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Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks© 1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6

Lecture 1

Doing 'being ordinary'

Usually I start the course by doing what I do in the course, without any programmatic statements, without any indication of why it should be of any interest to anybody. But - and this may be unfair - the course will tum out to be much more severely technical than most people could possibly be interested in, and some good percentage will drop out, and usually that has the consequence that they get nothing out of the class if they last one time. So I decided to spend the first time telling people something that I take it could hardly not be of interest to them. Then, when they drop out, they'd at least have gotten what I figure would be worth the price of the course. And I guess I should say if this isn't absorbing, you could hardly imagine how unabsorb­ing the rest will be.

Now, this is in many ways nothing like the way I ' ll proceed throughout the rest of the course. In the course I will be taking stories offered in conversation and subjecting them to a type of analysis which is concerned roughly to see whether it ' s possible to subject the details of actual events to formal investigation, informatively. The loosest message is that the world you live in is much more finely organized than you'd imagine. As well as that loose message, there are some really specific things about how stories work and why they work the way they do. I ' ll do that from next time on. But in this lecture I won't be studying the organization of telling stories in conversation, and I won't be attempting to prove anything. I ' ll be saying some things about why the study of storytelling should be of interest to anybody. But people don't have to stay around after that to have caught that message, and to have been armed with some materials that would permit them to wander around noticing things that they might not have noticed, and find them ghastly.

I 've been studying the organization of stories, how they work, for some time. And one sort of issue is, what do people make stories out of? In particular, given what they might make stories out of, what do they make stories out of? It wasn't of particular interest to me why anybody else should be interested in such an issue, but the question arose and now will constitute the business of this lecture: What sort of large-scale interest does what people make stories of or what they don't make stories of, have? A good deal of what I ' ll say has its obscure intellectual source (I say 'obscure' because if anyone were to read the book it' s not likely that they'd find that it says what I say, but with some consideration they might see how it is that I owe what I 'm saying to this source) in a novel called Between Life and Death by a French novelist, Nathalie Sarraute. The book is absolutely not assigned; I 'm just citing a debt.

2 1 5

2 16 Part IV

A kind of remarkable thing is how, in ordinary conversation, in reporting some event, people report what we might see to be not what happened, but the ordinariness of what happened. For whole ranges of things that you might figure to be kind of exciting, something like this will be offered (the following sorts of things are not made up but are actual) : Somebody talking about a man they met the night before might say "He's very nice. He's very very nice. " Or if they saw a movie they might say "It was really good . " If they went away for a weekend, they say something like "We went to Palm Springs. Bud played golf with the guys and I sat around the pool with the girls . ' ' The reports do not so much give attributes of the scene, activity, participants but announce the event's ordinariness, its usualness. We might figure that lots of these things could be stories, but they're not made into stories. And if you think of literature or poetry you can perfectly well know that out of any such event as is passed off as " It was a nice evening. We sat around and talked, " really elaborated characterizations are often presented . So I 've been wondering about the non-production of stories.

Now I come to the central sorts of assertions I want to make. Whatever we may think about what it is to be an ordinary person in the world, an initial shift is not to think of an 'ordinary person' as some person, but as somebody having as their job, as their constant preoccupation, doing 'being ordinary. ' It ' s not that somebody is ordinary, it' s perhaps that that' s what their business is. And it takes work, as any other business does. And if you just extend the analogy of what you obviously think of as work - as whatever it is that takes analytic, intellectual, emotional energy - then you can come to see that all sorts of nominalized things - personal characteristics and the like - are jobs which are done, which took some kind of effort, training, etc. So I 'm not going to be talking about an 'ordinary person' as this or that person, or as some average, i .e . , a non-exceptional person on some statistical basis, but as something that is the way somebody constitutes themselves, and, in effect, a job that they do on themselves . They and the people around them may be coordinatively engaged in assuring that each of them are ordinary persons, and that can then be a job that they undertake together, to achieve that each of them, together, are ordinary persons.

The core question is, how do people go about doing 'being an ordinary person' ? In the first instance there' s an easy answer: Among the ways you go about doing 'being an ordinary person' is spending your time in usual ways, having usual thoughts, having usual interests, etc . ; so that all you have to do, to be 'an ordinary person' in the evening, is turn on the TV set. It' s not that it happens that you're doing what lots of ordinary people are doing, but that you know that the way to do 'having a usual evening' is to do that. It ' s not just that you're selecting, "Gee I 'll watch TV tonight, " but you're making a job of, and finding an answer to, how to do 'being ordinary tonight. ' Some people, as a matter of kicks, could say "Let' s do being ordinary tonight. We'll go watch TV, eat popcorn, ' ' etc. - something they know is being done at the same time by millions of others around.

Lecture 1 2 1 7

We can see, then, that it ' s a job. You have to know what anybody/ everybody is doing; doing ordinarily. And you have to have that available to do. There are people who don't have that available to do, and who specifically can't be ordinary. If, for example, you're in prison, in a room with no facilities at all - say, it has a bench and a hole in the floor and a spigot - then you find yourself doing things like systematically exploring the cracks in the wall from floor to ceiling over the years, and you come to have information about the wall in that room which ordinary people don't have about their bedroom wall . It ' s not a usual thing to do, to say "Well this evening I 'm going to examine that corner of the ceiling. " Of course it may be that prison walls are more interesting than other walls, since among the other things prisoners are occupied with is leaving information on the wall that they've been there, so there' s things to read on the walls. But it ' s perfectly available to anybody to spend an afternoon looking at a wall . You could choose to do that. If you take drugs you're permitted to do that. But unless you take drugs you would not find yourself allowed to do it, though nobody's around. That is to say, in being an 'ordinary person, ' that' s not a thing you could allow yourself to spend the day doing. And there is an infinite collection of possibilities, of things that you couldn 't bring yourself to do; not out of boredom, though that's one way you could formulate it, but in the midst of the most utterly boring afternoon you nonetheless would rather live through the boredom in the usual way - whatever that way is - than see whether it would be less or more boring to examine the wall or to look in some detail at the tree outside the window.

There's a place in Freud where he says, "with regard to matters of chemistry or physics or things like that, laymen would not venture an opinion. With regard to psychology it ' s quite different; anybody feels free to make psychological remarks. ' ' And part of the business he thought he was engaged in was changing that around, i .e . , to both develop psychology and educate laymen, co-jointly. So that the laymen would know that they don't know anything about it and that there are people who do, so that they would eventually stop making psychological remarks as they stopped making chemical and physical remarks.

I raise this because while we all can see that that' s quite so, there 's a related and in a way much more interesting thing that I doubt we've noticed . If one were to pick up the notebooks of writers, poets, novelists, you're likely to find elaborated studies of small real objects . Like in the notebooks of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins there are extended naturalistic observations of a very detailed sort, of, e.g . , cloud formations or what a leaf looks like, looking up at it under varying types of light. And for some novelists what you have is extended character observations. Now, my notion is that as it is for chemistry and physics, so it is for making distinctive observations about the world and its persons. That is to say, that's the job of novelists and poets and not an ordinary person. It's just a thing that, in being ordinary, you don't do. For example, considering the situation of the Palm Springs weekend described as "I sat around the pool with the girls, " you don't get, from somebody doing

2 1 8 Part IV

' being ordinary, ' a report of what the wind did to the water in the pool, or some character observations other than "She was nice, " "She was not so nice, " "She's getting older, ' ' of the people with whom the afternoon was spent.

And I think it' s not only that one doesn' t make the story but does perhaps make the observations, it' s that the cast of mind of doing 'being ordinary' is essentially this: Your business in life is only to see and report the usual aspects of any possibly usual scene. That is to say, what you look for is to see how any scene you're in can be made an ordinary scene, a usual scene, and that' s what it is .

Now plainly that could be a job; it could be work. The scene doesn't in the first instance simply present itself, define itself, as insufferably usual, nothing to be said about it; it' s a matter of how you're going to attack it, what you are going to see in it, what you are going to see in it that you can say about it. Plainly, people are monitoring scenes for this storyable possibility. I ' ll give a gruesome instance of it, from a book called An Ordinary Camp by Micheline Maurel. She reports the first day in a concentration camp. The first hours are terribly horrifying, and then there' s a lapse.

Little by little conversation sprang up from bunk to bunk. The rumors were already beginning to circulate. Luckily the news is good. We'll be home soon. We'll have an unusual experience to talk about.

A way in which this event was dealt with while it was taking place - and which, for an experience which might leave one utterly without hope, we can see as wonderfully relevant for being able to survive it - was that in the end it will tum out to have been a good story. And we've all experienced being in scenes the virtue of which was that as we were in them we could see what it was we could later tell people had transpired. And there are presumably lots of things which, at least at some points in people' s lives, are done just for that, i .e . , it seems fair to suppose that there' s a time when kids do 'kissing and telling, ' that they're doing the kissing in order to have something to tell, and not that they happen to do kissing and happen to do telling, or that they want to do kissing and happen to do telling, etc . , but that a way to get them to like the kissing is via the fact that they like the telling.

It seems plain enough that people monitor the scenes they're in for their storyable characteristics . And yet the awesome, overwhelming fact is that they come away with no storyable characteristics, where presumably any of us with any wit could make of this half hour, or of the next, a rather large array of things to say. But that would take a kind of effort that could make one feel awfully uncomfortable.

So, there' s a business of being an 'ordinary person, ' and that business includes attending the world, yourself, others, objects, so as to see how it is that it' s a usual scene. And when offering what transpired, you present it in its usual 'nothing much' fashion, with whatever variants of banal character­izations you might happen to use, i .e . , there' s no particular difference between

Lecture 1 2 19

saying "It was nothing much" and "It was outta sight. " That is to say, we've all heard the usual characterizations of 'our Protestant society' or 'our Puritan background, ' which involve that ordinary people/ Americans/Europeans are built in such a way that they are constrained from doing lots of experiences that they might do, were they not repressed. And we think of the kinds of repressions that people have that are sociologically based, i .e . , the Puritan ethic involves spending most of your time working, holding off pleasure, etc. , which we think of as definitively what it means to be a usual person in Western civilization. Though that's manifestly important, it misses an essential part of the thing, which is : Were you to have illegitimate experiences, the characteristic of being an 'ordinary person' is that, having the illegitimate experiences that you shouldn't have, they come off in just the usual way that they come off for anybody doing such an illegitimate experience. When you have an affair, take drugs, commit a crime, etc. , you find that it ' s been the usual experience that others who've done it have had. Reports of the most seemingly outrageous experiences , for which you'd figure you'd be at a loss for words, or would have available extraordinary details of what happened, turn out to present them in a fashion that has them come off as utterly unexceptional. So we could perfectly well remove the Puritan constraints - as people report they're being removed - and our utter usualness, the ordinary cast of mind, would nonetheless be there to preserve the way we go about doing 'being ordinary. '

My guess is that we could now take that point with us, and, watching ourselves live in the world - or watching somebody else if that's more pleasant - we could see them working at finding how to make things ordinary. And presumably it would be from such a sort of perceived awareness of, e.g. , the ease with which - after practice - you see only the most usual characteristics of the people passing (that's a married couple and that' s a black guy and that's an old lady) or what a sunset looks like or what an afternoon with your girlfriend or boyfriend consists of, that you can begin to appreciate that there' s some immensely powerful kind of mechanism operating in handling your perceptions and thoughts, other than the known and immensely powerful things like the chemistry of vision, etc. Those sorts of thing would not explain how it is that, e.g. , you can come home day after day and, asked what happened, report without concealing, that nothing happened. And were you concealing something, if it were reported it would turn out to be nothing much. And, as it happens with you, so it happens with those you know. And further, that ventures outside of being ordinary have unknown virtues and unknown costs, i .e . , if you come home and report what the grass looked like along the freeway, that there were four noticeable shades of green some of which just appeared yesterday because of the rain, then there may well be some tightening up on the part of your recipient. And if you were to do it routinely, then people might figure that there' s something odd about you; that you're pretentious. You might find them jealous of you; you might lose friends. That is to say, you want to ask what are the costs, and if people have checked out the costs of venturing even slightly into making their life an epic.

220 Part IV

Now it' s also the case that there are people who are entitled to have their lives be an epic. We have assigned a series of storyable people, places, and objects, and they stand as something different from us. It may be that in pretty much every circle there' s a somebody who's the source andjor the subject of all neat observations, as there are for the society in general a collection of people about whom detailed reports are made; reports that would never, not merely be ventured about others, they'd never be thought of about others. The way in which Elizabeth Taylor turned around is something noticeable, reportable. The way in which your mother turned around is something unseeable, much less nonreportable.

The question is, why in the world should it be that it ' s almost everybody's business to be occupationally ordinary? Why do they take on the job - it's not that others do it for them - of keeping everything utterly mundane? I 'm not going to answer that question, but I guess it has some diagnostic interest, i .e . , there are presumably a really large collection of what seem to be serious changes in the world - changes in governments, economies, religions - that would not change the business of being ordinary. Across such changes it is enforced on pretty much everybody that they stay, finding only how it is that what's going on is usual, with all their effort possible.

And it 's really remarkable to see people' s efforts to achieve the 'nothing happened ' sense of really catastrophic events. I 've been collecting fragments out of newspapers, about hijackings and what the airplane passengers think when a hijacking takes place. The latest one I happened to find goes something like this: "I was walking up towards the front of the airplane and by the cabin I saw the stewardess standing, facing the cabin, and a fellow standing with a gun in her back. And my first thought was he' s showing her the gun, and then I realized that couldn't be, and then it turned out he was hijacking the plane . " And another; a Polish plane is in the midst of being hijacked, and the guy reports, "I thought to myself we just had a Polish hijacking a month ago and they're already making a movie of it . " And a classically dramatic instance is that almost universally the initial report of the Kennedy assassination (the first one) , was of firecrackers.

Just imagine rewriting the Old Testament in its monumental events, with ordinary people having gone through it. What would they have heard and seen, e.g. , when voices called out to them, when it started to rain, etc. There 's at least one place in the Old Testament where that happens . Lot was warned of the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah, and given permission to bring his daughters and sons-in-law out. ' 'And Lot went out, and spake unto his sons in law, which married his daughters, and said, Up, get you out of this place; for the Lord will destroy this city. But he seemed as one that mocked unto his sons in law . " And they stayed behind.

Here I 'm only giving specifically dramatic sorts of things, as compared to seeing the interesting possibilities in an event that can also be seen to be ordinary - which is really a much more fundamental kind of thing. And when we start considering stories, at least one tack we can take is to treat the overwhelming banality of the stories we encounter - in my data, in our own

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experiences - as not so much something that, e .g. , allows for statistical analysis of variation, or that makes them therefore uninteresting to study, but as a specific feature which turns on a kind of attitude; say, an attitude of working at being usual, which is perhaps central to the way our world is organized.

Now there are enormous virtues to seeing the usual in a scene. It perrnits all kinds of routine ways of dealing with it. Also, if you're dealing with an utter stranger, e.g. , somebody in an approaching car when you're about to cross a street, it seems to be awfully useful to know that what he sees, looking at you, is the usual thing anyone would see, with its usual relevancies, and not God only knows what. You do not, then, have to make an each-and-every­time decision whether or not you' ll be allowed the right of way. So, then, I 'm not saying let 's do away with the ways in which we go about being ordinary. Rather, if being ordinary is the sort of thing I 'm suggesting it is, then we want to know what importances it has .