Hobbes (1651/1997) reminds us, artificial persons, that is, humans literally made them up, created and designed them, which, of course, does not mean that they do not exist (we speak, for instance, of a “legal fiction,” i.e., a juristic person, an artificial entity, to refer to a company). When we deal with social organizations, we can potentially be somewhat like the person, staged by Ryle (1949), who is visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time. This person is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, scientific departments, and administrative offices, but is unable to see the university through all these representatives. The “university” thus remains abstract in the etymological sense of the term abstract, that is, withdrawn or separated from material objects or practical matters. But what the visitor fails to understand is that all these colleges, libraries, playing fields, scientific departments, and administrative offices are precisely supposed to embody or incarnate what the university is. They are the university as much as the university’s official voice is its president’s voice. If we compare “the university” with a table, for instance, one is a priori no more abstract than the other, given that both are configurations, which means that they are both held together by relations/communications/interactions (although the nature of these interactions are, of course, different). Imagine someone who would have never seen a table in her life, one could then imagine that the word table would be abstract to that person (similar to how string theory remains abstract to most of us), but this abstraction is always relative to the extent that if shown a table or explained what it is, this person will start to have a more concrete idea or representation of what it looks like. If social entities can appear more abstract, it is also because their incarnations can remain mysterious or inaccessible to most of us. For instance, Europe remains an abstraction to many Europeans precisely because its representatives and their actions are not visible: There is no clear presidency (the person in power changes every 6 months), no clear capital (Brussels for the administration, Strasbourg for the parliament), no clear representation (the political parties tend to be clones of national parties with sometimes very few interests in Europe per se), and so on.

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Furthermore, the question as to what or who is entitled to speak and act in the name of a social entity or its interests is always debatable, which reinforces this effect of abstraction (see Stohl & Stohl 2007, for a similar reflection regarding terrorist or secrete organizations). A collective (whatever it is, a table, an organism, a social entity) has to be held or reconfigured for another next first time. While tables, buildings, and artifacts tend to be held together steadily – that is, their restance (or staying capacity) appears, at first sight, more solid, social collectives tend to appear more fragile. Not only their configurations, but also their mere existence can be questioned. They are the object of fights, political influences, debates, and so forth. They are precisely things, in the etymological sense of the term, that is, objects of deliberation. If reification thus consists of treating something abstract as if it were something tangible, concrete, material, corporeal, then reification is therefore a false problem, given that social entities are, in the strongest sense of the term, things and even many things. Furthermore – and this is what a thing, as we saw, is supposed to be – its status and existence are debatable, controversial, questionable. In order to exist, things ought to be held together by a plenum or configuration of agencies (made of laws, plans, policies, rules, statuses, humans, institutions, etc.), which are themselves configurations and collectives (see also Suchman 2007). My point therefore is that we should stop considering the term reification to be a devil term because this leads to a theoretical dead end by making us think and speak of organizations, or collectives in general, in terms of abstract entities. Although collectives can appear abstract (it can be “just a name” for instance), their abstraction is always relative to the person who is experiencing them. Treating social entities as abstractions does not liberate anybody, except if they help people think that other things could indeed incarnate or represent them. But given that things and their status are, by definition, debatable, questionable, controversial, the term reification leads to a theoretical and analytical dead end. Although my point could be accused of intellectualizing a discussion, I strongly believe that the term reification actually serves what it is supposed to denounce. The idea is not to dereify organizations and societies by showing that they actually are abstractions with no material dimensions. On the contrary, any political agenda should consist of offering and creating new configurations, agencies, things as presentifying, incarnating, embodying what a collective is and should be. It is incidentally something that people continue to do without the intervention of scientists and critical scholars. People indeed keep reifying, but this is not a bad thing, as long as it is clear that things are objects of deliberation and that nothing incarnates a collective once for all.

Conclusion

In many respects, this book was an impossible journey from interactions to organizations and societies, but what I tried to demonstrate is that if there is a socalled gap between the macro and the micro, between the local and the global, it is mainly methodological, not ontological. Methodologically, it is indeed quite difficult, although not impossible, to follow the development of configurations, one interaction at a time, especially when we want to do justice to their longitudinal complexity. Latour (2002) might be right to notice that, with today’s technology, it becomes thinkable to follow the various traces that agents with variable ontologies leave behind as they participate in the making up of collectives, whether these are organizations or societies, but we have yet to invent instruments that could allow us to not suffer from analytical myopia or presbyopia. If interactions are indeed dislocal, it means that we have to pay extra attention to their details while remaining ever vigilant about effects of ventriloquism/presentification/incarnation, that is, effects that consist of mobilizing entities/figures/agents that come to participate in the definition and evolution of what is happening. Following the development of configurations thus consists of identifying the various figures that reattach themselves for another next first time through our interactions, a reattachment that always depends on both the eventful and iterative character of each conversation. What makes this journey difficult is not that we ought to bridge an ontological gap between interaction and collectives, since collectives, as we saw, are incarnated/present/embodied in our interactions. What makes it difficult is that we, as analysts, need sufficient time to see how such incarnations/embodiments/presentifications evolve and are negotiated. Following Vasquez (2009) as well as Jones, McLean, and Quattrone (2004), one could say that what is at stake is a question of spacing and timing, in other words, studying the details of interaction through a ventriloqual lens invites us to analyze, for instance, how a given figure manages to reproduce itself throughout various interactions/incarnations. As we saw, analyzing the figures of interaction and dialogue not only allows us to explain the very condition of their intelligibility, but also the way by which such beings as principles, values, collectives, facts, and even cultures incarnate

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themselves in our discussions. If interactants stage these beings in their conversations, it is because the interactants are supposed to be attached to these beings, an attachment that animates their discussions. According to this analysis, interactions thus become dislocated loci where the world speaks to itself, so to speak, that is, where it reconfigures itself for another next first time. Following Whitehead (1920), the approach defended in this book thus participates in the theoretical and empirical fight against what he proposed to call the bifurcation of nature (see also Debaise 2006a; Latour 2008; Stengers 2002). By bifurcation of nature, Whitehead (1920) meant what he considered to be the incorrect separation of “primary qualities” (the physical part of the world) from “secondary qualities” (its experience and understanding by human beings), a separation that is still today quite alive and kicking, not only in philosophy, but also in the social sciences and humanities – we have only to think, for instance, about the so called “social construction of reality” (Berger & Luckmann 1966), which still pervades our literature. Commenting on this bifurcation, Latour (2008) writes, In a nature that has bifurcated, it’s in vain that the nightingale sings: the singing is entirely in our mind, or even in our brain. If we could look directly at nature…, it would be soundless: the throat of the nightingale would simply agitate the air, the waves of which will strike our eardrums trigerring some electric effects in our neurons, and somewhere in the auditory folds of our cortex a pure invention will emerge which has no correspondence whatsoever with anything of a similar tone in nature: the sound of the soundless nightingale. (p. 11)

Bifurcating nature thus amounts to claiming that there is no correspondence, no translation, no link between the ways we experience the singing of a bird and the physical phenomenon that is supposed to make such singing possible. On the one side, the object of natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften), and on the other side, the object of human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), as proposed by Dilthey (1972). According to a ventriloqual analysis, such a bifurcation/separation/division/split does not make any sense: We saw that interactants are ventriloquized as much as they ventriloquize. In other words, such a bifurcation participates in the straightjacketing of conversation and interaction in general. As long as we acknowledge only human beings as being able to speak and say things, they appear like the nightingale: They might sing or speak but this activity has nothing to do with what is supposed to surround the conversation. They might be socially constructing their world (what a horrible expression!), one interaction at a time, but they are the only ones on the construction site. Such an explanation does not



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hold, precisely because it brings us to a solipstic position where interactants would reconstruct their world simply through the magic of dialogue and language. Dialogue and language exist, of course, but they should be understood as the phonation devices by which many aspects of the world, many beings (with variable ontologies) come to express themselves. Do these beings express themselves plainly, directly, straightforwardly? Never, and this is why studying conversation and dialogue is indeed so interesting. Again, this is a matter of mediation or translation (Latour 1994). When facts appear to speak for themselves, there is always, somewhere, something or someone who makes them speak for themselves. These facts can, of course, be erromeous or even rigged, but from such a possibility (which, as Derrida 1988, would say, is structurally constitutive of what a fact can be) one should not conclude that no translation is possible, that facts never speak for themselves. But fighting against the bifurcation of nature does not only concern the question of factuality, it also concerns questions of politics and organization, or, the very way by which we (re-)configure our world, one interaction at a time. Saying that we are not the only ones at the construction site means that we constantly ventriloquize (and are ventriloquized by) beings that participate in and contribute to this construction/production. I called these beings both figures and agents because they are at the same time constituted for another next first time in our exchanges (figures) and literally act as contributors to the way any situation is defined (agents). We saw that such figures/agents are the very conditions of our authorities and power, because they lend weight to our positions, offering the possibility of changing our world, as much as the possibility of reproducing it. If communication can be considered a practical discipline (Craig 1989, 1992, 1996, 1999, 2007), it means that such a ventriloqual approach should have some practical import. As long as we think of nature as bifurcated, our view is limited: From such a perspective, interactants cannot really grasp their world, because what they talk about cannot be truly linked – in one direction or the other – to the world to which they are supposed to be referring. However, as soon as we think of communicating and interacting as a matter of mediation or translation (with, of course, all the effects of treason that such activities necessarily entail), then human interactions become an important site (not the only one, of course) where (re-)configurations take place. This does not mean that all interactions have the same bearing over the fate of our world, it just means that each interaction plays a role, as minimal as it might be, in the evolution of our collectives or pluriverses. Whether we are talking about emotions that communicate themselves through the grapevine or a specific policy that progressively improves the living conditions of a part of a given population, a ventriloqual approach makes it not only possible to trace – without leaving the terra firma of interaction (Cooren

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2006) – how these phenomena happen, but also to demonstrate the importance that communication plays in their evolution. As long as the infamous opposition between structure and action is reproduced, people can appear to be or consider themselves to be powerless or ineffective, since their actions appear somewhat disconnected from the structure (whatever this is!) that is supposed to hang over their actions. However, as soon as they realize that their actions participate in the very reconfiguration of these structures, it is my belief that a form of empowerment or liberation takes place. For instance, how many times have I heard, as a department chair, that this and that could not be done because some policy, rule, precedent, or procedure prohibited it? We all know of these (bureaucratic and legal) figures that populate our organizational and social world. Let me be clear, I am not arguing that we should not pay attention to these figures, but rather my point is to suggest that we relativize their action by checking, for instance, if there would not be other ways of ventriloquizing them, that is, to make them speak. Returning to the Eichmann figure, I would even contend that a ventriloqual approach to interaction should encourage us to cultivate the experience of undecidability, which should certainly not be mistaken for the encouragement of indecision (see also Boltanski & Thévenot 2006, especially p. 216). Eichmann (and others) had decided once and for all to follow the Führer’s orders, no matter the price, an obsession that led him to participate very actively in one of the worse atrocities that humankind has ever experienced. Can we give ourselves the chance to experience more undecidability than he did? In other words, can we remain vigilant as to what will guide our conduct, one interaction at a time, throughout our lives? While deconstruction has often been mistaken for a nihilist position, it is, on the contrary, a very affirmative and modern position, that is, a position of constant vigilance that invites us to resist submitting to the facility of blindly following these beings that we call programs, principles, orders, values, projects, procedures, protocols, precedents, and the like. These beings exist and take multiple forms, but it is precisely because they exist that we must remain vigilant regarding their capacity to exhaust the complexity of any situation.43 I acknowledge that my reasoning is relatively abstract

43. If many different figures can be identified as “doing things” in a given interaction, it means that dialogues and interaction can be marked by uncertainty, failure, alterity, treason, openness, exposure, pollution (Pinchevski 2005; see also Cooren 2008). This actually parallels Deetz and Simpson’s (2004) point when they argue that “‘coming together’ and ‘finding common ground’ may be far less desirable activities than learning to recognize, value, and even celebrate difference” (p. 150). Although common figures can be mobilized in a given discussion, all depends on how we make them speak and say things.



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and does not take into account the constraints of each circumstance, but it is also sometimes too easy to claim that we did not have a choice or that we had to follow orders. It is the very condition of our (ir-)responsibility, that is our (in-)capacity to respond, to answer, not only for what we do, but also for what others do. If we ought to respond, it is also because, in many respects, we appear to be unable to answer for everything that we did, are doing, or will do. Recognizing our own hybridity and the infinite hybridity of our actions means that we, by definition, share responsibilities, but this is precisely why we must take responsibility for what lies beyond our perceived finitude.44 As Dostoieviski (2002) writes by ventriloquizing some of his characters, “We are all responsible to all for all,” an infinite responsibility which should not be mistaken for a plea for relativism. Some, of course, are more responsible than others, some have to respond for more than others, but delegation of responsibility, especially to these beings we call precedents, principles, supervisors, and procedures, is also the very means by which atrocities sometimes end up being committed. So again, let’s give ourselves the chance to experience undecidability, which is another way to give ourselves the chance to realize what we are participating in, even when we feel irresponsible for or remote from what is happening (see also J. Cooren 2009). This should not be confused with a call for measure or reasonableness, as nothing appears more unreasonable or immoderate than a person who decides not to follow orders, procedures, or principles. It is a call for complexification, as Weick (1979, 1995) would put it, a call for deconstruction.

44. In his groundbreaking contribution, Obedience to Authority, Stanley Milgram (1974) notes, “This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.” (p. 6). Interestingly, he also explicitly refers to Adolf Eichmann. Pointing out that his experiments have often been called “The Eichmann experiment,” he writes, “The ‘Eichmann experiment’ is, perhaps, an apt term, but it should not lead us to mistake the import of this investigation. To focus only on the Nazis, however despicable their deeds, and to view only highly publicized atrocities as being relevant to these studies is to miss the point entirely. For the studies are principally concerned with the ordinary and routine destruction carried out by everyday people following orders.” I could not agree more (see, of course, Arendt 1963, on this banality of evil, as well as J. Cooren 2009).

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Author index

A Aakhus, M.  137, 175 Agne, R. R.  114, 175 Alvesson, M.  5, 175 Anderson, R.  1n, 175, 177, 179 Anscombe, G. E. M.  16, 18, 175 Arendt, H.  66, 68, 71, 72, 173n, 175 Arquembourg, J.  40, 42, 175 Ashcraft, K. L.  145, 175 Aristotle  17 Austin, J. L.  1, 4, 15, 20, 36, 37, 46, 154, 175 Authier-Revuz, J.  88, 175 B Bakhtin, M.  1n, 88, 109, 175 Bardini, T.  164, 175 Barnard, C. I.  75, 175 Bateson, G.  160, 175 Baxter, L. A.  1n, 175 Beavin, J. H.  160, 190 Bencherki, N.  102, 150, 165, 175 Benoit-Barné, C.  2, 63, 73, 75, 137, 175 Berger, P. L.  170, 176 Bisel, R. S.  1, 176 Boden, D.  5, 176 Bogen, D.  78, 185 Boltanski, L.  10, 107, 172, 176 Bonito, J. A.  2n, 67, 188 Bonneville, L.  3, 80, 81, 182 Borges, J. L.  133n, 176 Bouzon, A.  20, 176 Brassac, C.  39n, 50, 79, 157, 176, 190 Brauman, R.  66, 176 Brentano, F.  24n, 176 Brown, P.  63, 95, 176 Browning, L. D.  2, 176

Brummans, B. H. J. M.  6, 49, 81, 133n, 142, 146, 154, 165, 166, 176, 178 Buber, M.  1, 176 Burke, K.  16, 60, 176, 177 Butler, J.  38, 44n, 54, 54n, 177 C Cahill, D. J.  42, 181 Callon, M.  20, 21, 23, 27, 30, 59, 79, 129, 156, 177 Carayol, V.  80, 177 Carbaugh, D.  10, 114, 115, 138, 177 Carroll, D.  88, 89, 177 Castor, T.  7, 79, 177 Chang, B. G.  19, 31, 177 Chaput, M.  6, 146, 152n, 154, 176, 177 Charland, M.  108, 152, 152n, 177 Charrieras, D.  6, 142, 146, 154, 165, 166, 178 Chia, R.  80, 177, 190 Chomsky, N.  43, 177 Cissna, K. N.  1n, 175, 177, 179 Clark, H. H.  41, 177 Clayman, S.  67, 177 Clegg, S.  65, 66, 69, 178, 179 Cochoy, F.  7, 178 Connor, S.  85, 178 Conrad, C.  1, 165, 178 Cooren, F.  2, 4, 6, 7, 15, 17, 20, 21, 32, 33, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 49, 54, 55, 57, 62, 73, 75, 79, 80, 81, 90, 93, 94, 102, 104, 118, 137, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 152, 154, 156, 157, 158, 161, 165, 166, 171, 172n, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 189, 190

Cooren, J.  173, 173n, 179 Courtés, J.  17, 61, 93n, 182 Craig, R. T.  114, 171, 179 Crozier, M.  75, 179 Czarniawska, B.  10, 108, 183 D Davidson, D.  16, 18, 22, 23, 24, 25, 179 de Sousa, R.  62, 189 Debaise, D.  63, 170, 179 Deetz, S.  2, 165, 172n, 179 Deleuze, G.  20, 88, 136n, 179 Denis, J.  164, 179 Derrida, J.  15, 19, 27, 28, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 52, 55, 64, 65, 69, 78, 102, 104, 109, 113, 133n, 136, 145, 146, 148, 149, 152, 153, 154, 171, 179, 180 Descombes, V.  18, 42, 43, 180 Desilet, G.  19, 180 Dilthey, W.  170, 180 Dostoievsky, F.  88, 173, 180 Ducrot, O.  88, 180 Durkeim, É.  158, 180 Dutton, J. E.  93, 187 E Eco, U.  133, 180 Edström, A.  75, 94, 184 Eisenberg, E. M.  10, 115, 180 Engeström, Y.  60n, 180, 183 F Fabbri, P.  50, 188 Fairhurst, G. T.  2, 5, 42, 80, 93, 94, 137, 151, 178, 180, 181, 183, 187 Fanshel, D.  99, 114, 184 Farrell, T. B.  75, 181

194 Action and Agency in Dialogue

Fayol, H.  75, 181 Fehr, B. J.  4, 78, 89, 114, 186 Feldman, M.  139, 181 Filliettaz, L.  94, 181 Fisher, J. Y.  7, 181 Fisher, W. R.  108, 138, 181 Fitch, K. L.  10, 59, 74, 77, 99, 114, 117, 138, 181, 188 Fixmer, P.  79, 157, 176 Foley, M.  59, 181 Fontanille, J.  62, 182 Foucault, M.  5, 86, 181 Fox, S.  154, 156, 157, 178 Fraenkel, B.  31, 152n, 181 Friedberg, E.  75, 179 Freud, S.  54, 55, 103 G Garfinkel, H.  4, 11, 31, 32, 36, 37, 38, 54, 60, 73, 78, 80, 104, 142, 148, 157, 158, 158n, 181 Gee, J. P.  5, 181 Ghiglione, R.  39n, 137n, 181 Giddens, A.  2, 25, 42, 181 Giroux, H.  129, 163, 182, 187 Giroux, N.  80, 189 Goffman, E.  2n, 3, 3n, 4, 6, 63, 67, 70, 74n, 76n, 81n, 182 Goldblatt, D.  9, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 100, 101, 115, 182 Gomart, É.  63, 183 Gray, B.  81n, 176 Greene, R. W.  2, 176 Greimas, A. J.  17, 20, 21, 61, 62, 74, 77, 93n, 94, 118, 182 Grice, H. P.  41, 104, 182 Grillo, É.  1n, 9, 136, 182 Groleau, C.  27, 60n, 182, 189 Grosjean, S.  2, 3, 80, 81, 182 Guattari, F.  20, 88, 179 Gumbrecht, H. U.  28, 108, 182 Gumperz, J. J.  10, 34, 114, 182 Gunn, J.  6, 16, 182 H Habermas, J.  1n, 182 Hagberg, G. L.  86, 183 Hanke, R.  81, 176 Hassard, J.  79, 185 Haynes, J.  1, 165, 178 Heaton, L.  27, 189

Heidegger, M.  86 Hemingway, E.  53 Hémont, F.  61n, 183 Hennion, A.  63, 78, 183 Heritage, J.  32, 33, 34, 37, 39, 40, 53, 78, 96, 114, 142, 183 Hilbert, David  69n Hirschman, A. O.  63, 183 Hobbes, T.  6, 167, 183 Hoffman,  160 Holquist, M.  88, 183 Hong, J.  75, 183 Hoogenboom, M.  75, 183 Hoskins, K.  29, 183 Huët, R.  81, 182 Husserl, E.  24n, 52, 183 Hymes, D.  10, 44, 183 I Iverson, J.  2, 78, 185 J Jackson, D. D.  160, 190 Jacques, F.  1n, 183 James, S.  9, 183 James, W.  57 Jian, G.  5, 183 Joerges, B.  10, 108, 183 Jones, G.  169, 183 Jönsson, S.  94, 184 K Kahn, W. A.  75, 184 Kant, E.  70, 71, 71n Kärreman, D.  5, 175 Katambwe, J.  9, 99, 111, 135, 184 Kecskes, I.  34, 35, 37, 43, 44, 49, 184 Keenoy, T.  128, 184 Kenny, A.  17, 18, 19, 184 Kierkegaard, S.  65, 184 Knorr Cetina, K.  27, 184 Korichi, M.  9, 62, 184 Kornberger, M.  65, 66, 178, 179 Kram, K. E.  75, 184 Kuhn, T.  29, 29n, 145, 184 Kupiec, J.-J.  150, 150n, 166, 184 L Labov, W.  99, 114, 184 Latour, B.  1, 4, 5, 19n, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 30, 57, 60, 63, 73, 75, 78,

79, 80, 118, 139, 141, 150n, 156, 163, 166, 170, 171, 177, 184, 185 Lausten, C. B.  71, 185 Law, J.  20, 79, 185 Le Ber, F.  79, 157, 176 Lépinay, V. A.  63, 185 Levinson, S. C.  53, 63, 95, 176 Luckmann, T.  170 Luhmann, N.  160, 176, 185 Lynch, M.  78, 185 M Maisonneuve, S.  63, 183 Marquis de Sade  79 Marx  165n Massumi, B.  146, 185 Maturana, H. R.  162, 185 McLean, C.  29, 79, 169, 183, 185 McPhee, R. D.  2, 6, 78, 185 Mead, G. H.  20, 21, 21n, 185 Meunier, D.  75, 185 Mey, J. L.  42, 186 Middleton, D.  60n, 180 Milgram, S.  67n, 173n, 186 Moerman, M.  10, 114, 186 Mondada, L.  79, 157, 176 Morillon, L.  20, 186 Mumby, D. K.  4, 62, 186 Murphy, J. M.  75, 186 N Nicotera, A. M.  6, 11, 80, 155, 157, 186, 187 O Obstfled, D.  2, 176 Onfray, M.  71, 71n, 72, 186 Orlikowski, W. J.  27, 186 Ossewaarde, R.  75, 183 Oswick, C.  128, 184 P Pacanowsky, M. E.  160, 187 Parson, T.  160, 186 Peirce, C. S.  18, 42, 43, 52, 186 Pentland, B.  139, 181 Pfeiffer, K. L.  28, 108, 182 Philipsen, G.  10, 114, 116, 117, 119, 119n, 139, 186 Pickering, A.  20, 21, 22, 86, 98, 186



Pinchevski, A.  172n, 186 Plato  86, 87, 89, 186 Pomerantz, A.  4, 5, 34, 78, 89, 114, 186 Pontille, D.  20, 186 Prelli, L. J.  108, 186 Putnam, L. L.  4, 5, 6, 11, 59, 62, 80, 81, 155, 160, 176, 181, 186, 187 Q Quattrone, P.  61, 169, 183, 187 Quéré, L.  3n, 187 Quinn, R. W.  93, 187 R Raspe, R. E.  164 Rawls, A. W.  158, 158n, 187 Rhodes, C.  65, 66, 178, 179 Riggins, S.  86, 187 Riley, P.  10, 115, 180 Robichaud, D.  3, 18, 20, 42, 80, 154, 156, 157, 163, 178, 182, 187, 189 Rosch, E.  53, 187 Roulet, E.  94, 181 Russell, B.  157, 187 Ryle, G.  155, 156, 157, 167, 187 S Sacks, H.  4, 5, 32, 33, 187 Sagemen  160 Sanders, R. E.  2n, 5, 35n, 38, 41, 48n, 49, 55, 67, 74, 77, 99, 104, 114, 117, 138, 179, 181, 187, 188 Sbisà, M.  8, 50, 188 Schegloff, E. A.  5, 32, 33, 35, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 78, 114, 188 Schein, E.  160, 188 Schell, S. E.  75, 189 Schmisseur, A. M.  5, 183 Schütz, A.  36, 188

Author index 195

Searle, J. R.  15, 16, 20, 24n, 25, 34, 41, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 154, 188 Semprini, A.  8, 188 Sennett, R.  75, 189 Shakespeare, W.  113 Shannon, C. E.  27, 189 Sillince, J. A. A.  32, 189 Simmel, G.  3n, 189 Simon, H. A.  61, 61n, 189 Simpson, J.  172n, 179 Sitkin, S. B.  2, 176 Sivan, E.  66, 176 Socrate  86, 87, 88, 89, 115 Solomon, R.  62, 189 Sonigo, P.  150, 150n, 167, 184 Sperber, D.  41, 189 Stein, G.  89 Stengers, I.  170, 189 Stohl, C.  75, 160, 168, 189 Stohl, M.  160, 168, 189 Styron, W.  65, 66, 189 Suchman, L.  27, 168, 189 Sutcliffe, K. M.  2, 176 T Talih, N.  154, 156, 157, 178 Tarde, G.  2, 63, 103, 115, 117, 118, 139, 142, 150, 150n, 160, 161, 189 Taylor, J. R.  2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 17, 20, 21, 27, 28, 66, 72, 75, 80, 94, 99, 108, 111, 129, 135, 137, 141, 146, 150n, 154, 157, 162, 163, 182, 184, 187, 189 Teil, G.  63, 183 Thévenot, L.  10, 107, 172, 176 Tompkins, P. K.  165, 190 Tracy, K.  59, 114, 175, 179, 190 Trognon, A.  39n, 50, 181, 190 Tsoukas, H.  80, 190 Turing, A.  69n, 190

U Ugilt, R.  71, 185 V Van Every, E. J.  3, 5, 6, 17, 20, 21, 27, 28, 66, 75, 80, 94, 99, 108, 137, 141, 146, 150n, 157, 189 Van Vuuren, M.  7, 190 Vanderveken, D.  15 Varela, F. J.  162, 185 Vasquez, C.  62, 75, 79n, 150, 161, 163, 169, 185, 190 Verbeek, P.-P.  8, 190 Vinck, D.  79, 157, 176 von Bertalanffy, L.  160, 190 W Wall, A.  88, 190 Wallace, K. R.  108, 138, 190 Wanca-Thibault, M.  165, 190 Watzlawick, P.  160, 190 Weaver, W.  27, 189 Weber, M.  75, 190 Weibel, P.  166, 185 Weick, K. E.  161, 173, 190 Weigand, E.  1n, 8, 42, 77, 190 Wetherell, M.  33, 191 Whitehead, A. N.  20, 21n, 63, 142, 150, 150n, 170, 191 Wiener, N.  160, 191 Wilson, D.  41, 189 Wittgenstein, L.  4, 5, 18, 59, 191 Woolgar, S.  21, 185 Worline, M. C.  93, 187 Y Yates, J.  30, 191 Z Zaug, P.  2, 6, 78, 185

Subject index

A Absence  4, 16, 31, 127 Abstract  149, 153, 166–168 Abstract entity  168 Abstraction  149, 153, 156, 166–168 Abstractionism  158 Abuse  159, 160 Abu Ghraib  159 Accident  162 Accusing  35, 102, 111 Accommodation  21, 22, 98 Accountability  7, 61–63, 78, 97, 104, 113, 148 Acknowledging  75, 80, 82, 94, 151, 156, 159 Acted upon  22, 58, 67, 68, 78, 159 Acting back  86 Action  1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 16, 17, 20, 22, 24, 25, 31, 34, 42, 57, 58, 60, 67, 78, 79, 90, 159, 163, 172, 173 Active  74, 79 Activeness  60 Activity  5, 9, 20, 58, 66, 78, 159 Activity theory  60n Activity verb  20 Act of faith  85 Actor  23, 101, 139, 142 Actor Network Theory  79 Addiction  62 Addition  33, 34, 38, 76, 137 Adversaries  151 Affection  58 Affordance  128 Agency  3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 20, 40, 66, 75–79, 90, 158, 159, 165, 168 Agent  5, 6, 8, 9, 23, 30, 31, 42, 50, 57, 58, 66, 70, 72, 73, 76n, 79, 142, 161, 162, 169, 171, 173n

Agentic state  67 Agreement  163 Aggravating circumstances  119n Aggregation  75 Algorithm  69, 72 Alignment  145 al Qaeda  160 Alterity  88, 172n Althing  166 Analytical myopia  169 Analytical presbyopia  169 Anecdote  109, 110 Anger  61, 77, 149 Animation  4, 5, 8, 9, 22, 57, 58, 60, 61, 66–74, 78, 100, 105, 110, 112, 113, 115, 117, 120, 122, 124, 127, 129, 144–148, 151, 170 Animator  67, 74n Announcement  47, 49 Answerable  63 Anticipation  155 Apology  87 Aporia  149, 153, 155 Aporetic logic  155 Apple  165 Appropriation  24, 25, 30, 51, 54–56, 102–104, 124, 139, 164 Archetype  65 Architecture  6, 8 Archives  94 Argument  6, 20, 101, 107, 112 Army  159 Art  85, 86 Artifact  8, 139, 157, 158 Artificial entity  167 Artificial person  6, 167 Assemblage  34, 38, 157, 160, 161, 165 Assembly  166 Assertive  154

Assessability  36 Assessment  44 Association  30, 75, 141 Assumption  99 Attachment  59, 61–65, 72–77, 115, 117, 119, 123, 125, 138, 139, 147, 169, 170 Attending to  128 Attitude  122 Attribution  20, 24, 25, 30, 40, 55, 101–104, 106, 119, 163, 164 Auctor  72, 108 Audience  85, 87, 138 Auschwitz  65, 72 Author  8, 10, 67, 72, 74n, 76, 77, 88, 108, 113, 153 Authoring  67, 77, 108, 157 Authoritative  73, 141 Authority  3, 8, 9, 10, 35, 67, 72–77, 88, 91, 97, 108, 109, 111, 113, 116, 120, 122, 136, 137, 141, 142, 152, 154, 157, 160, 163, 171, 173n Authorized/authorizing  2, 7, 10, 72, 73, 74, 108, 110, 113, 118, 119, 155, 157, 163 Authorship  30, 73, 75, 76n, 113, 118, 122 Automaton  67, 70 Autonomy  31, 32, 34, 51, 57, 90, 135, 164 Autopoiesis  162–165 Auto-production  162–165 B Background  115 Balance of power  127, 136 Balancing  63, 124 Bamboo stalk  140 Banality of evil  68n Baron of Münchhausen  164

198 Action and Agency in Dialogue

Barrier  152 Behavior  139 Being  117, 118 Being able to do  74 Belief  115, 162 Belly prophet  85 Belly speaking  85 Bergen, Edgar  85, 86, 100, 101, 102 Betrayal  31, 43, 50, 57, 61, 90, 96 Bifurcation  170 Bifurcation of nature  170 “Big D” Discourse  5 Binding  74, 115, 145, 148 Biology  150n Black  113 Blaming  111 Body  150 Body positioning  104, 135 Bootstrap  164 Bootstrapping effect  164 Bordeaux  132 Border  152, 155 Bottom up approach  150n, 162 Breaching experiment  37 Bureaucracy  66, 69, 70, 72, 122, 130, 131, 133 Brussels  167 Bylaws  157, 161 C Calculation  7, 63, 65, 70 Calling upon  80 Cambridge  155, 167 Capital  167 Car accident  35, 36 Caring for  128 Categorical imperative  71 Category  53, 69, 70, 73, 75, 156 Category-bound activity  33 Category mistake  155, 156, 157 Causal link  23, 24 Causality  78 Causing to be  146 Chief Executive Officer (CEO)  159 Chain of agencies  4, 23, 24, 66, 76, 88, 101, 162 Chain of authority  157 Change  17, 171

Characteristic  151 Charisma  151 Child language acquisition  43 Children  8 Chirac, Jacques  137n Choice  173 Chose  166 Christ  58 Cicadas  87 Circumscription  81, 157, 167 Citation  36, 38, 41 Citationality  36, 41 Citizen  155 Clandestine organization  160 Class  157 Cleft  41, 42 Closure  93, 97 Co-constructing a context Co-construction  39, 75, 133, 141 Co-generating a context  35 Co-incarnation  81 Coldness  63–65 Collaboration  130, 157 Collective  6, 11, 80, 81, 119, 136, 142, 150–169 Collective figure  113 Coming together  172n Commercials  17 Commodity  165 Common ground  172n Communication  5, 15, 16, 27, 28, 32, 50, 58, 80, 85, 102, 134, 151, 167, 172 Communicational being  5 Communicative constitution  6, 11 Company  159, 167 Comparison  70 Competency  77, 120, 142, 151 Complexification  173 Complexity  172 Compliance  72 Compositional learning  43 Compulsion  71 Concept  15, 139 Conceptual  149 Conceptual construction  158 Concrete text  29n Concreteness  149, 166–168 Conditions of (im-)possibility  37

Conditions of success  15 Conduct  151 Configuration  11, 34, 38, 79, 81, 82, 108, 150, 155, 157, 160–168 Congo wars  128 Congolese  113 Constative  154 Constitution/constitutive  80, 136, 152, 155, 171 Constraint  74 Construction  164, 170, 171 Construction site  170, 171 Constructivism  81 Contaminating  37, 146 Contention  98 Context  32–35, 41, 53, 104, 148 Continuing education  110 Continuum  139 Contract  136 Contribution  19, 22, 23, 25, 162, 164, 165 Control  8, 24, 49, 54, 61, 93–95, 152, 157 Controversy  168 Conventionality  31, 34, 41–45, 48, 49, 55, 135, 148 Conversation  5, 8, 79, 85, 108, 112, 115, 116, 136, 147, 169 Conversation analysis  5, 8, 40, 50, 78, 98, 123, 136 Conversational inference  114 Conveying  151 Convincing  18, 19 Convoking  113, 116, 132 Coordination  156 Co-orientation  138, 141, 145, 151 Co-presence  3 Coresense  44 Corporeality  166, 168 Correspondence  170 Cosa  166 Counter-attack  98 Counting  63, 64, 76, 81n, 117, 128, 138 Country  113, 151–155, 159 Coup of force  154 Course of action  95–97 Court of justice  119n, 166 Courthouse  149 Courtroom  53 Credibility  97



Crito  86–88 Cross-examination  53 Cultivating  10, 112–134, 172 Cultural analysis  123 Cultural base  114 Cultural clash  114 Cultural context  128 Cultural divide  130 Cultural figure  131, 133, 134n Cultural premise  114, 115 Cultural sensitiveness  132 Cultural trait  114, 133, 139 Culture  10, 112–134, 169 Custom officer  152 Cynical  116 D Daimon  87–89, 115 Dance of agency  21, 86, 98 Dead metaphor  49n Deadline  130 De-authored text  30 Debate  168 Decentering  27, 158 Deception  85 Decision  65–70, 73, 75, 101, 120, 132, 143, 147, 149, 151, 154, 160 Declaration  154 Declaration of independence  152–155 Deconstruction  38, 133, 140, 172, 173 Decontamination  28, 29 Definition  11, 25, 44, 81, 117, 148–154, 157, 164, 169, 171 Dehiscence  41, 42 Delegation  2, 23, 27, 67, 102, 153, 163 Delegate  57, 157 Deliberation  166, 168 Delimitation  81 Delineation  164 Delocalization  9 Democratic Republic of the Congo  28, 91, 128, 133, 134, 139 Demon  115 Denying  103 Deresponsibilization  72, 119n

Subject index 199

Description  18, 19, 22, 60, 76n, 101, 103, 104, 162, 163 Desdemona  7, 61 Designing  146, 167 Desire  58, 119, 120 Destruction  173n Detachment  64, 65, 116 Detecting  19 Determination  34 Dialogic scene  138, 140 Dialogism  88, 89 Dialogue  2, 5, 8, 9, 10, 27, 43, 57, 85–88, 101, 112, 171 Dialogue analysis  98 Difference  172n Differing  139, 147, 163 Différance  78, 145 Ding  166 Diplomacy  2, 3, 76 Direct meaning  46, 47 Direct speech act  45, 50 Direction  67 Directive  161 Disaffiliation  55, 102–104 Disagreeing  106 Disconnection  172 Discovering  18 Discourse  104, 132, 134 Disembodiment  10 Disincarnated  10, 149, 152–154 Disjointed  113, 141 Dislocal  2, 80, 158, 169 Dislocated loci  170 Dislocation  2, 3, 8, 9, 80, 113, 142 Disposition  76, 77, 151 Dispreferred move  34 Dissociation  102, 103, 159 Distributed nature of authority  75 Distribution  164 Ditransitivity  17 Divinity  88 Division  78, 131, 170 Document  19, 145, 146, 152–155, 158 Doing  3, 20, 23, 159 Domination  93 Downstream  57, 66, 78

Downstream form of ventriloquism  4, 5, 9, 89–104, 112, 135 Driven  115, 134 Dummy  9, 85, 87, 88, 90, 100–102, 120, 135 Duplication  161 Duration  17 Durkheim’s aphorism  158 Duty  74, 120 E Ecstatic  80, 85, 112, 113, 141 Editorialists  151 Effectiveness  132, 134 Egoistic  116 Eichmann, Adolf  66, 68–74, 172, 173n Emails  157 Emancipation  154 Embedding  94–96, 126 Embezzlement  38 Embodiment  6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 37, 44, 53, 54, 75, 78, 81, 112, 113, 121, 129, 141–173 Emergence  146, 150, 151, 155, 170 Emotion  4, 58, 59, 76, 77, 171 Empowerment  172 Enactment  11, 146, 161, 164 Endogenesis  32, 158 Engastrimenteis  85 Engendering effect of signs  32–33 Ensemble  34, 38 Entertainment  85 Enthused  115 Entitlement  98 Entity  169 Equal representation  128, 138 Equity  77, 136 Equivocality  161 Established  42, 43, 49, 108, 109, 139 Ethics  7, 69, 81 Ethnicity  116–119, 125, 127, 128, 140 Ethnic representation  129, 138 Ethnographer  132 Ethnography of communication  10, 138

200 Action and Agency in Dialogue

Ethnomethod  36, 40, 42, 48, 49 Ethnomethodology  8, 40, 78, 114, 136 Ethnomethodology’s fundamental program  157, 158 Europe  167 Evaluation  44, 63, 70, 94, 95, 126 Event  22, 25, 38, 79, 109, 152n Eventfulness  47, 169 Eventness  148 Evoking  113 Evolution  169, 172 Exappropriation  55, 102, 103, 113, 135, 160, 162 Exattribution  103, 113, 135, 160, 162 Existence  157, 167, 168 Extribution  103, 104, 164 Exogenesis  159 Experience  3, 76, 77, 170, 172 Expert  74 Expertise  74 Execution  87 Expertise  120 Exposure  172n Expressing oneself  171 Expropriation  55, 56, 102, 104, 164 Extension  27, 57 Extenuating circumstances  119 Extermination camp  65 Extribution  102 Expression  150, 151 Eye contact  96, 97, 100 F Fabius, Laurent  137n Fabrication  140 Facial agent  42 Face  150 Face-threatening act  95, 122 Facial expression  104, 135 Fact  5, 6, 107, 109, 115, 136, 158, 169, 171 Factuality  107, 128 Failure  107, 172n Fairness  77 Fait accompli  143, 144

Fake dialogue  85 Fallacy of reification  165 Family resemblance  59 Feeling  149, 157, 162, 166 Fiction  167 Fields, W. C.  100–102 Fight  168 Figure  3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 76, 77, 79, 81, 82, 86–88, 102, 105, 107–142, 150, 154, 157, 161, 163, 164, 169, 171, 172 Figure of authority  107n, 108 Figure of speech  89 Figurative meaning  45–47, 49n Figurative speech  5, 45, 76, 150 Figurative text  29n Figurativity  43, 61, 108, 113, 149, 155, 156 Figuring out  153, 154, 156 Final solution  66 Finitude  173 Flag  6 Flow  78 Folding  135, 136 Following  69, 173 Follow-up request  39 Footing  67, 74n For another next first time  147–149, 151, 152, 156, 157, 161, 164, 168, 169, 171 Force of law  66 Form  103, 140 Form of life  5 Formulaic  41, 42 Formulaic expression  43, 44, 48, 49 Foundation  155 Foundational text  152n Founding fathers  153 Fourth position repair  39 Fragile  168 Fragmentation  5, 142, 160 Framing  6, 81n Free will  71 Free play  100, 101 Frustration  157 Functionalism  160 Functioning  34 Functioning of texts  48 Functional learning  43

G Geisteswissenschaften  170 Gender  119 Generating  33 Genetic  139 Genocide  69, 128 Geometry  149 Gestapo  54, 66, 103 Gesture  37, 104, 135, 139 Gestural agent  42, 90 Ghost  113, 146, 151 Ghostal logic  146 Global  9, 169 Global organization  160 Going native  133n Good people  154, 155 Good reason  49, 108 Gorilla  140 Gradient structure  53 Grapevine  171 Gravity  149 Great Lakes refugee crisis  128 Group  151, 167 Guiding  67 Guilt  72 H Haecceity  36 Habit  108 Haunting  10, 37, 44, 48, 56, 62, 104, 113, 117, 128, 136, 138 Hauntology  146 Having  117, 118 Having to do  74 Healthiness  120 Heat of passion  63, 64 Heated dialogue  101 Heteronomy  162, 164 Heteropoiesis  164 Higher power  71 Himmler  66 Historical conditions  166 Hitler, Adolf  66, 71, 72, 172 Holding  74, 75 Holding together  167 Honoring  29 Hospital  28, 91, 92, 125, 131, 137, 138, 145, 147, 148 House of representatives  155 Human agency  22, 152, 157, 158, 168



Humanitarian intervention  132 Humanities  90, 170 Human sciences  170 Hustings  166 Hutu  125–130 Hybridity  75, 140, 149, 157, 173 Hypostasis  139 I Iceland  166 Idea  153, 155, 162, 166 Ideal  37, 38, 53, 136 Ideal conditions of production  37 Ideal figure  113 Idealization  37 Ideality  37 Identification  102, 149, 151, 152n, 164, 167 Identity  117–120, 137, 152, 157, 161 Ideology  115 Idiom  48, 49n Idiomatic  41, 48 Illocutionary force  51 Illusion  85, 165 Illustration  154 Image  154 Imagining  153, 155 Imbrication  94, 95 Immateriality  142, 145, 146, 152 Im/materiality  10, 11, 146, 148 Immigration officer  152, 159 Imperative  110 Implicit  135 Implied  135 Immutability  139 Importance  138 (Im-)possibility  152, 155 Impressing  3 Inaccessible  167 (In-)capacity to respond  173 Incarnation  3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 37, 40, 44, 53, 54, 75, 76n, 78, 80, 81, 105, 112, 113, 121, 129, 140–173 Inchoativity  17 Indecision  172 Independence  102 Indexical  43 Indexicality  148, 152

Subject index 201

Indicating  51 Indirection  45–48 Indirect meaning  46–48 Indirect request  41, 45 Indirect speech act  45, 49, 50 Individual  60 Ineffective  172 Inevitable  166 Inequality  77 Infelicity  15, 46 Inferential mechanisms  47 Infinite hybridity  173 Influence  168 Information deficit  47 Infra-individual entities  151 Inhabiting  117, 128, 138, 151 Injustice  77 Inquisitive question  35 Inspiring  115 Institution  42–44, 134, 135, 139, 142, 151, 159, 168 Instruction  29, 67, 109–112, 121 Insult  8, 100, 101 Intangibility  149 Intelligibility  113, 169 Intension  27, 57 Intention  8, 16, 24, 25, 29, 31, 40, 41, 42, 57, 88, 96, 135, 154 Intentional action  51 Intentionalist approach  50 Intentionality  17, 21 Interactant  170 Interaction  8, 9, 27, 33, 34, 38, 43, 54, 57, 81, 88, 112, 113, 115, 116, 132–134, 165, 167, 169, 171 Interactional scene  136, 138, 140 Interest  58, 110, 112, 113, 148 Interlocutor  107 Intermediary  29, 87 Interpretation  98, 161 Intersubjectivity  40 In the name of  6, 7, 9, 30, 31, 42, 50, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 90, 102, 108, 110, 112, 117, 118, 124, 127, 131, 135, 136, 146, 147, 152–154, 157, 160, 161 Intonation  135 Intractable aspect of communication  104 Invisibility  156

Invocation  78, 81n, 106–108, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116–120, 132, 141, 144, 149 Irony  54, 55, 55n, 56, 88, 103, 104 Irrationality  7 Irreduction  19n, 22 (Ir-)responsibility  173 Iterability  31, 32, 36, 37, 38, 41, 52, 148, 153 Iteration  11, 37, 40, 41, 42, 52, 120, 122, 132, 139, 160, 161, 165, 169 J Jealousy  7, 61, 76, 77 Jefferson, Thomas  153 Jew  66 Jewish affairs  66, 70 Jobs, Steve  165 Joke  100 Jordan  132 Journalists  151 Judge  149 Judgmental dope  38, 73 Juristic person  167 Justice  69, 77, 149 Justification  107n, 110 K Kantian imperative  71 Kinesic agent  42, 90 Know how  77 Knowledge  19, 74, 111 Knowledgeable  111 L Labeling  146 Labor  165 Laboratory  28, 29 Landlord  32–34 Landscape  133 Language  43, 165, 171 Laughter  121, 122 Law  86, 87, 89, 109, 149, 155, 161, 168 Law of communication  104 Law of exappropriation  104 Lawyer  54, 119 Leadership  151 Leading  67

202 Action and Agency in Dialogue

Leap of decision  65, 67, 79 Learning  18, 19, 53 Legal fiction  167 Legal power  72n Legal text  152n Legality  73 Legitimacy  73, 75–77, 155 Lending weight  9, 10, 106, 110, 111, 119, 120, 123, 124, 127, 136, 147, 171 Letter  145, 146, 161 Letting the fact speak for themselves  107, 115, 136, 171 Liability  35, 74 Liberation  172 Lifeworld  37 Light bulb  22, 23 Literality  43–46, 155, 156 Literal functioning  48, 49 Literal meaning  46–48, 49n Local  9, 80, 169 Localization  152 Logic  38, 110, 131, 151 Logic of conversation  113 Logic of emergence  149 Logic of incarnation  147, 148 Logic of plurification  157 Logical error  19n Logical type  157 Logo  6 Longitudinality  169 M Machine  158 Macro  1, 9, 169 Madness  65, 79 Magic  85, 164, 171 Maintenance  140 Making a difference  8, 20, 29, 30, 51, 59, 61, 62, 68, 72, 76, 79, 80 Making present  57, 80, 108, 109, 113, 147, 152 Making up  167 Management theorists  75 Map  155 Marginal cases  16 Mark  27, 28, 34, 37, 38, 41, 52 Material agency  21, 152 Materialism  81

Materiality  27, 146, 149, 166, 168 Materialization  6, 44, 53, 54, 81, 121, 142–173 Mathematics  149 Mattering  63, 64, 76, 81n, 117, 128, 138 Maxim of quality  104 McCarthy, Charlie  85, 86, 100, 101 Meaning  145, 148, 150 Meaningfulness  7 Measure  173 Médecins sans frontières (MSF)  28, 30, 90, 113–115, 120–138, 145, 153 Mediation  78, 171 Mediator  78 Medical protocol  91 Meeting  166 Member  158 Mental illness  62 Mental image  155 Message  27, 135 Metaphor  20, 49n, 61, 76, 78 Methodology  169 Metonymy  20 Micro  1, 9, 80, 169 Mimesis  139 Miscomprehension  48 Misinterpretation  50 Misperformance  38 Micro-interactionism  2 Middle voice  79 Misgiving  63 Misunderstanding  39, 49, 50, 135 Mobilization  3, 75, 81n, 141, 144, 148, 149 Mode of acting  161, 167 Mode of being  11, 151, 152, 155, 161, 167 Mode of defining  167 Mode of existence  139, 145, 148, 150, 151, 156 Model  36, 37, 52–54, 148 Monological approach  50 Morality  73 Motivating  115, 134 Motive  60, 120, 157 Mouvance  78

Moving  7, 9, 60, 69, 70, 72, 78, 110, 112, 113, 120, 122, 124, 138, 144, 163, 164 Much ado about nothing  126 Müller, Heinrich  68–70 Murder  61 Mute  137 Mystery  167 N Name  6, 11, 147–150 Naming  146 National Park of Virunga  140 Nationality  116, 117, 119 Natural  128, 165 Naturally occurring interaction  89, 90 Natural sciences  170 Nature  128, 140, 170 Naturwissenschaften  170 Nazi  54, 69, 70, 72, 103, 173n Negotiation  8, 75, 138, 150, 151, 169 Niger  132 Nightingale  170 Noncooperation  101, 102 Nonfigurative  149 Nonhumans  158, 159 Non-serious  41 Norm  102, 136, 142, 161 Normal  165, 166 Normal conditions of production  38 Normativity  37 Normality  37, 38, 148 North Kivu  91, 128, 132, 140 Note  29, 30 No time out  158 Nonhuman  17, 21 Nonhuman agency  7, 22, 23, 30 Nontransitivity  79 O Obama, Barack  55n, 150, 151 Obedience  66, 71n, 72 Object  79, 118 Objectivity  106, 107, 128 Obligation  9, 30, 74, 75, 77, 99, 114, 117–120, 125, 135 Obsession  172 Occidental  113



Offending  95 One-place model of speech act  50 Ontological gap  169 Ontology  107n, 169 Openness  172n Operativeness  120, 122–124, 126, 127, 131, 132, 134, 136, 144, 147 Opposition  101 Oratio obliqua  41 Order  161, 172, 173 Ordering effects  161, 163 Orderliness  161 Ordinary  173n Organism  164, 166–167 Organization  6, 8, 73, 74, 119, 129, 151, 159–169, 171 Organizing  161–165 Organization studies  157 Organizational chart  6 Origin  118 Orientation  5, 33, 45, 78, 114 Origin  78, 86 Osama bin Laden  55n Oscillation  9, 55, 101–104, 106, 115, 116, 118, 120, 135, 138, 144 Othello  7, 60, 61 Out of joint  113 Out of place  141 Overcultivating  134 Ownership  25, 30, 61, 62 Oxford  155, 167 P Package  34, 38 Painting  86 Paradox  148, 155 Parents  8 Paris  132 Passage point  129 Passion  4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 22, 58–65, 74, 76–79, 105, 110, 157, 158 Passional being  77 Passional figure  113 Passionate  64, 74 Passivity  4, 5, 9, 21, 22, 49, 57–59, 66, 74, 78, 79, 111, 159 Pathos  59 Patient  59, 79, 114 Pattern  161

Subject index 203

Performance  37, 75, 80, 152 Performance verb  18, 19 Performative  36, 154 Performativity  11, 150, 151, 155, 156, 159, 160 Performing  36, 80 Perlocutionary act  20 Permission  97 Personnel  159 Personification  2, 89, 105 Philatelist  62 Philosophy  170 Phonation device  5, 80, 171 Phone calls  157 Physician  113, 125 Physics  149 Physis  128 Plan  119, 161, 168 Platonic dualism  148 Platonic idealism  37, 52 Platonism  158 Plenum of agencies  57, 82, 168 Plurality  157, 159 Plural logic  157 Plurification  5, 6, 8, 159 Plurified world  159 Pluriverse  57, 171 Poetry  15 Polarization  130, 131 Police officer  35 Policy  67, 69, 72–75, 118, 119, 134, 136, 157, 159, 161, 168, 171, 172 Political context  128 Politics  171 Polluting  37, 172n Polyphony  88, 113 Pondering  63 Populating the dialogic scene  138, 140 Position  75, 103, 159, 171 Positioning  9, 78, 79, 102, 105, 106, 108, 120, 126, 127, 145 Positioning oneself  9, 102, 110, 113, 131, 136, 144, 147, 161 Possession  63, 103, 115, 118, 119 Posture  135 Potency  74 Power  3, 9, 10, 71n, 72–75, 94, 127, 136, 137, 141, 166, 171 Powerful  73, 75

Powerless  172 Practical discipline  171 Practice  37, 108 Practical  81 Preannouncement  45–48, 50 Precedent  69, 70, 172, 173 Predisposition  8 Preparatory condition  45, 46 Presence  4, 16, 41, 151, 169 Present  3 Presentification  81, 108, 142, 145, 147, 152, 156, 169 Presidency  167 President  155, 157 Press release  6 Presupposition  115 Primary illocutionary act  45, 50 Primary qualities  170 Prime minister  137n Principal  30, 43, 66, 67, 70, 72–74n, 152 Principle  6, 9, 67, 75, 110, 115, 128, 136, 147–150, 157, 161, 169, 172, 173 Prisoner abuse  159 Procedure  69, 70, 72, 119, 130, 131, 134, 150, 161, 172, 173 Process  78 Producing  154, 155, 164, 171 Profession  119, 134 Program  62, 65, 72, 96, 135, 150, 155, 161, 163, 172 Project  150, 153, 155, 161, 163, 172 Projective agent  161, 164 Projection  155 Promise  15, 95 Promotion  141, 142 Pronoun  162, 163 Prop  120 Proper  24 Prosopopeia  87, 89 Protocol  134, 144, 146–150, 153, 159, 161, 172 Prototype  53 Proxy  57, 102, 154 Psychology  58 Public  166 Purifying  15 Purity  36, 37

204 Action and Agency in Dialogue

Q Qualm  63 R Rank  118–120, 137 Rationality  7, 61n Raveh, Yitzhak  68, 70, 71 Reaction  20, 42, 107, 111 Readability  34 Ready-made chunck  43 Reaffirmation  155, 156 Reasoning  172 Reappropriation  124 Reason  4, 7, 58, 61–63, 66, 72, 108, 110, 125, 143, 157 Reasonability  7, 78, 113, 173 Reasoning  7, 63, 66, 149 Reattachment  169 Reciprocal possession  103 Recommendation  54 Recognition  31, 36, 43, 75, 151, 156, 159 Reconfiguration  170, 172 Reconfiguration  80, 124 Reconstructing a context  35, 36, 38, 54 Recurrence  161 Reduction  4, 8, 9, 19n, 75, 118, 145, 149, 150 Referring  148, 153, 171 Reflexive pronoun  162, 163 Reflexivity  17 Reframing  124 Regret  34 Regularity  161 Regulation  161 Regulatory agent  161, 164 Reification  11, 165–168 Reinterpretation  151 Relation  75, 118, 151, 167 Relativism  173 Relevance  33, 35, 41, 46, 48n, 112 Reliability  142 Religion  157 Reminding  137, 144, 159 Remorse  72 Repetition  120, 139, 148, 161 Repair  31, 39, 43, 50, 78, 95, 135 Replication  161

Repositioning onself  124 Representation  2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 75, 80, 81, 105, 108, 109, 112, 113, 127, 129, 141, 147, 152, 154, 156, 160, 167 Representative  53, 57, 73, 120, 138, 145, 153–157, 167 Reproduction  82, 139, 171 Republic  165 Request  93 Request for information  45, 46, 48, 49, 96 Residence  117 Resistance  21, 22, 96–102, 122, 135, 160 Resource  115, 117, 139 Responding  173 Response  93 Responsibility  7, 8, 61, 68, 72, 73, 81, 101, 110, 111, 119n, 134, 153, 163, 164, 173 Responsibility disclaimer  72 Res publica  166 Restance  44, 168 Retrospective  68 Rhetorical scholar  75 Rhetoric  107n, 138 Right  9, 74, 77, 99, 111, 114, 117–120, 125, 135 Righteousness  77 Robot  67, 70 Role  163 Routine  70, 139, 173n Rule  7, 65, 69, 110, 111, 119, 134, 136, 142, 159, 161, 168, 172 Rumsfeld, Donald  159 Rwanda  128 S Sacrifice  64, 65 Saliency  49 Sameness  147 Sanction  44, 93–97 Saying the same thing  161 Scientist  22 Scission  78 Scruple  63 Secession  102 Secondary illocutionary act  45, 50

Secondary qualities  170 Secretary  118, 119, 159 Secrete organization  168 Self-effacement  89, 106, 144 Self-interest  116 Self-organization  162–165 Self-production  162–165 Semiotic being  90, 101, 104, 135 Senate  155 Seniority  3, 76 Sentence  50, 51, 104 Sentence meaning  50 Sentiment  149 Separation  170 Severance  32, 42 Sexual intercourse  53 Sexual orientation  119 Shame  72 Shared premises  114 Sharing action  23, 27, 30, 51, 60, 69, 73, 118, 119, 158, 159, 163 Sicilian  117 Sign  27, 28, 31–34, 38, 52 Signatories  145, 148 Signature  54, 148, 152–155 Silence  144 Sin  166 Singularizing  102 Situated-bound expression  35, 43 Situated ideal  114 Situation  81n, 171, 172 Skills  19 “Small d” discourse  5 Social construction of reality  170 Social fact  158 Social hierarchy  117 Social sciences  90, 170 Society  6, 142, 150, 151, 160, 164, 166–169 Sociologists  75, 157 Soliloquy  15 Solipstic position  171 Sophie’s choice  65 Sorrow  72 Sounding box  67 Soundless  170 Space  38 Spacing  169



Speaker meaning  50 Speaking for oneself  100–102, 109, 135, 141, 171 Spectrality  77, 100, 136, 146, 151, 155, 156 Spectral logic  146 Speech  151 Speech act  15, 19, 37, 39n, 40, 49, 50, 54 Speech act theory  8, 45–47 Speech community  10, 44, 132, 133 Speech dislocation  86 Spirit  144–146, 148, 153, 161 Spokesperson  6, 123 Sri Lanka  132 Stability  43, 44 Staging  10, 68, 70, 78, 79, 81, 87, 102, 105, 109, 110, 112, 113, 124, 132–134, 136, 138, 170 Stamp  59, 62, 63 Stance  103 Standing for  105 Statement  103 Stating  154 Status  75, 98, 118–120, 125, 134, 137, 168 Stirring  115 Straightjacketing of conversation and interaction  170 Strategy  21, 116, 138, 160 Stop sign  51, 52 Strasbourg  167 Strategy  161 Stream  78, 79 String theory  149 Structure  1, 2, 9, 172 Structural possibilities  16, 19 Sociolinguistics  132 Subject  79 Subjection  94–98, 126, 135 Submission  94, 135 Substantiating  146 Subtext  99, 100, 135 Subtraction  38 Suffering  58 Supervisor  173 Supra-individual entity  151 Surgery  124 Surprise  22 Surrogate  57

Subject index 205

Symposium  87 System of defense  73 Systematicity  160–165 Systematization  164 Systems  160–165 Systems theory  11, 160–165 T Table  167 Tactic  161 Taking responsibility  173 Task  161, 163–164 Taking into account  128 Taking over  63, 91 Tangible  149, 166, 168 Teamsterville  116, 139 Technology  8, 159 Teleaction  28, 152 Telecommunication  27, 28 Tenant  32–34 Tension  91 Terminativity  17 Terra firma of interaction  5, 6, 139, 150, 161, 171 Territory  117, 155 Terrorist organization  168 Text  8, 28, 30, 32–34, 37, 38, 49, 54, 57, 66, 67, 135, 148, 157 Textscape  128, 133 Textual agency  40, 44, 49, 50–55, 57 Textual agent  42, 70, 90 Textual being  57, 77 Textual figure  113 Theater  15 Theoretical construct  89 The New Yorker  55n Thing  150, 166–168 Thingness  146, 149, 152 Theorem  149 Theory  150 Third-position repair  42 Time  38 Timing  169 Ting  166 Title  137 Token  51–54, 62, 148, 154 Tool  29 Torture  159, 160 Trace  9 Tradition  108, 109, 114, 116

Training  121 Trait  77, 151 Traitor  104 Transformation  17 Transitivity  17 Translation  31, 43, 50, 57, 90, 96, 129, 140, 161, 171 Transparency  23 Treason  31, 172 Tuning  21–23 Turn of talk  40, 57 Three-place model of speech act Throwing one’s voice  85, 86 Truth  164 Tutsi  128 Two-place model of speech act  50 Type  51–54, 148 Typical  114, 116, 118, 120, 126, 128, 134 Typification  11, 35, 36, 38, 154 U Un-American  159 Unauthorized  30 Uncanny  101 Uncertainty  172n Unconditional aspect of communication  104 Undecidability  55, 66, 79, 88, 101–103, 106, 172, 173 Underling  70 Undergoing  58 Understanding  40, 142, 170 Uneventfulness  126 Unintended consequences  42 Unintentional  25, 40 Uniqueness  148 United States of America  151–155 Universal law  71 University  155–157, 167 Unproblematic  166 Upstream  23, 57, 59, 61, 66, 78, 101 Upstream analysis  136 Upstream form of ventriloquism  4, 5, 9, 105–112, 135 US Citizenship and Immigration Services  152

206 Action and Agency in Dialogue

US Declaration of independence  152–155 Utterance  50, 51, 146 V Vacillation  9, 55, 86, 88, 90, 100–104, 106, 115, 116, 120, 133, 135, 138, 144 Value  6, 115, 136, 147–150, 169, 172 Variable geometry monster  156 Variable ontologies  161, 171 Vaudeville  85 Vent  86 Ventriloqual analysis  170 Ventriloquation  133n

Ventriloquism  1, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 55, 58, 79, 80, 85–140, 141, 144, 147, 151, 159, 161, 169 Ventriloquist  85, 88–90, 101, 102, 120, 135 Ventriloquizing  97, 100, 101, 104, 106, 107, 109, 111, 122, 131, 132, 136–138, 141, 151, 170–172 Veridictory  61 Visualization  149 Voice  85, 106, 111, 112, 150, 159, 167 Voiceless  111, 137 Volcano  140 W Wall  152

Ways and customs  108, 115, 121, 134, 138 Website  6 Weighing  63 Weight  107n, 137, 138 Welfare  123, 125, 147 Whatness  148 Will  25 Wit  21 Witness  50, 54, 107 Word  104, 146, 167 Working conditions  127 Worth  107n, 138 Writer  153 Writing  31 Written in advance  161

In the series Dialogue Studies the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Vitanova, Gergana: Authoring the Dialogic Self. Gender, agency and language practices. vi, 170 pp. + index. Expected August 2010 Koike, Dale April and Lidia Rodríguez-Alfano (eds.): Dialogue in Spanish. Studies in functions and contexts. xiii, 322 pp. + index. Expected June 2010 Cooren, François: Action and Agency in Dialogue. Passion, incarnation and ventriloquism. With a foreword by Bruno Latour. 2010. xvi, 106 pp. Weigand, Edda: Language as Dialogue. From rules to principles of probability. Edited by Sebastian Feller. 2009. viii, 410 pp. Baraldi, Claudio (ed.): Dialogue in Intercultural Communities. From an educational point of view. 2009. viii, 277 pp. Weizman, Elda: Positioning in Media Dialogue. Negotiating roles in the news interview. 2008. xiv, 208 pp. Weigand, Edda (ed.): Dialogue and Rhetoric. 2008. xiv, 316 pp. Grein, Marion and Edda Weigand (eds.): Dialogue and Culture. 2007. xii, 262 pp.