Hi William,
From what you said, it seems to me that the resumptive elements in dialogue are part of the mutual cognitive environment, since the aspects you mentioned about the interpersonal relationship between communicator and addressee are mutually manifest to them - as must be the case since they are not strangers to each other.
Rgrds,
Luiz Carlos Baptista
lucabaptista@sapo.pt
lucabaptista@hotmail.com
----- Original Message -----
From: William Mann
To: mjmurphy ; Luiz Carlos Baptista ; relevance
Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2004 5:02 PM
Subject: a contribution about: Re: RT list: co-presence and mutual manifestness
Dear all:
It seems timely to remark on the ongoing discussion of mutual manifestness.
For my own research purposes, I am making a distinction between the interaction between someone and a stranger -- someone that they have never interacted with before. For non-strangers, the language interpretation processes, the effective context, and to some extent the style of interaction, whether written or spoken, is affected by the prior interactions.
To capture this, I am saying "Natural Dialogue is Resumptive." That is the title of an unpublished paper that is in the process of adjustment and submission to a journal.
By Resumptive I mean that under certain often-fulfilled conditions, the interaction starts up with a recall of the interpersonal relationship that was present at the end of the most recent interaction. This relationship includes shared knowledge, the knowledge that shared knowledge is shared, attitudes, open issues, views of each other sufficient to support honorifics, titles, ... the list goes on. The point here is just that, after one gets co-presence and mutual manifestness right, there are other quite parallel matters that have been left on the researchers' table of things to describe.
So, resumptiveness might be a useful idea in pursuing this discussion.
Best wishes to all.
Bill Mann
----- Original Message -----
From: mjmurphy
To: Luiz Carlos Baptista ; relevance
Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2004 11:18 AM
Subject: Re: RT list: co-presence and mutual manifestness
Hi.
Thanks for the references. I must confess that I don't know Derrida's work in detail. Do I miss something important?
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Opinions vary, but mine is that you did not. The one thing Derrida does point to are some conceptual dichotomies that have bulked large in Western thought, like speech/writing, male/female, substance/void, etc., where roughly the term on the left hand side is "good" and the term on the right is "bad". He is the not the only or first one to have noticed these. I also disagree with him about the difficulty of "transcending" such dichotmomies, and don't see much point in "deconstructing" them, but that "thinking in them" is a habit of thought I do not doubt.
The Rousseau piece is far more interesting, and quite short. As I say, from the brief quotation you give, Goffman sounds very much like him.
Your interpretation of my "avant la lettre" remark is interesting. But I just meant "beforehand"... :)
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But of course, since Derrida would say he is doing a kind of psychoanalysis of Western culture, you didn't just mean what you wanted to mean :)
More seriously, though, you wrote:
I don't think that mutual manifestness is missing in written communication. For instance, this exchange establishes a mutual cognitive environment not only between you and me, but between us and all the other subscribers to the list who happen to read this message. Maybe writing, such as printing, broadcasting, computing, etc., as media of communication, are technologies which create mutual cognitive environments by their very use.
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I am not endorsing the view, but explicating Rousseau. In spoken language the participants in an exchange physically present to one another. They can percieve one another. This makes speaking a "better" form of communication (according to Rousseau) than writing because it is harder to lie, literally because it is harder to lie to a man's face. Again, from the very short quotation, Goffman seems to accent that to be "co-present" both parties must be physically present, speaking rather than writing. But perhaps not.
Cheers,
M.J.Murphy
The shapes of things are dumb.
-L. Wittgenstein
SMS 10
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