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“Hearability” Versus “Hearership”: Comparing Garfinkel’s and Schegloff’s Accounts of the Summoning Phone

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Abstract

This paper compares Harold Garfinkel’s phenomenologically informed “radical” ethnomethodology and Emanuel Schegloff’s “classical” Conversation Analysis, by focusing on their treatments of a ringing telephone as a summons. In their diverging accounts, Garfinkel and Schegloff use similar yet different terminologies in relation to the action of hearing. Garfinkel speaks of the “hearability” of the ringing phone, while Schegloff speaks of a recipient’s “hearership”. This lexical distinction is not irrelevant. “Hearership” stresses the obligations of parties to a phone call to speak and listen to each other while co-producing conversation. In contrast, for Garfinkel an analysis limited only to the parties’ work of speaking and listening to each other from within the hearable world glosses over the pervasive presence of the “hearability-structures” of the ordinary world. His “radical” version is predicated on the claim that the ordinary world is a hearable world. Accordingly, a phone summons is a familiar sound in which “hearability” is inseparable from the “hearability-structures” endogenous to the Lebenswelt.

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Notes

  1. The telephone is evolving technology; it has changed in many ways since being introduced in the nineteenth century, and has undergone some remarkable changes in recent decades. That being said my analysis focuses on the routine design and uses of phones during the decades in which Schegloff and Garfinkel wrote their articles.

  2. The letter was a personal hand-written letter from Sacks to Schegloff dated March 1974 (with the day not specified). Schegloff copied and typed the letter and circulated photocopies of both the hand-written and typed version along with a letter of his own to members of The Harvey Sacks Memorial Association on January 13, 1988. In his letter, Sacks acknowledges Schegloff’s contributions “in domesticating masses of stuff on openings” in conversation.

  3. Not only is Sacks committed in his analysis to singularity of detail; his own inquiry is marked by singularity. The randomness of the data selection speaks to his anarchic disinterest. There, where Schegloff intentionally selects conversation to account for the sequential structure of “conversation,” Sacks was interesting “only in this incidental way, that conversation is something that we can get the actual happenings of on tape and transcribe them more or less, and therefore have something to begin with” (Sacks 1992, V. 1: 26; my italics). Finding formal structures is not a goal, but rather an invitation to a methodological adventure to randomly “attack the phenomenon” to find “order at all points” (V. 1, 484); “… the question of what would be an account, and what it would look like, is by and large purely an adventure” (Sacks 1992, V. 1, 484). Finding formal structures is not a goal but rather an invitation to a methodological “adventure” to “attack the phenomenon” to find “order at all points” (Sacks 1992, V. 1, 484); and that “one of the ways we may get to see that we have something in an analysis is that it’s of that order of primitiveness that anybody can go out and look, and see that the thing seems to be as we said. (…) So they could learn the field as the field was learned” (Sacks 1992, V. 1, 484). Rather than objective science, Michael Lynch and David Bogen regard Sacks’ method as an instance of “primitive science,” in which Sacks was particularly interested in the structures of accountability that “anybody” is entitled to use; i.e., the competencies for doing and understanding commonplace and mundane acts like greetings, proverbs, stories and jokes. “Anybody” can see at a glance (or hear immediately) what such activities involve, since they are produced as ordinary organizational objects. In Sacks’ terms, such ordinary objects are assembled through verbal and gestural components which “anybody” is competent to analyze (Lynch and Bogen 1994: 71).

  4. It is worth noting that CA’s development over time had a complex trajectory. According to Michael Lynch, “By the time Sacks died in 1975, he had developed a deep collaboration with Schegloff and Jefferson, and that their joint papers on turn-taking, repair, and other topics exhibited an approach to ‘context-free’ and ‘context-sensitive’ rules and orders that differed from the explication of singular instances that was prominent in many of Sacks lectures, particularly the early ones. Also, it remains the case that in summary statements and introductions, many leading CA practitioners (including Heritage) continue to credit Sacks with being a founder or co-founder of CA. However, the trend in CA for quite some time has been away from Sacks’ (and even Schegloff’s) attention to singular detail.” (E-mail correspondence on March 21, 2019).

  5. In face-to-face conversation, the abab sequence also mandates a coordinated visual orientation along with an auditory orientation. Charles Goodwin identifies two rules, “Rule 1: The gaze of a speaker should locate the party being gazed at as an addressee of his utterance” (1979: 98); “Rule 2: When a speaker gazes at a recipient he should make eye contact with that recipient” (1979: 106). See also Jeff Coulter and E. D. Parsons’s praxiological elucidation of the interdependency of visual and practical accountability, including a critique of the use of “to gaze” as a generic term of visual orientation (1990: 265).

  6. For example, in the QA sequence that constitutes court proceedings, a witness often is instructed to take time with the answer because the time lapse conveys the witness’s reflection and commitment to the answer.

  7. For example, I have a new colleague who teaches a class at the same time in the room next door whom I want to meet, but for some reason we always pass each other.

  8. Such a case happened to me; I made two phone calls to the same number, and since I did not hear a ring on my phone I hung up both times, only to instantly receive a call from the called number informing me that each time I called, they attempted to talk to me and I hung up the phone. The person offered the explanation that something must be wrong with his new phone.

  9. Not only is picking up the receiver a bodily pre-given part of a telephone conversation, but hanging up the receiver is also a bodily nonlinguistic closure of a telephone conversation (Bjelić 1987).

  10. That the occasion of the A’s absence matters and that the notion that SA rule of “strong inference” extends equally to the face-to-face interaction is an analytical overreach can be illustrated by the following treatment by Schegloff of silence as a variable for “strong inference” in the SA sequence in the following data:

    A husband and wife are in an upstairs room when a knock on the door occurs; the wife goes to answer it; after several minutes the husband comes to the head of the stairs and calls the wife’s name; there is no answer and the husband runs down the stairs. If the forgoing analysis is correct, we might say that he does so in search for that which would provide an account for the absence of the wife’s answer. The point made here does not follow logically, but empirically. From the relationship of the availability of an inference to its use as an account, it does not logically follow that the absence of an inference entails the absence of an account and the legitimacy of a search. An account may not be needed even if absent. It happens, however, that is so although not logically entailed. (1968: 1087)

    According to Schegloff, there is no SA logical ground for the husband’s “strong inference” about the wife’s absence of an answer. In a personal correspondence about this Schegloff’s account Michael Lynch wrote me, “I think Schegloff is using a narrow conception of logic, and not ‘social logic’ or ‘logical grammar’—assuming that ‘grammar’ applies to what follows as a matter of course in a situation.  He seems to be developing something like a syllogism about the availability of an account from an inference, but it seems pretty obscure to me. What’s odd is that you don’t need to know if this is a recorded ‘actual’ instance to be able to understand why the husband might be troubled.  Even if it is a made-up example, it is a recognizable situation.  If we think of Sacks’ ‘inference making machine’ lecture [Sacks 1992, Vol. 1: 115), the ‘inference’ that the guy telling about the incident is ‘not telling the [whole] story’ is available on the basis of the categories and sequence of the narrative, whether fictional or not” (03/03/19). The fact that the husband acts upon hearing silence speaks to its “hearability-structures” in his very accounting for “hearably her silence” as constitutive of his action; one could argue that in the silence’s “galore” the wife’s “hearably” absent answer the husband accounts as indexical expression of the local “grammar” of the husband-wife Membership Categorization Devices.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Michael Lynch for his generous help in editing this paper and for his constructive suggestions.

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Correspondence to Dušan Bjelić.

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Bjelić, D. “Hearability” Versus “Hearership”: Comparing Garfinkel’s and Schegloff’s Accounts of the Summoning Phone. Hum Stud 42, 695–716 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-019-09506-6

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