From Heritage and Watson, 1979: 132. IE

overlapping turn has the character of interjacent overlap. This is a method by which a speaker can initiate a turn the relevance of which may be jeopardised by the on-going talk Jefferson, 1986. What Phil’s intervention does, then, is to propose that right at that moment Paul should be offering an answer; and that if an answer is not offered right at that moment, the opportunity or likelihood of an answer is diminished. In this, Phil’s question to Paul subtly transforms the interactional landscape. Prior to ‘Are you appalled’, Paul’s ‘Did you’ was at least hearable as the onset of an insertion sequence as a preliminary to an answer; but Phil’s intervention proposes that an answer should be forthcoming, and in this sequential context Paul’s current turn is hearable as an evasion of an answer. Also, consider the inferential impact of ‘Are you appalled’ as a candidate answer. Phil could have selected any kind of response to attribute to Paul. His selection of ‘appalled’ indexes a moral response which has been topicalised earlier in the interview. Moreover, it offers an extreme moral response; this is not, for example, merely disapproval. Finally, given the range of candidate answers which Phil could have offered at that point, this selection is hearable as one fitted to what is known about Paul: that he is the kind of person likely to have taken an extremely negative view of Aaron’s conduct. However, up to this point in the interview, Aaron, Phil and the interviewer have handled the topic of Aaron’s sexual adventures in a fairly lighthearted and casual manner. Consequently, the question ‘Are you appalled’ establishes a discrepancy between the seriousness of the incidents under discussion and the extreme nature of Paul’s likely reaction. And this in turn transforms the inferential relevances in play, in that it raises the possibility that Paul’s response what- ever it transpires to be may be heard as unwarranted or exaggerated. Phil’s question thus establishes an inauspicious interactional and inferential environment for Paul and the turn he is trying to build. And there is evidence – intrinsic to the data – that Paul himself is sensitive to the inferential implica- tions of Phil’s question. Note that Phil’s ‘Are you’ is produced in the clear of any other talk. There is good reason to assume that Paul heard that Phil was embarking on a question. Paul begins to speak, re-starting his turn, this time with ‘When you’. However, ‘When you’ is produced in overlap with all but the first sounds of ‘appalled’. Having re-started his turn knowing that Phil was asking him a question, Paul subsequently abandons it at the first possible point after the word ‘appalled’ – the point at which it becomes clear what kind of question Phil was asking and the kind of action it was accomplishing. Paul immediately produces a minimal and unequivocal ‘no’ before trying again to launch his response to the interviewer’s question. The point is this: Wetherell argues that this particular use of the phrase ‘out on the pull’ has an accusatory orientation because of its claimed wider cul- tural, historical and ideological resonances. A CA re-analysis reveals that the turn which eventually ends with the phrase ‘out on the pull’ is sequentially implicated in and generated out of what is demonstrably a sceptical – perhaps even hostile – interactional context. Thus what Wetherell interprets to be a 176 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS turn which initiates a hostile environment, transpires to be a turn which is itself responsive to the collaborative production of an inferentially sensitive moment in the interview. And what kind of response does it initiate? In this sequence, the co- participants – including the interviewer – have topicalised and made account- able what they anticipate will be Paul’s extreme and negative evaluation of Aaron’s activities. CA and DA studies indicate that in this context, a particular kind of next activity becomes highly relevant. The person whose position or claims have been made accountable will seek to establish or reaffirm the warrant for holding that position or making those claims. This is precisely what Paul does: he directs a question to Aaron which focuses on his intentions on the night in question, immediately raising the issue of morality and appropriate conduct. Paul’s turn, then, is not an accusation which draws on ideologically laden meanings associated with a figure of speech; it is a defensive utterance, in that it seeks to initiate a sequence of turns in which he can establish the grounds for his own moral position to a demonstrably sceptical audience. And in the same way that Phil’s ‘Are you appalled’ achieved its demonstrable char- acter as an aggressive turn by virtue of its precise sequential placement, so too does Paul’s turn achieve its character as an aggressively designed defensive response by virtue of its location in the unfolding trajectory of the encounter. This use of the figure of speech ‘out on the pull’, then, will not be heard as a mild tease, nor a joke, nor a simple description of a night’s activities; but because of its sequential context, it will be hearable as seeking to establish that Aaron’s behaviour was extreme, and extremely bad. On this occasion, the inferential force of ‘out on the pull’, then, comes not from culture or history or ideology, but from its use as a component of a turn which performs a particular kind of activity in a specific sequential location. There are other features of this fragment which are likely to be significant. First, and as Schegloff 1998 pointed out in his response to Wetherell’s 1998 plea for the fusion of CA and post-structuralist analyses, there is no account of the fact that this is interview talk initiated by a researcher and a relative stranger to the group for the purposes of an academic research pro- ject. There is a substantial literature in CA which shows that the organisation of talk in non-conversational or work-related settings is shaped by the partic- ipants’ tacit understanding of the tasks and identities relevant to those settings. But there is no analytic consideration of the way that the respondents’ talk may be organised with respect to, and constitute the relevance for them, of these contextual factors. This means that details of the talk which may be con- sequential for the subsequent trajectory of the interaction may be overlooked. To illustrate, look at the interviewer’s utterance in line 121. 119 PH: = Are you ap palled? 120 PA: When you ·hh no . s when you went out 121 N: Not appalled? METHODOLOGICAL DISPUTES 177 关 关 兴 兴 The interviewer’s ‘Not appalled?’ actively aligns him with Phil’s hostile question; and it also has the consequence of ensuring that the topic of ‘Paul’s extreme response’ is kept alive just at the point that Paul has completed a stark rebut- tal that he was appalled. Remember, this is the researcher who has asked this question: an adult stranger, with academic credentials, in a semi-formal research interview with adolescent boys, occasioned by him specifically to explore fairly sensitive matters, participating in such a way as to perpetuate and rein- vigorate an inauspicious interactional environment for one of the respondents. It is difficult to imagine how this cannot have had a bearing on the subsequent interaction; yet there is no attempt to track its outcomes. But there are other interesting features of these few lines which would need to be explored in further detail to provide a rounded account of the interactional activities in which the participants are engaged and to which they are oriented: the way that Phil and Nigel’s collaborative efforts seem temporarily to sidetrack Paul into beginning some form of declaration ‘I jus-’ which is jettisoned in favour of a promise about future disclosures line 122; the sceptical? laughter from the interviewer again and another unidentified interviewee in response to Paul’s prior contortions lines 123 and 124; and so on. The point is that without detailed analysis of the interactional context and its relevance to the participants’ conduct, it is hard to assess analytic claims about the kind of work an utterance is doing and its significance in the unfold- ing interaction, let alone arguments about the subject positions or discourses which it is claimed to represent. It is at least possible that the very nature of the talk reflects mundane interactional contingencies involved in conducting research interviews rather than the influence of discourses and subject posi- tions. The identification of discourses and subject positions as the explanation for the organisation of the talk forecloses precisely the kind of detailed analytic work required for an empirical investigation of these possibilities. To summarise: talk-in-interaction is social action. When examining talk-in- interaction it is important to take account of what is being done with the talk. As we have seen, the kind of interactional business people address through their talk is consequential for the design and shape of the things people say. Interactional considerations have an impact on the very composition of the utterances people produce, utterances which in turn become texts for analysts’ empirical endeavours. Talk is social action produced in the first instance for specific co-participating others, and is designed to attend to interactional and interpersonal matter relevant to the parties’ immediate ‘here-and-now’ concerns as interaction unfolds. In social research interviews, both inteviewers’ and respondents’ utterances will be action-oriented, and it is necessary to incorporate this in subsequent analysis. Respondent utterances which are identified as bearing the imprint of a discourse will have been interactionally generated; their shape, content and design will to some degree inevitably reflect the interactional contingencies for which they were designed. Utterances may exhibit particular properties not 178 CONVERSATION ANALYSIS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS because they convey some form of meaningful information which the analyst can identify and interpret in terms of the operation of discourses, or other theoretical concerns, but because they have been designed to perform sequen- tially relevant actions. Those features of the respondent’s talk which are initially taken to be evidence of a discourse, then, may be more intimately tied to imme- diate sequential and interactional context in which that talk was produced. The dangers of discourses and repertoires In this section I want to examine more broadly the nature of discourses, and their role in empirical analysis, as indicated in the methodological writings of researchers who work in the Foucauldian or post-structuralist traditions and related critical approaches. The analysis of discourses offers an impoverished view of human conduct As we have seen throughout this book, conversation analytic studies have revealed that talk-in-interaction is extraordinarily intricate. People attend to and manage their verbal activities at a hitherto unimagined level of detail. In the world exposed and explored in conversation analysis, human social inter- action is a living tapestry of complex and sophisticated activities, the micro- sociological accomplishment of which is informed by socially organised webs of normative and interpretative practices. Discourse studies which seek to identify the operation of discourses and repertoires invariably offer a much more shallow image of human conduct. We have already seen in earlier sections that the attempt to identify discourses or repertoires invites the analyst to disattend to the interactional frameworks in which such discourses, etc., are claimed to be present. But there is a more direct indication of the impoverished view of human conduct fostered by Foucauldian discourse analysis and related critical approaches. In their analysis of the way scientists characterise a debate in biochemistry, Gilbert and Mulkay found the use of two repertoires: the empiricist repertoire, in which scientific knowledge claims are depicted as the consequence of proper scientific procedures; and the contingent repertoire, in which the validity of scientific claims were interpreted in terms of the social factors, such as the scientists’ biography, friendships or personality Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984. Billig’s account of the methodology of rhetorical and discursive psychology which he treats as related approaches illustrates some methodological steps by discussing some of his work on how members of the public talk about the Royal Family in research interviews. Specifically he discussed how the respon- dents formulated the importance of history in their reflections on the Royal Family. Following from the broader argument in rhetorical psychology that discourse is inherently oppositonal, Billig claims that the interviewees’ talk is constructed around two competing narratives: History as National Decline, in which contemporary attitudes to the Royals, or their own actions, are METHODOLOGICAL DISPUTES 179