Ilana Gershon interviews Summerson Carr, Susan Gal, and Constantine Nakassis
Ilana Gershon: How did this book come about and what are some of the ways you hope this book will travel into other people’s reading practices?
Susan Gal: We hope this book conveys the power of Michael’s amazing intellectual leadership to the widest possible audience. When Michael was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in the Summer of 2019, there were two things he told his close friends he wanted to do: teach one last round of his signature course, “Language in Culture,” which he did in the Fall. And finish preparing for publication the set of lectures based on the version of the course he taught at the Summer Institute of the Linguistic Society of America in 2017. Cambridge University Press had already accepted his set of richly illustrated lecture-notes for publication. But he knew that, like any set of notes developed over many years, they needed polishing and editing, so that the connections among the lectures would be highlighted and explained. The three of us set about doing this with the help of a marvelous group of Michael’s colleagues and friends with whom – in a series of workshops – Michael discussed each chapter in turn, as we took notes, asked questions and listened to him further develop the ideas, suggesting elaborations and refinements. The book stands as a distillation of Michael’s lifelong intellectual project, which was also, from the first Language in Culture lectures in 1970, a pedagogical project. As he told us repeatedly, legibility and accessibility were top priorities for him in this book. He wanted to reach out to readers. Working as editors, we relied primarily on his lecture notes and the workshop elaborations, but also on his previous publications. Most importantly, we were determined to render Michael’s inimitably entertaining real-life voice, not as in his writings, but the one so many generations of students had heard and been captivated by in lectures and informal discussions. It is gratifying that many people who knew Michael well have commented that the book “sounds like him.” The book includes his playful side, his delight in irony and puns, his many jokes, quips and sometimes wickedly funny comments on his contemporaries, as well as his warm appreciations of others’ work.
I think there are many ways to use the book in teaching. Different parts of the book could work for different courses. It could be background reading for the instructor. I have found it useful to unfold the more complex theoretical points by reading passages with students; discussing them in class. The many detailed ethnographic and sociolinguistic examples are compelling on their own. Reading Michael’s precise and colorful dissection of them is an eye-opener and intellectual fun. He even gives instructions at one point on how to do the kinds of analysis he advocates.
Ilana Gershon: What makes a concept cultural and where do these cultural concepts come from?
Constantine V. Nakassis: One thing that really came out in working on this book – both in the book workshops Sue mentioned, and after – was how Michael was weighing into, indeed striking directly at the heart of, a much bigger Enlightenment philosophical discussion of the nature of thought (conceptualization) and, further, how he did so by thinking through the history of linguistic thought (and his relationship to it). In these lectures Michael chides a certain philosophical tradition (from Locke to so-called analytic philosophy to modern cognitive science) for its linguistic naivete, assuming that the world of concepts and the world of things can be transparently accessed in some way or other rather than seeing how language and culture – and language in culture, and culture in language – mediate the entire problem space of categoriality, and thus conceptualization and thought. Michael starts from the Boasian view of language and culture as classifications of experience (viz. concepts); but what kind of a thing is a concept and what kinds of concepts are there? Here, Michael distinguishes between grammatical categories – and the concepts they embody (precipitated as Saussurean values or intensions that are system motivated, with scope over extensions, or instances of the category) – and what he calls, at some point in the lectures, “Bakhtinian concepts” or, more often in the book, “cultural concepts.” The call out to Bakhtin here is particularly interesting, since it suggests that cultural concepts are discursively mediated notby principles of grammar (langue) alone but, rather, through the dialogism of semiosis, through – as Sue will note in her answer to the next question – voicing structures in/across interaction as they come to serve as the (political, ideological) field within which communicable categorizations of experience are indexed, entextualized, circulated, enregistered, institutionalized, and so on. Such processes are sociocentric, historically contingent, perspectival, and their normativity is dynamic (indeed, dialectically mediated by the events in which they are instantiated and abstracted from). They are, in a word, cultural.
In saying this, Michael is laying claim to the anthropological concept of culture (a term abandoned by many in our field but taken up by others outside of it), deconstructing it by inserting himself into a longer conversation while re-signifying the term. Because if concepts are cultural, it’s not because culture is some static “system”; rather, it’s because concepts are creatures of discourse, subject to its vagaries. Concepts are achieved, tenuous phases or states of a sociohistoric and evenemential flux.
It’s important to see, though, that Michael was not dismissing the importance of grammatical concepts. Quite the opposite; he was developing a more sophisticated apparatus to relate grammatical and cultural concepts. This is his recuperation of Whorf. Going against a naive “Whorfianism,” grammatical concepts are not determinative in any way of cultural concepts. But how, then, are they related? As Michael shows in the last part of the book, grammatical concepts can serve as a certain kind of germ for cultural concepts (though the latter have roots which are not reducible to the former), but only insofar as langue is enunciated – that is, entextualized and contextualized – in/across events of discourse and insofar as discourse is itself reflexively/ideologically reanalyzed. And in passing from the virtual plane of grammar to actual embodied (and ideologically mediated) communication, concepts slip beyond any reductive grammatical mediation. One of Michael’s fabulous examples of this is color terms, where he shows that while there are cross-linguistic structuralist patterns across languages as regards to how the denotational domain of color is linguistically categorized (lexically), such an analysis can only take one so far since, while it will predict certain contours of color terminologies, it can’t tell us what those terms’ pragmatic meanings consist in (for example, in terms of indexical significations; metapragmatic stereotypy, and so on), for this is the domain of the cultural, which has a semiotics distinct from that of structuralist analysis.
Ilana Gershon: What would Silverstein most want people to understand about voicing identity?
Susan Gal: I vividly recall that “identity” was not a central term for Michael when it first became ubiquitous in the social sciences over the course of the 1990s. His focus, as Costas elaborates below, was on “event” and what kinds of social facts precipitate out of presupposed and created indexicality in events. But later, in a characteristic move, Michael reinterpreted identity in his own terms. It now serves as an important category, in a changed form that incorporates insights from Goffman and Bakhtin, along with his own innovations. I’d say it has two key aspects.
First, deliberately opposing much of sociolinguistics, Michael rejects the idea that identity consists in the demographic categories that a person might fit into, it is not even the intersection of several such, like “middle-class woman.” It is not some person’s performance. No. It is not even something individual. It is the changing relationship among participants that emerges in the course of interaction as speakers position themselves with respect to each other in a kind of ballet, choosing among small bits of language in order to formulate verbally, in response to each other, the places, times, institutions and people that they talk about. With the words they select, speakers align with or distance themselves from each other, and with/from those times and places they talk about. This is not identity as a “thing,” but what he calls identity-effects, identity work. As Michael says: “there is no announcement of identities in culture,” no one proclaims himself as, for example, intolerant or arrogant, a “twit,” or “nice” and compassionate. These are inferences participants make; they are cumulative effects of the multiple little culture-invoking verbal partials that people use in interaction.
But how do those little “verbal partials” – the selection of one name for a place, rather than another, for instance – become “culture invoking”? That’s the second key aspect. Michael notes that we all, universally, have culture-specific intuitions about the kinds of talk that belong in different kinds of situations; we have folk models of registers (in speech and in other forms of expression) that shape our expectations; violations of those expectations change the situation and often the social selves of participants. Well established and institutionalizedregisters become stereotypes: “emblems of identity.” People deploy pieces of those emblems (characteristic sounds, lexical shibboleths) in self-fashioning. But speakers do not enact stereotypical identities. It’s more complicated. Michael builds on Bakhtin’s notion of “voice.” We speakers “voice” ourselves in relation to such stereotypes – aligning with them or against them and with/against our interlocutors – in given situations. As he writes: “It is as though we are thinking/saying: This is how a social category or group member communicates.” We can (partially) inhabit various such social “figures” or stereotypes, but always via events with their interactional organization and contextualized in specific ways that deviate from or build on those stereotypes. Registers are cultural phenomena. Their existence and use depend on circulation across situations; they emanate from many different institutional nodes such as schools (from which standard language emanates), or from government (bureaucratese), fashion industry, social media and so on.
Ilana Gershon: What drew Silverstein to so many analyses of Mr. A and Mr. B and Ms. C?
E. Summerson Carr: To be sure, these dialogues are neat encapsulations of some of the most central lessons of Michael’s program for the study of language in culture. That said, I think Michael was enchanted with these interactions for their political implications as much as their semiotic ones.
To back up a bit, readers may recall that Mr. A, Mr. B, and Ms. C were professional graduate students at the University of Chicago in the mid 1970s. They were also participants in a research study led by Michael’s colleague, University of Chicago Professor of Psychology, Starkey Duncan. As Duncan’s original study was designed, A, B and C – along with several dozen other graduate students – were paired off to engage in brief “Getting to Know You” conversations, with very little in the way of topical guidance given beforehand. Whereas Duncan and his coauthor, Donald Fiske, were primarily interested in turn transitions in talk (and their resulting book is filled with charts that account for sundry statistical (ir)regularities of face-to-face interaction: gaze rate, nod intervals, smile number and so on), Michael focused on semiotically loaded social distinctions: the interscalar differences between what it typically meant (and still means) to be a student at the University of Chicago Law School as opposed to a student in the School of Social Service Administration.
These intriguing coordinates naturally piqued Michael’s interest, suggesting as they did an institutional order (with which he was quite familiar, after all, as a longtime professor and deeply invested student of the University of Chicago). Indeed, if Duncan and Fiske overlooked salience of their research participants’ campus affiliations, Michael seized upon them in his subsequent analyses, not only by acknowledging the class positionalities and possibilities of lawyers and social workers, but also by showing how class hierarchy would be ritually enacted and reproduced in the students’ brief but densely diagrammatic conversation. As he puts it in the book, within the first minute of conversation, Mr. A and Mr. B “managed conversationally to double their intra-Chicago status asymmetry,” at least until Mr. A is unexpectedly knocked off his perch. For rather than simply showing how social class – as institution – is predictably rebuilt in interaction, Michael uncovered in the soon-to-be-social worker’s turns attalk – and turns of phrase – the political potentialities of linguistic virtuosity. More particularly, Mr. B and Ms. C – trained as they are in the therapeutic registers – manage to “clientize” Mr. A in their respective conversations with him, thereby gaining the upper hand. It seems quite clear, given his repeated return to these dialogues over the years, that Michael not only appreciated the play in these dialogues, but delighted in the disruption they entailed.
It is in this book, including – tellingly – its closing pages that, Michael provides his clearest parsing of the dialogues between A, B, and C to make three points central to his larger program of the study of language in culture:
1. Interactants cannot simply rely upon institutions to affirm their identities, confer role and status, and establish stable posts. Rather institutions are reforged through the dynamics of entextualization and contextualization.
2. Face-to-face interaction is ritual interaction, and the dynamic figuration of denotational material – the how of what people say – is highly consequential for participants and institutional products, and
3. Interaction diagrams how institutions order and taxonomize, if not always predictably or by participants’ plans.
So, in the end, through his reanalysis of these dialogues, Michael suggests that institutions are creatures of interaction, which means that they might – and often do – reorder people and build paradigms in predictable ways. Yet it might be otherwise, in part because interactants can draw on various genres and do so with virtuosity, yielding surprising identities and relations.
Ilana Gershon: What might Silverstein want analysts to focus upon when studying moments the analyst themself would label miscommunication or more precisely discoordination? What could be the first steps for tackling such a moment?
Susan Gal: That’s a great question about Michael’s actual analytical methods, which emerged in the workshops as something he wanted very much to emphasize. The book in fact starts with an example of what you might call miscommunication! But he was more interested in the participants’ assessment of “miscommunication” or “discoordination,” than the analysts’. How people react to each other is the revealing thing. When there is something that seems like discoordination to analysts, he would advise that we attend to what participants make of it; what are the uptakes, the alternate interpretations, are there attempts at repair? What future possibilities emerge for relationships, identities, institutions? As we worked through the lectures, it was clear that on the one hand, he emphasized that we can sketch out how social process works, at many scales. But on the other hand, there are no guarantees. Indeterminacy is everywhere (as his discussions of Mr. A and Mr. B reveal). Rituals sometimes fail, people often fail to convey or attain or even know their interactional goals. Intention is a poor guide to outcome, and outcomes are contingent. That was why he was strongly drawn to analyses of courtroom trials and political speech. Even firmly institutionalized practices like those must be reproduced, recreated in interaction, and subject to change. In Peircean fashion, Michael showed there is always a next moment of interpretation. So, I’d say his first step – as in the examples in the book – is to see how the participants react. The moments when participants are seen by themselves or others as violating expectations are the richest ones for understanding culture as a continuous chain of indexical and therefore interpretive process, and vice versa!
Ilana Gershon: What is the sign’s eye view?
Constantine V. Nakassis: This is one of the major innovations in Michael’s work, and the book, and like so many of Michael’s innovations reveals his sense of intellectual lineage. In particular, it always struck me how Michael saw his own work in relationship to Roman Jakobson, whom he always referred to as his teacher. In fact, I recall him once downplaying some of his own contributions to linguistics and linguistic anthropology by saying that he saw himself as just unpacking the implications of what Jakobson (and his other teachers) wrote! There is something to that, but I think Michael was also being overly modest. The “sign’s eye” is an example of that. In Lecture 1, Michael introduces this idea by way of his reading of Jakobson’s model of the speech event. Like the Saussurean speech circuit, in that model – visually, at least – we are not in the diagram per se but hover outside of it, indeed, over it, from the “bird’s eye” (or God’s eye, or the positivist linguist’s eye). From this perch, the speech event model is a kind of objective, etic grid. It’s static. Michael described this vision of communication as like a ball (the “message”, famously diagrammed qua Signifer/Signified in the Course in a ball-like shape) being lobbed back and forth from “sender” and “receiver.” Part of the problem with this view, among other things, is that it takes for granted what a “message” (or a “text”) is, and in doing so also takes for granted what a “context” is; or, as Hymes also pointed out, that the speech-event “factors” are straightforwardly, always already, “there” in an interaction and that our job as linguists/anthropologists is simply (simplistically!) to figure out how the factors are “filled in” in any particular instance or how they correlate with each other.
Michael turned this whole model inside out by instead reading the speech event model as a field of possible indexicables. That is, he read it from the point of view of the sign itself, asking what are all the things a sign, a message (or text), might ‘point to’ (index) as context for its construal? Speaker? Code? Channel? (Or, what must a sign be such that each such “factor” could be a relevant context for its construal?) To take the sign’s eye, then, is not to assume that there is a pregiven, static context for any particular sign. Rather it suggests that context is that which is projected by a sign, that is, that which a sign invokes as a relevant principle for its intelligibility, meaning, force. Since such an invocation takes, as its semiotic ground, a relationship of ‘pointing to’ (or making contiguous, co-present, existentially related); that is, it is indexical. The sign’s eye, then, repositions our analysis to ask how text and context are made through indexical sign activity, and in so doing puts us “inside” the speech event rather than just observers standing outside of or above it. And this move also thus takes us from speech event to indexicality, and from there to the dialectic of entextualization and contextualization, circulation, enregisterment, emanation, and so on and so forth. So this one move opens up a whole space for rethinking semiosis, discourse, language.
It’s a brilliant move, and typically Michael; he simultaneously sutures his own theoretical apparatus within the history of linguistics (in this case, Saussure to Jakobson to …) while inserting his own unique spin on it (here, by leveraging Peirce, but also a particularly anthropological sensibility which positions analysis within the phenomenon under study). In so doing, he works within a tradition but leaves the point of departure completely transformed, figuring his own contribution (a next-sign in a genealogical chain) as its fuller realization.
CaMP Anthropology 