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Affecting in Discourse: Communicating uncertainly and communicating uncertainty

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Abstract

We communicate uncertainly, and we communicate uncertainty. This essay argues the ambiguous and indeterminate aspects of everyday talk to be crucial to our felt sense of communication. To make this claim, I bring together an affect- and phenomenology-influenced orientation with close analysis of conversational discourse. Hence, this essay also offers one way in which affect theory can be entangled with language and discourse. Analysis of conversational episodes from fieldwork with teenage music listeners yields three key processes: (i) Patronage describes the experiential ‘distance’ between the ‘I’ and my own utterance or gesture, reflecting the intersubjective and improvised nature of conversation. (ii) Zones of indistinction describe transient pockets of ambiguity, which provide a sense of safety as I navigate uncertain waters conversation. (iii) These affective and reactive journeys through everyday conversation constitute the work of position-taking, through which emerges my style of being in the world, my subjectivity.

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Notes

  1. All transcripts use a simplified and modified form of the ‘Jefferson system’, common in conversational analysis. Given that the original conversations were in Korean, notations of prosodic elements have generally been substituted by commentary. All names have been anonymised into alphabetical letters; each excerpt features a different set of participants, making the use of pseudonyms unwieldy. The author/interviewer is always designated as X.Key:(pause)   Pause[word     Overlapping talk[…]      Omitted from transcript for brevity((word))    Analyst description of laughter, gestures, etc.{word}    Analyst description of contextual informationword {word} Transliteration, then translation, of the Korean original

  2. Although Schutz argued each such ‘social action’ required prior planning, I agree with Crossley (1996, pp. 79–80) that such expectations of orientation are of a more intuitive or naturalised order.

  3. I am applying the notions of fractional congruence and mutual coordination more broadly than Agha’s own definition, using them across multiple types of speech fragments and participant turns.

  4. The pervasiveness of ambiguity in conversation has previously been addressed in existing literature, though not quite in the same way (see Schegloff, 1984).

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Asif Agha, Carolyn Marvin, Sandra Ristovska, the anonymous reviewers, and the editors of Subjectivity.

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  1. Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, 19104, PA, USA

    Sun-ha Hong

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Hong, Sh. Affecting in Discourse: Communicating uncertainly and communicating uncertainty. Subjectivity 8, 201–223 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2015.9

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