Читать книгу Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences - Katherine Bischoping - Страница 12

Narrative analysts treat narrative as though it were Solitaire, the game for the contemplative player, with or without an onlooker. The player contemplates the relations among cards, the meaning of their sequences, the ways her game has turned out or could have turned out if played differently. At the same time as the player has agency, she is constrained by the structure of possibilities offered by the cards. Similarly, narratives involve searching for meanings in relation to the flow of events over time. A narrator can replay his story, or arrange its events differently to find new meanings. He has agency at the same time as he is structurally constrained. And, he might tell his story differently depending on who’s present.

Studying talk as a conversation analyst would be like studying Slapjack, a card game in which players take turns at laying down a card, face up. Everyone watches with eagle eyes for a Jack to be laid down, because whoever slaps it first moves ahead in the game. The fun comes from the game’s fast pace and the players’ hair-trigger responsiveness to what the last player has done – in these characteristics, it is like conversation, with its rapid fire coordination among speakers, its speakers’ responsiveness to the most recent utterances, and its chaotic orderliness. Finally, this game is child’s play, involving taken-for-granted competences.

Analyzing discourse would be like analyzing a game of Scrabble. Our vocabulary permits our action in a competitive game where knowledge is power. In Scrabble, letters materially ground the words we can possibly construct, just as economic and political circumstances ground the discourses to which we contribute. Your performance in Scrabble hinges on what is made discursively available to you by preceding moves in the game: as a skilled wordsmith or a three-letter wonder. Likewise discourses constrain or produce possibilities, setting conditions on their agency. Further, playing the game of Scrabble and life well involves performing according to norms – or the Scrabble dictionary – or risk being disciplined.